Castles!

It's hard to believe that I have been in London for five weeks! If page views are any indication, my weekly blog posts have been a success (over 400 views so far, not counting mine). If you have been enjoying them, please take a minute this week and leave a comment. I removed most of the barriers to commenting and I would love to have some feedback. (For example: Are their topics you'd like me to cover? Should I include more pictures and fewer words? More words and fewer pictures?)

My theme this week is castles and palaces. I mentioned in the post about my trip to Dover that I love visiting sites that have many layers of history, and the castles and palaces of the British monarchy certainly fit that description. It's not that I'm obsessed with the royal family. (In fact, I would have a hard time telling you who its current members are if they had not had so much trouble keeping their clothes on recently.) It's more the buildings themselves, their past inhabitants, and the historic events that took place there that interest me. So, here's a little bit about the ones I've seen so far, using a few more pictures than usual. (I've taken about 350 pictures so far and I know no one is going to want to look at them all when I get back.)

Kensington Palace

Kensington Palace is a close neighbor of mine. It's less than half a mile from my building and I go past it almost every day either on my morning run or my walk to work. It is most famous for two things. First, it was the childhood home of Queen Victoria, who ruled Britain and its empire for more than 60 years. Some of you might have seen the movie The Young Victoria a few years ago. There's a scene in it where she is told that her uncle, King William IV, has died and that she is now Queen. I saw the room where that actually happened! Second, Kensington Palace was the official residence of the former Princess Diana, after her divorce from Prince Charles. There is a gate on the south side of the building where people continue to leave flowers for her every day.

This is the side of Kensington Palace that faces Kensington Gardens, a popular park that adjoins Hyde Park. Behind this building is a wing that still serves as a residence for some members of the royal family.

Buckingham Palace

Buckingham Palace is the Queen's official London residence. It's closed to visitors for most of the year, but they open it up in the summer while the Queen is in Scotland. I've seen the outside several times, but this was the first time that I've been here when it was possible to go inside. Unfortunately, they do not let you take photographs. As the tour guide said, "We don't want you to catch the Queen in her housecoat." She also said that anyone caught taking a picture would be "taken directly to the Tower of London." That's a pretty obvious joke, but a good one. I'd use it if I worked there. So, you'll have to take my word for it, the state rooms are impressive. Decorated by George IV, they are every bit as opulent as you would expect. Getting inside was like going through security at an airport. This is understandable, especially since they're having a special exhibition of all the Queen's diamonds, in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee.

This is the view of the palace that you are probably familiar with. I never realized that this portion of the palace is used primarily by visitors.

This is the back of the palace. A view only visible from the gardens, which are inside the palace walls. I included it here so you would believe that I went inside.

Windsor Castle

When the Queen is in the London area, she spends most weekends at Windsor Castle. Windsor is about a half-hour train ride from central London. (I don't think the Queen takes the train, though.) On the audio guide that I listened to, Prince Charles said that Windsor "looks exactly like people expect a castle to look." It sounded a bit pompous when he said it, but I have to admit, it's true. The town seems just right, too. It has a very medieval feel to it. The shops, pubs, and other buildings are built, literally, right up to the very imposing castle walls. Begun by William the Conqueror in the 11th century, Windsor is the oldest, and largest, occupied castle in the world.

This is the view of the castle walls that you get as you walk up the path from the main entrance. It is part of what is called the Upper Ward.

The Round Tower is the most impressive structure in the castle. It was built by Henry II in the 12th century. If the castle walls were breached, it would be the final stronghold.

This is the central court of the Upper Ward. On the left is the official entrance to the state apartments, where the Queen, other members of the Royal Family, and their guests stay.

St. George's "Chapel." This is home to the Order of the Garter, founded in 1348. It is the real-world equivalent of King Arthur's legendary Knights of the Round Table.

Kew Palace

Kew Palace was built in 1631 and was one of the residences of King George III. If you've forgotten your history, he was King during the American Revolution. He spent quite a bit of time here later in life while he was suffering from "madness." There's a great movie called The Madness of King George about his struggle with mental illness. Kew Palace is located within the beautiful Royal Botanical Gardens. I'll post some pictures of it another time.

A great view of what King George's daughters called "Little Kew." Compared to Windsor, it is pretty modest. Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her 80th birthday with a dinner here.

Hampton Court Palace

This is the last one, I promise. I know I'm pushing it. Hampton Court is probably my favorite of those I've included here. If you were a fan of the Showtime series The Tudors you already know something about this palace. Built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in the early 16th century, he "gave" it to King Henry VIII in 1528. (Wolsey's power and influence had peaked and his enemies were already starting to bring him down.) But the Tudors are only half the story. In 1689, the famous architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to reinvent Hampton Court for William and Mary, the new King and Queen. The Wren additions stand in stark contrast to the original Tudor palace.

This is the front entrance to the original Tudor portion of the palace. 

Base Court, just inside the main gate pictured above, is the largest courtyard in the palace.

A partial view of Great Hall, added by Henry VIII during his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the second of his six wives. This is an amazing room.

One of my favorite parts of the palace was the Tudor kitchens, where meals were prepared for Henry VIII and the 600 members of his court. Food historians have done a lot of interesting research here.

What was for dinner? Usually meat. The racks in front of this giant fireplace were used to cook it on spits. There were five more fireplaces just like it. 

This is part of Christopher Wren's addition. You'd never know it was the same palace if you didn't see the two parts together.

The Gardens at Hampton Court are amazing. They go on for miles and include, among other things, a maze. This is a small, but beautiful portion.

I ran into Henry VIII while I was visiting. I wanted to talk to him, but he had been arguing with Anne Boleyn and was in a foul mood.

As if these were not enough, there are several other palaces in the London area. The Banquet House, which has a beautiful ceiling painted by Peter Paul Rubens, is the only part of Whitehall Palace, where Henry VIII actually lived, that is still standing. It's right in the heart of London about halfway between Trafalgar Square and Parliament. Then, of course, there is the Tower of London. That's worth a post of its own, so I'll restrain myself.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to leave a comment. Cheers!

Stonehenge and Bath

Last weekend CAPA took most of its 150 London students on a trip to Stonehenge and Bath. I had been to both places on a previous trip to the UK, but there was no way I could turn down a free trip to see them again. Also, one of my favorite things about traveling with students is watching them react to things they're seeing for the first time. The only drawback was that going along meant spending several hours on a bus, something that I don't really enjoy, but that's why I brought along a bottle of Dramamine!

Our first stop was Stonehenge. The historian in me would like to begin with an explanation of Stonehenge, but we really don't know very much. (My favorite crazy theory is that Stonehenge was built by an alien civilization as a message to humans, and its meaning will be revealed when we are ready. I'm guessing we won't be ready any time soon.) What we do know is that it was completed about 3500 years ago. It also seems pretty certain that the four-ton stones were brought to the site from southwest Wales, which is about 240 miles away! Maybe it is the mystery that surounds Stonehenge that makes it so interesting to us. Most of us, that is. People react in very different ways to Stonehenge. As we were pulling into the parking lot, one of my students said that the first sight of it gave him goosebumps. On the other hand, I heard a different student say: "There's only so long I can stand here and look at rocks."

Here I am with the Missouri London Program students. From left to right: Trevor, Alex, Beattie, Zach, me, Meghan, and Jeff.

One of many pictures I took. The last time I was here it was cloudy, so I was grateful that it was a sunny day.

After Stonehenge, we got back on the buses and went to Bath. One reason that I wanted to visit Bath again is that when I went there in the summer of 2007 it was so crowded you could hardly move. Unfortunately, it was just as crowded this time. It was a fun day to be there, though. It was the final day of the annual Jane Austin festival. If you're familiar with Jane Austin, you know that she lived there for a while and the city features prominently in several of her books. As the bus pulled into the city we saw several hundred people in the park dressed in early nineteenth century costume. We went back to the park after getting off the bus, but were disappointed to find that they had already dispersed. Fortunately, we ran into small groups of them in town all afternoon. Bath is a beautiful city, but because it is so crowded and very densely built it is difficult to photograph. Here are a few of my favorites.

Two Jane Austin Festival participants outside the doors of Bath Abbey.

This building is called the Royal Crescent. It's so large that it is hard to get it all in a photograph, but the panoramic feature on my camera did a pretty good job.

If you have trouble putting out your torch when you arrive home at night, you should consider installing one of these on your front porch.

Bath Abbey is right in the middle of the city, and surrounded by other buildings, so it's particularly difficult to photograph. In the right foreground is the 19th century entrance to the Roman Baths.

The interior of Bath Abbey.

The Great Bath in the Roman Baths. The terrace and many of the structures that surround the Bath were added in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the bath itself looks much the way it did when the Romans left Britain in the 5th century. 

Bath sits on top of a natural hot spring. This Roman tunnel brings the spring water to the bath. There is a new bath nearby that offers services similar to those available in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but the water in the Roman Bath is unsafe. Not only does it run through 1,600 year-old lead pipes, it is also infectious. A girl who swam in the bath in 1979 died five days later from amoebic meningitis.   

That's me! I probably have this exact same picture from 2007, but how can you not take it?

Thanks for reading my blog. If you're enjoying it, please take a minute to leave something in the comments section. The page has been getting a lot of hits, but I haven't gotten much feedback other than that. Cheers!

Dover

Well, I've pretty much settled into a work routine in London: Mondays I prepare for my classes, Tuesdays I teach, Wednesdays I check out the site where I will be taking my class the following day, and Thursdays I take my class on their "field excursion." That leaves Fridays, which I set aside for exploring a new neighborhood in London. I know, sounds like I have it pretty rough, doesn't it? And I haven't even mentioned the weekend! I plan to use about half of my Saturdays for day trips outside the city.

Last Saturday I took the first of these trips, this one to Dover. I really didn't know much about Dover, except that it is on the narrowest part of the English Channel, that it is the home of the famous White Cliffs, and that there is a castle there. I'm not even sure what made me choose Dover for my first outing, I guess the combination of those things just made it seem like a pretty cool destination.

Dover is about two hours from London by train. When I got there I walked out of the train station with no map and no guide book, but I wasn't really concerned. I've done that dozens of times in many countries. (Angela can tell you about the time that we wondered around the streets of Citges, Spain with our luggage for about an hour before a kind woman picked us up and drove us to our hotel--which was in the the opposite direction. Then there was the frightening hour I spent at the Hanoi airport when there was no one standing there holding a sign with my name on it.) The big difference here is that there is no language barrier! Also, I had all day and just two things on my agenda: a castle and cliffs. I followed some signs that were supposed to lead me to a visitor information center, but the signs ran out before I ever saw an information center. It didn't really matter, though, I could already see the castle. I should have known it would be at the highest point in the city. (I'm really glad I didn't ask anyone where it was! I can see them pointing up at it and me feeling like an idiot.)

It was a bit of a hike to get up to it, but it was well worth it! It really is one of the coolest things I've seen. (If you know me, you know that I say that about almost every place I visit for the first time, but I mean it every time.) My favorite historic sites are ones that have layer upon layer of history, and Dover Castle definitely has that. I'll save most of the history lesson for the photo captions, that way you can skip it if you want.

The site where Dover Castle stands was important long before the castle was built. This area, which is within the castle walls, had been inhabited for more than a millennia.

Here is a ninth century Anglo-Saxon church standing right next to a first century Roman lighthouse. How cool is that? You can tell by the red brick that the church has been substantially rebuilt, but they still hold services there every Sunday.

Here's a close-up of the Roman lighthouse, with the great tower of the castle in the background.

Here is the inner fortress of Dover Castle, with the Great Tower in the background on the right. I went to the top of the tower. On a clear day you can see France from up there. It was sunny, but there was a haze over the channel.

By the twelfth century, when the Great Tower was built, they had pretty much stopped building those familiar looking towers, so it was probably more for show than for protection. The outer portions of the castle, like what's pictured here, would have done the real work of defense.

They've done a great job setting up the rooms in the Great Tower as they might have looked in Medieval times. Here's the banquet room.

The passageways really make you feel like you are in a castle. This one is above ground, but there are many that go deep below the surface, with openings in the cliffs that overlook the channel.

The history of Dover Castle doesn't end in Medieval times. Every time that Britain was at war with the Continent, including the Napoleonic Wars, and World Wars I and II, the castle was adapted to defend the island at its closest point to the mainland. The passageways I mentioned above were used to direct the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in 1940. I was able to go down and see that area, which was left as it was during World War II, unfortunately, photography was not allowed.

After spending a few hours at the castle, I hiked (another serious hike) over to the best viewing spot for the White Cliffs. They were pretty spectacular. I took dozens of pictures, but they don't quite do them justice, and they all look pretty much like the one below.

Here are the famous White Cliffs of Dover.

I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to spend the semester this way and since I haven't done so yet on this blog, I want to thank Missouri Southern for giving me that opportunity. Well, I better get this posted, tomorrow I am off to Stonehenge and Bath!

Cheers!

London at War

Although they have nice facilities at CAPA, Missouri London Program courses are supposed to "use London as the classroom." So, yesterday, after just one meeting at CAPA, my World War II class hit the streets and made a visit to the Churchill War Rooms. 

My "Grand Alliance" class outside the Churchill War Rooms 

During "The Blitz," from June 1940 to June 1941 the German Luftwaffe bombed southern Britain, including London, without mercy. More than 43,000 civilians were killed, most of them in London. Number 10 Downing Street, where Prime Minister Churchill lived, was, at the time, a 250 years old.  To protect Churchill and his War Cabinet . . . well, I'll just let Winston tell you himself:

"During the last fortnight of September preparations were made to transfer my ministerial headquarters to the more modern and solid Government offices overlooking St. James Park . . . . These quarters were called "the Annexe." Here during the rest of the war my wife and I lived comfortably. We felt confidence in this solid stone building, and only on very rare occasions went down below the armour. My wife even hung up our few pictures in the sitting room, which I thought it better to keep bare . . . . Below was the War Room and a certain amount of bomb-proof sleeping accommodation." Winston Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War

Statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square

I'm not sure how much protection this "solid stone building" provided the Prime Minister, since during an air raid, if he was not busy in the armoured war room beneath his residence, he was fond of standing on the roof, which, he said, provided a "splendid view."

After the war, the Cabinet War Rooms were closed up and left virtually untouched until 1974, when plans to turn them into a museum began. The cramped spaces, poor light, and glass partitions make it difficult to take good photographs there, but I've posted some highlights below.

This is the actual Cabinet Room, where the full War Cabinet met. The chair with the rounded back, just in front of the map, is where Churchill sat. (Unfortunately, you can see my reflection in the glass on the left side of the picture.)

Although this appears to be a door to the toilet (the latch over the handle reads "occupied") it was actually a closet containing the trans-Atlantic telephone. Churchill made and received many calls from President Roosevelt in this room.

This is the official diary of the War Rooms. It is open to June 6, 1944.  "D-Day" is circled in the middle of the page on the left.

This is the log where visitors signed in. Notice that King George VI signed in on May 12, 1942. (I wonder if he had to show identification?)

This is a corridor leading to the Map Room. Because of a stairway above this portion of the bunker, it was considered a weak point. It was pumped full of concrete and then a tunnel was drilled through it.

The Churchills had living quarters above the War Rooms, but this space was always kept ready in case Winston had to stay below. (Clementine had her own room.)

This map was in the Churchill Museum, which now adjoins the War Rooms.  It was used by Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the "Big Three" conference in Potsdam. On the plastic covering of the map, they were making preparations for the occupation and partition of Germany.

Some of the other sites my World War II class will be visiting this semester are the Imperial War Museum, the National Army Museum, the HMS Belfast (a WWII-era destroyer that took part in D-Day), and St. Paul's Cathedral. I hope you will join us. Cheers!

This was just too good to leave out!

Greetings from London!

I've been here nearly a week and I thought I better make good on my promise to blog while in London. The main reason I told so many people about this blog is that I thought it would force me to actually do it. The trouble is I've never blogged before. I figured it would be easy, after all I have this voice inside my head that narrates my life like an episode of "The Wonder Years." I could just write down some of that stuff, right? I've kept a journal at various times in my life, usually while traveling, and I thought that's pretty much what I had done. When I went back and read some of those journal entries, however, I realized that what I had written was a boring chronicle of my daily activities. Nobody wants to read that. Those "Wonder Years" episodes had a point, right? So, for the last few days I've been trying to figure out what my point would be. Well, here's what I've come up with. My first few posts will be fairly descriptive, just so you get an idea of where I am and what I'm doing here. In later posts I will try to have some kind of theme: food and restaurants, beer and pubs, teaching and history (note my priorities), etc. Don't worry, I won't write history lectures, but I am an historian after all, so that's how I see the world. I'll also post some pictures and descriptions of places I visit for those of you who really just want to know what I'm up to.

Where I Live

I have one very spartan room with a private bath in a place called Vincent House, which caters to long-term visitors to London. I had received mixed reviews about Vincent House from friends and colleagues who have stayed here in the past, but so far I am very comfortable here. I have a good wired broadband connection, and there is wi-fi in the dining room and the lounge downstairs. I get breakfast and dinner every day and I have been pleasantly surprised by the food. Vincent House is located in Notting Hill. If that sounds familiar, you're probably thinking of the 1999 movie starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. I've never actually seen it. If the fact that Julia Roberts was in it didn't keep me away, the tag line probably did:  "Can the most famous film star in the world fall for just an ordinary guy?" (Yeah, Hugh Grant is pretty ordinary.) In reality, Notting Hill is a nice neighborhood to the west of central London. I'll write more about it when I get to know it better. I am less than a block from the nearest tube station, Notting Hill Gate; and I am only about a quarter mile from Hyde Park, a large park in the center of London, similar in many ways to Central Park in NYC. I've been doing my running there.

Vincent House

A room similar to mine.

Where I Work

I teach my classes at the London headquarters of CAPA International Education. CAPA, a Boston-based organization, hosts the Missouri London Program that I explained in my previous post. They also have facilities in Beijing, Buenos Aires, Florence, Istanbul, and Sydney. In addition to the courses taught by me and an English Professor from Missouri S&T, our students also take courses from CAPA faculty. This semester I will be teaching "The Grand Alliance," a variation on a WWII course I teach at MSSU, and "Roman Britain," a variation on a summer course I took at Oxford University a few years ago. These classes will meet for an hour and a half on Tuesdays and for three hours on alternate Thursdays. We'll use our Thursday meetings to visit relevant sites in London. (I'll write more about my classes and our activities another time.)  I met my students at our orientation on Thursday. I'm just getting to know them, but they seem like a good group. Anyone who has taken students abroad can tell you that the most important thing is that they have a good attitude. That seems to be the case with this group.

CAPA International Education, London. (They've painted their front doors red since this was taken.)

My MLP students in front of Buckingham Palace. (I believe that the Queen requires that all visiting students have their picture taken in front of Buckingham Palace within three days of their arrival.)

Well, I believe that is all I have a right to expect you to read in one sitting. To sum up, things are going great. The only thing I would change would be to have Angela here with me. I hope you'll continue to follow "News from London." Cheers!