May 8 – Arrival
I woke up at 4:30 AM in Prague for my flight to London. Upon arrival in the airport, I met up with Beau, Maya, Michele, and Morgan. Beau, using his prior knowledge of the Underground, led us to the hotel with no issues. After waiting around the hotel for everybody else to arrive, we took the Tube to Westminster and saw Big Ben and then went into Westminster Abbey. That evening we turned in early to get ready for the Churchill War Rooms the next day.
May 9 – Churchill War Rooms/Getting Lost with Beau/Michael Hanscomb Dinner
The Churchill War Rooms Museum was our first stop of the study trip. Here were the reproduced/preserved rooms from which Churchill and his Cabinet conducted the majority of the war after he was forced underground. The museum was interesting, and reveals the general cult of personality surrounding Churchill among the English public, which was a little strange as I don’t believe there’s a large FDR museum in the US. After the War Rooms, Beau and I went to Trafalgar Square and avoided some sort of Russian Nationalist protest before going into the National Gallery. We didn’t stay long in the Gallery, as there was a surplus of British schoolchildren that were quite irritating. After a quick lunch, we went exploring trying to find the various embassies, but instead wound up getting lost in some swanky neighborhoods south of Hyde Park. At the end of the day we had the great opportunity to hear the story of a survivor of the Blitz, Michael Hanscombe, who told us how London was before, during, and immediately after the war.
May 10 – British Museum/Cartoon Museum/HMS Belfast/Tower Bridge/All Hallows Church
Wednesday was our free day, so Beau, Brittany, Michele and I planned some things we could see across the city. First, we went to the British Museum, where we all broke off and saw our own areas of interest. Brittany and I went through the Native American, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese exhibits. From the British Museum, we went across and down the street to the Cartoon Museum. The Cartoon Museum was a little hole in the wall with a few rooms filled with cartoons and caricatures dating all the way back to the 1700’s. The political and social cartoons were actually pretty hilarious, but the comic section of the museum focused heavily on Judge Dredd and was lost on me. After the Cartoon Museum, we took the Tube to the Thames and walked along the river to HMS Belfast. The Belfast is one of the British’s most legendary warships from World War II, and it was fascinating to climb aboard and explore the ship. The Belfast sank the German ship Schwarzhorn(?) during the Battle of the Atlantic and was involved in combating many U-boats. From the Belfast, we went over to the Tower Bridge, and went through the exhibit relatively quickly. The bridge itself was pretty from a distance, but the only real valuable takeaway from going inside it was the panorama of the city taken from its observation deck. Afterwards, we crossed the bridge and walked past the Tower of London to All Hallows Church, the oldest church in London. The church, dating back to 675 AD was already nearly 1000 years old when William Penn was christened there in 1644. After All Hallows, we met up with Morgan and Alex and all had a late lunch/early dinner of meat pies at a pub called the Hung, Drawn, and Quartered.
May 11 – Bletchley Park/Kensington Palace/Curry
Thursday was back to our study trip, and we took a London Midlands train out to Bletchley to see the center of Ultra operations here in England. It was very interesting and satisfying to see the actual site where so many of those from our readings relied upon for intelligence. I inherited a love of mechanical based machines from my dad, and it was therefore fascinating to see the Bombe replica itself, seeing it actual run was a real treat. Additionally, the large collection of Enigma machines was very impressive, my next recommendation to my dad for an eBay purchase is definitely going to be an old encoding machine. After spending most of the day at Bletchley, we returned to London and walked through Kensington Gardens and the Kensington Palace to finish off the evening, before going and getting an obligatory curry from a small Indian hole in the wall.
May 12 – Imperial War Museum/Fishcotheque/Fan Museum/Cutty Sark/St. Paul’s/Jack the Ripper
Yesterday we started the day off at the Imperial War Museum, which was very impressive and satisfied my itch for seeing some of the machinery of the war. Being able to see the V-weapons was especially interesting, having only read about them and seen very old photographs. Seeing the V-2 in person really gave me an appreciation for how much more devastating those weapons could have been had their launch sites not been destroyed. The replica of Little Boy was also very cool to see, as the ratio of the size of the bomb to the destruction inflicted by it is almost unfathomable. The World War I exhibit was incredibly detailed and immersive, and it would be nice to see the World War II exhibit evolve into something similar. After a walk through the Holocaust exhibit, Brittany, Alex, and I went to find a chippy close to the museum, and wound up in a place called Fishcotheque, (which I thought was a hilarious name), across from Waterloo Station. After that, Alex went on to the Tate Museums, and Brittany and I rode the Tube east to the DLR, and then southeast through Metropolitan London to see the Fan Museum and the Cutty Sark. The Fan Museum was as I expected, a small old house that was ran by a bunch of old British ladies, but the fans themselves were actually quite interesting and intricate, and the craftsmanship required to make such beautiful pieces is incredible. After the Fan Museum, we went down the street in Greenwich to see the Cutty Sark, a famous tea-trading ship that was once the fastest in the world, making the passage from Sydney to London in just 73 days. After the Cutty Sark, we sat by the Thames and looked over the city for a while, as the weather had finally cleared up, before then heading back to St. Paul’s to take a few pictures before our Jack the Ripper tour. The Jack the Ripper tour was a guided story through East London which was interesting, but I personally expected Jack to have quite a bit more victims to be such a legendary figure. After our tour, we wandered through the Bangladeshi streets before heading back to the Lancaster Gate Hotel to pack up for this morning’s ferry.