On our fourth day in London, we were clearly beginning to feel like we weren’t going to have enough time to do everything, because instead of our usual “one main activity per day,” we did three things: Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, and a play.
Our day began with a return to Westminster Abbey, and this time we got to see the inside for real, though without a guide. I’m not really sure what I thought it would look like on the inside, but it was… different. Mickey said her brother once described it as looking like a house that desperately needs to have a yard sale. It is, in fact, absolutely jam-packed with stuff, which in many cases looks like it’s been shoved back in to a corner or off to the side to make way for more stuff, except, in this case, the stuff is famous dead people and their extremely grand memorials. One of my favorites was a memorial in the form of an enormous marble four-poster bed-type thing, but which had been turned sideways and shoved into the back corner of one of the side chapels, with the head of “bed” facing the wall, so no one could see whose memorial it was anymore. We made a guess about which king it had probably been based on the people listed for that chapel in our guide book, but who knows if we were right?
Most of the dead people are not actually in great big bits of statuary, but are instead in the walls and under the floors. I wonder what percentage of the floor is actually made up of marker stones rather than regular flagstones? In any case, people have been getting buried in Westminster Abbey for so long that it is clear that if there was ever any kind of organization about who was intended to go where, it’s been given up. So, amongst the famous dead people we saw, in no particular order, are:
- Queens Elizabeth I and Mary I, buried side by side in a large double tomb. This is much, much funnier if you’ve seen the play my mother and I once saw about how well the sisters’ ghosts get along with each other (or rather, don’t) in their shared confines. I refrained from laughing, though. You do have to wonder what the officials in charge of burying them were thinking, though.
- Isaac Newton, who has a very elaborate white marble tomb. We watched another visitor get reprimanded for taking a picture of it, because pictures are forbidden in the Abbey, but you can see what is presumably a sanctioned picture of it here.
- Charles Darwin, who as I recall has a very large floorstone inscribed to him just a few feet away from Newton.
- A memorial stone for John Harrison, complete with a meridian line running through it, “in two metals to highlight Harrison’s most widespread invention, the bimetallic strip thermometer. The strip is engraved with its own longitude of 0 degrees, 7 minutes and 35 seconds West.” (via) His memorial was amongst those of a rather surprising number of civil engineers.
- A memorial for James Prescott Joule.
- A memorial for Howard Florey, discoverer of penicillin.
- A huge number of literary and musical figures, amongst them Shakespeare, Dickens, Tennyson, and Handel.
Of course, there are also things as well as people stored in the Abbey, since it has served so many functions over the years. Notably among them is the Stone of Scone in the Coronation Chair built to hold it. Also within the Abbey complex is the Pyx Chamber, wherein the pyxes, or boxes with original samples of all the official minted currency was kept. (The pyx plays a large part in The Baroque Cycle books, so again, it was like actually walking into a part of a book for me.)
There’s also a small museum with wax effigies of monarchs, some of which are actually several hundred years old. It’s there that you get to learn things like King William was actually shorter than Queen Mary, and so the famous pair is displayed with his effigy standing on a little box for height. Oooh, historical royal gossip!
Anyway, I’m sure there were many other things we saw there that I’ve forgotten or possibly didn’t even know I was looking at at the time, but as noted before, there’s rather a lot, and that’s all I seem to have taken notes on as standing out to me.
Hmm, this is actually getting rather long, so I’ll do the Tower of London in the next post, because there was certainly a lot to see there, too.
