thisislondon – ARUNDHATI BASU

I mean where else might you gape? Though if you’re a gaper like me, you would find fodder for it most anywhere. There’s no harm really, except once in a while midges might make their way in and an odd fly or two. So if you like experimenting with bugs and beetles in Asian food markets, why just keep your mouth open and you can have them for free in your own city.

The husband works in the heart of the City. Right next to the Gherkin. On Friday evening, I sauntered into its shadow to meet him for drinks and dinner. Now, a prime area for gapers is within the bounds of London City, you know the Square Mile, which is supposed to be just 1.12 square miles in London, but as you walk around, it seems substantially larger than that humble number.

But first, whip back your lovely heads. Though I shall not and will not be held responsible for a crick.

2017-04-11 08.53.42 1.jpg — **The Gherkin (aka 30 St. Mary Axe) looms above me.**

2017-04-11 08.53.41 1.jpg — **Standing tall at 591 ft. if contemporary architecture can woo you, The Gherkin gets the job done.**

2017-04-07 04.29.37 1.jpg — **The Walkie-Talkie (20 Fenchurch) stands tall too at 525 ft.**

2017-04-11 10.35.52 2.jpg — **The Shard. The tallest in the hood at 1,016 ft.**

2017-04-11 08.53.40 1.jpg — **Even street installations loom over you.**

2017-04-11 08.53.38 1.jpg — Straight ahead on the right hand side that weird steel structure, with its ducts and lifts sticking out in your face, is the home of insurance. Lloyd’s of London. You can literally see its bowels, the inner workings, so you would get the term ‘Bowellism’ and an example of a strange, modern school of architecture. It was coined by a British architect, Michael Webb, who got it from a lecture delivered by a history of architect in which that man said: *“I saw the other day a design for a building that looked like a series of stomachs sitting on a plate. Or bowels, connected by bits of bristle”*.

**Where Lloyd’s of London stands, there used to be located the ‘Old’ East India House (a late 17th-century Dutch print) which came up in the 1600s.**

This is the ‘New East India House’ that was built by 1729. It was the London headquarters of the East India Company that ruled British India till the government wrested power from its clutches in 1858 and took over the job of governing India.

2017-04-11 08.53.22 1.jpg — **The Cheesegrater (Leadenhall Building) is 737 ft. tall and can you spot those lifts that are moving simultaneously in shades of neon orange and green? It is a fascinating feature.**

2017-04-11 08.53.24 1.jpg — The 387-ft. tall St. Helens on the left, The Gherkin on the right, and in its shadow, bathed in the mellow rays of the setting sun is St. Andrew Undershaft, a 16th century Gothic church, that survived the Great Fire of London and the Blitz.

If you stepped back in time, this was Londinium, a trading port for and by merchants along the mighty Thames. It came up around 47 AD when the Romans ruled Britain and later was sacked by the tribe of Iceni led by their queen Boudica.

2017-04-11 10.35.53 1.jpg — **All hail Boudica.**

Now that I am done waffling, how about a pint or two?

Where to Drink:

Sky Garden at 20 Fenchurch. This is an expensive affair but with a view of London’s skyline. You could be easily looking at £70 per person (totted up for the most expensive items on the menu which include starter, main course and dessert) excluding alcohol. A 5-course tasting menu is priced at £55 and for wine pairing add £42 more. If you are still game, you can book 60 days in advance because people do book it up weeks ahead. P.S.: Dress code is a bummer but there you are, no shorts, flip flops, sports gear, please.

Aqua Shard. Here’s another pricey beauty that will get you when the bill arrives, but hey, the views of the riverside loveliness of the city from the 31st level of The Shard might just make up for it. I would say pop in for a Champagne afternoon tea that starts at £58 per person. Nibble into dainty delicacies while sipping on some bubbly to numb the senses before the bill arrives.

Leadenhall Market: If you are fine with views of the city on the ground level, look no further than Old Tom’s Bar in this market that stands on grounds where trade has been going on since the Roman times. Potter fans, you have seen it in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Yes, I know that you know, yet the need to disperse Potter trivia…

2017-04-07 04.29.31 1.jpg — Follow me into Leadenhall Market? The 19th century Victorian market traces its origins back to the 14th century when it used to be a meat, game and poultry market within the portals of a ‘hall with a lead roof’. It has an ornate roof painted in shades of green, maroon and cream.

2017-04-11 08.53.27 1.jpg — City workers hard at work on Friday evening. They stand in massive columns outside pubs with their pints. Soon those ties shall go askew, shirts protest their way out of trouser waistbands and the hair shall manage to look ruffled even with generous amounts of hair gel in place. For the bald, the last is not a problem.

2017-04-07 04.29.24 1.jpg — **Where the husband leads, I follow.**

2017-04-07 04.29.22 1.jpg — **Next to roll down the stairs of the craft beer pub.**

2017-04-07 04.29.16 1.jpg — **Inside the atmospheric bar.**

2017-04-11 08.53.26 2.jpg — **And find delectable extra mature cheddar cheese that melts like cream in the mouth, paired with sourdough crackers and caramelised onion chutney. That Camden Pale Ale is precious.**

Before I leave you, the shot below is from an obituary published on April 16, 1835 in The Times. The allusion is to Old Tom, a gander who had arrived in the City from Ostend in Belgium. He followed his heart (a wily female of the flock), and even though the rest of his flock became fixtures on dining tables, Old Tom somehow had people indulgently feeding him scraps. He made it to the ripe age of 37 till he died a natural death and was buried in the market. Below is a tribute to the venerable gander.

Sparkling sunny weekends are a rarity in our part of the world. If the week shall go in a sunny, breezy mode, Friday rolls in and the clouds declare their presence, often not in a I-am-billowy-and-pretty-just-like-that way. The weekend did start on a cracking note and the sun did power its way through Sunday. So the British have declared summer. Over the last two days, men have been spotted in speedos atop caravans, women have been noted to drive in bikinis and others have been sitting in barely-there-shorts in the backyards.

On Friday, quite early in the morning I had work in London – which meant I had the whole day to myself after. I made my way to the Horniman Museum. The fact that it was free added a spring to my step. But what I had overestimated was my power to get lost. I Will get lost. No matter how many years I have been living in a country. My teenage years in Calcutta were spent regularly landing up in odd places and an irate father coming to the rescue. Once after a date, I took the wrong bus and reached another part of Calcutta quite late at night. I was invited by an old man to his terrace home – when I look back I am astounded at my calibre for silliness. I did go up to the terrace with him and make an SOS call to the parents (who could not believe their ears). As it happened, it was new year’s eve, and my uncle and his family were visiting us from London. The whole family came to get me back home. Suffice it to say that the evening is etched in my memory.

It took me two hours to get to Forest Hill from Baker’s Street by tube and overground trains (when it should have taken me all of 50 minutes). I do not know where I went wrong except that I did get on and off a few trains and stand at stations where I should not have. In the meantime, the person who was getting steadily worked up through watsapp was the husband. He had visions of massive charges on the card because of all the overground trains I was changing.

But I did reach Horniman. I have proof of meeting the in-house walrus.

2017-04-07 02.43.23 1.jpg — **Walking beneath the cherry blossoms of Forest Hill take away the sting of goofing up.**

2017-04-07 02.43.19 1.jpg — **Beneath bowers of cherry blossoms who can be woeful for long.**

Our Walrus is an unusual taxidermy specimen, it appears stretched and ‘over stuffed’ as it lacks the skin folds characteristic of a walrus in the wild. Over one hundred years ago, only a few people had ever seen a live walrus, so it is hardly surprising that ours does not look true to life.

The name Horniman is owed a great deal to by tea lovers. Today it is owned by Douwe Egberts but the founder of the eponymously named Horniman’s Tea was a trader called John Horniman. He had started the tea trading business in the small but beautiful Isle of Wight in 1826 and had also changed the concept of selling of loose leaf teas which were often adulterated with dust and hedge clippings by unscrupulous sellers (horrendous, right?). He sealed his packages of tea thus ensuring that authentic tea leaves reached the customers sans the extra ingredients. Even our much-touted philosopher of profoundness, Nietzsche, deemed Horniman’s to be his preferred brand of tea. Who likes the great outdoors (apart from the leaves) in his tea? Well, the great majority clearly gave John a thumbs up, so his company did become the largest tea trading company in the world by 1891.

The museum however was not his idea. It was his son Frederick’s brainchild.

Frederick_Horniman_by_Trevor_Haddon_(detail).jpg — **Portrait of Frederick John Horniman**

Thanks to the country’s passion for tea, Frederick had enough moolah to indulge his passion for collecting. Everything from natural history to musical instruments and cultural artefacts. This museum of his has a sum total of about 350,000 objects. As a tea lover how could I not see what tea had wrought?

2017-04-07 02.42.47 1.jpg — **Meet the walrus of Horniman’s. He is a celebrity, okay? He was possibly sourced from the area around Hudson Bay in Canada. Queen Victoria too had visited our tooth-some friend.**

2017-04-07 02.43.07 1.jpg — **If he looks unnaturally fat, blame it on the taxidermist. He/she overstuffed him. So there are no folds on his skin.**

2017-04-07 02.42.49 1.jpg — **Meet the three long-eared owls. I took to them. I mean, just look at them. Especially the look of the third fellow on the extreme right.**

2017-04-07 02.42.52 1.jpg — **Look at that beak of the Crowned Horn Bill. Solid as a curved piece of wood, you think?**

2017-04-07 02.43.12 1.jpg — **Iridiscence. Beetles and bugs.**

2017-04-07 02.42.59 1.jpg — Scarlet Ibis

2017-04-07 02.42.55 1.jpg — A Central American beauty.

2017-04-07 02.42.57 1.jpg — Merman. ‘WHAT’, did you say? In the early 18th-19th centuries, mermen were brought by sailors to Europe. They were believed to be real for centuries, inhabiting the oceans around Asia, till it was discovered that they were indeed products of man’s genius for imagination. They were found to have been the head and torso of a monkey put together with the tail of a fish. Man is a genius. Fraudulent ones, more so.

2017-04-07 02.42.54 2.jpg — Golden-headed Trogon

2017-04-07 02.43.09 1.jpg — **Philosophising orang-utan. He has the stance and stick of a hermit.**

2017-04-07 02.43.08 1.jpg — **Be kind to my special friend, the red-howler monkey. He belongs in the treetops of Brazil. I am sure he thought, ‘Oh no, am I in the Blighty?’ and that priceless expression was thus frozen.**

Lest you think that strange stuffed animals is all you shall get to see, there is also the wonderful park and greenery around you on a fine summer’s day.

2017-04-07 02.42.33 1.jpg — **Horniman gardens**

2017-04-07 02.42.36 1.jpg — **Views of London’s skyline (you can just about make out the silhouette of The Shard on the horizon)**

2017-04-07 02.42.40 1.jpg — **Conservatory at the Horniman Museum**

2017-04-07 02.42.32 1.jpg — **When you leave the museum, you might just be rewarded by a Mr. Whippy.**

So, the question is that if you are in London, should you or should you not head over to Horniman’s. I would say give it a go if you feel like turning into a child all over again. And do remember me if you meet the walrus and the red howler monkey.

Tag: thisislondon

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