Lew Perin (@babelcarp)’s thread starting 2025-05-28 23:31:39

We’re on our way to England tonight for three weeks. Not gonna burden you with grumbling about how we got to the gate. Blighty here we come…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blighty

2025-05-28 23:31:39 babelcarp

After a more or less sleepless night we arrived at Heathrow. Getting through Passport Control was a breeze (due to biometrics😬) but the airport is so vast that getting to the train station took longer than the express train from Heathrow to central London.

The nice thing about the train was that it dropped us in Paddington Station, just a ten minute walk from our hotel.

2025-05-29 13:07:49 babelcarp

Our hotel may be the least swanky option in quite a swanky neighborhood just north of Hyde Park. The room is very small, but it has everything we need, and the people who run the place are sweet.

2025-05-29 13:16:14 babelcarp

On our first day walking around in London, it was hard enough getting used to cars coming at us from the “wrong” side. But on top of that, English drivers have a disorienting habit of parking facing both ways. This is something you never see in supposedly chaotic NYC.

2025-05-29 13:22:13 babelcarp

It doesn’t matter if you’re circling the drain as long as you maintain an indomitable stiff-upper-lip attitude.

Note: this isn’t intended as a comment on post-imperial, post-Brexit Britain — it would hardly be appropriate for a Trump era USAian to get haughty that way.

2025-05-29 13:28:25 babelcarp

Bayswater Rd, London: I’m grateful that London has taken responsibility for helping me, a humble tourist, live to see another day.

2025-05-29 20:02:19 babelcarp

Kensington Gardens, London: Sorry to say, London has outclassed NYC beyond dispute on one dimension: a Rolls Royce ice cream truck.

2025-05-29 20:09:18 babelcarp

London, north bank of the Thames: From a distance you see this gilded monument on an impossibly high plinth—compare the humans at the bottom of the photo for scale—and you assume it was erected to celebrate some military triumph.

Draw closer so you can read the inscription? Nope, it commemorates the 17th century fire that wiped out most of London. I don’t think there’s anything like this in Chicago or San Francisco. I just don’t know what to make of this.

2025-05-30 21:30:21 babelcarp

We spent the day mostly rambling around London’s parks with our tea friend K.

We took an hour or two for a gongfu session at Mei Leaf in Camden Town. K went low and slow with a green from Habian County in Sichuan: low temperature, slow drip of hot water into the gaiwan, slow decanting. The first steep had a crazy thickness of texture, almost like matcha.

https://babelcarp.org/babelcarp/babelcarp.cgi?phrase=Ma3+Bian1+Yi2+Zu2+Zi4+Zhi2+Xian4

@tea

2025-05-30 21:45:38 babelcarp

> We flew overnight. I basically didn’t sleep a wink, but the next day I was as good as new.

Jetlaggadocio

2025-05-31 14:21:37 babelcarp

London, south bank of the Thames: when someone says something like “well, you won’t be seeing him for awhile—they threw him in the clink”, now I know where the expression comes from.

2025-05-31 17:21:02 babelcarp

The wastebaskets in London’s royal parks are so swanky, I’m not sure my litter is worthy of them.

2025-05-31 17:25:58 babelcarp

London’s Tube vs. NYC’s subway (provisional):

Tube’s more expensive.

Subway, unlike Tube, runs all night.

Tube has plush seats vs. subway’s hard plastic.

The Tube map doesn’t give you enough information to know how many places you can get to directly from a given station. Instead, it shows you what line(s) your station is on. But “line” in London isn’t as granular as in NYC; it’s more like, “is this station on the IRT, BMT or IND” (if your NYC subway memory goes back far enough.) That is to say, the Tube is confusing in a way that NYC (and German transit systems too) aren’t.

When an NYC subway line goes out of service they run free shuttle buses shadowing its route. When a Tube line goes down, you need to figure out how to get where you’re going using regular buses.

2025-05-31 17:47:05 babelcarp

If you’re an ordinary American and you learn that English people say “sort it” to mean “take care of it”, you say to yourself, “oh, that’s interesting.”

But if you’re a USAian who’s taken a CS fundamental algorithms course, at the moment you find this out, your mind temporarily disengages from the external world entirely.

2025-05-31 20:10:27 babelcarp

Thus far, my favorite Tube station name is Barking.

2025-05-31 20:31:03 babelcarp

This morning we set out for Kew Gardens, the great London arboretum, to use an inadequate term: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kew_Gardens

It was to have been a 3-hop Tube journey, but when we got to Notting Hill Gate, the first transfer point, we learned that the lines for the rest of the way were inoperable till 11 AM.

So: bus to Hammersmith, then another to Kew, a much slower journey. On the ride to Hammersmith, a voluble guy from Marseille sat down next to us and undertook to tell us his life story. He’s lived in England with his partner for 6 years, most of which time he’s been studying to become a London cop. And he’s finally achieved his goal! No matter he doesn’t have British nationality and does have an extremely thick accent.

Anyway, now we can deal with London buses too.

2025-05-31 20:49:47 babelcarp

On a warm late spring day, it’s paradise to wander through the meadows and woods, and just hang out on the grass or a bench when you feel like it. There are many, and varied, huge old trees. And you certainly wouldn’t want to neglect the flowerbeds, not with roses in bloom.

2025-05-31 21:02:19 babelcarp

Kew has a number of huge glass houses hosting plants from around the world that aren’t especially fond of English weather.

2025-05-31 21:06:31 babelcarp

But for me there was one disappointment in our visit to Kew Gardens. I was hoping to find some trace of Robert Fortune, the buccaneering botanist who got away with massive industrial espionage against the Chinese tea industry in the mid 19th century, bringing many of the spoils back to Kew:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune

Apparently ordinary visitors could look at his stuff in the Economic Botany collection decades ago, but it isn’t open to the public anymore:

https://teajourney.pub/kew-gardens/

@tea

2025-05-31 21:15:52 babelcarp

I don’t think I could prove that English gallows humor is different in some specific way from, say, the German or Jewish varieties, but I like it a lot.

2025-06-01 17:40:58 babelcarp

This morning we went to Hyde Park, where we met this spunky magpie.

2025-06-01 17:46:44 babelcarp

Nothing much was happening in Speakers’ Corner.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speakers%27_Corner

But we fell in with a procession of Sikhs on their way to their annual demonstration marking a 1984 massacre and calling for an independent Sikh homeland in Punjab.

It was a mellow crowd, and Spouse and I had a good conversation with a Sikh couple. I was surprised to learn there are about 2 million Sikhs in the UK.

We eventually left them behind and walked to Trafalgar Square where we originally intended to go and where, coincidentally, the big Sikh demo was being prepared.

2025-06-01 18:00:28 babelcarp

After Trafalgar Square, for no good reason, we made our way to Soho. We happened upon a Hare Krishna temple’s cafeteria and went in for a late lunch.

Judging by the employees—sect devotees?—unlike in NYC, London Hare Krishnas aren’t white reformed druggies, they’re people born Hindu. And the customers are, too.

The food (vegetarian of course) was quite good and cheap for its quality. The place runs super efficiently, with a much higher employee-customer ratio than you’d normally see except in a luxury restaurant. No doubt this is made possible by the employees working more for, shall we say, love than money?

2025-06-01 20:14:26 babelcarp

Because we could see on the map that London’s Chinatown was nearby, we walked through Soho to get there.

London’s Chinatown is unlike any Chinatown in the USA I know (maybe 8 in NYC alone plus SF, DC, Philadelphia, LA.) It’s so orderly! Maybe 15 blocks with no vehicular traffic, profusely hung with thousands of red (paper? plastic?) lanterns, and lined with many many restaurants and other shops, lots of which seem pretty posh. *Of course* tea means bubble tea.

The whole district was busy on a Sunday afternoon, more so than Soho proper. The crowd was varied, and you could tell the district must be recommended by whatever media Chinese tourists refer to these days.

There must be a story behind the project that is London’s Chinatown, and I’d like to know it.

2025-06-01 20:34:59 babelcarp

In England toast, like revenge, is a dish best served cold.

2025-06-02 08:04:39 babelcarp

Near our London hotel, deceptive advertising that would never be engaged in by those who do free-as-in-speech.🙃

2025-06-02 20:45:09 babelcarp

We spent today at London’s National Gallery. You don’t need me to tell you it has two Vermeers and hundreds—thousands?—of other great paintings. Let me tell you a couple of things about the museum that most likely didn’t make it into guidebooks.

First, the captions on the wall are really worth reading. Not only are they informative, but sometimes they’re argumentative, even spicy.

2025-06-02 20:55:49 babelcarp

There’s an Ingres painting where he turns his sharp attention to the face, and more importantly the character, of a mean cop: the police chief of Rome when Napoleon ruled Italy.

2025-06-02 21:03:01 babelcarp

I love Peter Brueghel the Elder so much! He didn’t just accept well-worn iconography, he rethought it again and again.

In this adoration of the Magi nobody looks happy. The wise men are ugly and they’re nervous. The virgin is kind of hiding. The baby has this attitude of, who are these people and why are they bothering me? There are menacing soldiers in the background.

2025-06-02 21:12:51 babelcarp

Then there’s this painting by an unknown artist from France or the Low Countries from the early 1500s.

Could there possibly be a weirder Madonna and Child? I doubt it. There’s a saint on either side of the holy duo, but at the bottom of the painting there’s A MONSTER WITH WIDE OPEN JAWS WITH SPIKY TEETH!

In fact, if you look closely you see the saint on the right is emerging from the monster. That saint would be St. Margaret, who is said to have been swallowed by a dragon who couldn’t keep her down.

(Hi Margaret!)

2025-06-02 21:24:41 babelcarp

Today’s weather was blustery and drizzly, so we decided to go back to the National Gallery. I am sure you could spend the best part of a week there.

There’s hardly any nationalist nonsense there, if you ignore the coronation portraits of Chuck III and Camilla. But at the top of a staircase you can walk on a mosaic of Winston Churchill in his wartime siren suit

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siren_suit

confronting a monster that, if you squint hard enough, seems to be shaped like a swastika.

2025-06-03 18:41:39 babelcarp

Thé National Gallery is insanely deep in Italian Renaissance art, and today we saw a lot of art by painters with surnames ending in vowels. I was really surprised by how much I liked works by artists I’d never heard of.

Because of his charismatic painting of St. Francis in the Frick Collection, I’ve certainly heard of Giovanni Bellini. But this painting credited to his workshop belongs to a *genre* I’d never heard of: the circumcision of Jesus.

2025-06-03 19:05:40 babelcarp

We walked back to our hotel through Hyde Park, and we were lucky enough to encounter a linden tree that still had fragrant flowers this late in June.

2025-06-03 19:10:19 babelcarp

Today’s weather was to be rainless, so we set out for Hampstead Heath and Highgate Cemetery.

Now that we’re familiar with the Central London transport options (Tube and bus) we were ready for the added degree of difficulty of transferring from the Tube at West Hampstead to the Overground for two stops to the Heath.

The Overground is pretty much a suburban railroad system that doesn’t exactly share stations with the Tube but comes pretty close at a number of places. It’s a little startling to see big freight trains on the Overground tracks blowing past the platform you’re waiting on. I suppose this limits how often the actual Overground trains run.

2025-06-04 17:44:57 babelcarp

I’m developing more affection for the Tube with time. At least some of the lines seem to run more frequently than any in the NYC subway. One of those lines, the Central, is the one closest to our hotel.:awesome:

And the narrow coaches with domed tops and curved sides and even curved doors dictated by the dimensions of the tunnels on some (older?) lines? In my current mood I find them kind of charming.

2025-06-04 17:54:39 babelcarp

Hampstead Heath is vast. We only covered maybe a third of it walking across it toward Highgate and later walking back across it at another angle from below Highgate Cemetery. It also gives something much closer to solitude than the parks closer to the center of London.

This allee reminded me of some German parks we’ve been to.

2025-06-04 20:29:31 babelcarp

In Hampstead Heath, Spouse noticed a guy in a Heath t-shirt doing something mysterious at the base of a poplar tree surrounded by poplar fluff and asked him what he was doing.

Answer: counting the shells left behind by the hornet moth larvae infesting balsam poplar trees with fatal results these days.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornet_moth

2025-06-04 20:39:53 babelcarp

The East section of Highgate Cemetery is the more recent section (19th century till now, making it roughly contemporaneous with Green-Wood in Brooklyn.) It’s also the part that’s cheaper to visit and lets you wander without a tour guide, so that’s where we went.

When you enter, there’s no doubt whatsoever what—who—is the main attraction.

2025-06-04 20:49:09 babelcarp

On the way to Karl Marx’s grave we stopped at Shura Cherkassky’s. He was a classical pianist with a gorgeous sound who was all about the music, egoless, a little old guy who could hold an audience spellbound with a minimum of movement onstage. His repertoire ranged from Rameau to Stockhausen.

https://youtu.be/YIXTbkk5RnM?feature=shared

2025-06-04 21:01:05 babelcarp

As you might imagine, Douglas Adams’s followers have left lots of whimsical keepsakes.

2025-06-04 21:06:15 babelcarp

(Sorry, my photo of George Eliot’s Stone is illegible due, I assume, air pollution eroding the inscription.)

2025-06-04 21:09:44 babelcarp

The great man gets a lot of tribute to this day. While we were there today a South Asian woman laid a bouquet in front of the Marx monument.

In front of the monument were a lot of things left by Chinese people; to the right a rainbow beaded bracelet.

2025-06-04 21:23:19 babelcarp

At the Marx monument we had a conversation with a cemetery employee of a few decades’ standing.

He said marble monuments aren’t allowed anymore because they erode into illegibility too fast. And granite mustn’t be polished to a gaudy shine!

And…the cemetery is full. This doesn’t mean nobody can be buried there anymore, but only on top of an existing grave. And to do that you need permission from the relatives of the deceased below. And if they can’t be found, well, it’s difficult and time-consuming.

The guy also told me he used to bowl regularly with someone for thirty years before learning that he too was a gravedigger.

2025-06-04 21:34:07 babelcarp

Today was museum weather again, so we headed for the British Museum.

The British Museum used to be as much a library as a museum. It’s where Karl Marx did most of his research for _Capital_, and Orwell, Woolf, Garvey among others worked on their books in the Reading Room.

But now the Reading Room, beautiful as it is, has nobody sitting at those concentric arcs of desks: the institution has decided that the public can’t be trusted to not harm the facilities. So now visitors can just stand at the perimeter and gaze at the awesome interior.

A guard told me with sadness in her voice that the institution is currently trying to figure out what the room might be used for in the future.

2025-06-05 20:47:53 babelcarp

To my mind the British Museum isn’t mainly for aesthetic experiences, rather it’s for learning how people lived in many parts of the world over ~5 milliennia by glimpsing their material culture.

The Museum was able to acquire (or loot) some amazing objects like the immensely long relief from the palace of Nineveh near modern-day Basra.

2025-06-05 20:56:55 babelcarp

The British Museum has Yixing teapots!

It also has an insanely impractical (look at the spout!) teapot designed by some artiste in the 1980s.

@tea

2025-06-05 21:05:23 babelcarp

I would totally agree to drink tea from these lovely Akkadian cups the British Museum says are more than four thousand years old.

@tea

2025-06-05 21:11:59 babelcarp

This so-called brooch is about 1/2 meter long. It’s what a Viking might have used to bind his heavy cloak in winter.

(I guess he could also slay an enemy with it.)

Makes you glad you live in a time and place where the button is a widely used technology, let alone the zipper.:awesome:

2025-06-05 21:27:30 babelcarp

The British Museum has three dinner plates that work as a political and aesthetic history of the Soviet Union:

1920. Promoting communism with vanguard art—inspired by Kandinsky?—that jettisons representation and symmetry.

1922. Promoting the 4th International with a portrait of Zinoviev long before he was purged.

1960. Saluting the dying (or already dead?) chairman of the DDR part.

2025-06-06 06:29:55 babelcarp

“Mind the gap” is one of those expressions that, to a USAian, instantly evoke the UK. And on the Tube you certainly hear it a lot issuing from the PA system.

But till I started riding the Tube it never occurred to me that the gap in question is more often vertical than horizontal.

2025-06-06 08:33:38 babelcarp

You can buy all kinds of merch marked with MIND THE GAP or the Underground logo or the Tube map. But I wonder if you can buy furniture with Tube upholstery?

2025-06-06 17:33:36 babelcarp

Today was our last day in London on this stretch before we head north. The weather was dry, so we decided to wander the streets of two neighborhoods.

Figuring that we could get a feel for London Caribbean culture in Notting Hill, the site of the famous annual West Indian carnival, we walked over from our hotel in Bayswater. We headed down Portobello Road, which was running the weekly market for…all things moneyed-hippie, it seems. And it goes on forever.

Strangely there’s a plaque on a Portobello Road house indicating Orwell once lived there. He’d harsh their mellow for sure!

We twice had the chance to talk to middle-aged West Indians about the neighborhood. Both said we’d arrived decades too late.

2025-06-06 20:35:22 babelcarp

So we caught the Central Line at Notting Hill Gate and headed east to Liverpool St so we could explore Tower Hamlets and especially Brick Lane.

Walking from the huge station toward Brick Lane, after a few blocks I noticed we had reached the eastern edge of the congestion pricing zone.

(Now I realize that where we’ve been staying is northwest of the zone, making us hicks, relatively speaking. But we can handle it—in NYC we’re outside the zone too.)

Brick Lane is the main Bangladeshi neighborhood in London, but it too is getting gentrified. Today at one end of the street, something called London SXSW was underway. Was it up to the standard of the Austin, TX South By Southwest? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

2025-06-06 20:50:47 babelcarp

We walked to the un-SXSW end of Brick Lane and (in honor of our Bengali relatives) went into a restaurant that identified itself as Bangladeshi rather than generically Indian like most of the others.

The food was good and the vibe was better. It happened to be Eid al-Adha, and locals were drifting happily along the street outside. Inside the sound system was playing a loop that the waitress identified as a song people sing on the Hajj expressing how happy they are to be there.

Later, walking around the neighborhood, Spouse, whose fruit radar developed during a childhood stealing fruit off trees, noticed a bearing cherry tree in a park. Can you see the ripe cherries in the photo?

2025-06-06 21:05:30 babelcarp

Travel, no matter how much you plan, has an element of contingency.

Today at lunchtime we’re taking the intercity express from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly. Judging by the weather forecasts, we’ll be achieving profitable weather arbitrage: London afternoon rain vs. Manchester morning rain.💰

2025-06-07 08:23:46 babelcarp

We’re only in the London Euston National Rail station and already there’s big Manchester energy: many of the food concessions in the station have urns of PG Tips tea.🙃

@tea

2025-06-07 10:14:16 babelcarp

Speaking of Manchester energy, there’s a guy in our coach wearing a Smiths t-shirt.

2025-06-07 11:22:09 babelcarp

First impressions of Manchester after a late afternoon/early evening walk:

I counted 4 Morrissey t-shirts, and there must’ve been more under coats—it was blustery and cold.

In downtown and the university district near our hotel there’s lots of impressive, heavily ornamented Victorian commercial/institutional architecture made of red brick and sandstone, including the sorta-gothic town hall. But what really knocked me out was the uncategorizable town hall extension built in the 1930s. Did Art Deco meet Gothic here? The way all the ornamental energy of the building is focused on that one lacework vertical window is remarkable.

2025-06-07 19:25:05 babelcarp

Walking around Manchester on a mostly rainy day, the most memorable things were monuments.

Near our hotel there’s a statue of Alan Turing holding the cyanide-laced apple he killed himself with. Appropriately, it’s situated between the institute where he worked after WWII and the gay neighborhood he frequented.

2025-06-08 20:18:36 babelcarp

There’s a monument downtown marking the site of a crucial event in the struggle for democracy in the UK when troops massacred people gathered peacefully for a pro-democracy speech in 1819:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

The monument doesn’t seem like much of anything till you mount the circular steps to the top and see there are arrows pointing to many places on earth where the authorities have killed peaceful protesters.

2025-06-08 20:33:24 babelcarp

There’s a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Square. Why? Because in the American Civil War, Manchester, whose economy was totally based on processing cotton grown by slaves in the US South, decided to boycott the Confederacy at Lincoln’s request.

Ironically, these days there’s a big encampment of homeless people there, mostly African asylum seekers, I’m told.

2025-06-08 20:42:55 babelcarp

Spouse, who has fruit radar, also has a talent for finding coins and the occasional bill on the streets of NYC, but so far has come up empty in England.

My wild hunch is, there’s money to be found where there’s litter. Have I mentioned that the streets of London and Manchester are way cleaner than those of NYC? And NYC has vastly more wastebaskets than we’ve seen in England, so New Yorkers don’t have that excuse.

Another hunch: since English cities allow far less curbside parking than NYC, could it be that wanton street side vehicle storage leads to general disorder?:blobcatthink::

If you want to read some more anti-car incitement, see https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/06/09/car-harms-so-dominant-that-you-dont-even-notice-youre-being-inconvenienced-for-them

2025-06-09 16:17:49 babelcarp

Manchester has hardly any observant Muslims but London has lots. Manchester has more East Asians than London.

I think Manchester has more homeless people on the streets than London.

Manchester has no Tube; it’s tram city.

Since both Adam Tooze and Tyler Cowen say the UK economy is in the doldrums, who am I to disagree? But there seem to be more construction cranes operating in London and Manchester than in NYC these days, especially in Manchester.

It seems strange to me that while London and Manchester are unwilling to use their streets for free car storage, there are hardly any protected bike lanes there.

2025-06-09 19:51:40 babelcarp

Manchester is where the Industrial Revolution kicked off in the late eighteenth century. The coal that litet fueled this came in via a canal that seems impossibly narrow. The canal runs through the neighborhood now known as the Gay Village.

2025-06-09 20:17:16 babelcarp

The Museum of Science and Technology shows you what happened in Manchester during the Industrial Revolution, both technologically and socially.

Near the entrance there’s an 1846 version of the steam engine that made it all possible.

Inside the museum is the world’s oldest railroad station, from 1830 when the action in Middlemarch was taking place. Sadly, right now the station is closed for renovations, so we didn’t get to see it.

2025-06-09 20:29:07 babelcarp

The museum’s main hall has a massive sunken area that contains a variety of machines from 19th century Manchester cotton mills. Some of them, like the multiple bobbin spinning machines, still work, and museum personnel demonstrate their operation periodically in the course of the day.

2025-06-09 20:40:02 babelcarp

Among the machines in the sunken area is a Jacquard loom of the type that’s an ancestor of modern digital computers.

2025-06-09 20:48:13 babelcarp

The People’s History Museum in Manchester is a soulful, non-doctrinaire, colorful, sometimes comic attempt to trace the history of democratic movements in England over the last ~300 years. Even the café has a nice, un-corporate vibe, and good, reasonable food and coffee.

The museum is crammed with period artifacts and has some imaginative ways of conveying information. And if you’re not an English history expert, there are countless surprises.

Example: every USAian knows about John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s pro-slavery assassin. But I’d never heard of John Wilkes, the English radical reformist for whom Booth was weirdly named.

2025-06-10 08:39:13 babelcarp

One example of the People’s History Museum’s inventiveness is the display on the Stamp Act as a means of suppressing the flow of pro-democracy writing. There’s an upright coffin you’re encouraged to open. And when you do, you find out how the democrats used coffins to get around the Stamp Act.

2025-06-10 19:10:38 babelcarp

There are wise-ass cartoons from three centuries. My favorites are an anti-poll tax pamphlet that reuses the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen iconography and an anti-Thatcher poster mocking her as Scarlett O’Hara to Reagan’s Rhett Butler.

2025-06-10 19:21:54 babelcarp

The museum has some fantastic finery from labor struggles in England. Maybe the most spectacular is a huge 2-sided banner carried by London tea dock workers in an 1889 strike. I’m sure it would have taken several strong men to carry that banner in a march.

@tea

2025-06-10 19:35:48 babelcarp

It seems inordinately hard to find a place to launder your clothes anywhere near the center of an English city. Here in Manchester this morning, we loaded our smaller wheeled suitcase with dirty clothes and set out on an absurd laundry adventure.

The first (relatively near) laundrette was 15 minutes late opening and then turned out to be a dry cleaner in sheep’s clothing. So then we had to schlep our suitcase out to a real laundrette in Hulme not far from Manchester United’s old stadium.

It turned out that all the customers that morning were fellow transients. Do all English people have washers and driers in their buildings?

An hour and a half later we dragged our clean clothes off towards the hotel so we could begin our day as proper tourists.

2025-06-10 19:59:19 babelcarp

In the afternoon we spent an enjoyable hour or so in the Greater Manchester Police Museum, a long since decommissioned police station crammed with 200 years of cop relics and staffed by amiable retired officers eager to show you the ins and outs of handcuffs, holding cells, and so on from Robert Peel till now.

The museum seems to be determined to make clear to visitors that the toilet in the holding cell is for viewing only.

2025-06-10 20:12:13 babelcarp

From the rear of the Police Museum we walked a block to Stevenson Square. There we realized that the damp, cool, windy weather of the last several days had shifted and the sunlight actually had gained a warming quality.

So we got a pint of a creamy session IPA from the pub and enjoyed it at a sunny outdoor table.:awesome:

2025-06-10 20:23:50 babelcarp

To a New Yorker it’s kind of shocking how many places there are in English cities where you can gamble on machines. This one is in Manchester’s Chinatown, as you might guess from the decorative motifs.

2025-06-10 20:32:44 babelcarp

Manchester’s totem animal is the bee, for historical reasons going back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution.

In Sackville Gardens in the Gay Village neighborhood, there’s a statue of a bee, only it’s thorax is painted in rainbow colors and each eye is an image of Alan Turing!

2025-06-10 20:39:11 babelcarp

21st century engineering still hasn’t conquered the challenge of keeping a DO NOT DISTURB tag moored to a door’s Euro-handle.

2025-06-10 20:45:05 babelcarp

If you’ve been reading this thread up to here and still don’t realize Manchester takes its history seriously, well, now you will.

2025-06-10 20:51:59 babelcarp

When we found chunks of fried potato in our falafel sandwiches yesterday, were we learning something new about England or just, uh, getting lucky?

2025-06-11 06:43:58 babelcarp

Noontime today we walked from our Manchester hotel to the train station to go to Liverpool. We walked a short, simple, straight route that we figured out by walking around the city over the course of 3 days. By contrast, the route from station to hotel that Google Maps chose was ridiculously complex.

Pictured: the Manchester train station seen from the platform where we awaited the Liverpool train.

2025-06-11 20:55:26 babelcarp

We got to walk around quite a bit in Liverpool this afternoon and evening. While the Old Dock area has been turned into essentially an international corporate mall—think Kurfürstendamm or Kensington High Street or Union Square in SF—our hotel is in the flavorsome Ropewalks neighborhood.

Our upstairs neighbor James in Brooklyn, who grew up in Liverpool, recommended one pub in the whole city, and it turns out it’s on the same street as the hotel. So we spent a nice hour at St. Peter’s Tavern (a decommissioned church) drinking Brixton Pale Ale and eating a scouse pie and a veggie samosa.

2025-06-11 21:10:50 babelcarp

Seen from our hotel window: the pigeons of Liverpool are seagulls.

2025-06-11 21:16:01 babelcarp

Today’s band name: Full English Breakfast

2025-06-12 09:16:31 babelcarp

The International Slavery Museum is supposed to be one of the greatest experiences available in Liverpool. It’s certainly one of the reasons we came here.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Slavery_Museum

But it’s closed indefinitely for renovations. Not only that, the way I read this, they aren’t even sure they have the money to go ahead with their plan:

https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/waterfront-transformation-project

2025-06-12 15:56:10 babelcarp

Our hotel is in a zone heavy with entertainment venues. So it makes sense that posters for four different shanzhai acts would get pasted together on a wall to form a collective rectangle.

I especially love that “The Smyths” are appearing with soecial guest “Billy Blagg.”

2025-06-12 16:27:10 babelcarp

The (Church of England) Liverpool Cathedral up on what must be one of the highest places in the city, is the largest house of worship in the UK. You really feel the size of the place inside when you look up.

When you see the cathedral from a distance over intervening buildings, seeing only its top, it looks like the Bat Tower of Gotham City.

2025-06-12 17:12:47 babelcarp

From the cathedral grounds you can descend through a tunnel hewn from rock into a strange little area called St. James’s Gardens. It’s a lush green park and it’s also a somewhat chaotic cemetery. It owes its existence to the stone quarrying done there in the middle of the 19th century for the cladding of many of the major buildings of Liverpool.

2025-06-12 17:29:55 babelcarp

We walked along Hope St, which follows the ridge line from the C of E cathedral to the (Catholic) Metropolitan Cathedral, which could hardly look less like its schismatic sibling. It was finished in 1967 when Vatican 2 was young and gay, and it looks it.

2025-06-12 17:48:03 babelcarp

From there we descended toward Liverpool’s Royal Albert Dock, mainly following the car-free shopping corridor.

A guy there was ranting into his sound system about Keir Starmer being a hard-core communist and the inevitability of a civil war in the UK that will kill 2 million people. As you can see, he wasn’t attracting a lot of attention.

I don’t know if he was affiliated with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. Honestly, I didn’t want to engage him.

2025-06-12 18:05:47 babelcarp

In the Albert Dock area there’s a Liverpool historical museum. It’s a spiffy Brutalist structure that I’d guess was built some time in the last twenty years, but inside? While there’s lots of stuff on display, as a whole it seems kind of dingy and sad, as if the collection had been transferred from a much older building in a hurry. We missed the verve of the People’s History Museum in Manchester.

The harbor, though, is wonderful. We had no idea the Mersey was so wide. It reminded both of us of the Elbe at Hamburg.

Turning your attention from the water to the dock itself, you get reminded that it’s the gulls who own the city.

2025-06-12 18:21:40 babelcarp

One of our goals for the trip was to eat some truly authentic fish and chips. Our Liverpool-born friend James has a buddy who recommends a chippy near our hotel, so we went there late this afternoon.

The fish was perfect. The chips were disappointing, seemingly made from spud slurry. The mushy peas were like extremely thick split pea soup: surprisingly good. The curry sauce was what french fries live for: just tart enough, not too sweet, and with a moderate chili kick; too bad about the chips themselves. The gravy was, uh, brown. The portions were huge. The food overall was surprisingly, refreshingly un-salty.

2025-06-12 18:37:17 babelcarp

Our neighborhood in Brooklyn has some major tourist destinations. This means there are always tourists wandering around looking for, say, the easiest way onto the Brooklyn Bridge. Spouse loves to detect these people and offer to help them.

Five or six times already we’ve been confused about how to get somewhere in Liverpool when a local will help us without being asked. But I don’t think what we’ve experienced in Liverpool is just a matter of karmic reward. I think scousers skew more friendly than people from most parts of the world I’m familiar with.

2025-06-13 19:21:09 babelcarp

We were walking from our hotel in Ropewalks toward Liverpool’s museum district on the other side of the main train station when we came upon an impressive old brick and sandstone building we’d noticed before called Grand Central.

We noticed a guy on a ladder cleaning or polishing the entrance. We walked over and said we admired the building, which was locked. He got down from his latter and invited us in. We gladly accepted.

2025-06-13 19:37:23 babelcarp

As he unlocked the entrance and took us upstairs, he explained that Grand Central was a theater that had been through multiple owners but had been closed for years.

At some point in the past one of the owners had spiced up the architecture by adding art nouveau/Spanish touches that you can see at the entrance, and especially inside at the fancy bar.

Upstairs there’s an auditorium with room for hundreds of people and an organ our guide says still works.

2025-06-13 19:50:55 babelcarp

We spent most of the day at the Walker Art Gallery. While it isn’t the National Gallery in London, it’s terrific for a regional museum; it would be a shame to visit Liverpool and miss it.

The museum has an interesting craft section that contains teaware that…you just have to see it. There’s a 1989 Alessi kettle that has to be the mot impractical I’ve ever seen, and there’s an ornate mid-19th century lockable (!) uranium-glazed (!) tea caddy.

@tea

2025-06-13 20:15:31 babelcarp

But my favorite teaware in the museum is this weird teapot. Why does its spout turn downward like an ibis’s beak? Let the caption explain:

“J.J. Royle's patent Self-Pouring teapot, made by Doulton, Burslem, about
1886. The metal cover has a deep flange. When you pull it up then push it down, the pressure of the air in it makes a cupful of tea pour out.”

Does it actually work? The world wants to know!

@tea

2025-06-13 20:26:22 babelcarp

But let’s not neglect fine art, as they say. Between 100 and 200 years ago, when Liverpool was a port that fabulous riches fowed through, shipping magnates were buying up old master paintings that ended up in the Walker Art Gallery.

I think my favorite of them all is this charismatic Supper at Emmaus by Titian.

2025-06-13 20:38:10 babelcarp

There’s also this wild Nicholas Hilliard portrait of Elizabeth I. To me, the way it abstracts away her face in favor of the sumptuous costume foreshadows Klimt.

2025-06-13 20:45:31 babelcarp

This morning, returning from breakfast to our Liverpool hotel, we both got bombed by seagulls.

While being shat on by NYC pigeons does happen, it’s rare. To call Liverpool gulls aggressive would be an understatement. Two days ago near the docks, we actually saw a seagull pecking at the corpse of a fallen comrade.😵‍💫

2025-06-14 19:02:02 babelcarp

Today, acting on the independent advice of two people who know what they’re talking about, we took a day trip down to Chester.

Chester, on the River Dee near the northeast corner of Wales, was a Roman fortress town, and then in the Middle Ages was important enough to have a cathedral. Tourists flock there because its Roman and medieval built environment is so well preserved.

But well preserved: what does that even mean? The 2-mile Roman wall circling the city, whose whole length we walked today: how many times has it been repaired/replaced over nearly 2000 years? And those half-timbered Tudor-ish buildings: are they 500 years old or are they Victorian replicas? It’s pretty complicated and beyond my powers of discernment.

Shown: a main street seen from the city wall.

2025-06-14 19:54:24 babelcarp

The Chester cathedral isn’t as big as the Liverpool cathedral, but I like it better; it just seems more lived-in, which makes sense for a building whose earliest parts are more than 900 years old.

You could spend all day peeking into various parts of the building trying to figure out what people were thinking at various times during that span.

2025-06-14 20:16:25 babelcarp

In front of the main altar there’s a strange lectern in the shape of a bird if prey. Iconographically this means…what, exactly? This afternoon, the bible on the lectern lay open to early pages in Exodus, and for sure it wasn’t the King James Version.

2025-06-14 20:24:42 babelcarp

There’s a nice garden totally enclosed by the cathedral building. On all four sides the walls looking into the garden are lined with narrow vertical stained glass windows, each commemorating a person or thing important to…someone some time?

St. Werburga (there are many spellings of this name) is the patron saint of Chester. Coincidentally, Werburga was to be Spouse’s middle name, but the Bavarian registrar goofed.

2025-06-14 20:40:07 babelcarp

There’s a window for John Wesley. What?! Wasn’t he a big Dissenter? Well, I looked him up, and during his lifetime he never broke formally with the CofE; his followers the Methodists only did that once he was gone.

2025-06-14 20:48:12 babelcarp

You may remember I posted about a Venetian painting in the National Gallery on the theme of Baby Jesus getting circumcised. Well, there’s a circumcision scene among those inner courtyard windows in the Chester Cathedral too.

2025-06-14 21:02:40 babelcarp

As I said, we walked the whole two miles of the city walls, most of the way at some height above the city streets. One of the best places is at the southeastern corner of, where you can climb up to the medieval castle and look off into the distance at the hills of Wales.

2025-06-14 21:12:19 babelcarp

There was one big surprise walking the walls of Chester. There’s a race course nearby, and you have a perfect view from atop the wall. Not only that, but they were running when we got there!

Given the pristine greenness of the track, they couldn’t be doing that terribly often, I’d guess.

2025-06-14 21:19:50 babelcarp

It’s Saturday night, and the Ropewalks neighborhood of Liverpool—indoors and outdoors—is a disco inferno! Goid thing our hotel room is on the third floor and thrsca floor zero too.

2025-06-14 21:23:19 babelcarp

On our last morning in Liverpool we had breakfast in a bar that the previous night was at the center of the cacophony but opens every morning at 8 no matter what.

We got friendly enough with the waitress to satisfy some of our curiosity about the complex of maybe 8 indoor-outdoor drinking establishments with massive sound systems within 100 meters of each other.

On Saturday night they close at 3 or 4. She said all but one of them are owned by the same company. “Small world, Liverpool, isn’t it?”

2025-06-15 08:50:55 babelcarp

This guy, seen in front of the Liverpool Lime St intercity train station, may be the hardest working man in show business now that James Brown is gone. During our Liverpool stay we passed by the station 6-8 times, and he was there each time.

He plays a cappella and he’s seriously good. This morning we tried to start a conversation with him, but he smilingly waved us off, gesturing to the effect that he’s profoundly deaf.

2025-06-15 16:35:47 babelcarp

We’re back in London again.

Our nearest Tube station is on the Central Line. Every time I encounter that phrase, my morbid streak emerges and reminds me that a central line is what doctors use to connect a very sick patient’s abdominal vasculature to chemotherapy, nutrition, etc.

Back in Brooklyn at the 36 St subway station, the sign emblazoned with DNR, indicating those 3 train lines, makes me think of Do Not Resuscitate.⚰️

2025-06-15 16:44:32 babelcarp

We would’ve gone to the London Transport Museum today, but in order to get in the door you first need to buy an annual pass for £25.

Clearly they aren’t interested in one-time visitors AKA tourists. The stiff fee also seems strange in a city where the world-famous museums are gratis. Not to mention that a museum devoted to maybe London’s most egalitarian institution the Tube would impose such a financial barrier.

Well, we know where we aren’t wanted…

2025-06-16 08:07:23 babelcarp

We basically spent the day at the Tate Britain on the north bank of the Thames. It takes a refreshingly lenient view of what is British art, with some knockout paintings by Whistler and Sargent, and even a Matisse.

A lot of the museum is arranged historically, and I found the captions really instructive. There’s one room concerned with political upheaval from 1640-1720 that goes beyond captions: they have maybe twenty reproductions of radical/dissenting/feminist pamphlets on the wall.

2025-06-16 20:11:13 babelcarp

The Tate Britain has a bunch of spicy William Hogarth works, including a painting of the climax of the original production of The Beggar’s Opera from 300 years ago. (Yes, that’s the play Brecht and Weill reworked into The Threepenny Opera.)

One of the Hogarths shows a rich English family sitting down to tea. Interestingly, while they’re hardly doing Chaozhou gongfu, their cups are pretty small and lack handles, and the servant is pouring hot water from the silver kettle into quite a small teapot.

@tea

2025-06-16 20:22:01 babelcarp

That brings me to the subject of the Tate Britain’s cafeteria, which has excellent food at prices that are reasonable considering the quality. Plus, on a nice day like today you can bring your tray to a table in their garden.

*And*, unlike virtually every other establishment serving food and/or drinks in London, they make tea from loose leaves. And the second flush Darjeeling Spouse and I shared cost onl £3.30.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t, really. The liquor was flat tasting: a lot better than restaurant teabag tea, but lacking Darjeeling tang. Whether the leaves are stale, the brewing water too cool, or London tap doesn’t support brewing DJ, I can’t tell.

@tea

2025-06-16 20:36:02 babelcarp

For me, one of the joys of visiting a good art museum for the first time is encountering a work of art that speaks to you by an artist you’ve never heard of. This happened to me today with a painting by Denis Williams, a painter who lived in Guyana, England, and Sudan. Sorry, the colors look less vibrant to me on screen than they did in person.

2025-06-16 20:44:39 babelcarp

Okay, but the real reason most people go to the Tate Britain is to see paintings by JMW Turner. They have so many that I doubt anyone could do justice to all of them in a day.

And I love Turner too but—try to convince me I’m a philistine—I think, for all his virtues, he never could wrap his mind around human anatomy and physiology. I’m aware that some people say he lost interest in biological accuracy as his style became freer and more expressionistic with age, but if you go to the Tate Britain you’ll see it’s consistent throughout his career.

He painted one of these when he was 23 and the other when he was 70, and in both there’s one or two people at the center of the action with impossibly long, floppy arms.

2025-06-16 21:05:24 babelcarp

On our second London stay, we’re in the same quirky budget hotel in an expensive neighborhood. Having scoped out all surrounding restaurants, we’re using the hotel’s breakfast room. It’s a better value and less hectic, and we like the polyglot staff.

Every morning as we eat there, the sound system plays an extremely varied mix that couldn’t be the taste of any one person: techno, some Streisand imitator, bouncy Bollywood, Elvis, Abba-ish Europop,… Is this some strange streaming service?

So I asked the breakfast room manager. She said they bought a big bunch of CDs once, and they have been playing them on shuffle ever since.

2025-06-17 07:43:06 babelcarp

A few blocks north of London Bridge: Is this the Tube exhibiting typical British self-deprecation or am I misunderstanding something?:blobcatthink:

2025-06-17 17:07:50 babelcarp

As long as I’m displaying my ignorance of London street furniture, I might as well mention another thing that mystifies me.

On London’s tarmac streets, lanes of traffic are normally divided by white lines that follow the contours of the edges of the street (straight more often than not.) But sometimes the straight lines turn sawtoothed for no reason I’ve been able to discern. I’ve asked several locals about this, and none could give me an answer. One didn’t even recall ever seeing the sawtooth pattern.🙃

2025-06-17 20:28:55 babelcarp

On our last full day in London we went to Croydon to hang out and hike in the woods with one of my English cousins. In order to skip one Tube link in the journey, but mainly to savor the parks once again, we walked across Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park on our way to the Bond St station. In Hyde Park we encountered this chestnut tree in bloom, more than a month later than the ones in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

2025-06-18 20:54:15 babelcarp

As an NYC subway rider, one thing that makes me feel at home in London is the way many people don’t just ride the up escalator, they march past the riders on their right.

2025-06-18 20:58:48 babelcarp

Seen on the Tube this evening after a delightful afternoon with cousin Roland and his family: an ad trying to convince (some small fraction of) the riding public to rent software that claims to use AI to build business application software.🤨

2025-06-18 21:08:03 babelcarp

Last thing we did before returning to our hotel at 9 in the evening to get ready for tomorrow’s return flight to NYC: enjoy the blue evening sky and the trees of Kensington Gardens.

2025-06-18 21:13:36 babelcarp

Everything I know I learned in Gatwick Airport.

Seriously, we got through baggage drop and security quickly. The only thing that surprised us was, once you get through security there’s a literal maze of shops till you reach the gate area. It’s like trying to leave an IKEA store, if you know what I mean.

2025-06-19 12:03:18 babelcarp