Around the World in 80 Days Part IV – London for a day

By Temple Ligon
February 6, 2014
 

After eight days crossing the North Atlantic from New York City to Southampton, after eight nights of wretched excess and disregarded decadence, Passepartout #3 and I took the train to London’s Victoria Station early in the morning on Saturday, March 24, the 10th day in my 80 days to get around the world in the 1872 style and route of Phileas Fogg of Savile Row and his valet Passepartout.  
We had agreed to tour London together for the day and then split up early in the evening. I would take the train that night to Broadway in the Cotswolds where I had a reservation at the Lygon Arms. Passepartout would run along on her own to France before returning to the USA.
 
First stop in London once we left Victoria Station was the London Eye, the 443-ft.-high Ferris wheel built on the south bank of the Thames in observance of the year 2000. The tickets were about $20, and the experience was well worth it. We paid a small premium to jump ahead in line. After all, lunch details were already dominating the conversation.
 
After the Eye, we dragged our bags over to the bridge connecting with Big Ben to take a taxi. My idea was to have lunch on the top floor of the London Hilton about 25 stories high. I was singularly unimpressed with a building’s height, but the London Hilton was the only high-rise hotel in town and its top-floor restaurant had the best view in town. Besides, it was nearby on the east edge of Hyde Park, a smart move to find a day’s storage for our bags.
 
When our taxi pulled up to the Hilton, we handed off our bags with the warning we were not checking in but just visiting for lunch. The staffer told us the restaurant was no longer serving lunch, but the hotel would happily check our bags for the day. Maybe we could have dinner there that night. Fine. Always come into a city with a plan in play to take care of the bags.
 
My suggestion to Passepartout was to nibble as we toured and to have a late lunch, say around five o’clock. Whatever we did, I wanted to be sure to wind up at the Connaught, arguably the world’s most civilized hotel. The hotel sat in Mayfair two blocks south of Grosvenor Square, home of the American Embassy, and two blocks east of Park Lane, near the Hilton and our bags.
 
Our first stop was the National Gallery overlooking Trafalgar Square. Before even getting into the museum, though, I wanted Passepartout to share something with her friend Temple, honorary Texan. A short throw west and down the hill from the National Gallery was a Tex-Mex Cantina, but it was also the very same building that was the Texas Embassy when Texas was a nation in the 1840s. The former embassy building in Paris is now the Vendome Hotel, just around the corner from the Ritz on the Place Vendome. I think London does the better job reminding us where Texas used to be.
 
I walked Passepartout back to the National Gallery where the main entrance was in the new Sainsbury wing designed by the American architect Robert Venturi after an earlier scheme by a different architect had come and gone. The National Gallery had already decided on its new wing when Prince Charles came along and campaigned against it. Philadelphia-based Venturi and his wife Denise Scott Brown were credited with resolving similar design challenges, and they were well-suited for the National Gallery.
 
Also facing Trafalgar Square is St. Martin-in-the-Fields, the direct influence on St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields on Clemson Avenue in Columbia. Note one without and one with an apostrophe. A stone from the Trafalgar Square church is embedded into the brick coursing on Clemson Avenue.
 
To walk due south from Trafalgar Square, past the column holding the statue of Admiral Nelson and past the equestrian statue of Charles I to Whitehall, is to find Banqueting House on by architect Inigo Jones, England’s great Renaissance designer. It was in the front of Banqueting House where the Puritans chopped off the head of Charles I in 1649. Cromwell ruled without royalty but he also ruled without drinking, dancing, theater – you get the idea. No one had any fun until Charles II restored the throne in 1660. Boston started under the Puritans in the 1630s, while Charleston started under Charles II in 1670. The first opera performed in America and the first ballet performed in America were both in 1735 in Charleston. Cromwell put into play some principles of a representative democracy, but he was a Puritan all the same.
 
Back up the hill on Trafalgar Square Passepartout and I hailed a taxi to get over to the British Library next to St. Pancras station. Way back when, right after WWII, the Library of the British Museum, a k a British Library, was planning to locate along Great Russell Street, still near the British Museum. The surrounding neighborhoods really liked their convenient retail on Great Russell Street and they didn’t want to see it dug up in deference to the new British Library.
 
So the library’s proximity to the University of London was held as most important, but its connection with the British Museum would have to go. The British Library moved from the southwest corner of the University of London to the northeast corner of the university campus. But now being next to St. Pancras Station, the terminal for the trains coming under the English Channel, is a great advantage for the continental types frequenting the British Library.
 
The British Library had pretty much completed its architectural plans before the French got underway with their new National Library in Paris. The Brits were putting their people in the fenestrated upper floors and the books in the basement, sensibly enough. The French did the opposite. They put their books in glass towers and their people in the basement.
 
To walk inside the British Library and to see its most famous exhibit is no security problem. Just come in and take the few steps to the left for one of the world’s great displays of history.
 
Under glass and special light are documents from the entire history of the English-speaking peoples. The Magna Charter is there as is a Gutenburg Bible. A letter from the Duke of Wellington declares victory at Waterloo. Samples of handwriting by the likes of Milton and Dickens and even Evelyn Waugh. And so it goes to include penciled notes correcting sheets of music by John Lennon.  
 
Passepartout had never been inside the Royal Opera House overlooking Covent Garden. It’s also the home of the Royal Ballet. Being a self-declared expert on opera houses, I took Passepartout on a tour of the place. I explained the name of the Crush Room, part of the intermission action. It was not named after the compacted crowds during intermission but after the soft drink Orange Crush. Some Brits saw no sense in alcohol before a performance and certainly not in the first intermission for the same reason: Why get sleepy early in a grand opera? So they drank Orange Crush until the second intermission, which became an ideal time to start on the Champagne.
 
As we walked down the red-carpeted steps inside the ROH, I pointed out to Passepartout we were tracing the footsteps in film with Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. Eliza Doolittle sold her flowers among the columns of St. Paul’s (the church in Covent Garden, not the much bigger St. Paul’s by Sir Christopher Wren).
 
Covent Garden, by the way, was where nuns grew vegetables. Their convent garden was named later to follow its pronunciation.
 
Down the hill from the Royal Opera House was the Savoy Hotel, one of the sexiest places on the planet. When Liz Taylor married little Mr. Hilton, Conrad’s son, she insisted on the Savoy, something of a put-down to the Hiltons. The Savoy was built for the weekend tryst. Richard D’Oyly Carte, the Gilbert & Sullivan impresario, made enough money off his operettas to build the Savoy Theatre, and he made so much more off the Makaido at the Savoy Theatre he built the Savoy Hotel so his theater goers could reserve a room for the weekend while they reserved seats for the performances.
 
Before the turn of the last century, the Savoy was the first hotel in the world to offer practically all its rooms with adjoining bathrooms. But the Savoy bathrooms were behind two doors, part of the route through the foyer between the bedroom and the bathroom, so people not altogether familiar with each other could still comfortably use the attached bathroom. Before the Savoy, a hotel guest or a guest of a hotel guest walked up and down the hall, gaining privacy in the distance from the room and its roommate.
 
The Savoy was London’s first hotel overlooking the Thames, and its restaurant was the city’s first to overlook the river. Speaking of firsts, the Savoy’s manager for its first year was Cesar Ritz and its chef was Auguste Escoffier, both who left to start the Paris Ritz.
 
Passepartout wanted to see the Savoy Grill, the power lunch for the United Kingdom, London’s version of the Grill at the Four Seasons Restaurant on Park Avenue. We walked it off, but we couldn’t stay to see the menu. We did, though, check out the hotel’s American Bar, Hemingway’s London headquarters.
 
We took a taxi from the Savoy, where they have the only automobile entrance in the UK that requires approaches up to the curb on the right instead of the left. The Savoy Theatre came first, then the hotel, and the old approach was kept.
 
I wanted Passepartout to walk off some of Mayfair, one of the world’s stuffiest and most expensive neighborhoods, home of the Connaught Hotel and the American Embassy. The embassy, by the way, was moving out of Mayfair to a site on the south bank of the Thames. Too bad.
 
We had drinks at the Connaught bar, and we walked a few hundred feet to a neighborhood pub for our very late lunch. Since it was a Saturday, we saw plenty of people like ourselves, tourists pretending to know somebody in Mayfair. I told Passepartout we could be friends for an hour with General Eisenhower in bronze on Grosvenor Square next to the American Embassy. The American diplomatic corps is going to miss the neighborhood, seriously miss the neighborhood. You are where you live.

(To be continued…)

Reach Temple at – [email protected]

Sign up here to receive MidlandsLife weekly email magazine.