Take a Walk on the Southside

“The opportunities you missed, the streets you didn’t walk, the people you didn’t talk and the dreams you didn’t dream will be the fate of others, not yours!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

 Sites/Topics covered in this post:

• St. Paul’s Cathedral
• Millennium Bridge
• Tate Museum
• Southbank of the Thames

Go-Date: Day 158, Saturday, June 29

Lesson Learned: Sometimes its not about learning anything. It’s all about the experience, the emotion, the visual impact of where you are.

St. Paul’s Cathedral

St Paul’s Cathedral, is an Anglican cathedral on Ludgate Hill at the highest point of the City of London. Its dedication to Paul the Apostle and the original church was built in the year 604. The present cathedral dates back to the late 17th century. The building is in the English Baroque style by Sir Christopher Wren. Its construction, completed in Wren’s lifetime, was part of a major rebuilding program in the City after the Great Fire of London.

If the name sounds familiar, Sir Christopher Wren (October 20,1632 –March 8, 1723) was an English anatomist, astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist, as well as one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history, that lived an exceeding long time for the period. He designed and built 52 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including what is regarded as his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, completed in 1710.

The cathedral is one of the most famous and most recognizable sights of London. Its dome, framed by the spires of Wren’s City churches, has dominated the skyline for over 300 years. At 365 feet high, it was the tallest building in London from 1710 to 1967. The dome is among the highest in the world. St Paul’s is the second-largest church building in area in the United Kingdom after Liverpool Cathedral.

A lot of major events have been held here including the funerals of Admiral Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Winston Churchill and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; peace services marking the end of the First and Second World Wars; and the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.  

We did not take a peek inside because the tickets are 24 pounds each. That’s $60.50 for the two of us. We’ve been in multiple churches over the past 6 months and nothing comes close to having a charge as high as this. The UNESCO World Heritage Site at Chartres was free. Is the Church of England so broke they need to charge such fees to see the edifice? I’ve got better things to do with my money. Something is a bit wrong for churches to charge people to enter. Hell, I wouldn’t pay $60 bucks to watch Lady Ga Ga do a strip tease on the pulpit with Jesus C. acting as DJ plus Beyonce’, Miley Cyrus, Meghan and Harry sipping champagne in the pews; much less forking out that amount for an entrance fee just to look around and light a candle or two. From here it was a quick two-step to the Millennium Bridge made famous by Harry Potter.

Millennium Bridge

The Millennium Bridge, officially known as the London Millennium Footbridge, is a steel suspension bridge for pedestrians crossing the River Thames in London, linking Bankside with the City of London up by St. Paul’s Cathedral. It is located between Southwark Bridge and Blackfriars Railway Bridge. Which, is kind of a pretty cool part of London, with an especially young vibe

Londoners nicknamed the bridge the “Wobbly Bridge” back in 2000 after pedestrians experienced an alarming swaying motion. The bridge was closed later on opening day and, after two days of limited access, for almost two years while modifications were made to eliminate the motion. It reopened in February 2002.

The southern end of the bridge is near the Globe Theatre, the Bankside Gallery, and Tate Modern. The bridge alignment is such that a clear view (i.e. a “terminating vista”) of St Paul’s south façade is presented from across the river, framed by the bridge supports. Ordinarily, bridges across the River Thames require an Act of Parliament. For this bridge, that was avoided by the Port of London Authority granting a license for the structure obtaining planning permissions from the City of London. Construction began in late 1998 and the bridge was completed at a cost of £18.2M.

The bridge’s movements were caused by a ‘positive feedback’ phenomenon, known as synchronous lateral excitation. The natural sway motion of people walking caused small sideways oscillations in the bridge, which in turn caused people on the bridge to sway in step, increasing the amplitude of the bridge oscillations and continually reinforcing the effect. On the day of opening, the bridge was crossed by 90,000 people, with up to 2,000 on the bridge at any one time.

Resonant vibrational modes due to vertical loads (such as trains, traffic, pedestrians) and wind loads are well understood in bridge design. In the case of the Millennium Bridge, because the lateral motion caused the pedestrians loading the bridge to directly participate with the bridge, the vibrational modes had not been anticipated by the designers. The crucial point is that when the bridge lurches to one side, the pedestrians must adjust to keep from falling over, and they all do this at exactly the same time. Hence, the situation is similar to soldiers marching in lockstep, but horizontal instead of vertical. This situation was solved 17 years ago. Damn, we never get to have any fun.

Tate Museum

The Tate Museum is an institution that houses, in a network of four art museums, the United Kingdom’s national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, not to mention Michael Bloomberg.

The gallery was founded in 1897, as the National Gallery of British Art. When its role was changed to include the national collection of modern art as well as the national collection of British art, in 1932, it was renamed the Tate Gallery after sugar magnate Henry Tate of Tate & Lyle, who had laid the foundations for the collection. The Tate Gallery was housed in the current building occupied by Tate Britain, which is situated in Millbank, London. In 2000, the Tate Gallery transformed itself into the current-day Tate, which consists of a network of four museums: Tate Britain, which displays the collection of British art from 1500 to the present day; Tate Modern, also in London, which houses the Tate’s collection of British and international modern and contemporary art from 1900 to the present day; Tate Liverpool (founded in 1988), which has the same purpose as Tate Modern but on a smaller scale; and Tate St Ives in Cornwall (founded in 1993), which displays modern and contemporary art by artists who have connections with the area.

All four museums share the Tate Collection. One of the Tate’s most publicized art events is the awarding of the annual Turner Prize, which takes place at Tate Britain. The original Tate was called the National Gallery of British Art, situated on Millbank, at the site of the former Millbank Prison.

The idea of a National Gallery of British Art was first proposed in the 1820s after the Brits rudely found out that America wasn’t coming back to join the Commonwealth, (so why the hell did this make a difference?) and it took a step nearer when Robert Vernon gave his collection to the National Gallery in 1847. Even better, a decade later John Sheepshanks gave his collection of mutton, wool and Stilton cheese along with his collection of art to the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum), which became a hand-me-down to the Tate.

I’ll compare this place to the Pompidou Center in Paris due to its collections. The Pompidou has a more unique space, but the collections have the same type of urban wild feel to them. I think Ellen preferred the Tate, but I liked the collection in Paris more. None the less, this is a great place to kill a few hours.

Southwark

Southwark is a district of Central London just south of the Thames River. I’m not sure exactly where Southwark ends and the South Warf begins, but this funky neighborhood goea all the way out to the Tower Bridge and the Tower of London across the river. It was at the lowest bridging point of the Thames in Roman Britain, providing a crossing from Londinium, and for centuries had the only Thames bridge in the area. Today, there are dozens of bridges in this city. Far more than we have in Washington D.C.

Its entertainment district goes back to the 16^th century when Shakespare’s Globe Theatre (which stood 1599–1642) was dishing out irreverent plays mocking all of the very proper British institutions of the time. It’s still there and Ellen and I have tickets to the Merry Wives of Windsor on the night we depart London for Ireland. After the 18th-century decline of Southwark’s small wharves, the borough rapidly grew in population and saw the growth of great docks, printing/paper, railways, goods yards, small artisan and other often low-wage industries and Southwark was among many such inner districts to see slum clearance and replacement largely with social housing during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

It’s now seeing a resurgence of popularity with the Millennials with the area known as the Borough, which has an eclectic covered and semi-covered market and numerous food and drink venues as well as the skyscraper The Shard. It’s really a cool area to wander about on a Saturday morning.