Exhausted in Brilliant London – Day 2
This is the eight post in a series about our first European vacation. We booked a repositioning cruise aboard the Celebrity Apex, which would depart from Barcelona, Spain, sail west through the Straits of Gibraltar, stopping in Portugal, first Lisbon then two nights in Porto, with a final stop in La Coruña, Spain, before disembarkation in Southampton, England. Check out Fascinating London – Day 1.
Tower of London and More
After a good night’s sleep, our feet and legs were marginally ready to explore more of London, and this time we were going into places, not just taking pictures from outside! The “actually go inside” menu for today would include the Tower of London, the British Museum, and a West End show, though we would check out many more sights.
Two months prior, we had booked 9:30 AM tickets for entry to the Tower of London on the official website. Entry cost £71.60 for the two of us, plus £10 for a pair of audio guides and another £6 for the Crown Jewels guidebook that looked interesting and turned out to be quite nice. This added up to $109. General admission to the British museum is free, but it is recommended that you reserve your spot on their web site for a particular time slot, which we had done while still on the cruise ship.
Much like with Broadway in New York, there are many avenues for discounted West End theater tickets. For those familiar with the TKTS booths in New York, there is also a TKTS booth in London’s Leicester Square. The booth was closed for construction during our visit, but unlike in New York, TKTS London offers discounted tickets online. In addition, you can also shop for discounts on a reputable web site such as OfficialLondonTheater.com,
From the comfort of our London hotel bed that morning, we found availability for a number of shows that were also on Broadway, soon-to-be on Broadway, and no-longer on Broadway. We went with the latter, and bought tickets for the musical Back to the Future that evening. Two seats in row G of the “Stalls”, a.k.a. Orchestra, cost £59.50 ($78) each, which was about 50% off.
Before we headed out for the day, we ate a hearty breakfast in the Page8 Hotel coffee shop (more brightly colored eggs!), while the front desk called for a taxi to ferry us to the Tower of London. We didn’t have the 2+ mile walk in us that morning to be honest. While the underground would have been a reasonable and less costly option than the $32 taxi ride in London Monday morning traffic, this was the one opportunity to ride in an iconic black cab.
Riding in a NYC taxi is a straightforward, no-frills dash through gridlock in a regular sedan with a partition and tight seating, while we had heard that a London black cab offers a more spacious ride with a driver trained in “The Knowledge” who can expertly navigate even the city’s most tangled streets. I can’t speak to “The Knowledge”, but our driver got us to within a couple of blocks of the Tower of London while we sat comfortably in a purpose-built roomy cabin with jump seats, extra headroom and space for luggage or wheelchairs.
The Tower of London is actually a fortress on the northern banks of the River Thames, and was founded in the 11th century by William the Conqueror as part of the Norman Conquest. There are several buildings surrounded by two concentric rings of defensive walls and a moat, though the moat is just a grassy area now. We presented our tickets at the West Gate, which is the main entrance, and once through its grand archway with the royal coat of arms, we picked up our audio guides and began our self-guided tour.
Immediately to our right was Traitors Gate, a watergate entrance to the fortress and part of St. Thomas’ Tower. As the name implies, this is where prisoners were brought in, but like the “moat”, there was no water. We hung a left and headed through an arched pathway beneath the Bloody Tower, so named due to its association with the disappearance and alleged murder of the Princes in the Tower, Edward V and his younger brother, Richard.
In the center of everything stands the White Tower, a former royal residence that currently houses the Royal Armories collection. On the lawn in front of the White Tower, we had our first encounter with the symbolic guardians of the Tower of London, the legendary ravens. According to lore, if the ravens ever leave, the Tower and the Kingdom will fall. These large black birds have a dedicated keeper called the Ravenmaster, who is also a ceremonial guard of the Tower.
Of course we wanted to check out the Crown Jewels, which are housed in the Waterloo Barracks, so while the line was still on the shorter side we queued up. Definitely try to get the Tower early if you can because that line only grows as the morning wears on. You can’t take pictures once inside the building, but it is a remarkable collection, ranging from crowns worn by monarchs during and after coronations, scepters, orbs, rings, and the largest punch bowl we’ve ever seen.
We picked up our Crown Jewels guidebook in the gift shop at the end of our time ogling the Crown Jewels, then accidentally found our way up and onto the Northern Battlements and into the Royal Beasts area. This spot has a distinct lack of beasts, instead offering lots of information about the history of all the exotic animals that were kept in the Tower. Along the way we had quite an up close encounter with a raven, and some amazing views of London.
Our last stop was the White Tower, where we saw the incredible collection of arms and armor, including the “Line of Kings”, an exhibition of armor worn by several English monarchs, displayed on carved wooden horses. The Chapel of St. John the Evangelist is also inside the White Tower, as are a number of interesting “armor-adjacent” relics, like an armored dragon sculpture called “Keeper”.
After a little more than two hours at the Tower of London, it was time to check out a bunch of London spots from the outside. Tower Bridge is right next to the Tower’s exit, so we climbed up the stairs to the pedestrian walkway, onto and across this iconic bridge. On the other side is a pedestrian promenade along the southern banks of the Thames called Queen’s Walk that we stuck with for a while. The HMS Belfast, a WW-II era ship now serving as a museum, is moored along the banks a few minutes’ down Queen’s Walk from Tower Bridge.
At this point, we were ready for lunch, and just past the HMS Belfast is the Hays Galleria, a covered shopping complex housing a number of shops, cafes, and restaurants. Not looking for anything fancy, we were happy to try Costa Coffee, a British coffeehouse chain that competes with Starbucks. Sitting at a quiet table outside the coffee shop, we people-watched and along with the coffee, ate short bread cookies and our first toastie, which was made of ham and cheese, the latter found both on the inside and outside of the sandwich. For the uninitiated, think of a toastie as a grilled cheese made in a waffle iron. It was crunchy, cheesy deliciousness.
Properly satiated, we set out to find Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, and along the way walked under London Bridge. It was not falling down despite the nursery rhyme’s claim. Off Queen’s walk we turned onto Montague Close and paused in front of the Southwark Cathedral, its origins dating back more than a thousand years.
Winding our way around some building that had the nerve to block our path, we found ourselves in Pickford’s Wharf standing in front of the ruins of a couple of old-looking walls. This turned out to be all that’s left of the Great Hall of the 12th century Winchester Palace. As comedienne Suzy Eddie Izzard said, “we got tons of history lying about the place, big old castles, and they just get in the way.”
We kept moving, first along the aptly named Clink Street, on which there’s a Prison Museum, and then Park Street, on which Shakespeare’s original Globe Theater sat, though we didn’t realize it at the time. After about ten minutes, we arrived at the reconstructed theater, which we were disappointed to see that from the street it just looks like a modern theater. Thankfully, from the Bankside (along the Thames) it resembles the original 16th or 17th century building.
Just down Bankside is the pedestrian-only Millennium Bridge, with which we crossed back over the Thames, heading for St. Paul’s Cathedral. This iconic, domed Anglican cathedral rises above everything around it as you cross the bridge. It is the seat of the Bishop of London and has held numerous royal weddings, including that of Prince Charles and Lady Diana, Jubilee celebrations and funerals.
The British Museum
By now, our legs and feet didn’t have much left in them, so we hopped in a $17 Uber to the British Museum, and soon wandered into the Starbucks across from the museum for some iced tea, while we waited for our 2PM reservation. Even though we had a reservation for the museum, so apparently had everyone else. We queued up as the line snaked down Great Russell Street and around to Bloomsbury Street. The line did move relatively quickly, and eventually navigated through the security building; no outside bottles or cans allowed!
We were shortly inside, intending to follow the One Hour at the Museum Trail. Since admission was free, we did not feel obliged to see everything and stay all afternoon, especially given we were planning on dinner before the West End Show. The nice thing about this trail is we got to see some of the most well known examples of ancient civilization, including the Rosetta Stone, sculptures from the Parthenon, a bust of the Pharaoh Ramesses, a statue from Easter Island and much more.
The breadth and number of ancient artifacts spanning the British Museum’s collections is vast, and the back story to some of them is intriguing. For instance, Hoa Hakananai is a moai, a statue that a British ship brought from Easter Island in 1868.The indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island consider the moai to have been taken without permission, and have requested its return.
The China and South Asia room featured a number of stunning Tang Dynasty figures. Several other rooms house Ancient Greek artifacts, including fragments of Parthenon sculptures and architecture. It was striking that a great many of the sculptures are headless torsos. There are many reasons for this, though an interesting one is that some of the heads are in the Acropolis Museum in Athens.
If you have the time, the British Museum is definitely a worthwhile visit. There are also other museum trails you can follow if you can spare more time than we could. We did hit up the gift shop before leaving, and then right outside the gates of the museum we found an ice cream van selling a 99 Flake. This is a soft-serve vanilla ice cream cone with a chunk of a Cadbury Flake chocolate bar stuck into it. It was tasty and sweet, though not very creamy.
Now it was time for us to make the 15 minute walk back to our hotel, passing through Seven Dials, a small but famous junction in Covent Garden where seven streets meet at a central point marked by a column with six sundial faces (the seventh “dial” is the column itself).
Wrapping it up with Dinner & a Show
That evening, we decided to try Honest Burger based on a fellow cruise passenger’s positive experience the previous night, which they posted on our cruise’s Facebook page (join your specific cruise sailing’s Facebook page). This was a five minute walk from our hotel past some mostly empty restaurants, including Gordon Ramsay’s Street Burger. It was a Monday night, which could explain the quiet restaurants. Honest Burger was also close to the theater, and unlike NYC’s Broadway, which is dark on Mondays and mostly open on Sundays, there are some West End shows available on Mondays and only some on Sundays.
As compared with everything we passed, Honest Burger was crowded and we nabbed the last table, this one upstairs. Rona had one of the special chicken sandwiches and I had a really tasty burger, both with excellent chips. The service was solid. To be honest, we were so exhausted from our travels and trying to see as much as we did in London that our memories are a bit hazy. But we wouldn’t hesitate to go back.
Back to the Future: The Musical was at the Adelphi Theater, just around the corner from Honest Burger. This is a mid-sized West End theater, dating back to 1806, though it has gone through two reconstructions, the latest in 1930. The theater filled right up and we struck up conversations with a family from New Jersey, and an extended family from New York. The show was a lot of fun, and we liked it even more than we thought we would. It was a perfect homage to the movie, and the Delorean was one the stars of the show.
When it was all over, we headed back to the hotel to pack for our journey home. We had reserved a $240 Uber for the next morning for the 90 minute ride to London Gatwick Airport, which is not in fact in London, but bygones. Our first European adventure had come to a close, and while there was so much more to see and do in just the cities we visited, we were ready to go home, and see our family, friends, and doggos.
We’ll come back with a trip summary, highlights, lowlights, best bites, and best sites. What were your favorite moments?