MINIATURE PORTRAITS, LONDON

NIGHT GALLERY, LONDON

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Wasn’t even on my list of things to do, but stopped in on my last day and was transfixed by the names, Mary Shelly, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and the most amazing portraits of W.H. Auden and Aleister Crowley. Photography not allowed.

JACK THE RIPPER

Around Halloween Cara and I went on a ghost walk tour of the East Village that I later found out with a bit of web research was full of bullshit and filled with inaccuracies. I still think this method is a better way than just wandering around someplace trying to guess what happened and where. Like trying to figure out software without reading the manual. Guidebooks seldom give you the good details, but like I said, there’s a lot of crap out there. So before I left for London I did some research and for my last night in London booked a place on a walk in Whitechapel, the lair of ye old Jack The Ripper.

I’m utterly fascinated by all that gritty and gruesome Victorian era/early nineteenth-century crime with all its fog-filled brick lanes and lamp-lit atmosphere. The Ripper thing’s been in my craw since I was a kid, and years ago I discovered Casebook, a lovingly detailed and heavily annotated website about the Ripper that has just about every disturbing aspect one could want.

It was time to finally see things for myself, and I had this ridiculous notion in my head things still looked the same, like they preserved that whole section of London for posterity, an homage to a world-famous serial killer. Fat chance, progress steps aside nothing, and when I stepped off the tube I was immediately shocked to see new office buildings mixed in with the old decaying brick, most of which tottering on the crumbling side like a lot of NYC.

We met in front of the Aldgate Tube station and as was the case, I was the only single person there; the rest all couples for a night out, not even tourists for the most part. How charming. We marched along through empty alleys stopping so our stern and rather serious guide could give us the background on how things were and what happened where and whom it happened to. Most of the murder locations were built over, councils flats here, apartments there, and entire section of this area once filled with pubs and whores was now a thriving Indian and Pakistani neighborhood filled with curry and incense. And all that remained of the most brutal of all the crime scenes was a bit of curb that signaled the entrance to the original doorway through which the murderer led his last alleged victim to be butchered in her room. But still, he she or it walked over this very place over a hundred years ago. History takes imagination to make words, stories and things seem possible when MacDonalds opens a franchise or when the young urbanites line up to smoke outside the very bar some of the victims themselves once drank at.

TOWER OF LONDON

One of the pricier attractions is also one of the best. Tours are usually avoided but without the Beefeater key facts and attractions would have been sorely missed: The ravens, the gruesome torture, the gruesome executions—the glory of it all. Isaac Newton lived here and William Penn was imprisoned here before founding Pennsylvania. If you come on Sunday you can attend the service without paying admission, and the Chapel alone was worth the visit when you think of Kings and Queens who sat in those pews. No photography allowed in there.

B/W GALLERY

If you take a thousand pictures and get five great ones, I’d call that a good ratio.