England is a nation of shopkeepers.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

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Go-Date: Day 169, Wednesday, July 10

You’ll find what you want in the Portobello road.

Portobello Road is a street in the Notting Hill district of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in west London. On Saturdays it is home to Portobello Road Market, 10,000 or so tourists and bargain hunters, and it is one of London’s notable street markets, known for its second-hand clothes and antiques.

Portobello Road was known prior to 1740 as Green’s Lane – a winding country path leading from Kensington Gravel Pits, in what is now Notting Hill Gate, up to Kensal Green in the north. Its really a nice part of town. Lots of crescents, townhouses, row houses, and great cafés. It’s a lot like Capital Heights in Washington, DC. In 1740, Portobello Farm was built in the area near what is now Golborne Road. The farm got its name from a popular victory during the lost War of Jenkins’ Ear, when Admiral Edward Vernon captured the Spanish-ruled town of Puerto Bello. OK, so this is more than you wanted to know, but it is quirky.

Before 1850, the road was little more than a country lane connecting Portobello Farm with Kensal Green in the north and Notting Hill (where our flat is located) in the south. Portobello Road shops and markets appeared and thrived by serving the wealthy inhabitants of the elegant crescents and terraces that sprang up around it, and its working class residents found employment in the immediate vicinity as construction workers, domestic servants, coachmen, messengers, tradesmen and costermongers(a person who sells stuff from a cart). This area is still trendy and affluent. There is active renovation underway on almost every block. I wish I had a scaffold rental business here.

The market began as many other London markets and mainly sold fresh-food in the 19th century; antiques and wares dealers arrived in the late 1940s and ’50s, and gradually antiques have become the very main attraction of this market, having a substantial number of them trading mainly on Saturday mornings. It is the largest antiques market in the UK.

The main market day for antiques is Saturday, the only day when all five sections are opened: second-hand goods, clothing and fashion, household essentials, fruit, vegetables and other food, and antiques. Be prepared to wade through the crowds on Saturday. It is fun though, I don’t know what I enjoyed more, people watching or browsing through the bric-a-brac. Shops and Cafes are opened daily.

Westminster Cathedral Slot Machine

It’ll cost you 20 pounds a piece to get into Westminster Abbey. That’s about $24.14 each or almost $50 for two people. If you want a tour (which can be interesting) it’ll cost you another 10 pounds each plus a tip. So I figure it cost us about $80 for a two hour tour. That’s pretty steep. If I had it to do over again, just walk around the building. They won’t let you take pictures inside, so you are better off just going to Wikipedia and reading about it and looking at the pictures on the Internet.

Seriously, just type in “images of Westminster abbey” and you’ll see just as much as you do when you go inside, and you’ll save some money. I took some pictures, until I got caught, and they made me put away my camera. I’m sure I’m going to Hell now. There are a few interesting statues, the graves of many famous people (Isaac Newton, Steven Hawking, a bunch of kings named George, D.H. Lawrence, and on, and on. So what.

It is one of the United Kingdom’s most notable religious buildings and the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English and, later, British monarchs. Between 1540 and 1556, the abbey had the status of a cathedral. Since 1560, the building is no longer an abbey or a cathedral, having instead the status of a Church of England “Royal Peculiar”—a church responsible directly to the sovereign. Everybody calls it an abbey or cathedral, so do it anyway……it pisses off the clergy, the stuck-up bastards.

According to history, a church was founded at the site (then known as Thorn Ey (Thorn Island)) in the seventh century, at the time of Mellitus, a Bishop of London. The recorded origins of the Abbey date to the 960s or early 970s. Construction of the present church began in 1245, on the orders of King Henry III. Since the coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066, all coronations of English and British (I suppose the difference is like a tangerine and a mandarin orange) monarchs have been in Westminster Abbey. There have been 16 royal weddings at the abbey since 1100. As the burial site of more than 3,300 persons, usually asshole royals, but a few commoners like eight Prime Ministers (not Winston Churchill), poets laureate, actors, scientists, and military leaders, and the Edgar, the Unknown Warrior (OK, his name really isn’t Edgar).

If after reading this you still want to visit the Abbey, knock yourself out. Me, I’d rather spend my 20 pounds on a good English Ale in a pub across the street. In fact, I’ll go beyond that and say I’m not giving another nickel to visit another Church of England abbey. I don’t think you ought to charge people to visit a church. You never know, they might even be a Christian. I went for the tombs and the architecture, it wasn’t the least bit of a religious experience.

Our Flat

I nicknamed our apartment Hogwarts. Why, you may ask? Because the stairs leading up to our flat reminded me a lot of the moving stairs in the Harry Potter movies. No big deal, just a few pics of the stairs and the block where we are staying. The best part is the bus stops right outside the door. Literally 15’ away, not that I’m lazy, but it is nice since the tube station is about 6 blocks down the road.

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