(London, England, U.K.)
My last two posts (on the Royal Albert Hall concert and the Beatles pilgrimage) represented the last two musical highlights of my visit to London. However, I still have quite a bit of non-musical stuff to report.
First, however, I want to share a strange coincidence that I noticed after posting the Royal Albert Hall report. I had mentioned one concert in particular (the “Concert for George”) as being one of my favourites. This concert was held in the Royal Albert Hall on November 29, 2002, being exactly one year to the day after the death of George Harrison (November 29, 2001). Jools Holland was one of the performers at that tribute concert. When did I see Jools Holland perform at the Royal Albert Hall? November 29, 2014.
On the afternoon of Friday, November 28, I went on a walking tour of “Legal London”: the purpose was to see some of the city’s legal landmarks, with a focus on the ancient “Inns of Court” that formed the basis of the legal profession for barristers.
In Canada, every lawyer is a “barrister and solicitor”, although in practice most lawyers choose to specialize in one or the other. In England, however, there is a much stronger separation between the two. A solicitor will rarely, if ever, appear in court. If anything becomes contentious, a solicitor generally refers the matter to a barrister.
Each barrister is associated with one of the four Inns of Court that are located within easy walking distance of each other just west of downtown London. Traditions die hard here: these are the same medieval Inns of Court that Charles Dickens wrote of in the 19th century. We saw a legal robe and wigmaker that has been in business continuously since the 17th century.
Dickens didn’t think much of lawyers (nor did he think much of my hometown of Kingston, Ontario, incidentally) but at least he was writing from personal experience. He clerked at Gray’s Inn for a short time before exploring other career options. The Inns are relatively quiet urban refuges from the hustle and bustle of modern London, similar in many ways to the colleges of Cambridge University.
The tour ended in the Fleet Street area at the Royal Courts of Justice. Fleet Street has long been associated with British journalism but in reality most of the media has long since relocated to less expensive real estate.
After the Legal London tour, I didn’t have much time to spare before I needed to head for the distant neighbourhood of Putney for the Los Pacaminos concert. I allowed plenty of transit time, even though I found a bus route that went from my hotel right to Putney. The scheduled travel time was an hour, but the incredibly congested city meant that my bus (and every other) was also about an hour late. I still arrived in time but had to settle for a rather unhealthy fast-food meal before the concert.
Urban gridlock is particularly bad here. Even a steep congestion tax, which costs you $18.00 every time you want to drive into the city, has done little to alleviate the traffic woes. There is a comprehensive underground (“the Tube”) system, but it too is prone to severe delays: my relatively short underground trip the following night to Kensington also took at least about half-an-hour longer than it should have.
Looking back, transportation was about the only negative experience I had in London. The buses and trains themselves, however, were relatively well-kept and I certainly never had any safety concerns.