London: Nov 13: The Houses of Parliament, Chelsea, and more

I took an assortment of pictures on my various outings this day, Saturday, November 13, 2010.

In the morning, a friend of Di Yin's who was visiting us, B, and I ventured out to tour the Houses of Parliament, which is officially called the Palace of Westminster.

Pictures were not allowed except at Westminster Hall, the starting/ending location of the tour. Instead, I took lots of notes about sights I saw and things I learned. Incidentally, there are 360-degree panoramas of every room in the Houses of Parliament online. Not all of the rooms are listed on that page; some you can only find viewing a panorama in one room then clicking on a door to another room.

To enter, we had to go through security like in an airport. The security guards also took our photos and printed them on visitor badges to wear around our necks.

Everything in the Houses is tall, ornate, grand, gothic. The hallways make me feel short, as if they were designed for people eight or nine feet tall. This is a bit of a different feeling for me than in other royal palaces, which are designed to make people feel small/be intimidated as they pass through the larger and larger spaces approaching the king. In this case, I didn't feel small in the same way, just short. Maybe the hallways are narrower?

The complex is strewn with murals, paintings (mostly huge), busts (lots of prime ministers; most of the older busts are of nobles), stained glass, and coasts of arms. Also, on the Lords side, there's lots of gilding. For instance, in the Royal Gallery, there are gold-plated life-sized statues of past warrior kings. Regular kings only get paintings. It also has giant frescos of the battles at Waterloo and Trafalgar.

The House of Lords, which the queen called over-decorated (especially the neo-gothic throne), actually to me felt decorated in an orderly, symmetric manner. (It doesn't feel too busy, as Westminster Abbey does). Although there are more than 700 lords, I'd guess the room looks like it can seat only a third. This is significant because the lords only get paid when they show up.

The Central Lobby has tons more statues climbing up to the ceiling, a notable feat given the height of the room's rotunda.

The House of Commons is nicely done, but nowhere near as extravagant as the House of Lords.

Funky observations:

• There are bas reliefs and frescos of King Arthur in the Queen's Robing Chamber. Some convey lessons: generosity, mercy, etc. (The story was popular when the room was being designed in the mid-nineteenth century and made it into the royal mythology.)
• Frescos, of which there are many, are a bad idea in cold, wet climates such as London (versus, say, Italy). They take a while to dry and get darker and darker as they do. Once dried, the colors are sealed in and can't be touched up unlike oil paintings.
• The Prince's Chamber's paintings demonstrate history and show the Tudor family tree (post-civil-war monarchs) by their order (chronological) and placement on the wall.
• The House of Lords side of the complex has red tones and lots of gilding; the Houses of Commons has a green theme and no gold.

History & Odd Facts:

• The current palace dates mostly from the nineteenth century, after its most recent fire and rebuilding.
• The House of Lords is gradually shrinking as people get kicked out (e.g., hereditary posts get abolished) and as some new people are not automatically added (bishops, judges). By the way, the way people get added to the House of Lords is by getting voted in. This happens to a variety of people, ranging from retired members of the House of Commons to sports celebrities.
• When William & Mary were asked to invade England as part of the Glorious Revolution, they had to accept the crown with conditions: a bill of rights. These rights said, among other things, the monarch cannot make or unmake laws, raise an army, or raise taxes without consent of parliament. There's a painting (The Lords and Commons presenting the crown to William and Mary in the Banqueting House) in the Member's Lobby that shows this scene. William and Mary look very unhappy.
• Near the start of the English civil war, King Charles I went to the House of Commons to arrest five members of parliament for treason. They escaped the chamber shortly before he arrived. The king asked the speaker of the house where they were. In one of the first major times that parliament has stood up to the monarch, the speaker replied,

  "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here."
  

  William Lenthall, Speaker of the House of commons

(As you can tell, I thought the tour was interesting and wrote down a lot.)

After our tour, we found a pub for lunch. After lunch, B and I split up. (He, as a new tourist in London, wanted to see places I've already been.)

Because the day was warm enough to walk around outside, I decided to do so. I chose to do a walking tour of Chelsea. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chelsea was known as the fashion district in London. A well-heeled neighborhood, it retains echoes of its heyday, with many fashion boutiques surrounding Sloane Square and on King's Road. These are mostly clothing, jewelry, and accessories, with names such as Tiffany and Cartier and many others too exclusive and high-end for me to recognize. Along King's Road farther from Sloane Square are some less expensive stores with more familiar names (such as Gap).

During my walk, I stumbled upon a food market in Duke of York Square. Much in the style of Borough Market, it had pastries, cheeses, cured meats, meat pies (even venison, stout, and chestnut pie, and wild boar and apple pie), prepared foods (even Brazilian (feijoada), Thai, and Jamaican), all sorts of stuff. It was a good find.

I made it part of the way through the walking tour before it got dark. I saved the rest of the tour for another day and instead headed home. Having learned from the previous weekend, I'd planned for the planned tube closures. It's too bad I couldn't plan for the unplanned closures. It should've taken me forty-five minutes to get home, but ended up taking me two hours! :( I don't want to bother telling the story here, but at least it had one positive note: I got to walk down Regent Street and Oxford Street at night and took some pictures.

For dinner, B, Di Yin, and I went to a restaurant I spotted in our neighborhood a few days before. Named Kovalan, it's an Indian restaurant specializing in food from the state of Kerala. Kerala is in the south of Indian along the coast, so this naturally means seafood. It also means, by the way, a class of dishes called thoran, which are vegetables stir-fried with grated coconut. They're dry dishes--no curry sauce.

The result? The restaurant was a good find. Details are in the pictures.