Day 3: Britain's Treasure Trove, and Jazz in the Evening
June 16, 2025
On our first night in London, we crashed and we crashed hard. We decided not to set the alarm and in our room with no windows, we were in the dark as to time. I woke up at 9 AM! I guess we really needed the sleep!
We headed next door to the Water Rats for breakfast. The Water Rats is a music venue with a pub at the front. It has an interesting history. It was originally known as the Pindar of Wakefield, and was built in 1517. The current public house was built in 1878. The pub has been visited by many famous personages over the years, including Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin. The music venue has an even more storied past. It was the site of Bob Dylan's first UK gig. Many artists have performed there before they became famous, including the Pogues, Oasis, Katy Perry, and the Decembrists. In the 1986, the establishment was purchased by the Grand Order of Water Rats, an entertainment industry fraternal and charitable organization. Notable members of the organization include Rick Wakeman, keyboardist of Yes, who was the King Rat in 2014 and 2015.
We were there for breakfast, not a show (though they did have evening shows there during our stay in London). Vicky and I got into a habit after our first breakfast and always ordered the same thing: She had porridge (oat meal), toast, and tea, and I had the Full English Breakfast. The FEB is something you can get all over the UK. (It's called the Full Scottish Breakfast in Scotland.) There are variations form place to place, but they all have the similar elements: Eggs (cooked to order), toast, a little triangle of hash browns, baked beans, a piece of grilled tomato, grilled mushrooms, a sausage link, bacon, another meat-based product such as black pudding (a grilled sausage made of beef, beef blood, and oatmeal), or, in Scotland, Lorne sausage (another beef and cereal sausage),or haggis (lamb parts, oats, herbs and spices cooked in a lamb stomach). The beans are something Americans are familiar with, but not for breakfast. Their bacon is back bacon: it has a large section of pork loin and a smaller section of pork belly. It's more like Canadian bacon (which is all pork loin). The Brits call American bacon "streaky bacon" and I never saw it on offer in the UK. Most of the places we stayed in the UK offered all the elements of the FEB in a breakfast buffet, but for our time in London, we got what was served at the Water Rats. I enjoyed their grilled mushrooms better than any other we had in the UK. It's a hearty breakfast, for sure, but don't laugh when I tell you that it has an advantage over large American breakfasts: it is proportionally higher in protein and lower in carbs than the American fare. I usually was not hungry until almost dinner time, and never had a "carbo crash" from eating it.
The way we usually plan a travel day when not with a tour is to have one or two things on the agenda and to add more depending on our energy level. This tends to leave enough room in the day for breaks, and for serendipity. Our plan for the day was to visit the British Museum in the afternoon, then head to the Soho neighborhood in the late afternoon for a look around and for a show at Ronnie Scott's jazz club.
The British Museum was about a mile from our hotel. We got to walk through a couple of small parks: St. George's Gardens, a slip of a park in a 17th century cemetery that seemed like just the place for some teenagers to get high, and Russell Square, a somewhat larger park crowded with pedestrians going to and fro.
The British Museum, like many public museums in London, is free to get into (except for special exhibitions), but you usually have to wait in line. But the line moved quickly, and soon we were in.
The museum, dedicated to human history, arts, and culture, is one of the largest museums in the world. At one time, the sun never set on the British Empire, so cultural artifacts from all over the world, from Paleolithic to recent times, housed there: million year-old stone tools from the Olduvai Gorge; Greek sculpture; Egyptian mummies; statues and totem poles from everywhere in the Pacific, from British Columbia to Easter Island; cultural artifacts from China, the Near East, India, the Americans...it's truly a vast trove. The Wikipedia page for the museum alone would take a couple of hours to get through. The museum itself would require several visits to fully explore. We spend a few hours in the museum and barely scratched the surface, though we did make sure we each got a glimpse of our own "must-see" pieces.
We were especially keen to see the Rosetta Stone, the Sutton Hoo helmet, and the Elgin Marbles. We spent the most time with the last of these. The Rosetta Stone is a stone with an inscription in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian demotic script, and Ancient Greek. It was used by scholars to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time. The Sutton Hoo helmet is an ornamented Anglo Saxon helmet dated from the 6th or 7th century found in a ship burial in Suffolk with many other artifacts in the 1930s.
The Elgin Marbles are a collection of ancient Greek sculptures from the Parthenon and other places on the Acropolis in Athens. The Parthenon, though a ruin for centuries, was in pretty good shape until the late 17th century. Then, during a battle between the Turks and the Venetians, the Turks were using the Parthenon as a gunpowder store. The Venetians scored a lucky hit which blew up the store. The explosions blew the roof off the Parthenon, caused, the inner walls to collapse, and knocked most of the sculpture from the frieze and pediments. In the aftermath, portions of the remaining structure of the Parthenon were scavenged for building material. In the early 19th Century, the Earl of Elgin, who was an ambassador to Turkey, which controlled Greece, took it upon himself to salvage as much of the sculpture as possible. Because his government would not finance the venture, he did so himself at a cost of over 5 million pounds in today's money. Due to sketches made before the explosion at the Parthenon, it is known how most of the sculptures on the friezes and pediments were arranged. The sculptures from the friezes and pediments are now in a room arranged in the positions they had atop the Parthenon at the time of the explosion.
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