The Hoop And Grapes

For as long as I can remember, there has been a small watercolor of the Hoop and Grapes pub in London hanging in my parents' living room. Neither my mom nor my dad can remember where they bought this picture but they both acknowledge they purchased it before we left the U.K. in 1979, meaning they have had it up on their wall (or walls, I guess, given that they have lived in three places since we moved here) for at least 35 years now. It's a great little painting. It's very simple and representational. It's one of my favorite things art-wise that my parents have ever bought.

My mom and dad have never visited the Hoop and Grapes. Not even close. They don't visit London that much and I don't think they'd give much thought to stopping in there if they did. I think it's very interesting that they even decided to buy this picture because bars and pubs have little to no place in their lives at all (unlike their oldest and only son). But since I was headed to London for a week or so in late August of this year, I thought I owed it to this picture and to my parents to find the Hoop and Grapes to see if the place looked like the image on their wall and to connect on a deeper level with something that I have been looking at for over three decades.

The Hoop and Grapes is located just east and south of the entrance to the Aldgate Tube station near the intersection of Aldgate High Street and Mansell Street. The neighborhood is a little less than half a mile from the Thames but Aldgate is not what you would call a tourist-heavy area of town; there's absolutely nothing to draw out of town visitors to the area around that particular Tube station. And after a couple of days in London at the city's top attractions surrounded by Americans all day, that was just fine with me.

The pub building is almost the spitting image of what hangs on my parents' wall. The red door is gone and the stucco below and above the upper story building is now white instead of black. But other than that, it looks pretty much exactly the same. The surrounding context, meaning the buildings to either side, is missing from my mom and dad's picture, and in person, it looks like the pub is squashed between the two neighboring buildings, probably because the building to the right was scaffolded all the way out to the sidewalk and because the ground floor bay window of the Hoop and Grapes looks like it's being pushed to the left. 

The point of going to the Hoops and Grapes was two-fold. First, to see if it looked like the image in my parents' house. That box got checked pretty easily. The second reason I wanted to visit was to understand what it was like inside. But before I relay what I found, there's one other thing about my mom and dad's picture worth discussing. Beneath the watercolor portion of the picture on their wall is a caption "London's Oldest Pub" written in block capitals. I am sure it might have been one of the things that drew them to this painting. But is it true? It turns out that it's pretty unlikely.

I can't fault the artist for noting that the Hoop and Grapes is London's oldest pub. The definitions of "London", "oldest" and "pub" all seem to be really really relative. Over the centuries, London has expanded, so the city today is much larger than it was a few hundred years ago and includes parts of England that were heretofore not named London. Oldest as it refers to parts of properties is also fluid. Does a building built on a foundation from the 1600s make the building itself old? I'm sure some folks might think so. And new pubs are in buildings that are extremely old. Is the pub the business or the building? I'm not sure about that. So depending on how you structured your argument, I am sure you might be able to construct a case for the Hoop and Grapes being older than any other pub in London. I'm not sure what the argument is, but I'm sure you could make one.

So determining which pub is actually London's oldest is a total moving target. Even the Hoop and Grapes can't seem to agree with itself. The painted words on the wall of the pub indicate the the building was built in 1593 whereas the pub's website state's the building was built in 1721. The website also acknowledges the cellars below predate the building by probably 50 years or so putting them as being in place just after the Great Fire of 1666. However, the pub's menu claims the building survived the Great Fire so there's that too. Pinpointing the exact date when the place was built using only internet resources seemed to be a bigger task than I was really capable of so honestly I just quit.

There does seem to be little question that there are older pubs in present day London. The Prospect of Whitby (founded 1520) on the north bank of the Thames river and the Mayflower (founded around 1550) on the south bank are clearly older than the Hoop and Grapes. I don't think there is much debate about that, although curiously the Mayflower claims it is the oldest pub on the Thames. Not going there. But if the artist intended to mean central London, the Hoop and Grapes may have a claim, although it's fairly clear that the place wasn't a pub until centuries after the Great Fire. It's all very confusing and I'm not sure that it really mattered to me when I visited. I just take the caption on the picture with a fairly sizable grain of salt now.

While the Hoop and Grapes may not be the oldest pub in London, I'm pretty sure it was the oldest pub I drank at during my nine days in England last month. And I drank in quite a number of pubs in those nine days. I believe 11 in total. That's not to say that I drank a lot of beer while I was in those 11 pubs, although I guess there are some folks who might disagree with my opinion on that matter. Regardless, I don't think I had a couple of beers in a building older than the Hoop and Grapes.

Inside the building, the pub looks like a typical English pub that I love. Its walls are trimmed in dark wood, there is very little sunlight from the small windows illuminating the interior and the rooms are full of couches, wooden chairs and (perhaps most importantly) English people having a pint after work. It's dark and cozy and gives you shelter from the outside world over a beer or two for a few hours. I love places like that in the United States. I certainly appreciate finding one just like that when I was in London.

 

The building wasn't always a pub and it shows. Walking through the front door (now black instead of red) you enter into an entry hallway flanked by the front room to the right and leading to the main body of the pub if you continue straight on. It looks decidedly like a former row house. There is a small room with tall tables and chairs beyond the entry hall and the main dining area is located beyond that. The bar (which is the most important part because that's where the beer is) is to the left of the room with the tall tables and chairs. It's a classic English serving bar with no chairs, which distinguishes itself from most American bars.

 

The Hoop and Grapes is a Nicholson's pub, tied to the Nicholson's brand but also allowed to serve other breweries' products, unlike most of the other pubs in London I visited which were Fuller's houses (this was on purpose - I was on a quest to drink as much Fuller's product as possible). I tried a Nicholson's Pale Ale which turned out to be a pretty typical pale ale although not as aggressively hopped as it would have been in the hop-crazy United States. After that pint, I moved on to a glass of Who Is Tom Ditto?, a local beer made by Truman's, one of the original London breweries whose name was resurrected in 2010 by two beer enthusiasts. This beer was darker than a pale ale with a more aggressive hop flavor and maybe a touch of liquor on the palate. At least it tasted that way to me anyway.

 

After a day of walking about 10 miles (a typical vacation day for me) in London, I only stopped into the Hoop and Grapes for a couple of pints before heading back to my hotel. But I know next time I visit my parents' house that the picture on their wall is going to mean a lot more to me now. I will be able to imagine walking through the main door to the bar, ordering a pint and then sitting on the couches in the front room looking out the window that appears to be pushed to the left. Although from the inside, it's pushed to the right. And it really is, by the way. According to the words on the pub's front room, the building has shifted 18 inches over the centuries it has stood. It's great that it's still standing up.

We Are Family

Me, my mom and her parents, 1982.

On July 25, 1979, about a month after I turned 11, my parents moved themselves (along with me and my sister) from England, across the Atlantic Ocean, to Connecticut in New England to start a new life. Our move was not the redemption story of so many immigrants who came to this country fleeing persecution or poverty or some other hardship, but I believe it changed my life in so many ways for the better. I love being an American and I love living in the United States; I believe that move 35 years ago gave me opportunities that I wouldn't have had staying in England. I'm not saying I would have been miserable or unsuccessful at life if we had stayed put, I'm just glad we moved. Perhaps more glad than anyone else in my family. Well…not perhaps. Definitely.

While the move across the pond had a lot of positives, the big negative was that we were all a lot further from family than we ever had been before. My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all lived around Normanton in Yorkshire where my mom and dad had grown up. They seemed a long way away when we lived in Leicestershire (although it was really only about 85 miles); the distance from Connecticut to Yorkshire seemed insurmountable to an 11 year old in the late '70s. We could obviously not just take a weekend drive to see my two grandmas and my grandpa and granddad. The end result was that we just saw a whole lot less of each other. And I think that was unfortunate.

I try not to think about why and how I am on this planet too much because quite honestly, it freaks me out a little bit. I can't read any book or article that deals with the creation of the universe and the big bang theory; my mind just can't handle stuff like that. But I sometimes think about how lucky I am to exist and how my existence depends on all my ancestors somehow surviving whatever perils existed during the time they were alive at least long enough to procreate and pass their genes along. Generally speaking, my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and so on lived through wars, disease, famine, persecution and untimely accidents. If they hadn't survived all the stuff that threatened to kill them, I wouldn't be here. That just amazes me.

In the 35 years since I left the United Kingdom for good as a resident, I've been back there just five times, including my trip there last month. I returned twice as a kid with my mom (in 1982 and 1985) and, before August of this year, twice on my own as an adult (in 1997 and 2007). The two trips I took in the 1980s were completely about going to see family. On the other two I made without my mom, I saw family but the trip was not necessarily about visiting relatives. I try not to regret much in life because I am happy where I am now and I believe regrets and considerations of doing things differently might have led to a different outcome. But I do lament a little bit the fact that I have lost touch with people whose blood I share. I thought 2014 was maybe an opportunity to try to make myself regret less by connecting just a little with my past.

My grandpa and grandma.

My vacation in England this year was perhaps the best trip I have ever taken there. Not for what I saw or experienced or ate or drank but for softer reasons. I saw five of my six cousins, two of whom I hadn't seen in 1982 and one whom I had spent all of about two or three hours with in my life before last month. I saw all of my aunts and uncles, something I haven't done in one week since the same 1982 trip. I spent time in England with my dad for the first time since we left the country together in July of 1979. But perhaps most importantly, I spent time being in Yorkshire, the place where I really come from, with no other agenda than just being there.

Of course, just being there with no agenda actually had to have an agenda. I'm a creature of very deep ingrained habit and I have to accomplish things on vacations. So after six nights in London, I took a train north to Yorkshire to spend a couple of days and nights in a place that seemed so far away in my boyhood. And in between visiting with people I hadn't seen very often at all in the last three and a half decades, I explored my family's past just a little, with the help of my parents and my uncle Malcolm (who was always my coolest uncle - sorry everyone else), who performed double duty as both a guide and driver.

When we moved to the United States in '79, all four of my grandparents were alive. Some kids don't ever know some of their grandparents so I feel fortunate that I knew both my dad's parents and my mom's parents and can remember good things about them all, even if I didn't see that much of some of them after we moved. Within 20 years of our move to Connecticut, all four were gone. I believe all had long or long-ish lives (all made it beyond 70) but I would have liked some of them to stay around a little longer than they did.

I was anywhere from a teenager to my late 20s when my grandparents died. I wasn't able for one reason or another to attend any of their funerals and I'd never visited their resting places. On this trip I thought I should do that, not just to check an imaginary box or anything like that, but so I could understand exactly where they ended up and in my own way remember what they meant to me. I'm not going to write everything that they meant to me; some things are just for me and not for the whole world to read.

My grandma Dinky (so called because she had a poodle named Dinky when we were growing up) and my granddad were easy to find. They lie in a family grave (although my granddad was cremated and wasn't actually buried there) with my mom's brother Graham, who died at age four, and my cousin's daughter, who died as an infant. My mom's grandmother is buried in the same cemetery, along with her children who died early in life. Seeing the names of children on graves from the early and mid 1900s reminded me how far we have come in preserving life and staving off deadly disease. There were times in the history of this planet that the only way to guarantee children surviving to adulthood was to have a lot of children. I can't imagine how painful it would be to lose a young child, even if you sort of knew you were rolling the dice each time you brought a son or daughter into the world.

My grandma Dinky's grave.

My great-grandma Sophia's grave.

I've visited cemeteries before on vacation, although not in such a personal way. The cemetery where my mom's family is buried is part of a churchyard that includes the church where my mom and dad were married, so the visit here was not all somber. My mom and dad recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary (how awesome is that?) and I can remember the pictures at their party of them at this church 50 years ago. It looks just the same. I vividly remembered my much younger parents in those pictures when I visited and it honestly and truly looks exactly the same, which was just so incredible how in this world where so many things change, that some things don't change at all.

The church where my mom and dad were married.

While the trip to find my mom's parents was very productive, the next cemetery visit to try to find the graves of my dad's parents, my grandpa and grandma, was less successful. In fact, it wasn't successful at all. My grandpa, who was probably my first hero in life and whom I like to think is like me in so many ways even if it's just based on his complete lack of handiness which I share, is the only one of the two actually buried (my grandma was cremated) in the second cemetery we visited. And while we had some directions to the poorly marked communal family grave, we were unable to find the exact spot, which was ultimately a little disappointing. I'm still glad I went. It's the first time in a long long time I've been near my grandpa. That meant something to me.

In between and around the two cemeteries and a drive up pineapple hill, where my grandpa's brother Jeffrey died in a motorcycle accident as a young man, we also visited the houses where I remember visiting my grandparents as a child. These places are very vivid in my memory, which is sometimes excellent and sometimes frustrating in the holes that are in it. I had stayed in my grandma Dinky and granddad's house in 1997 because my uncle Malcolm had bought it when my grandparents moved out, but it had been over 30 years since I'd been to my grandpa and grandma's house.

I don't know why it comes as a surprise to me, but I am continually astonished at how small things that looked so big to me as a child are today. Before 1997, I was convinced that my mom grew up in a sizable English row house. I remember it as a three bedroom house with two living rooms downstairs that seemed enormous to me at the time. Not so much when I visited in '97. The place was small; I can't really imagine a family of five living there, although I am sure it was way more spacious than a lot of places folks lived back then, and even today.

Despite that experience, I was sure that my dad's parents' house would be the palace that I remembered it between 0 and 11 years of age. Not so much. I think the main reason I remember this house as being very very large was the garage (that albeit thinking back only held one car) and the back yard, which was like two large bowling greens either side of a row of what I remember as rosebushes but which I am sure probably were not. We couldn't run around the back of the house to check if the back yard was the size I remember it but suffice it to say that the driveway and front yard, which I remember as expansive in front of a house set back far from the road, were remarkably short. I'll have to remember not to be surprised in the future.

The palace on The Crescent…or so I thought 35 years ago. The garage is gone.

Finally, just a word about Yorkshire's recent history and how it ties into my own family's history. If there's an industry in the last 150 years or so that is tied to Yorkshire, it's coal mining. There is a massive coal seam called the South Yorkshire Coalfield between Barnsley, Doncaster and Sheffield which is very close to the surface of the Earth and therefore eminently accessible to men willing to mine it. Or perhaps more accurately, men willing to exploit other men to mine it. While Normanton is not within the triangle defined by the South Yorkshire Coalfield, there are significant coal seams below Normanton, which led to the establishment of a number of mines there in the 1800s and 1900s.

Coal mining is a dangerous and dirty business. It posed and poses both immediate (collapses, explosions or accidents) and long term (black lung comes to mind here) health threats to the men, women and children (yep, you read that right) who went or go down into the pit daily to work the black seam. But for some families, coal mining was either worth the risk or the only way they could survive at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. My great-grandfather (my grandpa's dad) was one of the men who braved the dangers of the pit daily, specifically for 50 years. Now, 50 years is not a conventional career as we think of today; he likely started working when he was just a little older than ten and retired at about the age of 60.

The National Coal Mining Museum for England is located in Yorkshire about a mile from my uncle Malcolm's house. The museum features a series of exhibits at ground level but it's greatest treasure is the 90 minute tour below ground in a former working coal mine. The exhibit is set up to walk you through the history of coal mining, from the earliest, very unsafe days to today's largely automated, heavily regulated industry. Our tour was led by a 45 year mining veteran (started at 12 years old) speaking in a broad Yorkshire dialect which lent a definite authority to the tour; the experience isn't going to be the same when these men retire for good.

The whole tour is useful and I'd encourage anyone to take it, but the first 30 minutes or so were truly chilling. Mining in the earliest days was a family affair, meaning the entire family (dad, mom and kids) would mine together. And this is not a good thought. 

The way it worked was dad and mom would mine a seam together, maybe 12-18 inches high, meaning on their hands and knees, separated from the main mine network by a wooden door which the kids would monitor. The purpose of the wooden door was to contain any sort of explosion or fire which happened during the work day. There are two really grisly things about this concept. First, if there's a fire or explosion, dad and mom are dead and the kids are orphans and they know it right away. Second, the mine owners only give the family one candle (candles cost money, after all), and the kids don't get it; they sit there all day long (with mice or rats but not both because rats will eat mice) in the pitch black waiting for one of their parents to knock on that wooden door. Or not. Think about it.

I am sure that by the time my great-grandfather started working in a mine that things had progressed a bit, maybe to the point where he only had to shovel 26 tons of coal per day to get any sort of payment in a cramped, barely lit, dirty environment still subject to collapse at any point. But that thought alone makes me so grateful for the world which I live in. It also makes me think I'm glad that somehow he survived all this to hand down his genes to me today and let me live. There are few things I have done on vacation recently that have made me think more than my visit to the National Coal Mining Museum.

I'm not sure where any of this leaves me long term, but I know short term I am a richer man. I'd love to spend more time researching my family history because I think it would really fascinate me, but I know to do that I need to spend a lot more time in Yorkshire, and that is not likely to happen in the next couple of years. Maybe after I get done with this five year plan, I can take some time to dig a little deeper.

The National Coal Mining Museum of England.

Wren's Dome

On Sunday night, September 2, 1666, a small fire started at the bakery of Thomas Farriner on Pudding Lane in London. Three nights later, the fire had consumed most of the city within London's old Roman wall and a small portion beyond the wall to the west. While there were relatively few deaths in what became known later as the Great Fire, the blaze destroyed more than 13,000 houses, almost 100 churches and a number of large public buildings in the city. Like most major fires in cities throughout history (Chicago comes to mind most notably in the United States), the event caused sweeping changes in building construction and firefighting policies to be implemented immediately.

Of all the buildings destroyed in the Great Fire, one of the most important was the old St. Paul's Cathedral, the largest church with the tallest spire in the city. The Cathedral, which had stood for more than five centuries at the time of the Great Fire, was not only a place for people to worship; it was literally a fixture on the London skyline. The task of recreating St. Paul's Cathedral would be a significant post-fire priority. The city and the church turned to Sir Christopher Wren, England's pre-eminent architect at the time, to take on the task of designing and overseeing the construction of the Cathedral. While the undertaking was not without design and construction obstacles, the importance of the effort clearly shows. In Cathedral terms, the construction was astonishingly fast; it was consecrated in 1697, a mere 31 years after the fire.

One of the greatest challenges for Wren was designing a building way taller than any other in the city while also maintaining a correctly proportioned interior, most importantly at the Cathedral's crossing, which was to be located beneath a massive dome. This was not a new idea for architects during the Renaissance. For centuries in Europe, man had been trying to build taller and taller churches. During the middle ages, the Gothic cathedrals throughout the continent stretched the limits of stone construction and the rudimentary understanding of structural principles decade after decade to reach closer to heaven. Generally speaking, the builders of these cathedrals were concerned only with height and not with the experience for the people on the inside; the task was about building close to God, not building correctly proportioned interior spaces.

But during the Renaissance, the discussion shifted. Now all of a sudden the conversation was about every aspect of design, and the architects of the world, who were slowly developing their craft into a profession, were now very concerned that the crossings of most Gothic cathedrals were just too tall. Filippo Brunelleschi had solved this problem in the design of the cathedral in Florence, Italy in the 1400s by creating two domes: one inside the church that could be viewed from below at a correct height and one to create the exterior form of the building. Michelangelo borrowed the same idea in the design of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in the following century. Operating on the time tested tradition within architecture of borrowing other people's ideas, Wren followed suit with the design of St. Paul's: the building has a magnificent outer dome which is visible from throughout London and an interior dome which is suitable to the interior building proportions favored by Wren. Between the two is a cone of brick, which is really holding the whole thing up.

Now I'm not usually a sucker for visiting old buildings. My primary historical interest in architecture is the work of the pre-Modernists, architects struggling to develop a new language of architecture appropriate to the new materials and technologies arising from the industrial revolution at the end of the nineteenth century. One of my objections to classical architecture is the concealing of the building's structure with cladding more pleasing to the eye; I'd rather see the columns and beams which are holding up the building rather than covering it up with ornament. This is a concept that the pre-Modernists wrestled with and you can see it in their work, which is one of the reasons I find that stuff so appealing. Wren, of course, being a Renaissance architect, covered all the building structure in St. Paul's. But you can still see the structure of the dome, if you are willing to work for it. Which is why I visited.

I have to admit, when I first started looking into creating an itinerary for my England trip, I initially balked at the £15 (or about $25) admission fee to St. Paul's. Yes, I had already paid a similar price to visit the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona earlier this year. But the Sagrada Familia is a masterpiece of pre-Modern architecture; St. Paul's is a seventeenth century classical-by-the-book church and not exactly my cup of tea (if you will excuse the expression). The admission price I was thinking about not paying, by the way, was a discounted advance purchase price; tack on an extra £1.50 when purchased on site! It just seemed to all be a bit too much. 

But ultimately the pull of Wren's dome was just too much to resist for two reasons. First, the admission price fell into my "I've come all this way and spent all this money just to get here, I may as well fork over a couple of more dollars" logic that I find myself using all too often lately to convince myself to part with a little more money than I really want to on vacation. Although I find my own logic sound on this point. And secondly, and I'd like to think more importantly, you can go up into the dome. I'm a bit of a sucker for going up high buildings and seeing the places I visit from a different perspective. Knowing I could go check out the hidden structure between the interior and exterior shells, which I know I would find truly beautiful, proved too irresistible. 

The trip to the top of St. Paul's dome seems like an easy one from the ground. The brochure you pick up with your admission price shows a great sectional view of the dome (above) with the number of steps to each level of the dome listed: 257 steps followed by 119 steps followed by 152 steps. 528 steps in all covering a vertical rise of 85 meters or about 279 feet. So at about a little before 4 pm on Tuesday, September 2, I made my way to the southwest corner of the Cathedral's crossing and entered the staircase hidden within the column at that location and started to climb.

The stairs to the Whispering Gallery.

The first 257 steps in the climb take you almost one third of the total height of the dome to the Whispering Gallery, so named because you can allegedly whisper on one side of the dome and have it be clearly audible on the opposite side. Given the number of fellow tourists in the gallery at the same time I was there, I was unfortunately unable to test if this was true. I suppose if I wanted to validate this claim, I'd get there when St. Paul's opens and rush up to the gallery before anyone else could get there. Maybe next time.

The Whispering Gallery is about half the distance to the top of the interior dome. From here you can see in more detail the paintings, including the many many saints, on the curves of the dome which are considerably closer in the Gallery than they are from the Cathedral floor. The steps that you climb to the Whispering Gallery (shown above) are spiral, like the rest of the stairs all the way to the top of the dome, and fairly wide. Wide enough even to accommodate two people going up passing two people going down. There is plenty of room and the climb seems pretty easy, although by the time you get to about step number 250, you start to feel the burden of sitting all day in an office, despite having walked yourself almost to death in the previous couple of days of vacation. I was glad for a few minutes rest before considering resuming the trek higher.

Before I continue, I should point out that photography in St. Paul's is forbidden. Yes, I took some pictures anyway. I figured they can't possibly want to restrict people from taking pictures of the insides of the stairs to the dome. That's really only fun to people like me, right? Besides, how would I write about my climb to the top without a few pics. If I've erred in judgment here, the Cathedral can probably figure out where to find me. 

The stairs to the Stone Gallery.

The next stop on the climb up St. Paul's dome is the Stone Gallery, 376 steps total and 53 meters total above ground level. The Stone Gallery is the exterior platform just below the base of the outer dome and it affords some nice views of London when you peak through the stone balustrade that runs about six feet high all around the perimeter of the Gallery. St. Paul's is truly one of the best places in the city to see the rest of London from an elevated viewpoint. It's really right in the middle of the old city and you can see pretty much everything. If only we could get rid of that pesky balustrade.

The stairs to the Stone Gallery are not like those from the Cathedral's floor to the Whispering Gallery; they are noticeably tighter. There's no two way traffic on these things. There is actually an "up" stair and a "down" stair leading to and from the Stone Gallery. There's room enough for a fairly large sized man (i.e. me) to get up or down but not much more. And there are resting spots for those folks who cannot take all 119 steps without stopping, allowing others to pass while catching some breath. Thankfully I'm not in bad enough shape yet to have needed any rest but the stair is challenging. As you go higher in the building, the rise of the steps increases. Each set of stairs gets more difficult.

The view through the Stone Gallery balustrade to the Shard.

The Stone Gallery is nice. I know nice is not a great word but that about sums it up. It's got a decent view and it's refreshing to get a breath of fresh air after being inside the centuries old church. But the fun part lies just ahead: the final climb to the Golden Gallery. Not only do you get the biggest payoff for your efforts in the form of panoramic views of London, you also get to check out the hidden structure between the domes while climbing past and in between it. This stuff is truly interesting from here on out.

The difference between this portion of the climb and the previous two sets of stairs is immediately obvious as soon as you step inside from the Stone Gallery. You are no longer climbing a spiral staircase with stone steps built within stone walls. Instead, you are ascending a series of metal stairs suspended between the structural brick cone and the inner face of the exterior dome, all of which is painted white. Looking up, you can see a spiral staircase system winding its way up and over as the curve of the outer dome forces you towards the center of the building. You can also hear the shoe-on-metal clanking of others climbing ahead of you echoing in the dome chamber. Only 152 more steps to go from here.

The metal spiral staircase from the Stone Gallery to the Golden Gallery.

The perforated ribs of the structural dome.

The structure is fascinating. The structural brick cone is your floor so to speak. It's solid and forms a surface by which to measure your climb. Between the brick and the exterior dome are a series of horizontal curved ribs to support the outside of the building, with cutouts both to allow passage of the stair you are climbing but also to decrease the weight of the structure (Wren knew what he was doing). The views you get as you climb are constantly changing as the space gets tighter and tighter. It's really sort of cool, I would think even if you are not an architect.

Eventually, you run out of dome and you start climbing into the cupola, which includes the outdoor Golden Gallery, and the stairs start getting really tight. The last half dozen or so stairs are no longer the metal spiral stairs but are instead hewn out of stone, much like the stairs to the Whispering Gallery or the Stone Gallery. Except tighter. Like way way tighter. I had difficulty fitting through here. My shoulders were just about touching the side walls and I actually managed to bump my head on the arch of the final opening before eventually emerging into the inside of the dome's cupola. Be careful here. It's a tight squeeze, but the sense of accomplishment you get in finally reaching the top is a good one.

The final staircase. The Golden Gallery awaits!

There is a small room within the cupola that by comparison to the last stairs seems enormous. There are some stairs leading further up which are closed to the public (totally jealous) and a door opening to the exterior Golden Gallery which is the ultimate view of London. Stepping through the doorway to the outside, you can see central London in an extraordinary way; there is absolutely nothing to obstruct your view of the city and you are right smack dab in the middle of everything. You are even able to take in some spectacular views of St. Paul's itself. But be prepared: the Golden Gallery is small and it is likely to be packed full of people. Hold on to your camera.

Getting to the top of St. Paul's is a bit of a chore, but exploring the innards of the dome and looking out over the entire city are well worth it. I did this once before in 1997 but I am sure the day was not as beautiful and I know the company was nowhere near as good. I'm not sure I'd do this every time I visited London but once every 14 years or so I think is OK. It's amazing how much a city changes in that time. I hope London is as gorgeous 300 years from now when St. Paul's is twice as old.

Looking down on St. Paul's from the Golden Gallery.

The ultimate payoff: looking south from St. Paul's over the Thames to the Millennium Bridge and the Tate Modern.

Stonehenge

Look up any sort of "Top 10" or "Top 12" or "Top Whatever" list of tourist attractions in England and Stonehenge is bound to be on the list. Before I started writing this post I Googled some top 10 lists to see if my supposition was correct and found Stonehenge first on two lists, third on another and ninth on the last. Yet in early August of this year, despite spending some of my youth in the United Kingdom, I had never been there. Neither had my parents. Or my sister. Or my grandparents. Or any of my cousins. I found one aunt and uncle (out of three couples) who had actually been to Stonehenge and that was years and years ago. If this recent trip to England was about fixing holes in my English experience (and it was), I knew I had to add a trip to Stonehenge to my itinerary.

So maybe just a sentence or two about Stonehenge is required before launching into what I found earlier this month on my trip there. Before I arrived at the site, I really knew very little about the circle of stones that makes up Stonehenge.  I knew it was world famous, thousands of years old, had a purpose that nobody seemed to agree on and somehow was connected to the solar cycle. Other than that, I would have struggled to describe anything more about the place. It is one of the most famous places in the country where I was born and I basically know nothing about it. It was time to find out.

The excuse I had always been offered (by my parents I suppose) as to why I had never been to Stonehenge was that it was (a) difficult to get to and (b) crowded. From that description, I imagined the stones in the middle of some densely populated English town with throngs of tourists milling around and within the circle, touching and leaving whatever was on their grubby paws on the centuries old stones. In some of my imaginings, the circle was in a traffic roundabout with packs of people crossing the road to get to it dodging cars and lorries like a game of Frogger. None of that turned out to be true. Not the Frogger. Not the roundabout. Not the tourists touching the stones. Not the crowded. Not even the difficult to get to.

The first sighting of Stonehenge.

OK, so it's not super easy to get to, but it is by no means difficult. For those folks with a car, it seemed really easy. The roads are both pretty and also pretty wide and the parking lot outside the visitors' center is huge. I didn't have a car while I was in country so my trip was perhaps a little longer and more involved but again by no means difficult. Sure, getting there involved the Tube from our hotel to Waterloo Station in London, a train from London to Salisbury, a double decker bus from the train station to the visitors' center and then a coach (of sorts) ride to the stones themselves. I managed to make it one step more complicated by getting off the coach halfway and wondering through a field of cows before finally making it to my destination.

Despite how involved all that seems, it was remarkably easy. Trains and buses run on schedule in England so the process of transferring from one mode of transportation to the next was super simple. The most difficult part of the whole thing was dealing with the South West Trains' staff who proved to be incredibly unfriendly and utterly unhelpful. I don't suppose they care that much but the next time I'm in England, I'll do what I can to avoid their train service.

So after the Tube, the train, the double decker bus, the coach (of sorts) and walk through a field of cows, you finally find yourself on Salisbury Plain, which is an absolutely gorgeous unspoiled English countryside dotted with prehistoric burial mounds, strange and very large scale markings on the ground and a fairly prominent henge. The place is peaceful (if you ignore the tourists) but it is clear looking at the stones in front of you that something pretty spectacular at one time or another was happening here. You can't get within probably 50-75 feet of the stones any more but the size and mass of the individual stones is pretty obvious. It's not surprising folks have been trying to wrap their brains around these things for a century plus.

Stonehenge is not the only circle of stones in the British Isles that pre-dates written history or befuddles scholars as to its exact meaning.  There are spectacular circles of smaller stones some of which look like they have been thrown into the ground by giants all over Scotland and the islands off the coast of northern Britain. But Stonehenge is much different. There are actually two circles of standing stones at Stonehenge surrounding a series of smaller stones which are either lying on their side or standing up. The larger standing stones are local to the area; and by local, I mean brought from 30 kilometers or about 20 miles away in an age where machine power didn't exist. These things weigh about four tonnes each (a tonne is a metric ton or 2,204 pounds). That's a long way to roll something that big.

The smaller stones on the inside of the circle are NOT local to Salisbury Plain. Those stones (and by smaller I mean "just" one or two tonnes) were brought to the site from southwest Wales which, while being the closest part of Wales to Salisbury, is about 240 kilometers or almost 150 miles away. Again, without machine power. Amazing!

The biggest differentiator between Stonehenge and other circles of stones in Britain, however, is that Stonehenge is the only circle with lintels, meaning the horizontal pieces of stone which span over the top of two adjacent vertical stones. While I imagine it is very difficult to get a stone weighing about 9,000 pounds to stand on its end without any machinery, I can't begin to fathom how difficult it is to put a stone on top of two other stones when the tops of those stones are about 12 or 14 feet off the ground.

This is likely the understatement of this entire blog (including the parts that aren't written yet), but the people that built Stonehenge were obviously extremely motivated. I mean, think about it. In an age where probably most of any human's time was spent trying to just survive, a group of people took time out of their day to move huge stones hundreds of miles on primitive wheels, then surrounded those huge stones with even bigger ones erected vertically after shaping those stones into roughly rectangular masses using other pieces of stone (metal tools were not used when Stonehenge was erected). And as if that weren't enough, they then decided to cap those stones with other stones which is not like tipping a big stone into a pit and then straightening it; you have to actually get the whole thing off the ground using a lot of men and I imagine levers and pulleys of some sort. It's absolutely astounding what these people did.

I can honestly say after spending an hour walking around Stonehenge at a distance slowly, that I understand a lot more about the place. However, I still don't know what they were used for and neither does anyone else. The audio guide you pick up as part of your admission ticket does an excellent job of narrating the history of just about every theory advanced about the stones but wraps it up with absolutely no conclusions, because there is no consensus about the purpose of these things. I get that "sacrifice site" has been ruled out but "observatory", "burial ground", "shrine to honor the dead" and many other things are still on the table and likely will be forever. This is a puzzle we are not solving any time soon because there's nothing written down by the people that built it (hence the term prehistoric).

I do know that the place is younger than 5,000 years because scholars know (or think they do, I guess) that the earliest burials at the site were taking place at about 3,000 B.C. when the stones were not in place. And there has to be some kind of solar connection because the design of the henge starting at the heel stone creates an axis that aligns with the rising sun on the solstices. I also know that I'm impressed by what I saw earlier this month near Salisbury. I don't have a bucket list and don't imagine I will ever make one (I refuse to have a list of things that when completed allow me to give up and die) but Stonehenge was surely on my must see in England list and it was worth the 90 minute train ride and 20 minute bus ride and 20 minute walk through a field to get there. Now at least when my niece asks me years from now if anyone in our family has been to Stonehenge, I'll be able to say yes.

And in case you are wondering...cows do not get spooked by Spinal Tap's "Stonehenge" being played on an iPod while walking through their field. At least they didn't the day I was there. I kept a watchful eye out just in case though. I had to listen to Spinal Tap while walking there. Just had to.

How To Save Money In England

The Tower of London: cheaper with advance purchase; even cheaper if you refuse the charitable donation.

This post represents the halfway point of me blogging about my recent trip to England. I don't often offer travel counsel on this blog because that's not really the point of telling stories about my travels, but I thought I'd make an exception since I think I actually have some useful advice to dispense here. So here goes.

If you are heading to England for vacation, and particularly London, I'd recommend you take a lot of cash or make sure you have some money set aside in your bank account to pay the bill you are inevitably going to have to deal with when your credit card statement arrives in the mail. This place is expensive. I mean like really expensive. Just using food as an example, I found the cost of meals at restaurants approximately the same in pounds as you would expect to pay in dollars in the United States. Considering a pound is worth 60 to 70 cents more than a dollar, you are essentially paying 60 to 70 percent more for meals. Think about that when you are ordering.

Traveling is often confusing. The customs of our own country don't always apply to a foreign land and if you visit without even a little research, you could find yourself surprised and forced to think on the spot with no resources to help you. Visiting a place where you speak the language helps, but not always. When I went to Iceland last December, I neglected to check the exchange rate for Icelandic Kronas and ended up taking $800 out of the ATM when I first got there; not surprisingly I still have some Krona nine months after that trip. So for those of you out there looking at a trip to the United Kingdom, here are some money saving tips that saved me this time around.

1. Pay for Your Hotel in Advance

So this tip doesn't really just apply to traveling in England, or Europe for that matter, but if you are a chain hotel person (I generally am), you can probably save some significant money by committing early to a room. When reserving a hotel room in larger hotels, the hotel is generally able to offer a discount on your stay if you reserve early and pay in advance. Of course, the catch here is the room is completely non-refundable and non-changeable, so if you somehow find yourself unable to travel when you thought you would be able to or just simply change your mind, then you are out of luck. But if you can make an early decision and stick with it, then you could save generally 15-20% on the cost of your room.

I realize that 15-20% may seem like a small discount and maybe it's not worth it for a night or maybe even two. But for me, the cost of a hotel is the single biggest expense on a trip and saving even 10% would be worth it. The cost here adds up, especially if you are staying put for any significant time. My hotel in London cost me about $200 per night after the exchange from pounds to dollars. I booked in advance and so I saved between 15-20% on the room. That's a savings of $30-$40 per night. Over six nights, that's a couple of hundred bucks which is nothing to sneeze at. This is one of my favorite ways to save money on trips; I use this strategy all the time. I'm sure I've saved hundreds this year alone.

2. Get an Oyster Card

I love the London Underground (or Tube). It goes everywhere in the city, it's quick, it's clean, it's safe and it comes regularly, even on weekends. Whichever station you visit during reasonable hours, you can expect no more than a couple of minutes wait. Considering the alternatives, which I suppose would be walking (which takes a long time) or taking a cab (expensive!), it's the ideal way to get around which is why it tends to be always packed, even on a Sunday afternoon. I know there's no way I could have completed my typically ambitious itinerary on my London trip earlier this month without spending a lot of time in the Tube.

But if there's one thing the Tube is not, it's cheap, especially if you pay cash. The minimum cash fare on the Tube is £4.70, which is about $7.75. That's a ton of money, especially if you take multiple trips in any one day. There were some days I took five or six rides on the Underground in a single day; no way do I want to be shelling out $50 or more just to get from place to place in the day. Fortunately, there is a solution, which is to get an Oyster Card, which is an electronic pay as you go touch card that you can load money onto and which offers a significant discount over cash fares. Discounts on the Tube when using an Oyster Card can be 50% or more and the cards are available in advance loaded with money from the London Underground website. We ordered our Oyster Cards on a Sunday night and they got to Arlington, Virginia the following Thursday; just like the Tube, they came quickly. I spent about £60 on the Tube in London in six days; that's about $17 per day. If I were paying cash, I'd easily have doubled that.

3. Free Beer

This is not a typo. If you are smart, there's free beer for the taking.

Over the past few decades, pub visitorship is down in England. As societal norms and gender roles have changed (not to mention the availability of alcohol in stores), fewer men are going down to the pub after work without their wives to drink delicious cask beer heavily and then hopping in a car and driving home. This has caused closure of all but the best pubs in the country and has caused a real crisis for pub owners so they have started to entice people to come back to the pub with an offer of free beer. That's right, FREE BEER!!!

The picture above is a screen shot from a pub in London called The Dove. Notice the words in the upper right of the screen. That's right: "free beer?" Clicking on this link will ask you to sign up for The Dove's mailing list in exchange for a free drink (you can unsubscribe easily). Other pubs, including the Duke of Wellington on Portobello Road in the Notting Hill section of London, have similar offers. Now, if you are a Londoner, the offer of one free beer over the course of a lifetime at a pub you will visit frequently is not much of a bonus; but if you are on vacation, you can pretty much get a free beer a night if you are smart, and that IS worth something. A beer in London will set you back about $7. It's worth signing up and getting a free pint.

4. Don't Tip

OK, let me clarify. Don't tip 15-20% like we do in the United States. It's not expected and it's not required. If you get really excellent service, then consider a 10% tip or so. The pay structure of wait staff is totally different in Europe than it is over here in America. People serving you food are not working for less than minimum wage with the understanding that they will make more based on tips. There's a reason the food costs 60-70% more than it does at home.

The Tower Bridge seen from the top deck of the Thames River Services' boat. Two discounts at once.

5. Buy Attraction Tickets Before You Leave Home

So this is similar to paying in advance for your hotel rooms, but unlike other destinations, I found this situation to be peculiar to London. In planning my trip to London, it seemed to me that there are a number of tourist attractions that offer discounts if you are willing to book on line in advance and (mostly) commit to the date you are visiting. Unlike reserving hotel rooms and paying in advance, you will likely not save 15-20% but there is an opportunity to save a few bucks (or quid) by committing early and sticking to your plan.

Tickets to St. Paul's Cathedral are £1.50 less expensive on line in advance. Tickets to the Tower Bridge are £2 cheaper in advance. And buying ahead of time at the Tower of London saves a ton of money; you can purchase tickets on line for £1.10 cheaper than in person but decline the additional voluntary charitable donation and you can knock an extra £1.90 off the ticket price. I know this is taking little bites of the apple but these discounts add up. At the very least you might be able to save enough to have an extra beer at a pub later on in addition to the free one you have already secured. Most tickets commit you to visit on the specific day you choose; the Tower of London allows you to visit within seven days of the date you select so that's a little more flexible.

Finally, sort of in this same category, one of the most popular tourist attractions in London is a boat ride to Greenwich (or beyond) on the Thames. This tour allows you to see most of the great sites in London from the water and gives you a great lay of the land (or water, I guess) while resting your feet for a little while if you tend to walk as much as I do when I'm on vacation. Most tour boats offer on line discounts in advance; the best value to me seemed to be Thames River Services, which knocks 50% off the £17 price for the tour from Westminster all the way beyond the Thames Barrier, a two hour tour in total. They even offer a 50% off coupon on the internet which allows you the full discount without committing to a date at all. There's no question that this deal was probably the best I got in London. I'd recommend it to anyone.

I'm sure there are other ways to save money in England, but there are my two cents (pun intended). I hope others can learn from my research. I haven't steered you wrong, I promise.

Baker Street

I am a big believer in lists and rankings. Show me any sort of "best of" list be it ranked or unranked about any subject I am remotely interested in and I'm all over it. Music charts, basketball power rankings, top restaurants, best travel destinations…the list of lists could go on and on. Rolling Stone magazine seems especially adept at making lists that distract me for hours and hours. I still have their 100 Greatest Albums of the 80s issue from November 16, 1989 and their Top 100 Game of Thrones characters list they published last year made me stop working for a while on the day it was published so I could digest the whole thing in detail (I made up the time, I swear). My favorite new (to me) lists may be Eater.com's lists of best 38 or 18 restaurants for cities in the United States and Canada. Essential stuff to find some good grub on the road.

Over the years, I've made my own share of lists. The last two summers I've ranked NBA mascots and team names on my other blog, My Swag Was Phenomenal, which details my life as a Washington Wizards fan. When I was in college at the University of Michigan, my friend Andrew Royster and I used to include a Top 10 albums list (that I am sure were heavily overfilled with Moody Blues albums) in every letter we wrote back and forth to each other (this is when people actually wrote letters on pieces of paper; imagine that!). Even at 46 years of age, I continue to make music lists today; every year I make an unranked list of 50 albums that I would take to a desert island with me as a way of recording my current taste in music.

So considering my obsessions with lists and especially music lists, I have to have a number one song of all time, right? That's correct. I do. My hands down, no question about it, number one song of all time is Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street". So it seemed appropriate to me to make a quick pass by the real Baker Street in London when I was on the other side of the Atlantic a few weeks ago so I could pen a few words about my favorite song ever.

"Baker Street" wasn't always my favorite song. I remember as a kid really hating the song when it was released, although admittedly most of the reason I disliked it was that it was keeping "The Smurf Song" by (you guessed it) the Smurfs, from the number one position on the English pop charts. I remember sitting with my dad in our car while on vacation in France that summer listening to the announcement of the number one song and being disappointed by the Smurfs still being at number two. My musical taste has matured just a bit since 1978, although I still have my Smurfs 45 rpm single.

Looking south down Baker Street, August 29, 2014.

"Baker Street" is about Rafferty's struggles to extricate himself from a record deal he had signed while a member of Stealer's Wheel, a group that released three albums in the early 1970s. While with Stealer's Wheel, Rafferty wrote and released the song "Stuck in the Middle With You" which might not have been a hit at the time but continues to enjoy plenty of airplay today. When he decided to dissolve Stealer's Wheel and go out on his own, his record company objected, claiming he was under obligation to record for them and blocked any release or recording of a solo album.

So for a three year period during the 1970s, Rafferty was involved in a legal fight to record as a solo artist which required him to travel to London a lot. While in the city, he ended up staying at a friend's place on Baker Street, which is obviously how the song got its name. "Baker Street" is not exactly an uplifting song. It's full of imagery about how depressing the city is and a longing for time in the country living a quieter, less complicated life. The lines "This city desert makes you feel so cold/Its got so many people, but its got no soul" in the middle of the first verse set the tone right away. Along the way to the end of the song, he explains how disillusioned he is with the music industry and describes drinking every night as a means of coping with what he is going through and escaping the personal hell that the city represents.

Despite the depressing nature of the lyrics, I find the song very romantic and it sort of has a happy ending. I love the character who is haunted by meaningless relationships and a love of alcohol as a means of coping (Rafferty struggled with alcohol for most of his life). Musically the song is amazing. It is punctuated at critical points by gorgeous saxophone playing by Raphael Ravenscroft (I actually have his solo album which I assume was recorded off the success of "Baker Street", for what that's worth) and a guitar solo after the last verse which is surely overshadowed by Ravenscroft's playing but which is no less deserving of recognition. It's an odd song to achieve worldwide acclaim; it's not structured as a verse-chorus with a bridge type of song. I guess its popularity is a measure of its brilliance.

I realize this post isn't really about my trip to England, so if you are disappointed in reading this I'm sorry. But I thought Gerry Rafferty deserved this post (he died in 2011 so won't be making any more music). This song has made my life better and I'm glad my stopping by Baker Street in London allowed me to co-opt my own blog for selfish reasons for just one post.

Gerry Rafferty's City to City; "Baker Street" is track number two.