London Calling

London as you like it: the city where Shakespeare lived and observed that " all the world is a stage and the men and women merely players."  Each have their exits and entrances and play many parts.  So it is that we arrive in this great city on Saturday 29 November 2019 after a good flight from Dubai.

Catching the underground from Heathrow to Kings Cross gave us a snapshot of the diverse and colourful players. Two women in their late 20's were in our carriage most of the trip: spray tan x2, drinking cans of vodka, fake eyelashes, botox lips and talking non stop about their love lives and  matters, meaningful to them perhaps but inane to the rest of us , a way that everyone in the carriage could hear.  They were dressed up and I wondered whether they had just come from the set of East-enders.  Although amusing for a few minutes after 25 it was suffocating and everyone was relieved when that scene ended on their departure.

Arriving in the majestic Kings Cross station we transferred to St Pancras and the Northern Line B for a 15 minutes trip to Cricklewood station.  The Airbnb at Cricklewood was just as advertised and will be an excellent base for our stay.

Across the road is the parish church of St Agnes and on attending the vigil Mass we found a booming Irish Priest who completed the service solo despite a full congregation.  I  felt him as a touch of the Redemptorist Missioners from my childhood experience of Mass at the freezing Duntroon Hall.  Another colourful actor!  The parishioner sick list read like a list of Irish exiles and the name Maureen was amongst the favorites.

Roman Wall of London outside Museum of London

We have sought immersion in the cities of Rome , Paris, Athens and now London.  Part of this is to visit the city museum which we did on our first full day.  The Museum of London
is superb with exhibitions focusing of each historical age: London before London, Roman occupation, Medieval, War plague and fire, Expanding city , Peoples City and World City.  
I was particularly struck by the importance of the Thames in the historical story including it being seen as a deity in pre-historic times.


Since reading Dickens and the Tale of Two Cities at high school and being interested in the development of social policy and the origins of Social Work I could not pass up a tour on Expanding City- the period between 1850 -1940 when London grew from ~2 million to ~9 million people.  The tour compared and contrasted the poor east end of the city with the newer and more affluent west end.  Nearly 30% lived in abject poverty with poor sanitation diet and housing.  The Thames was a sewer and only after the 'Great Stink' in 1858 consumed the houses of parliament and many outbreaks of cholera did the government commission Joseph Bazalgate to build a new sewerage system that dramatically  improved sanitation and health.  In a way Bazalgate was the saviour of London in an analogous way to  Charles Guillaumot saved Paris in the 1790's.  We learned about the beginnings of epidemiology when Dr John Snow confirmed contaminated water as the source of cholera after a bad outbreak in 1854.  Then there was Charles Booth, a shipowner who sought to refute socialist allegations that a quarter of London’s population lived in poverty.  He mapped the whole city actually finding that more than 1/3 lived in poverty.  This was the beginning of mapping of social determinants and is still ground breaking today.  The final comment from the tour was that London today is more like the expanding city period with a widening gap between rich and poor and the east vs west divide more evident than anytime since 1945.

Maureen found in the museum a Vespa scooter - much like the Lambretta her parents rode around London in the late 1950's even traveling 10 hours from from London to Bradford while her mother Trudy was pregnant!