London Day 2: Portobellow Market, the Museum of Natural History, and the Globe Theater

Today was a great day in London.  The sky was clear (apparently a rarity in England) and the temperature was warmer than in Paris.  I started by going to the Portobello Road Market, a very longstanding and excellent flea-market in London held on Friday and Saturday.  If you’ve seen the old Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks, it is the same market that they visit to find the book of spells.  After visiting there, I can believe that they could find such a thing.  It was easily the best market of that type that I have ever been to.  If my dad were there, I would fear for his retirement fund.

After that I went through Kensington Gardens, a large park that was very pleasant.  It was there that I discovered that the birds have lost their fear of humans due to the influence of the infamous Bird Lady from Mary Poppins.  They have become so accustomed to being fed, that instead of fleeing humans, they swarm them.  It is very amusing to watch small children with bread disappear beneath a cloud of feathers.

I next visited London’s Museum of Natural History.  This too is a place my dad would love: biology, geology, astronomy, zoology, entomology, and even a large section devoted solely to Charles Darwin.  I probably spent more time in there than I should have, but I was enthralled by the superb quality of their collections.  They had an extensive section on dinosaurs with some of the first fossils ever recovered, including many of the first complete ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. 

Next stop was Shakespeare’s Globe Theater.  Sadly, nothing remains of the original structure: when the Puritans took power after the English Civil War, they demolished all of London’s theaters as being dens of sin and corruption.  The modern structure came into being when American actor Sam Wanamaker travelled to London to make a film and was dismayed to discover that the only trace or monument to the original site was a small plaque next to the parking lot built where the theater once stood.  Wanamaker managed to get enough donors together to rebuild as faithfully as possible the original theater 750 ft. from where it once stood.  The original spot could not be gotten because supporting structures from the London Bridge now occupied part of the grounds, and seeing as that is one of the most important traffic crossings over the River Thames, they could not just knock it down for the sake of art.  But the reconstruction is an amazing sight and I really enjoyed the theater and the history of theatrical productions of Shakespeare’s day.

After that, I went to the Clink Prison Museum.  The Clink Prison was London’s oldest prison, founded in the 1100s.  It is the prison that gave the name “Clink” to all others, a fact of which they are immensely proud and are sure to remind visitors of several times.  The museum is fantastically creepy as it takes you on a tour of the old setup and gives details of the prison’s history, the stories of several inmates, and descriptions of torture devices from the prison’s many eras of jailkeeping.  It makes me very happy indeed that I did not live under that criminal justice system. 

I then wandered the banks of the Thames for a while, visiting London Bridge (luckily not falling down) and Tower Bridge.  Tomorrow I will hopefully be seeing Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, Big Ben and Parliament and Westminster Abbey, and a number of other museums (such as the Churchill Museum).  We’ll see what it holds.