A night to sleep without rocking..London

 Yesterday at 9am we left our home of 4.5 months and headed into London to send the next few days checking it out. 

Big Ben is of course one of the first iconic things we saw!

 And the telephone box.. not used so much now that we all have cells. We decided to tour with the hop on hop off buss. Most of these pictures are just buildings I found particularly interesting. I can’t remember their names but they represent what I thought London would look like

There are statues and monuments every block! 

We drove by the area of Buckingham Palace. The actual grounds include a large park area ,lots of out buildings, the carriage house (the Mews), horse barns,complete with Georgian columns..everything a King will need….

As we drove by we noticed a number of people ,smartly dressed, lining up

Princess Anne was hosting one of the Garden Parties! Ive never actually seen so many fascinators on ladies!!!

The London Eye..each pod will hold 25 people!

St. Paul’s

It is a magnificent building.

This green area had little stone huts on the corners

The Dorchester hotel

Intricate stone work

A pub

For me. Saint Pancras station is the most impressive building Ive ever seen. It is a rail station and takes up an entire city block or more. This station has Eurostar and you can be in Paris in three hours! 

It was impressive from the outside and I imagine just as well on the inside.. there are shops restaurants and bars as well.it was refurbished in 2007.

The Frick building..kinda looks like the DNA structures he helped discover and catalogue.

 A growing building!

The Palace Theatre

A pink pelican in St.James park near Buckingham Palace. 

This was my view of the Palace.. we were on our way to the Churchill War rooms and grabbed a quick snap

Have no idea what this is but its beautiful

These were along the pathway

A picture from the map room of the many electrical lines used…We visited the war rooms. It was much more interesting than I thought at first. It is also the Winston Churchill museum. The war rooms are in a low basement under a building near to Parliament. From here, the war of WWII was handled by the chiefs of staff and various parliament officials. The area was locked and closed on the day WWII was over and not opened again until the 80s so the rooms are pristine with the artifacts. Churchill was an interesting character and couldn’t stand noise. Remington typewriters had a noiseless machine for the secretaries to use so it wouldn’t disturb him! 

 

The map room. Each colored phone was a direct line to its own organization. There were maps on all walls that showed troop locations, bomb strikes and ship locations.  All this information would have been relayed by phone, telegraph or teletype. One secretary related that her job would be each early morning to draw in little pics of submarines on each map. The secretaries were often young women age 18 and up who lived underground for months at a time while the city was being bombed up above. It is quite an interesting place.

After a little rest from our outing we headed out to a local pub for a nice dinner. I got onion cider soup and the others all had great fish and chips…and of course a pint! We have two more days of our visit to London adI have no doubt we will get to see more great things!