From Abbey Road to Fleet Street

Today’s day trip to London satisfied a “bucket list” item for me. Visiting Abbey Road is a must for any Beatles fan and today was our day. The Abbey Road Studios, where the majority of the Beatles music was recorded, are still there. There is a live webcam at www.abbeyroad.com/Crossing

It’s fun to watch the tourists posing in the crosswalk as John, Paul, George and Ringo did back in 1969 for the album cover.

The Beatles Coffee Shop is right in the St. John’s Woods tube station.

Back on the tube, we traveled the Central Line to the Chancery Lane Station. Walking down Holborn Street we spotted the Staple Inn. From Wikipedia: Staple Inn dates from 1585. The building was once the wool staple, where wool was weighed and taxed. It survived the Great Fire of London, was extensively damaged by a Nazi GermanLuftwaffe aerial bomb in 1944, but was subsequently restored. It is the only surviving Elizabethan domestic building in London.

In 1834-7, Charles Dickens lived in Furnival's Inn while working as a 22-25 year old reporter on the Morning Chronicle.  His famous work, Pickwick Papers, was started at Furnival's Inn.

We had been told about a pub that dates from 1546 called Ye Olde Mitre Public House.

We went down the little dark alley and found it. It is easily missed by the casual traveler. I doubt sunight ever gets into this cramped place.

St. Ethelreda’s Catholic Church was close by and we went inside to view the stained glass windows which are the largest in London.

St Etheldreda's church was built around 1250 as a "double-decker" church ie one chapel on top of the other. It is a very interesting building which by some miracle ( . .?) has survived the Great fire of London, the Reformation (Henry VIII), the Blitz of the Second World War and every other threat to its existence. It is the oldest Roman Catholic church in the country.

Then on to St. Andrews Holborn which first appears in written records in AD 951 as a church on top of the hill above the river Fleet. The wooden church was replaced by a medieval stone one in the 15th Century, of which only the tower now remains.

In 1666 the great fire ravaged London, but the medieval church of St Andrew’s was only saved at the last minute by a change in the wind direction.The pulpit and the font were previously at the chapel of a foundling hospital in Bloomsbury, where the composer George Fredrick Handel would have played for his fundraising concerts.

Inside there were some lit candles and a woman sitting reading in one area. A sign indicated she was the designated “listener” for anyone who needs to talk. On the last pew was a man fast asleep.

Fleet Street is a street in the City of London named after the River Fleet. It was the origin and home of the British newspapers until the 1980s. Even though the last major British news office, Reuters, left in 2005, the term Fleet Street continues to be used as a metonym for the British national press. Many famous men are associated with Fleet Street, either by living there or in one of its many side streets, or by being regular frequenters of its taverns.

Our walk down Fleet Street was interesting with plaques and history everywhere. The Chesire Cheese Pub was where in 1859 Charles Dickens using a pen name wrote his journal “All the Year Long” It’s in the “Wine Office Court” which he mentions in “A Tale of Two Cities”

“Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “If you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this great City you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts.” Very true.

The Griffin statue sits atop the Temple Bar monument, which marks the boundary between the City and Westminster. The griffin was placed in 1880.

Charles Dickens mentioned Temple Bar in A Tale of Two Cities, noting its proximity to Tellson's Bank, also on Fleet Street. While critiquing the moral poverty of late-18th century London, Dickens wrote that in matters of crime and punishment, "putting to death was a recipe much in vogue," and illustrated the horror caused by severed heads, "exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity..."

Royal Courts of Justice
The Times described the buildings as follows:
the architect has given accommodation to no less than 18 distinct courts, each with its own entrance and staircase, with separate approaches and doors for the judges, the jury, the witnesses, the Bar, and the public, together with rooms for clerks, secretaries, and registrars, and also waiting-rooms...'

"...the new clock at the Law courts is surely too trivial and small. The fine massive tower behind seems to be holding out a watch instead of a clock, and is thus actually robbed of its own majesty…"

(Maybe so, but we still think it's majestic)

So ends another day of adventure and learning in London. We're getting pretty good at getting around; we didn't get lost even once this time!