In preparation for the trip, one of my colleagues had bough the tickets to the tour online and I popped over to the Surbiton train station to buy the rail passes.
(I wasn't about to go to the local station. See yesterday's posting for the reasons why.) We left the station and took the brisk fifteen minute walk across the village to the Thames Ditton rail station around 16:15 to catch the 16:24 train into town. Changing to the First Capitol Connect train at Wimbledon, we arrived at the Blackfriar's train station about 45 minutes later and repaired to the pub below the platform to have dinner* before the tour began.A word about the train station, with space being at a premium, they tend to fit things in where they can get them. The Blackfriar's train station is built above the river on stilts. The railroad bridge across The Thames expands about a hundred yards from the shore and platforms spring out beside the tracks. The actual terminal building is up on stilts above the buildings on both sides of the road that runs along the embankment. The actual footprint of the station is pretty small. Just a small building that joins the Rail station above and the Tube station below street level with a few stairs, shops, and an elevator. Other than that, the rest is either suspended above or entrenched below the bustle of London.
Alongside the station there are the piers of an old bridge that has been torn down. When the bridge was ripped out, the engineers left the pilings in place and just capped them off. They stand there like monuments to civic re-planning in the middle of the river. But I digress, back to the evening's main event...The tour started just after seven and wended its way around the streets of Central London. We say various "haunted" locales around the London financial district; the churchyard where, drunken and disparaging the dead, a man left the pub and went to prove his lack of fear of the dead. He left with an ornamental sword to drive it into the grave of his late rival. The found him dead (apparently of fright) on the grave of his nemesis, the sword driven firmly through the tails of his coat fixing him to the spot here he died.
There were a number of highlights; some of the stories were quite humorous, for example. Other stories were interesting for their historical importance. Still others were interesting for the reasons that had nothing to do with the stories themselves. For example, the story the guide tried to tell at the steps of St. Paul's. At the outset, we knew he was going to have fun but I enjoyed watching to see how he was going to out-shout the carillon.
For some reason, the bells started ringing as we approached the cathedral and were still audible thirty minutes later as we were finishing the tour three stops later. How he out-shouted the bells was, as you may have guessed, my giving up, pointing to a few things he wanted us to make not of and then giving his talk in a courtyard in a street a couple blocks away.
One of the final stops was the church of St. Albans. (Okay, you guys who have seen a number of my photographs will notice that I love to take buildings from strange angles... give me a break!) The story was pretty interesting. Apparently the Prior at St. Alban's had the habit of waking the condemned the night before their execution to assure that they were not getting a good night's sleep before they were hanged. Perhaps that is why so many of them hang-out at the most hunted pub in the UK which is directly across the street. (Please note, this picture was taken at night without a tripod. I think it came out relatively good under the circumstances.)All-in-all, it was an excellent tour and I would heartily recommend it to anyone who wants to take a walk around London at night in the relative safety of a big group.
I hope that wherever you are today you have a pleasant day for whatever it is you have to do!
Don Bergquist - 25 October 2006 - Thames Ditton, Surrey, UK
*Editor's Note:
Please see more tomorrow on this part of the adventure.
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