I’m standing at a tube station in central London, guidebook in hand, as the throng of daily commuters rush past me. I’m the proverbial pebble casting barely a ripple in this sea of over eight million souls. “What will it be?” I shout to my wife. “Magna Carta or the Rosetta Stone?”
Such is the nature of choice at the crossroads of London’s ubiquitous subway stations. I can think of few other places in the world where so many of the planet’s historic artifacts and cultural icons are assembled within a single city’s borders. It’s as if London’s individual attractions themselves seek to embody the wild range of culture and knowledge that encompass the shrunken, but still magnificent, British Empire.
At the British Library, original manuscripts from Beowulf to Shakespeare rub shoulders with a cocktail napkin where Lennon and McCartney scrawled early lyrics to the music that would catapult The Beatles to fame. The British Museum opens with an airy modern rotunda connecting — both figuratively and literally — an exhaustive display of priceless antiquities highlighting Egyptian, Greek, and Assyrian cultures including the Elgin marbles that once surrounded the Parthenon in Athens. Entering the Victoria and Albert Museum, I immediately spot the modern blown glass chandelier crafted by American Dale Chihuly. It illuminates the grand hall entrance to a collection that includes the mind-boggling casts of Trajan’s Column depicting the exploits of the Roman emperor. Just down the road at the Natural History Museum superb paleontology and geology exhibits are still overshadowed by the unique presentation in the museum’s Darwin Centre “Cocoon” experience. This self-guided tour is highly interactive, visitors meander through functional labs where scientists work in an oddly zoo-like atmosphere.
London’s hodgepodge of marvels extends to its architecture as well. It takes no special equipment or photographic skill to frame the stone spires of Tower Bridge with the glass and metal sphere of City Hall. Turning my back on this image, the battlements of the Tower of London (housing the Crown Jewels and the site of many a gruesome execution back in the day) fill the foreground while the garish outline of a giant crystalline pickle, the Gherkin, looms in the background. If you don’t fancy an office building shaped like a briny vegetable, Londoners can instead choose the sloping glass lines of the Shard’s pyramid. The entire schizophrenic skyline fabulously spreads before me from my vantage point aboard a capsule of the London Eye — England’s gargantuan river-side Ferris wheel.
Having been suitably reminded of England’s sometimes explosive political history, I wander into the bunkers of Churchill’s War Rooms. The non-descript, almost apologetically meagre entrance conceals a vast network of underground passageways in which Churchill and his war cabinet ran the offensive against the Nazis during World War II. Huge wall-sized maps festooned with colour-coded pins and string demarcate the ever evolving front-lines of the conflict. Dim lighting and an oppressive claustrophobic silence make it easy to imagine the incredible tension that must have engulfed these tight quarters as the German bombs laid waste to the city above.
I close out my brief time in London with what promised to be a decadent evening of luxury and entertainment cruising serenely down the River Thames. As it turned out, weak food coupled with weaker wine amounted to a significant disappointment in comparison to the water-side view of many of London’s key landmarks. The evening would have been a complete loss had it not been for the entertainment value of a couple at the next table who alternated between loudly spewing venomous curses at each other and having a make-up snog-fest on the dance floor. In many ways, the wild unpredictability of this couple is a metaphor for London itself. A traveller here is kept constantly off-guard never knowing what to expect around the next corner. Medieval castle or a monstrous ferris wheel? A brush with royalty or the lunatic screams of a crazed participant at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner? London’s got it all.
From across-the-pond to around-the-corner, keep following @CrimeTraveller on Twitter and tune in to this space for dispatches from his upcoming family road trip through Canada’s east coast.