Day Four - The City, museums, and pub crawlingAfter our big adventure on Thursday, you'd think that we would take it easy on Friday. Oh, no, we had lots to see. We planned on hitting the Tate Modern before lunchtime, meeting Tess and our friend Aaron for lunch, sightseeing a bit more, then hustling back to Carburton to meet Bruce and John for a pub crawl. It was an ambitious itinerary, but we had a great day. To sustain us on the first leg of our journey, we stopped at the Villandry Foodstore, where we procured some delicious pastries. They were crazy good. People always make jokes about how bad British food is, but we didn't really run into that on our trip. Maybe that's because we largely steered clear of actual British food in favor of other types, mostly Asian and Middle Eastern. In Villandry's case, the surroundings seemed more like France than the U.K. With pastries in hand (and quickly migrating to our stomachs), we hoofed on up to the Great Portland Street Underground station to catch a train. This was our first experience with the Tube, as it is commonly known, and we found it to be pretty interesting. One the one hand, it has all the modern efficiency of the Washington DC Metro. On the other hand, it has the smell, soot, and history of the New York Subway. The combination is quite enjoyable, and we found it to be a good way to get around the city. One thing that can confuse Americans a little bit is the fact that in London they have "subways" which are just pedestrian tunnels that cross streets underground, though they are often associated with Tube stops. We got wise to the whole subway vs. Underground thing right quick, so it wasn't any trouble for us. One quick transfer and a short trip later, we found ourselves at the London Bridge stop.
The London Bridge behind us for the moment, we strolled along Southwark's Millenium Mile past a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre where Shakespeare got his bard on, and the Clink Museum where the Bishops of Winchester got their torture on. We were fixing to get our modern on at the Tate Modern. As the kid at Trafalgar Square said, "it's fucking massive!" We didn't have a lot of time before we had to meet Tess and Aaron at Lloyd's, so we did the fast National Lampoon's Vacation tour. There were lots of interesting pieces on display, but the highlight for us was Patrick Caulfield's "After Lunch." Speaking of lunch, we were late for ours, so we hustled back to the London Bridge to meet our friends in The City. The City is to the U.K. what Wall Street is to the U.S. It's the financial hub, where trading is a very big deal and you can almost smell the money in the air. Everyone strides around purposefully, and we were no exception as we high-tailed our way to the Lloyd's of London headquarters. Tess and Aaron were out front, and we met them only twenty minutes late. Tess was kind enough to sneak us in for a tour, and it was awesome. The architecture of the building is outstanding, and the history is palpable. Tess showed us the Lutine bell, and we were able to thumb through the adjecent ledgers which chronicle every claim made on a Lloyd's policy. Pretty weighty stuff. Tess also took us up to the higher floors, where we dashed through a private party on our way to the top floor. There our enjoyment of the top floor was quickly quashed by a wet blanket who shooed us away. Ahn, we were getting hungry anyway. The history and grandeur (and fussy people) of Lloyd's behind us, we strode through The City looking for a pub where we could grab a quick bite and a couple pints. We first went into one that was very crowded and thick with smoke. It turns out that a lot of The City's financial types take really long drunken lunches on Fridays. That's all well and good for them, but it was really cramping our style. After stumbling around a bit more, we finally crossed the All Bar One pub in Tower Hill, and gave them a shot. The place was quite nice, with high ceilings, a decent selection of beer, and a surprisingly good menu. We had a fine lunch, enjoying one another's company, and then Aaron had to run some errands before our pub crawl in the evening. With the afternoon quickly turning to evening, Tess, Kerah, and I set off for Terence Conran's Design Museum. On our way, we strolled past the Tower of London, stopping only long enough to look for a snow globe in their gift shop. (Our friend Mary Sigler collects them.) We then crossed the Tower Bridge, which is just as lovely up close but has a tendency to bounce pretty seriously when big lorries roll over the drawbridge part. We goofed around up there, taking photos of the bridge and each other until the sleety rain started to get the best of us, at which point we hightailed along the riverside walk to Sir Terence Conran's Design Museum. By the time we arrived at the Design Museum it was almost four o'clock, with little over an hour before closing. If we waited until after four, we could enter with discounted tickets, so we kicked around the gift shop for a few minutes then entered the museum proper with high hopes and an hour. Personally, I was fretting because I didn't think that we'd be able to see everything in so little time, but as it turns out I needn't have worried. The museum wasn't tiny or anything, but it wasn't really large, either. The other thing that it wasn't was well-designed. You'd think that a museum specifically dedicated to the topic of design would itself be well designed, but alas, that was not the case. In particular, there was a display from the permanent collection which spotlighted 20th century advances in particular materials like wood, steel, and plastic. There were lots of great pieces in the square displays, but it was hard to puzzle out the name and designer for each piece. You see, they had arbitrarily assigned numbers to the pieces, so you might be looking at numbers 3, 7, and 14 on one side of a display. Worse, the legend for these numbers was written in its entirety on one side of the square, so if you wanted to identify any of the pieces on the other three sides, you had to remember the numbers and walk over to the legend. The legend itself was all smooth black san-serif text on the white paint, and I imagine that the person who made the display fancied it to look very much like something in a design museum should. If only it were half as functional as it was pretty. They could have at least included tiny photos of the items to help make associations, but I suspect that would offend their ascetic aesthetic. Don't they still teach FFF (form follows function) in design schools? Bah. Form also held the field in the Web Wizards exhibit, as all of the sites displayed didn't really have a point beyond being cool. It was basically a public display of rasterbation, or in this case, vectorbation. Now I'm not saying that there's no place for that sort of thing, because that would make me a giant hypocrite. It's just that when something is billed as a museum dedicated to design, it would be nice to have exhibits that celebrate the marriage of good function with pleasing form. If I want to see art, there are plenty of art museums out there. I suppose it was so disappointing because I had such high hopes for a different kind of curatorial focus. With that said, don't even get me started on the Memphis collective exhibit. The Design Museum wasn't all bad, though. One thing that I rather enjoyed was a line-up of various designer chairs that you could actually sit in. It was quite nice of them to engage museum-goers in such a direct fashion, and I applaud the interactive nature of the exhibit. Gaetano Pesce's Up 5 chair in particular was easy on the eyes and easy on the body, but most of the other chairs weren't as fun to sit in as they were to look at. I'm left wondering whether anyone has ever really let form follow function or whether that's just something that embarassed artists say to make themselves believe that they are designers. I'll take a Sam Maloof chair over those punks any day. The other cool exhibit was the Conran Foundation Collection 2001, with guest curator Marc Newson. In the words of the Design Museum November 2001-April 2002 Bulletin: "Every year Sir Terence Conran chooses a guest curator to spend £30,000 on "things you would like to live with" which are then exhibited at the Design Museum as the Conran Foundation Collection. Past curators have included designers Jasper Morrison, Ross Lovegrove and the gardener Dan Pearson." With his thirty thousand pounds, Marc Newson had purchased a cosmonaut's suit, a whole mess of surf memorabilia, and various other things. Best thing about the exhibit was the little placards explaining why he had chosen the things that he had.
For all our well-intentioned hustle, we still hit a bit of a snag. What a nice snag it was, though. Just as we were leaving the gallery, we were treated to the sight of the Tower Bridge being opened for an approaching tall ship. We oohed and aahed, took a bunch of pictures, then beat feet to the Tower Hill station. We tarried just a bit at the Tower Hill station for some pictures of the Tower of London with us in the foreground. Our touristy posing done, we took the Circle Line back to Great Portland Street and met up with John and Bruce at Fool UK HQ. After checking email, having some pre-pub suds, and other geekery, we then proceeded to crawl. We visited three pubs, the names of which escape me now. We started with a little place in a mews (an alley that used to serve as access to stables). Inside the joint it was smoky as hell and more than a little crowded. Luckily, the pub had a nice rail out front and the temperature was pretty agreeable for the last day of November. Even more fortuitous, the British buy drinks in rounds, so someone else had to fight to the bar while we chilled outside. We only had one pint at the place in the mews, then headed for another pub (I think on Portland Place). It was considerably quieter, and our pals said that this place was frequented by BBC types. Those types obviously had other places to be on this evening, though, as there weren't many patrons. We had a few pints, and finally left when some drunk started telling us how he was in the SAS and would be shipping out for Afghanistan. He urged us to remember him, but I don't think he meant for it to be as an annoying drunk. I guess you never know how things will work out in life. All that drinking made us powerful hungry, so we stumbled down the road to a Lebanese restaurant, where we were told that we'd have to wait for half an hour. Kerah and Tess agreed to stay and wait while Aaron, Bruce, John, and I went in search of another pub. Bruce said that he thought he remembered a place nearby that he thought was frequented by truckers. To my mind, that wouldn't necessarily be bad nor good, but as it turns out it was largely incorrect. At least, if there were any truckers they didn't look particularly truckerly. Then again, I don't have much concept of what a British trucker looks like anyway. In any case, the place was very Scottish, and had a name with Caledonia in it. We found a little empty standing room by the bar, and it was my turn to buy the round. In a stroke of luck for me, we only ordered up half pints due to the time constraint. We stood around listening to the Scottish musicians, marvelling at the sheer volume of Scottish memorabilia on the walls. And I'm not talking about tartans and crap like that. They did have some of that stuff, but mostly the walls were covered with articles about Scotland football (i.e., soccer). There were newspaper clippings, framed jerseys, posters, and jokes disparaging other national football teams, mostly England's. We enjoyed our ale and cheap cigars while making jokes, mostly about the Scots. What business two Americans, a Canadian, and an Aussie have making fun of Scots in a Scottish bar is beyond me, but fortunately no one overheard us, or at least no belligerent people overheard us, so half an hour later we tottered back down the street to the Lebanese restaurant. We were seated at a long, narrow collection of tables, and once again went through the now traditional wrangling with the servers "Still or sparkling?" -- "TAP!" John ordered up some Arak, another licorice-tasting liquor. Apparently, the widespread banning of absinthe around the turn of the century spawned myriad anise-based substitutes: arak, ouzo, sambuca, raki, pernod, etc. Personally, I can't see why the world needs so many anise-based drinks, but they seem to be quite popular. Armed with our arak, we ordered a bunch of other mezes. Most of the group was vegetarian, so Bruce and I got to split the delicious lamb stuff between the two of us. We ate until we were stuffed, then ate some more, then rolled home for some well-deserved shut-eye. > Day Five - Holland Park and the Notting Hill Arts Club > |
