Museums and Harry Potter

Preface: If you clicked this link because you’re a Harry Potter fan and aren’t as big a fan of random museum musings, scroll down to the third subsection.

West End Museums

For our second to last Modern Art class, we were given a map to follow on an independent walking tour of five smaller West End galleries. Three of the museums were nice and thought provoking and the other two seemed to have the primary goal of seeing how many visitors they could shock into closing their eyes in horror and curling into the fetal position. 

I met Maggie and Kathinka on campus with time to spare for getting lost and we caught a train to Charring Cross Station where we started looking for the first museum. Actually, we were quickly sidetracked and started looking for Scotland Yard instead, which is where Harry and Mr. Weasley and took the phone booth entrance into the Ministry of Magic in the fifth movie and then Harry, Ron and Hermione snuck into the Ministry in the seventh movie, and found it quickly. After that though we did start looking for The Institution of Contemporary Arts (ICA). We found that less than a mile up The Mall from Buckingham Palace.

The Mall was designed in the early 1900s to be used for
major national ceremonies and processions, and is tinted
red so it loos like a red carpet leading to the Palace.

The ICA is in a huge, white columned building that seems to take up the entire street. We found the unassuming entrance, a simple glass door instead of the traditional grand entryway, and found that the first few rooms were sparsely decorated with minimalist, modern pieces. A lot of the 

paintings were more blank canvas than actual paint, and with some pieces it was difficult to tell where the art ended and the museum began. For example, with one piece you walked along the room like normal and then came to a short set of black stairs on your right. After climbing the stairs you realized they led nowhere but to a window, and you were actually standing in the middle of the art. In another section there were several sculptures that were little more than lumps of metal and clay presented on vertical metal poles. Each lump had a different shape, texture and title. While strange, the art at the ICA was still interesting, but we moved on after about twenty minutes so as to make sure that we had time to find the other four museums on our list.

We managed to find the aptly named white cube next, which was hidden (I mean hidden in the literal sense) in the middle of a courtyard formed by buildings that were all taller than the White Cube. We circled several times before discovering that we had to go through one of the near-hidden passageway tunnels formed between the buildings to get to the Cube.

The White Cube is a photography space and was my favorite museum from that day. There was a wide range of photographs, from a barren, rocky hill with scattered sheep to an artistic photo of a woman in a mirror that mimicked Manet’s painting, A Bar at the Flies-Bergere. I can look at photographs forever, but after about a half an hour we moved on once again, this time finding the branch of Hauser and Wirth in Piccadilly Circus.

To say I disliked this gallery is being kind. I did like it more than the branch on Seville Row though, but more for the Piccadilly location and the fact that the space itself is old and charming than for the art inside of it. The main piece was called The King, and took up the entire first room.

Once we entered, we took a spot on the pews facing an unfinished wooden stage and begin to soak in the weird that was all around us. Photographs of various naked women at strange angles were blown up and had been hung on the walls to the side, with a few odd photos of an old man’s face thrown into the mix. On the stage, elevated in all his obese, naked, hairy glory, is the figure that I can only assume was the king, sitting in a barber’s chair and surrounded by exposed wires, flickering fluorescent lights and trash. There was a giant photo of a black man behind him and more trash surrounded the bottom of the stage.

It was weird.

I stayed long enough to analyze it for my class before briefly slipping up and down the stairs to see the various affronts to the senses that were on offer on the top and basement floors before we moved on to find The Rifle Maker.

If Hauser and Wirth part one was an assault on the sense, The Rifle Maker was more like a cleansing massage. There was a lot of art that combined words and colored lights, some of the pieces rotated calmly, there were literature-inspired collages, but the best part was that there wasn’t a single old, naked man statue in the entire building.

The peace was not meant to last though, because we had to leave and find our final museum: the Seville Row branch of Hauser and Wirth. About a block from Seville Row we began to pass people who looked nauseated or disgusted. Some looked catatonic. I should have taken this as a warning.

We went inside though and heard a weird noise coming from the second room that sounded like pistons pumping. Confused, we followed the noise into the first gallery room, where I stayed for precisely five seconds before returning to the lobby. Let’s just say there was a mama pig, and there were baby pigs and a politician and the entire thing was huge and moved and the baby pigs and the man were…doing…something to the other pig…

Nope, I reject that as art. If you want to make disgusting, graphic political statements, don’t disguise them as art.

Before leaving we stopped in a very small room off the lobby where there was a very long video of people slowly covering a naked woman with plaster.

Yep, still werid.

 

Imperial War Museum (IWM)

I would rank the IWM as one of the best museums in London. Not only was the space itself amazing, but the exhibits were curated incredibly well, with a majority of the artifacts being really impressive stand-alone items as well.  

The first room is a large, high-ceilinged and has various tanks, planes, submarines, missiles and the like on display. After passing through this room, I climbed the stairs to the second floor where the exhibit I had come to see, The Children’s War, was being housed.

A lot of the exhibit space here was different than the wide-open museum set up that is more typical. It was as if the walls between smaller, narrow rooms had simply been knocked out to create several long rooms. This does make some amount of sense since the building used to house the infamous (now prestigious) Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam to many people, and used to be made up of a lot of smaller rooms. 

(Side Note: While Bethlem Hospital is Europe’s oldest and longest running psychiatric hospital, it is more famous for the terrible conditions patients (called prisoners at the time) were held in for several hundred years and the fact that casual visitors were allowed to see the inmates like animals in a zoo. In fact, families often stopped by after church on Sunday to look at the strange patients. Bethlem Hospital wasn’t moved to the building where the London Branch of the IWM is now until the early 1800’s though, and public visiting was outlawed more than 150 years prior to the move, meaning this building is probably significantly less haunted than the previous ones.)

Tom Murphy made the cast bronze sculpture to
commemorate the more than 4,000 people who
had died between 1940 and 1942 in Liverpool
and Bootle. The oldest victim was over 90 and
the youngest victim was just one day old. 

Although The Children’s War covered a very broad topic, the pieces were each so personal and powerful that it didn’t feel very broad at all. At the beginning there was a simple white room with five photographs of people projected on the wall. Underneath the photos were short personal stories from each person about their experience as a child during World War II, and on the opposite wall was part of a twin sculpture of the one by The Church of Our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Liverpool. The IWM only had the little boy playing with the airplane part of the statue, but I enjoyed seeing him again.

I’m not used to getting so much specific information about each artifact in such broad exhibits. “This frock is similar to one children would have worn in London during the Blitz,” is more common, but in this exhibit pretty much every single item had a previous owner and story attached to it. The descriptions were more similar to: “This dress was worn by Emily Smith on the day she was evacuated from London and sent to live with the Long family in Plymouth. Her mother made the dress for her.” 

Frederick Baker's letter to Pat 

The letters on display were probably the most powerful artifacts in the exhibit.  Lance Corporal Frederick Baker wrote one letter in October 1942 to his young daughter Pat before he left for the front lines. It was three pages long and was to be given to her if he died. It told her how much he loved her and how he hoped she would grow up to be a good person and the things he wanted for her future. He finished the letter with a drawing of Pat and her brother that he sketched from memory. He died in the Dodecanese in November 1943 and she received the letter. 

Another letter written by a little girl who died when her evacuation ship to Canada was sunk by a German submarine. As the ship was under attack, some of the children were able to write letters to their parents and, unlike the children, the letters made it off the ship safely. In the letter she told her parents how much she loved them over and over and said she was sorry she wouldn’t see them again. Next to this letter was another one her parents had sent to her at the home where she would have been staying in Canada if she had made it. They were informed of their daughter's death a few days after sending the letter.

After the featured exhibit, I found the London Blitz experience. You start in a small bunker room, sitting on benches and you hear a tape of people talking and bombs falling. It’s dark and you have to be quiet, as if you were really in a World War II bomb shelter. The guide comes through once the bombing is over and leads you out onto the replica of a 1940’s London street. Rubble is everywhere, buildings are burning and you can hear people talking and screaming. The guide gives some statistics about what happened and how people dealt with the blitz, and then you are rereleased into the museum.

The experience was so realistic that it felt strange walking back into the museum. I continued up the stairs to the permanent Holocaust exhibit, which was also curated amazingly well. The most striking part of this exhibit was a miniature, all white, to-scale model of over 6,000 Jews arriving at Auschwitz from the Berehovo ghetto in June 1944. The model showed them climbing out of cattle cars, lining up to be sorted to the left or the right and showed the figures who had already been sorted walking over to the camp bunkers or far off to the other side to the gas chambers. It was stunning how huge the area was. The model was 40 feet long and over 6 feet wide, and the tiny figures weren't even half as tall as my pinky finger. The model was amazingly detailed and gave a clear, sobering impression of how vast the camps actually were.

The Union flag outside of the IWM

Hermione’s House

Since many scenes in the eight Harry Potter movies were filmed in and around London, there are a lot of minor filming locations scattered about. I made it my mission early on to see as many as humanly possible.

One weekend in late November, I convinced Maggie to come with me to Hampstead’s Garden Suburb to see St. Jude-on-the-Hill, or St. Jude’s Church. (Re-watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 1 and pay attention to the scene where Hermione has just wiped her parents’ memories and is walking away from home. That church she’s walking towards is St. Jude’s.)

I know what most of you are thinking. Something along the lines of “a little obsessive, isn’t it Megan?”

Yea, well whatever. The area is pretty too. (Plus if you’re already thinking that, you might not want to read the next section.)

After a Tube change and a bus ride, we got close and walked through the beautiful Hampstead Garden Suburb until we found the church. We went a little picture crazy, recreating the shot where she’s walking away from home over and over again for about a half an hour. Finally satisfied, we walked away from the church toward the Heath. (And took a photo of every house along the way in case it was Hermione’s house.)

Film shot

Maggie recreation

The view of the street looking away from St. Jude's

Is that Hermione's house?

Is that??

We walked through the Heath for a while before walking around to the front of St. Jude’s Church, which faces in on the main town square near The Free Baptist Church and The Henrietta Barnett School, a grammar school for girls. The whole square is beautiful and definitely worth seeing if you visit London and have the time.

The front of St. Jude's Church

The Free Church

The Henrietta Barnett School

Privet Drive

Martins Heron is a suburb of Bracknell in Berkshire, which is 25 miles outside of London. Picket Post Close, a street in Martins Heron, was used as the filming location for Privet Drive in the first three Harry Potter films, with Number 12 Picket Post Close being used as Number 4 Privet Drive. The street, the front of the house, and the back of the house (in the third film when Aunt Marge blew up) are all shown in the movies. After the third film, a replica of the street was built in the studio and used for the final five movies.

The owners have said they regret agreeing that their house could be used as the famed Number 4 Privet Dr. because of the dedicated fans (like Maggie and me) who make the trip to take photos outside of their home.

As much as I understand that this must suck, there was no way that I was going to live half an hour from the original filming location of Privet Drive and not go see it.

Maggie and I took the Tube to central London to catch a train to Martins Heron on December 6, the day before Felicia and I took a bus to Ipswich. It was cold and overcast - basically perfect London weather if you ask me. We got off the train at the tiny station and began walking the route that my phone outlined, discussing how we would be the least creepy about taking photos in front of someone’s home and settling on strolling past the house on the first pass as if we were simply going for a leisurely walk.

No. 12 Picket Post Close

We found the street and turned, nerding out silently with a lot of hitting and muffled exclamations when we saw the row of houses from the films and attempted to walk casually by. (Which probably looked about the same as spastic children trying to walk by an ice cream truck without buying anything, but whatever.) We quickly ran into a problem though since about three houses later the street ended in a cul-de-sac with no outlet. We walked up a random driveway looking for a path to the park behind them and had to walk back shamefully when we found none. There were no cars in any of the driveways though and the houses looked pretty empty, so to avoid having to make a second awkward pass we took photos as discreetly as possible before exiting the street and walking on towards a park.

(Side Note: As we approached the park we saw a small cat with markings around its eyes. Yep, that’s right - we saw McGonagall. We scared her away though by approaching too enthusiastically.)

Maggie is ridiculously photogenic. 

Maggie: "Pretend you're casting a spell. I can't see the wand
against the sky. Kneel down. No, no don't do that, you look
stupid." 

After more photos and a rest in the park, we visited the house once more, emboldened, this time standing a bit closer to take a few more photos before reluctantly leaving and returning to London. 

Other Photos

Classy West End

Is that...

A Blue Plaque? By the White Cube?

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

Oxford Streed Decorations

Another one?

This one was near the IWM

Row Houses from the front of the bus on the way to St. Jude's.

It seems that every famous person who ever lived in London
for any amount of time lived in Hampstead at least once. 

The Heath

My future home

RLO - Bank Holidays

It seems like half of the time when I Skype Palak she has the day off because it's a Bank Holiday, which basically is the same as a public holiday. Although people aren't entitled to time off, the banks are closed and most people get Bank Holidays off, hence the name. 

I know we have a lot of little holidays here in the US, like President's Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day,  Labor Day and so on, but if people are getting time off for the day, we usually attach some meaningful value to it. As an example, we don't get April Fool's Day off because you aren't honoring anyone, you're just putting salt in sugar bowls, vaseline in hand sanitizer bottles and other stupid things like that.

Bank Holidays in the UK do include Christmas and Boxing day and New Years day, but they also include random days that don't really seem to be for anything other than just taking time off. I really think the Brits have the right idea though since most of their random days are Mondays, like the first Monday in May (May Day), the first Mondays in June and August (for kicks and giggles), the Monday after Easter, and the last Mondays in May, August and October (also seemingly just for fun). 

So apparently if you a) like random days off, and b) hate Mondays, the UK is the place to be. I'm going to go look at one-way tickets now. 

Londonisms

Pot Noodle - Cup O' Noodle

Hosepipes - garden hose

Junction - intersection

Bum Bag - fanny pack

Chin - punch

Bang on - spot on (i.e. I didn't expect it to be so bang on.)

Que Jump - cut in line

Visiting Charles Dickens (and other trips around London)

“You can find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” -- Samuel Johnson

Revisiting

I spent the next two weeks after my family left working my way through my list of London to-do’s. Since Dad, Beth, Grace and I had arrived at the Tower of London too late to go on the Yeoman Warder tour or go into most of the buildings, the Tower was again high on my list. Felicia and I went back on a rainy Tuesday and got off at the correct tube stop during a perfectly timed break in the rain. (Side note: That’s one out of three times to the Tower that I got there on the first attempt. I’d say that’s improving.)

The Tudor style wooden houses above the entrance to the Tower.

We walked under the portcullis just as a group of people was gathering around an older Yeoman Warder for the last tour of the day.  It wasn’t long until he roared “Laaaadies and gent’lmen!” in a thick Scottish accent and led us away into the Tower.

 

I loved everything about the tour. Not only was our guide’s deep, booming voice and Scottish accent fun to listen to, but he was the kind of man who is fond of telling corny, pun-tastic jokes that pretty much match my sense of humor. (Did you hear about the fight that happened in the London fish and chip shop? A lot of fish got battered!) (Ba-dum-tss)

He paused outside of one of the towers surrounding the White Tower and talked about the dungeon at the bottom and the old methods of torture employed there. “Now it is my duty; I must inform you that it is still a torture chamber to this very day. So when you go inside you have to look closely, for it is cunningly disguised as a gift shop.” Everyone laughed and the men put their hands inside their pockets as if to guard their wallets from the kids, wives and girlfriends who had just turned excited faces toward them.

He took us around the courtyards, highlighting monuments and towers to paint a rich picture of the Tower’s history. We stopped again at the glass pillow monument over the old execution site, where, in addition to listing the famous names that met their end on the spot, our Yeoman guide explained that beheading with an axe, as the English preferred, wasn’t nearly as clean as the French guillotine. Apparently, the tools used to sever people’s heads weren’t always as sharp as they needed to be, and the men swinging them were hardly skilled in taking aim.

Take John Ketch, commonly known as Jack Ketch, for instance. He was hired as an executioner by King Charles II and quickly gained a reputation as somewhat less than proficient at his job. James Scott, the first Duke of Monmouth, mounted the scaffold on July 15, 1685 for his execution and said to Ketch, “Here are six guineas for you and do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; if you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir.” The first stroke merely wounded the Duke a little, and he rose and glared at the executioner as a result. Upon the second blow he appeared to suffer greatly as his body began to convulse and thrash with pain. Ketch threw his ax down and refused to go on, but after much admonition from the crowd and sheriff he picked it up again and delivered another two blows to finally kill the Duke. Though dead, his head ultimately had to be cut loose from his body with a butcher’s knife brought from the kitchens. According to records though, the Duke showed less bravery than Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, who sustained 11 blows before her head parted from her shoulders.

Once the warder had finished describing the executions, he began to lead us, much to my delight, toward the small chapel behind us. Unfortunately there was no photography or video recording allowed inside the chapel, but I was happy just being allowed to enter this time. I was particularly interested in the chapel because the bodies of the people who were executed in the courtyard had been carried into the chapel and buried beneath the giant slabs of stone on the floor. That meant the Chapel was the grave of three British queens - Anne Boleyn, Jane Grey and Catherine Howard - and two Catholic saints - Sir Thomas More and John Fischer - in addition to many other prominent people from history.  Most of the bodies have since been re-interred in the Tower’s crypt.

The current Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, or Saint Peter in Chains, was built inside the Tower of London in 1520 for Henry VIII. The current building is the third chapel to stand on the spot, the first one having been included in the castle by Henry III in the 1200’s and the second being rebuilt during Edward I’s reign. The small chapel is built almost completely of stone, and monuments commemorating officers and other residents of the Tower cover the cold, grey walls and floor inside. It is still used as a place of worship for the roughly 150 people who live at the fortress.

After thanking our guide on our way out of the chapel, we meandered toward the Crown Jewels and the White Tower. I hadn’t been inside the White Tower before, mostly because I didn’t previously realize you could go inside, but we found the entrance and began to walk through the museum-like exhibits on the ground floor. They had suits of armor that were worn by various kings, including Henry VIII’s armor from when he was a child through his old age. It was kind of funny to see his growth, starting as a skinny, short child and shooting up and then out. Once his height peaked, the suits began to widen until they were almost as wide as they were high. He also became quite generous with his…er…cup size, as he got older. On one of the later suits, the cup stuck straight out quite noticeably from the rest of the armor.

Henry VIII's suit of armor

We climbed the stairs to the upper floors and found another chapel made of white stone with a vaulted roof and arches ringing the small oval room. It felt very medieval and was bare of decorations, providing a stark contrast to the chapel outside. Further along was a futuristic looking metal dragon before a final opening leading to the last room we could enter near the top of the Tower.

On the ground floor near the suits of armor were life-sized
wooden horse statues. They looked like the horses from the
animated movie Spirit were modeled after them.

Just inside the door was a glossy, black wall with nothing but a white handprint and the words “Touch this,” also painted in white. The only thing visible when standing outside of the door was the black wall.

Felicia and I stopped several feet from the entrance and stared at the wall, trying to figure out what it was and why we should touch it. Confused, we slowly walked forward, eyes fixed on the black wall ahead, raised our hands gingerly and finally, came to a stop with our palms resting flat against its surface.

Nothing happened.

We looked at each other in confusion, and, in doing so, saw the rest of the room to either side of the wall, which was full of weapon reproductions and other objects that the “touch this” was clearly referring to.

We sheepishly pulled our hands back, laughing. I’m not entirely sure what we expected to happen when we touched the wall; maybe it would light up, maybe audio would begin to play, maybe it would slide down into the floor and reveal the batcave. To be fair though, the instructions weren’t exactly clear. We did have fun picking up medieval weapons and feeling mystery cloths and crops once we were inside the room.

By the time we left the White Tower, it had begun raining again in earnest. We headed across the street after leaving the Tower to a little shopping plaza and ducked into a Starbucks. Warm drinks in hand, we sat on cozy chairs by the window and watched the rain, waiting for a break so we could head back to the Tube and catch a train to meet Maggie at Winter Wonderland.

Maggie with an incredibly creepy dancing Santa

Winter Wonderland (Again)

As you know, I had been to Winter Wonderland with my family the week before. However, taking all of the awesome things into consideration - the mass amounts of Christmas lights that made it feel like the best holiday season ever, the chestnuts roasted on an almost-open-fire, the bow and arrow game that allowed you to feel like Legolas-Katniss-AND-Hawk-Eye all at once - one visit was not enough.

We met Maggie at the entrance and began to pick our way towards the bow and arrow booth, where I did considerably better this time, popping four balloons out of the five required to win as opposed to popping none last time. The rain had almost completely stopped by now, but the still-wet ground reflected the lights in a magical way. We got candyfloss and watched ice-skaters turn around the large, ovular ice rink in the middle of the park before catching a train back to Northwick Park station.

Fun with candyfloss

Felicia, refusing to dance with creepy Santa

One of Felicia's favorite types photos to take are bad close ups of
my face. I have so many photos like to this one.

Charles Dickens House Museum

“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts” --Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

My first encounter with Charles Dickens was during my freshman year of high school when I read Great Expectations. I was enchanted by the rich descriptions of Miss Havisham, the tattered remnants of her wedding that never was and the fledgling romance between Pip and Estella, and when we read A Tale of Two Cities the next year the crush I’d developed on Dickens evolved into a full blown love affair. It grew as I read A Christmas Carol and started to re-read A Tale of Two Cities, then stumbled when I tried to read Oliver Twist five different times and found myself unable to finish because it was too depressing, but finally made a comeback with Hard Times, which I read while I was in London.  Visiting the museum in Charles Dickens’ London home was pretty close to the top of my list of “to-do’s,” and I finally made it with Palak and Shruti one crisp, lazy day in early December.

Palak, Shruti and I walking down their street in Feltham to
the train station.

48 Doughty St.

The streets we walked through around the museum were wide and open, with tall, simple looking row houses making up a well-to-do, quiet neighborhood. Dickens’ house itself was under renovation and had large sheets of plastic hung over metal scaffolding so that the house, and consequently the Blue Plaque, weren’t visible. Even covered in plastic, it was awesome to stand in front of 48 Doughty St. This was the house where Dickens had lived between 1837 and 1839. Two of his daughters were born in the house, his 17-year-old sister-in-law, Mary, died in the upstairs bedroom, and The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickelby and Barnaby Rudge were written here. This was where Dickens lived in the middle of his rise to incredible fame.

We walked through the front door (Charles Dickens’ front door!) and into the gift shop to the left to get tickets and guides before taking the stairs down to the basement level to watch a video about Charles Dickens’ life.

Charles was born in 1812 as the second of eight children and had a peaceful, pleasant childhood, spending long hours outside, reading voraciously and even having the opportunity to attend a private school for several years. Due to financial difficulties, his father moved the family to Camden Town in London when Charles was 11, and when Charles was 12, his father was arrested and sent to debtors’ prison where he was joined not long after by his wife and Dickens’ younger siblings. Charles was forced to leave school to work ten-hour days at a Warren’s Blacking Warehouse on Hungerford Stairs near what is now Charring Cross station to pay for his board with an older, impoverished woman and to help pay his family’s debts. After a few months of this, Charles’ great-grandmother died, leaving his family a large sum of money that allowed them to leave debtors prison and move to his great-grandmother’s old house. Though the situation only lasted for a few months, the experience left a deep impression on Charles that can be seen in his sympathy to the lower classes in his books.

The video went on to speak about his journey to becoming one of the world’s first modern celebrities, his experiences dabbling in acting, and his affairs. His works and his time were widely demanded during much of his lifetime, and though he first resisted, he eventually regularly hosted public readings that were said to be amazingly vivid.

After the video was over, we wandered back into a room to the side of the stairs where an official-looking woman sat before a wooden table piled with books. She paused in her reading when we came in to smile and explain that the books on the table in front of her were early editions of Charles Dickens’ books. Some of them were even first editions, she added, gently handing me a copy of Pickwick Papers.

“Like that one you’re holding now,” she said, smiling. “That’s a first edition of Pickwick Papers, which was one of the books that Dickens’ wrote while he lived here in this house.”

I nearly dropped the book in surprise. I had thought the first edition copies of Dickens’ books would be safely locked behind a glass display case upstairs, not on a table where I could pick them up and flip through them. I turned the pages carefully, reading the copyright page at the front and a few paragraphs on the first page before staring in awe at the cover and handing it on to Palak.

As we were on our way to see the upper floors, we got sidetracked by the smell of pastries and wound up in front of the café counter on the ground floor. Several minutes later we were nestled around a small table by the window looking out onto Dickens’ small back garden with large cups of tea, hot chocolate and pastries. It was just starting to get dark and the sky was glowing twilight blue, illuminating the charming back yard in a soft, even light. A pamphlet on the table detailed a group that met weekly in the reading room to read and discuss Dickens’ works. I wished I had known about it earlier, but I guess that’s something I’m going to have to do when I move back to London someday.

We spent nearly an hour chatting, laughing and sipping our warm drinks before finally rousting ourselves and climbing the stairs to the two upper floors. The rest of the house was decorated for the holidays in traditional 19^th century Christmas fashion. The rooms have been carefully restored so that period furniture similar to what Dickens would have had is in each room, and in many cases his own furniture has been found and returned to the house. Original sketches and famous depictions of Dickens and his works are also framed and hung on the walls, and his writing desk where he penned the last pages of his unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (which shall forever remain a mystery since Dickens took the ending to the grave with him), is sitting in front of a window alcove upstairs.

We walked through Dickens’ bedroom, the room where his sister-in-law lived and died and the other rooms where the great author wrote and lived with his family, and when we had finished being awed over the rooms and items upstairs, we found ourselves once again in the gift shop.

This was definitely one of my favorite museums, partly because of how helpful and friendly the staff was. The woman in the gift shop chatted with us for almost half an hour while we browsed and collected keepsakes. When we came to the dish cabinet and they didn’t have the white mugs and saucers that said “Charles Dickens Museum, London,” in a delicate, brown scrawl from the café for sale, the woman went and got one from the kitchen for me and only charged me 7 pounds.

We left after spending almost 2 hours inside with quite a dent in each of our debit cards and took the train back to Feltham.

That night I was playing with my camera in the kitchen while the three of us sat and talked, taking photos of the black and white checkered tiles, the aluminum cups that were always on the table and the pineapples waiting to be juiced by Palak and Shruti’s mom on the counter.

“You’re taking photos as if you’re not going to be here ever again,” Palak complained, avoiding the depressing fact that I was leaving in 19 days.

“I won’t soon,” I answered. “Not for a while anyway.”

Other Photos

Christmas at the Tower

Bungalows in Palak and Shruti's neighborhood in Feltham

Bungalows in Feltham

A random, old phone booth in someone's yard in Feltham

What does that say?

Ah, Good Enough College. Interesting choice of name.

RLO - Topping up

Going to London and getting a cell phone was so much easier than getting a cell phone in America, and it was nice to be able to pop over to a convenience store and top up either my phone or my Oyster card when I needed to go into London or add more minutes to my mobile. Their pay-as-you-go system is so much simpler and more accessible than the many contracts and options available in America. This was definitely an area where I would say the UK wins in terms of ease and convenience.

Londonisms

Have(ing) a go - give it a try (i.e. “I can’t open this jar. Have a go, will you?”)

Cracking up - to mentally snap. (i.e. “He was shouting about something. I think he’s cracking up.”)

Good on ya mate - Well done, good for you

Rank - disgusting (i.e. “That smells rank,” Or “I took the rubbish out because the bin was rank.”)

One off - a special, one-time event (i.e. “The show was a one off.”)

Cracking - splendid, brilliant. (i.e. “It was a cracking film!”)

Crackers - Crazy

Hang a left/right - turn left/right

Parky - a word used to describe the weather when it’s cold. (i.e. “It’s rather parky today.”)

Now and Then

Ipswich, December 2011

London, July 2007