An excellent day of exploration that rather typifies our experience of the city – so much to see, in so many layers, that you keep getting distracted and don’t do what you intended to do.

Clarissa was working so K and I got on the Tube in the direction of four museums, carefully curated from a much longer list. Got off at Blackfriars (Dominicans whose monastery was here; see portly figure below) –

with the intention of getting to Museum #1 via a historic walking tour of the neighborhood around St. Paul’s. But the map route we were following, perhaps 5 miles, had detailed info on 53 historic points of interest along the way. In an area I thought I was pretty familiar with, we kept stumbling on fascinating nooks and crannies I’d never seen before.

Apothecaries Hall. Playhouse Yard and Ireland Yard – haunts of Burbage and Shakespeare. Chunks of monastery wall from 1200-ish. Several small gardens – the sites of churches that were not rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. Wardrobe Place,  a small courtyard that was literally the King’s wardrobe under Edward III, c. 1330, and which Shakespeare came to once to collect cloth for a costume. Chunks of Roman Wall (c. 150) with chunks of medieval wall balanced on top.

Suddenly seeing people on the street dressed in academic / church / vaguely Renaissance regalia – plus the sudden sounding of large bells – alerted us to the fact that an annual service for the ancient guilds (Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers, that kind of thing) was letting out of St. Paul’s a couple of narrow streets away. Quite a show.

And so to a long list of other interesting sights, and a pause in a Victorian pub opposite the site of the dreaded Newgate Prison:

Fortified with a pint and a pie, and still only at about stop #20/53, we visited the church where Capt John Smith of Virginia / Pocahontas fame is buried, then St Bart’s hospital / Smithfield Market (presided over by the city’s only statue of Henry VIII, plus one of London’s only surviving Elizabethan buildings, from which Elizabeth I reputedly watched traitors being burned at the stake), Saint Giles Cripplegate (where Milton, Cromwell, etc. etc. are buried), and Bunhill Fields cemetery – originally and appropriately Bone Hill – which has been a graveyard for a thousand years and contains the graves of William Blake, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Bayes, and (they estimate) at least 120,000 other people.

K here. A bit pressed for time, and possibly a bit history saturated, we stopped following the guided walk and headed to Novelty Automation, a collection of homemade satirical arcade games.

We played the Amazon Fulfilment Center game (drive your mini cart around to retrieve products within the alloted time, winner gets a zero hours contract) and tried a Divorce (crank your handle harder than your opponent until the partners split, tearing the house down the middle) and laughed ourselves silly following the adventures of the bed bugs in the “Airbednbug”  animatron.

R enjoyed the Auto Frisk

Then it was closing time, and dusk, and we sprinted from there across Primrose Hill to enjoy a delicious dinner prepared by John and Isabella. So good to catch up with them!

Traditional pork pies in The Viaduct Tavern opposite Old Newgate Prison. Enjoying a historic walk through old London.