Today was too big for our site to gandle in one posting. The rest of our day follows. ???
Just over the road we came to The London Silver Vaults. The vaults were originally opened in 1876 as an area for safe deposit vaults for London’s wealthy, and was used as the storage area London’s silver dealers during WWII. They are situated relatively deep underground (maybe 3 floors below street level. And as the name suggests, the whole underground floor is filled with vaults of many sizes, everyone with a large old style bank vault type door. Many of the larger vaults are now used as retail outlets, as well as secure storage, for London’s top silver dealers. In the shops we saw everything from a silver (probably just silver plated, but you never know) WWII heavy duty machine gun, so many antique pieces ( we saw items that belonged to Kings and Queens and other famous people, teapots, and all silverwares you could possibly think of. There are over 30 shops to choose from. Very interesting and worth a visit.
It was almost lunch so we walked down to the Bloomsbury Farmers Market just behind The University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. We walked around and soaked up the atmosphere and stalls on offer. We finished up getting a Pasty and Sausage Roll for lunch. A good choice in the end, it started raining again, and our plan to sit on a bench and people watch while we ate lunch turned into sheltering under a small eave and eating lunch standing up.
From there went set off to the British Museum. A daunting building to set foot in, there is so much stuff in there. And it’s all really interesting. We started with The Rosetta Stone, a stone tablet that was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Rosetta Stone was a stone tablet that recorded a government decree on 27 March 196BC. The decree was written in three languages, Hieroglyphs – the traditional script of Egyptian monuments, Demotic – the everyday script of liberated Egyptians and at the bottom Greek – the language used by the government of the day in Egypt (Egypt was ruled by a Greek dynasty at that time). It was this last greek entry that was the key. In another room, we saw a vase called the Rosetta Vase. It too had the same message inscribed on it in several languages. It is fascinating to see how archeology works. We walked further afield and saw so many incredible items on display. It makes you wonder how England obtained all these treasures of the ancient world, and how they were moved from where they were (Egypt, Greece, Italy, ……) to this museum. We saw items from ancient Europe and England, The Roman conquests, the medieval period through to today.
They had a special display on the times of Lieutenant/Captain James Cook. It was impressive the amount of work he did in a relatively short time, he sailed so much of the world.
From there we walked down to Covent Garden markets. We have been there before and we weren’t disappointed. So much life goes on in and around the area. We stopped, watched and listened to a string quartet play in the lower restaurant area. On the way out we stopped to watch a busker, his big trick was a bed of nails!
We then walked to Fortnun & Mason, a fancy homewares and gift shop. And it was all very fancy. They have one of the finest/most extensive tea selections in London. We looked around for a while, but didn’t buy anything.
We then caught our favourite No.6 bus home to relax a bit.
I took a stroll to the shops to get some provisions, on my way I noticed some activity in a small park just behind the chapel near us. It was The Resident’s Society of Mayfair and St James’s Summer Garden Party. It seems that Summer Garden Parties are a thing in London with many communities organising them. At 50 pound a head for non-members we decided to give this one a miss. When you’ve been to one summer party with drinks, canapes, barbeque, entertainment, live music, a casino and “fabulous” raffle prizes you have been to them all!
Looks like a very damp day tomorrow, we might have an easy day watching the French Tennis Open semi-finals. Let’s hope Ash Barty does well.
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