London trips 2022-3


Great day out with John Beynon in London including a trip down river to Greenwich for lunch just round the corner from the Cutty Sark, one of the last tea clippers to be built (1869) and one of the fastest. It's the largest nautical feature at Greenwich towering over the dock there. 


Unsurprisingly we’ve been taking to the river in London over the hot spell. Here en route from Hampton Court to Richmond on a good old boat ‘Princess Freda’ built almost a century ago. ‘Freda’ plies her route day by day over the summer through Teddington Lock to Richmond and back.



A familiar sight to regular attenders at St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield Thursday fantastic free lunchtime concerts. It’s the gothic tomb of Prior Rahere 1405 standing in contrast to the Romanesque main body of the church. The kneeling figures flanking his body hold open Bibles bearing cheering words from Isaiah 51: God ‘will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord’.  Rahere had a vision of St Bartholomew telling him to build a church and hospital and founded twin institutions, St Bartholomew's Church and St Bartholomew's Hospital, in 1123. They both survive to this day. 




My Green Top, Thorne Primary School contemporary Christopher Pavlosky and I met in London at St Olave, Hart Street by Tower Hill for last Thursday’s lunchtime concert with Guildhall Harpists. In the picture top left is the head of Elisabeth Pepys looking down from her memorial towards that of her husband Samuel Pepys (1632-1703). The Pepys’ lived in Seething Lane and worshipped in St Olave’s adjacent to his workplace at the Navy Office.



My friend Christopher Pavlosky in the ruins of St Dunstan in the East on our way from Pepys’ Church (St Olave, Hart Street) to the Samuel Pepys pub for lunch overlooking the Thames from its north bank. The Saxon Church was restored by St Dunstan in 950 AD, rebuilt by Christopher Wren 1697 after the Fire of London but succumbed to the Blitz in the Second World War opening as a public space 1967.



Statues of Fortitude and Truth above the entrance to the Old Bailey flank a recording angel with the City of London Arms below all fashioned in Portland Stone by Frederick William Pomeroy 1905-6. The Old Bailey central criminal court is a couple of minutes from City Thameslink station. 





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