Today was my birthday. As a child I never liked having my birthday on the Fourth of July. People squeezed my cheeks and said stupid things like, “You’re just a little firecracker, aren’t you?” As an adult, though, I came to appreciate always having the day off work and having special things happening on my birthday, even if obviously they had nothing to do with me. Celebrating the day abroad, as I often have in recent years, I find myself feeling a little miffed that the world is carrying on, utterly oblivious to the occasion. Fortunately, I was surrounded here in London with people who had remembered that I just turned 61 today. As I joked to Vicki, “If I am no longer in my prime, at least I am a prime number!” Vicki gave me a plate of croissants for breakfast surrounded by strawberries with candles in them. It was so sweet. I ate a couple with some peanut butter, a culinary atrocity, of course, but somehow it seemed like an American touch for the day.
Having fed myself, I also thought I might feed the local swans.
Jerry had to leave for Leeds today where he is in a golf tournament with friends from his old company. I must admit that I seldom think of golf and Leeds as having much to do with each other, but apparently there is a famously difficult course just north of that old industrial city. Vicki did have the day to spend with me and John, so we had a few adventures. I knew that we would be going into the West End later in the day, so when they asked me what I wanted to do this morning, I asked to see Kew Gardens again and a couple sights in the area that I have never seen. It turned out that Vicki, who has lived in this area for most of her life, had never seen them either, so it worked out well for all of us.
Our first stop was Strawberry Hill. This is not one of England’s great stately homes, but it is monumentally significant in architectural history. It was the estate of Horace Walpole. Horace, who sometimes preferred to be called Horatio, was one of the strangest characters in a country that seems to produce any number of strange characters. His father was Robert Walpole, the man who not only was England’s longest serving Prime Minister, but the man who more or less invented the office during the reign of King George I. Robert Walpole, born a minor country squire, became the first Earl of Orford and a very wealthy man as well. Horace was his youngest son. He was an odd child who probably would have been severely bullied at Eton had he not been the son of the monarch’s most trusted advisor. As an adult, he was bone thin and extremely pale. He seemed to glide more than walk, and he had an odd kind of voice. He never married at a time when marriage was socially required, and his biographers have speculated that he was probably gay and for a time may have had a relationship with a former schoolmate. He tried to follow his father into politics, but despite holding a few seats in the Commons he never made a name for himself as a Whig politician. Instead, he made himself famous by inventing the Gothic Revival.
At a time when all houses in England had followed the rules for architecture that Andrea Palladio had derived from his study of Roman buildings, Walpole chose to flout just about all of them. He bought a small estate called Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, then quite far out into the country. There was already a house on the land, apparently a small and rather uninteresting place built in a simple classical style. Horace changed all that. He knocked out the window and put in weirdly shaped stained glass. He built a turret. He placed fake arrow slits on the roof line and added gargoyles for extra effect. He broke every possible rule, and adopted all the touches that Palladio and his disciples had derived as barbaric elements of the Dark Ages. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, but the world was apparently ready for something different. Strawberry Hill Gothic became the rage for much of the remainder of the eighteenth century until far more extreme forms of Gothic architecture would take its place. In the library of this house, Horace wrote The Castle of Otranto, one of the first pieces of Romantic prose in English, a clunky preview of far better later works like those of the Brönte sisters, Bram Stoker, or Mary Shelley.
By the nineteenth century the estate had fallen from fake ruin into actual ruin. Walpole’s heirs sold it to Saint Mary’s College, the first Roman Catholic university in Britain since the Reformation. The grounds of the estate became the campus of the school. In recent years, Saint Mary’s with the help of a private foundation has refurbished the interior to suggest what it might have looked like when Walpole lived there. It was, unfortunately, closed when we arrived. That did not stop John from pretending to seek admittance.
Our second stop on the tour of Twickenham was Eel Pie Island. There are a about three dozen aits or small islands in the Thames River. We know that one of these islands was home to a small inn as early as 1743, and by the early nineteenth century the island was a popular day trip from London. The inn served pies made of local eels — the British loved this dish back then — and hence visitors began to refer to Twickenham Air as" Eel Pie Island.” By the 1900 the inn had been replaced with a large hotel and dance hall.
This dance hall became one of the most celebrated music venues of the 1960s. All kinds of bands which later became huge like The Who and the Rolling Stones played Eel Pie Island when they were just starting out. In fact, Pete Townsend named his music publishing business Eel Pie Music. Unfortunately, the owners of the hotel had difficulty with the Richmond Council over various issues, and the storied place mysteriously burned to the ground in 1990.
Today, Eel Pie island is home to a boat repair business and a couple dozen artist studios. It is about the most bohemian spot in London. It seems remarkably reminiscent of Venice, California before Julia Roberts and Google moved in.
There is a kind of old hippie art everywhere.
Sometimes you are not even sure if it is deliberate.
Several fake crows had been placed atop some steel bars outside of one artist’s studio, and John and Vicki tried reenacting scenes from The Birds.
My favorite place on the Island was a boat that had been converted into a home and a studio. It reminded me of the boat on the beach in Great Yarmouth where the Peggotty family lived in David Copperfield.
Vicki was ready to move to Eel Pie after we finished our walk. But we had a few more things to do on our last day in London. We left Twickenham and drove across the river to Kew Gardens.
The Royal Botanical Gardens is one of the largest and most important botanical gardens in the world. Yet it was not planned originally to be anything other than a summer home for aristocrats and later for the royal family. The gardens there were laid out for the diversion of the monarch and family. But Victoria had no interest in keeping Kew as a summer home, probably because it was by then fairly close to London itself. So in 1840 the Royal Horticultural Society convinced the crown to make it a national botanical garden. There are elements of its days as a royal residence.
During the nineteenth century, the great draw was the greenhouses. These allowed Londoners to see plants during winter. There was the Palm House and the Temperate House. The later has been remarkably restored to its 1848 perfection.
The interior is a stunning open space.
But to a Southern Californian, it was also a little disappointing because most of the plants grown there can be found in many of our back yards. We were hoping for something a bit more exotic. But I suppose for the English they are.
Despite this, we could have stayed and explored Kew all day. But we were scheduled to meet Kris, our niece Rebecca’s husband, for dinner that evening and we had a play in the West End. So we planned to take the boat from Kew to Westminster. It is not all that much slower than the Underground and it provided a lot more interesting sights. Unfortunately, for an amateur photographer it was not easy to capture the buildings on the side of the Thames in a way that really caught their history or occasional beauty. Most of the industrial buildings than once lined this river have been demolished and huge glass and steel apartment complexes have taken their place. Although these no doubt provide a great view of the Thames, the size and materials used are completely out of place with the gentle flow of a small English river. The older architecture has a much better sense of place and style, particularly the utterly lovely Albert Bridge.
As we grew closer to Westminster Pier, we could see the House of Parliament. Despite its Gothic appearance, this building is not really all that old. It was build in the 1840s, making it a younger structure than the American Capitol. Much of it is always under renovation.
The London Eye, one of the many unfortunate results of the Tony Blair years, is not far off.
We met up with Kris in Covent Garden after a short but pricey pedicab ride. We had a pleasant dinner in a small Greek restaurant there.
Our last event of the evening was to go to one of London’s hottest shows, Tina. This is a musical version of Tina Turner’s life. John jokingly called this my “birthday present” because he knows he likes this sort of stuff way more than I do. We did not have very good seats, though we had no problem either seeing the stage or hearing the score from Row Z (remember, say “zed”). I was not surprised that I was pretty bored and quite critical of it. I was surprised that John had just about the same reaction.
We took the tube and Uber back. Tomorrow, we leave for New York. Sigh. Our trip is almost over.
