I can't remember who it was, but one of the many, many interesting people I've met here claimed there was nothing which spanned all three catagories: entertaining, educational and on television. I instantly countered, perhaps predictably with Doctor Who, yet I do believe this to be true.
Doctor Who was at the very start concieved as an educational show - the Doctor was originally accompanied by his granddaughter, Susan, and her two nosy schoolteachers whom he refused to let leave after they saw the inside of the TARDIS. Ian Chesterton, as well as occupying the role of chief Hero (the Doctor was too old, Barbara and Susan too female), was a science teacher - which meant that every other week he could interject "look, it's electromagnetics! This means..." and explain it for the audience. Barbara on the other hand was, being a history teacher, was handy in episodes in the past.
Before you dismiss them as walking exposition, Ian and Barbara were also great companions in their own right. And even though Doctor Who lost the educational edge very quickly, the bredth of issues and topics addressed across a 45 year old show leave you with a wealth of useful, random trivia -histories, places, people, even words (recursion, Grand Guignol, adumbrate and apostate being four which spring to mind). Why, even Just War made me feel more genuine interest and outrage at the German Occupation of Guernsey than ever before - and this is a place I've lived in for some 16 years!!
And so to today - that digression on fiction's hottest physics teacher has a purpose, never you fear. The Adventuress of Henrietta Street by Lawrence Miles has the Doctor helping out a coven-cum-brothel in Regency-era England, but brilliantly is presented as a novel of that era also. Letters, weird spellings, citing sources and surmises for events when no one was present. It's practically set at my university - Henrietta Street itself adjoins Covent Garden (I visit it more often than I should, because the road sign still excites me), and events take place up and down the Strand.
Did you know there was once a menagerie on the Strand? A zoo for posh people in a second floor apartment? More importantly, for today's events, did you know that the Temple the whole area refers to was once a genuine Knights Templar temple built around here? Temple walk, Temple place, Middle Temple, Temple tube station - even the Knight's Templar pub where Geeksoc meet. I'm reminded of one chapter of From Hell, when one of the characters takes another on a tour around London and strips past the layers and layers of past. I could stay here forever, because the mess of architecture and history is just so appealing.
It all started when my Myths lesson went missing. It's always at 11, 3rd basement, along to the left - but I arrived late, and none of the class were there. In its place, another very settled lecturer who seemed suprised indeed at the suggestion that he shouldn't be there. I half heartedly went looking for the class, but the Strand Campus comprises the Norfolk, Kings, Chesham, Philosophy buildings not mentioning the Classics wing, all of which have their own staircase and floor labelling system, linked up in an irrational manner known only to Escher. I had in fact just the day before discovered a passage directly from Classics to Film - a long, sickly lit corridor made up of tiny doors, winding staircases which lead nowhere and doors surely containing professors long-forgotten by the college who haven't left their offices since 1943 and have no idea the war is over. You could certainly starve to death and it would be at least fifteen months before anyone discovered the body.
To digress, that little voyage of discovery brought me to the College Chaiplancy Common room - "please enter, open to all" ominously written on the door. In any case, I took a peep - I've been longing to find a place in the college I can nap when I get exausted during the day. Then I spotted a poster on the wall - advertising for singers to sing mass on a Sunday morning. Brilliant! I thought - I've been longing to join a choir, but it seems my voice is just a bit too classical for the pop/rock groups, yet not classical enough for the serious groups. So I went in to take down the details, and that's when the trouble started.
Religious people are like tigers. I love tigers, I'd hate it if they went extinct. Tigers have a very important role to play in the world's ecosystem - they're a vital part of the way it all works. And individually, they're some of the most incredible things in the world. It's just...you don't want to end up alone in a group of more than five tigers under any circumstance, especially not on their own territroy.
And indeed I did feel I was being checked out by everyone - oooh, a new person, I wonder if she's edible? Inexplicably - probably because of my previous blog about Remonstrances - I suddenly got Cousin Jasper's advice about avoiding Anglo-Catholics pounding through my head.
Eventually, one of the group came and asked if they could help - and it turned out they were all genuinely very nice people. I was made the best hot chocolate in the universe - cream, sprinkles and everything - and I'm sure a mounting sense of discomfort when I realised I was trapped between a shelf of Vatican Discources and a pile of Bibles was more from my own prejudices than anything which actually happened. I'll probably find it again sometime, if I have a sour day. Will I sing in the choir? A better question is, will I be able to get to Holborn before 11 on a Sunday morning?
In any case, looking for my Myths seminar was a courageous but foolish idea - and while poking around for it, I ran into Spirita who was using her height to balance precariously at the top of a staircase and to put up a "revoke Peres' honorary doctorate" poster so high it couldn't be removed. Typically, she did not object to putting up posters against Kings regulations - but objected strongly to me pinching blu-tack from a nearby noticeboard to back up her own poster. With a little help from my umbrella, we stuck down the corners she couldn't reach.
We're on the eighth day of the Kings Occupation - and the occupiers have got all their demands met bar one. Kings are going to give Palestinians scholarships and send surplus equipment (to explain, Palestine just got its university blown up), organise funding events and open up their books to clear up allegations of involvement in the arms trade. But they won't revoke Shimon Peres' Doctorate, so the occupation continues. My views? My view is I still don't know enough about the scenario to judge, it still hasn't been explained to me adequately and impartially enough. They have my thoughts, if not my physical presence.
In any case, we got chatting in a stairwell about the most random things - Abba, Celine Dion, the Sphynx without a Secret and the house we're all going to get next year, which probably deserves a post all of its own. Along the way, I tried explaining my theory of auras - that when something repetitve happens in an area, it does affect the area in some way. This arose because we had both visited Bodmin Gaol, one of the most evil places I've ever been - it just had uncomfortable scratched into the walls, and that was before they decorated the ex-Victorian prison with grotesque mannequins of the dead inmates. Ellis Island Immigration Centre was another - as if the terror and expectation and the weariness of thousands upon thousand travellers had got absorbed by the building. Almost like a sense that it was holding it's breath, waiting to exhale all its stories. I feel the same way about churches and libraries, as if the respect and silence of everyone who has passed through has somehow left a mark on the places themselves.
A bit new age spirital - and Spirita offered some rational suggestions, which may have been correct - but in those two places in particular did give me the spooks on a level other than the rational. Certainly Ellis island, which was open and spacious, redecorated and wasn't so obviously unsettling as Bodmin Gaol, made me feel physically sick, bizzare and just disquieted in a way I couldn't define. I would strongly object to returning to the latter; the former, I would if only to get a handle on what worried me so much about it.
I'm not necessarily claiming I feel a so-called "psychic connection" to any of those places. To my mind, it would be pretensious - and it would suggest firmer beliefs in new age spiritality than I actually hold. I'm interested, and a percieved personal reaction to these places is one of the things which spurs this interest - but still not wholly convinced. One thing I have always thought curious is that places where genuinely terrible things have happened - I have visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and I've been in the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol where the Easter Rising leaders were executed - the places you would expect any "psychic sympathy" to just be unbearable are empty, completely emotionally empty. They're like completely blank areas, as if the events there have just rubbed the land raw.
As I said above, this doesn't necessarily prove anything one way or another. Maybe it's all real, maybe it's in my head. Maybe I really am a powerful psychic, maybe there's no such thing. In any case, even though Spirita was twice as sceptical as I was about this whole idea, we decided to go and see if we could get into Aldwych Tube Station and see what the "psychic vibrations" left by an abandoned tube station would be. Along the way, we bumped into fellow Geek Caterpillar who joined our quest.
Fans of Lara Croft will recognise this as a location from Tomb Raider 3 - the fact as a functional station it is no more will explain a quibble I always had with this level, namely "why are there armed men, angry dogs and absolutely no civilians on that branch of the Underground?" I've enjoyed delving into the history - did you know the station opened on my birthday, 1907? But it was hardly ever used, so it was more cost effective to just shut it in 1994 than pay for a replacement lift. Somewhat frustrating, because a tube straight from Kings to Holborn would make the Maughan trip far more appealing - as it is, the walk is unpleasant and it's impossible to reach on a sensible tube line. Yet it's been useful in its own way - as an air raid shelter during the war for both humans and British Museum treasures, and a testing space for innovations on functional tube lines.In any case, I've longed to have a look around there - actually, I really want to have the best goth disco in the universe down there, but I suspect the hire would be more than Geeksoc could afford. Spirita had had a peep a few days ago when there were builders, and indeed there were people there when we visited - a man had popped out for a cigarette.
We tried to gain entry as politely as possible, but he revealed that the police were using it as part of a training simulation so naturally we couldn't go in. The policeman also pointed out, fairly enough, that it was the tube station we saw in every tube-station movie - Atonement, Prince Caspian and V for Vendetta to name three - and that it just looked like every other tube station. Here's Aldwych Tube station in action in the infamous "Firestarter" video by Progidy:
Great video, by the way. Disturbing as hell, but still great.
Seeing the Tube on video wasn't exactly the point, but we thanked him. Looks like, for now, I'll have to make do with the photos on Subterranea Britannica - which do seem to have a certain sickly karmic something to them. I've always felt abandoned places do have an energy.
This disappointment didn't deter our adventure, however, and we went off to see the Roman Baths. They are located under the King's building, right next door to the entrance - but my love of Classics has always been overcome by my hatred of small, dark pokey alleyways. The idea seemed much safer in company, however, and in that particular London rain which makes everything grey and gorgeous, we went looking for Architectural Treasure no. 2.
The alley itself was thoroughly Dickensian, and in it's own Jack the Ripper way, quite beautiful - vents, ducts, windows and mess, in that uniquely London manner of making architctural chaos appealing. From the bottom, we could see the whole belly of the university, and it's crazy-paving layout. The back of the chapel is only held up by two very determined columns, and we walked under several very high tunnels which we pass through without thinking every day. Aptly enough, the Classics department is actually right on top of the Roman Baths...
...which were being redecorated or something - in any case, two builders fixing doors ensured that we couldn't actually see them. At this point I saw a dead mouse and almost hurled. I hope I never see a real human dead body, because even though my mind can objectively cope with the idea, in actual fact I always react to animal corpses with far less dignity than I would like.
At this point, you'd think we would be deterred by our double failing. Yet I started rhapsodising about London history, including my much-quoted trivia lovingly ripped off from Henrietta Street as mentioned above. Which reminded Spirita, when I came to the Knight's Templar, that someone had told her there really was a very old chapel about somewhere. So we trotted down to Temple Tube to ask the man there for directions, and he helpfully pointed us right.
Which was weird in its own right, because I take the crossroads from the Strand to Temple every day but never go any further - it's as if the world just stops there. So walking down this new road was a particular treat. If I had a massive wall-map of London, I'd ink in the roads I'd visited and make a point of seeking out those I hadn't. Because I'm sure all my activity would clump around one or two areas, when there's just so much to discover all over the place.
Luckily, at this point Caterpillar suddenly realised where we were headin
g and lead us through the most brilliant maze of buildings - imagine Hogwarts, Oxford and a set of church cloister gardens crunched together and rearranged. Temple Court Chambers, as I understand, is a little isolated village of barristers and bores in suits - and it occured to me that the three of us all looked like undesireable delinquents. There were pathways with iron fences and stone flagstones, a fountain, lines of trees, columned arcades - and finally, after feeling like I'd accidentaly wandered into Florence, we came to the Temple Church, built by the Knight's Templar as already noted above and as used in The Da Vinci Code, and responsible for the naming of the whole area.
And in keeping with the theme of the trip, the church was closed until later in the afternoon.
History was everywhere, and I longed to go examine all the Latin (we found a Gurney on a tombstone) and go explore more winding streets - but the group voted for lunch, and we went on another trek of quite a different kind in which my desire for a peking duck wrap but refusal to pay coffee shop prices (£5 to eat in?! seriously?), our ethical aversion to the evil of chain brands, my friends' vegitarianism and Caterpillar's various allergies/intolerances made agreement of any sort completely impossible. Indeed, the lunch quest took longer than the architecture one and is far too tedious to recount. Except that Tango new brand lemonade is worth trying.
And that's that. We met Calypso later, and then all of a sudden it was 6 in the evening and time for tea. But a very exciting day, all in all, and I forsee more Random London Architecture rambles in the future.
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