Books: Better than girlfriends

It has hundreds of mini-biographies of European monarchs, from Agesilaus to Zog, and loads of regal bon mots, such as Henri IV of France saying ”I want there to be no peasant in my kingdom so poor that he is unable to have a chicken in his pot every Sunday”.

There is a staggering commitment to completeness, with King Arthur (“semi-legendary King of the Britons”)  and the Etruscan Kings of Rome included, as well as Archelaus of Macedonia, whose entire entry reads “He was a great patron of the arts.”

A book listing every monarch that Europe has ever had (and several it didn’t) that fits in my pocket.  I’ve cherished it for almost half my life.

Anyway, at the back of the book, after the invaluable list of Roman Emperors and the family tree of every European royal house ever…

Roman Emperors

House of Capet

…is this section. Heads of European Royal Houses (for countries which no longer have monarchies).

List of people nobody loves

This is basically a list of deranged stalkers who refuse to accept that they have been told by their entire country not to come near them anymore. Their countries have taken restraining orders out on these nutters, and their descendants, forcing them into exile in Monaco, Mayfair and Manhattan. Yet they still claim their thrones.

Almost none of them have actually ever been a monarch. Their parents, grandparents, and in several cases great-great grandparents, lost their thrones in 19th and 20th century revolutions. Pretty much every major European republic has at least one would-be-royal stalker. France has two, the royal and the imperial. Scotland also has two, including possibly the most ambitious man ever born in Belgium, the wonderfully deluded Prince Michael Stewart of Albany (real name Michel Roger Lafosse).

Michel Roger Lafosse, claimant to the throne of Scotland
Source: jmsorg

Monsieur Lafosse holds an ambition to become the king of an independent Scotland. Since 1979 he has referred to himself as “HRH Prince Michael James Alexander Stewart, 7th Count of Albany”. Lafosse also says he has the right to other noble titles including Comte de Blois, Duc d’Aquitaine and Baron Lafosse de Chatry, all of which is utter bollocks.

His claim rests on a completely fictional account of Charles Edward Stuart annulling his marriage in 1785 to re-marry and father an ancestor of Lafosse’s.  At the time, Prince Charles, a prominent Catholic, was living in Rome and living with his daughter. They were both dying. No historian has ever seen evidence for a re-marriage and child.

Lafosse has also stated that he was “President of the European Council of Princes”, following Archduke Otto of Austria’s tenure in that position. Archduke Otto has said that he had never been president of any such body, or a member of any such body, and that, in fact, he had never heard of it.

Now, there is a small chance that Scotland may break away from the United Kingdom and become a separate country for the first time in over 300 years. I don’t want to see this happen, but it might.

However, if it triggered a chain of events that saw the Scottish overthrow Queen Elizabeth, heir to over three centuries of secure Anglo-Scottish monarchy, and choose not a republic, not the actual true heir to the Stuart claim to the Scottish throne (Franz, Duke of Bavaria), but a funny little Belgian man who has written himself into the Da Vinci code, I would give it my FULL backing.

I spent a lot of time reading about people like Sir Richard Francis Burton, 1821-90. Here are the ten best things that he did:

1. He learned 29 languages.
2. While in the army, he kept a large menagerie of  monkeys in the hope of learning their language.
3. He went on a secret pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca, disguised and circumcised to avoid detection and certain death.
4. He was the first European to see Lake Tanganyika.
5. He got impaled with a javelin under attack from Somali warriors, the point entering one cheek and exiting the other. He was forced to make his escape with the weapon still transfixing his head.
6. He was nicknamed Ruffian Dick.
7. He translated into English The Karma Sutra and The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.
8. He got expelled from Oxford University for going to the horse racing, and trampled the college’s flower beds with his horse and carriage while departing Oxford.
9. He challenged another student to a duel after the latter mocked Burton’s moustache.
10.  He said:”Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause”.

A medieval site, Christ Church was re-built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666 and was one of eight Wren designed London city churches that were destroyed by the German air force on the single night of December 29th 1940.

Ian Heron wants to see part of the church restored to its former glory and become a memorial to the citizens of London who lived through the Blitz and the other times that the city has come under attack.

Yes, I was interested, so I went along to meet Ian at the ruined church to see what he had in mind.

And now I am obsessed.

For not only was this medieval church destroyed by the Great Fire and gutted by the German bombers, it fell victim to those most sacrilegious of vandals – 1970s town planners.

Today Christ Church looks like this:

You might be forgiven for thinking that the missing two walls were knocked down by a bomb, or crumbled under the weight of burning timber as London blazed in 1940.

You’d be wrong. Here is a picture of the church taken from the opposite direction on the morning after the German bombers had done their work. You’ll notice that, among the destruction, those two walls (directly ahead and on the right) survived the bombing.

Actually, those two walls, designed by Wren in the 17th century, were removed in 1970 to make way for the traffic filling up London’s streets. Down came the walls designed by London’s greatest architect during the city’s golden age of architecture, in came the cars and buses. Shrug went the shoulders.

Ian remembers this being a bit of a controversy at the time, but nobody was prosecuted for it, or exiled, or thrown from the roof of St. Paul’s.  Nowadays, there is no mention of what happened in 1970, only a hint of recognition that an act of urban vandalism was committed.

This plaque sits upon a modern wall built in 2001 to claim back the church’s original footprint.

So a gesture has been made. A concession that knocking down the walls of a 270 year old church to allow a road to encroach upon medieval holy ground might have been the wrong thing to do.

For Ian Heron though, nowhere near enough has been restored. He wants to see those walls rebuilt, he wants the space turned into a peaceful sanctuary for city workers, and he wants the whole thing to become the Citizens’ Memorial.

Proposal for Citizens’ Memorial at Christ Church, Greyfriars

Ian has had this project in mind for most of this century. He is a former architecture student, so his interest is in the lack of respect the site has been shown.

As Ian puts it, “One has to ask whether this Grade 1 monument in its present state exemplifies the tradition of civic pride associated with the City of London. To many, leaving the ruin as it is would seem to dishonour the achievement of England’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, and the contribution made by his work to our national identity.”

His interest is also more personal though, for Ian’s father was a fire warden during the Second World War, working in Bethnal Green, scene of the Bethnal Green Tube Disaster of March 3 1943. It is more than fitting that Ian alone has kept the dream of restoring this church alive, and hopes to turn it into a site that reminds future generations of the sacrifices that Londoners made, and the damage that fire has inflicted upon them over the centuries.

Ian has drawn plans and written a proposal, and he has had the work priced up at around £4 million. Until recently, however, he hadn’t got very far, because he doesn’t really know any of the people that he needs to, i.e. the people that run the City of London and English Heritage.

That all began to change recently, however, when Ian captured the imagination of City of London Member Anthony Eskenzi, who has declared himself “behind the proposal one hundred percent”. Mr Eskenzi, whose family established their business in the city of London in the 18th century, is described by Ian Heron as the proposal’s “friend and advocate within the City”.

After many years of quiet and isolated dedication to his cause, Ian now has a City Member, with his own Chartered Surveyors practice, bending the ears of the right people, asking the right questions and pushing the the proposal up the right avenues, hopefully to a wonderful conclusion.

Ian’s blog and proposal explain his ideas pretty thoroughly, so I’ll just mention the highlights here:

• Restoration of the church walls to enclose the space and create a sanctuary for Londoners in the heart of the city
• Gardens and benches to be maintained for an attractive space that people can relax in
• Design and construction to be entirely sympathetic with original materials and current local demands for space and access.
• Existing pavement to be included within the walls to create an attractive thoroughfare for pedestrians, providing a daily glimpse into a sacred urban sanctuary
• Site to become the Citizens’ Memorial for London

So, from the angle similar to the first picture, the church will hopefully look like this,

and a site that currently only hints at its 700 year history can begin to reclaim its role as one of the city’s loveliest places. It would also be a massive improvement on what is currently the only memorial to the people of London, in the grounds of nearby St Paul’s Cathedral:

London’s only war memorial to its citizens

The tower of Christ Church, Greyfriars.

Offices surrounding Christ Church, Greyfriars have been built sympathetically and unobtrusively.

This pavement is on the site of the church, and would be enclosed under Ian Heron’s proposal

If you would like to support the Citizens’ Memorial, or simply get the occasional update, please email Ian Heron at ian.heron@ymail.com or subscribe to his blog at http://thecitizensmemorial.wordpress.com/

P.S.
I sent the above to Ian Heron for his approval last night. After a few tweaks (‘vandals’ and ‘vandalism’ are his words, I had ‘criminals’ and ‘crime’), he approved it for publication this morning and I was ready to click ‘Publish’. Purely coincidentally, on the journey to work I happened to be reading Diana Souhami’s book ‘Murder at Wrotham Hill‘, a dramatised history of a 1946 murder in Kent. The victim was bombed out of London during the Blitz, and one passage describes what Londoners were going through in 1940.

Ian’s proposal is very much about the restoration of an important piece of architecture, and the creation of a place of sanctuary for modern Londoners. However, it is also a perfect place to honour the London citizens that lived through the war. As I read Diana Souhami’s words, it struck me that she was describing exactly the experiences that Ian wants to commemorate, and I realised that I hadn’t given this much emphasis in my blog.

So, in Diana Souhami’s words, here’s what they went through:

“Black Saturday, 7 September 1940, was the start of the Blitz on London. Hitler ordered it as a prelude to invasion. It was the fiercest air battle of the war. There was the bleak wail of air-raid sirens, then at five in the afternoon the sky filled with bomber planes. Five hundred aircraft an hour for eight consecutive hours. On that first day 430 civilians were killed and 1,600 severely injured. The following day 412 more people died. Over the next months there were constant bombing raids. Two hundred German bomber planes flew over London every night for 57 nights in succession. By the end of September 1940 about 6,000 people had been killed and 10,000 seriously injured. Houses, shops, offices and public buildings were destroyed, railways lines smashed, trolley lines brought down and gas, water, electricity and telephone supplies broken.

It was the same ordeal, night after night after night: the wail of sirens, the drone of planes, the shells that lit up the sky, the crashing of bombs, the sound of heavy guns. Christmas was the gloomiest Londoners could remember. Much of their city had been demolished. Seventy-six thousand buildings had been damaged. Over 3,000 bombs were lying around, needing to be defused. Civilians were being killed at a rate of 6,000 a month. On 29 December eight Wren churches were among the buildings destroyed and GPO’s Central Telegraph Exchange in St Martin’s Le Grand burned to the ground without enough water to put the fire out.

Churchill wrote: ‘At this time we saw no end but the demolition of the whole Metropolis.’”

It’s fair to say that the house that we bought is a fixer-upper. The lady that we bought the house from moved in straight from her honeymoon, having bought the house from its only previous owner. That was in 1959, when my mum was only three years old, which was a very long time ago.

In 1980 I suspect that something magical may have happened. It is my belief that the owners received word that the children fated to buy their home had been born, and that their fate was unavoidable. So the owners decided that they could get away with never decorating the house ever again, or cleaning it. Actually, I think our births had been prophesied for quite some time before 1980, because in several rooms they had taken their chances with this non-decorating/cleaning policy since at least 1965.

I’ve uploaded a few photos to illustrate my point.

Here’s the kitchen, painted in Dulux’s Scorched Retina range:

In a not at all good way, the 60′s drinks cabinet had survived, complete with space age wallpaper…

and here’s where it lived next to the solid brick fireplace…

which ended up vanquished by this well dressed labourer. Note the attractive dirt marks around the missing picture frames.

The house was so dangerous to anyone that wanted to, say, switch on a light or use an appliance, that it had to be completely re-wired at a cost of several thousand pounds.

Here’s what a house full of wire looks like:

Below you can see me running my finger through 53 years’ worth of spider webs, dirt and old people skin, which was so thick that I actually mistook the layer of grime and dust for a mat.

Obviously, the ceiling was damp and mould infested and so all of the plaster came off like a dream.

As so often happens, when we took the floorboards up we discovered 38 bottles of homemade wine stored in an especially constructed mini-cellar:

Apple, blackberry, elderflower, all of the great fruits associated with producing outstanding Hertfordshire wine, are represented, ranging from 1977-1990. Yes, I tried some. Not to my taste, really. I’m more of a grape man, and I prefer my wine not to gloop during the decanting process.

So, the house needs work. The garden, though, is pretty nice. Here it is in the summer, check out the lush green trees:

But when Autumn arrives, it’s time to get the rake out:

It’s a joy to have a garden, something we lived without for nearly six years. Local gangs come in to toil in the soil…

and the fruits of their labours have so far been French beans…

and salad potatoes.

Perfect with a chilled glass of the ’79 Elderflower. Cheers!

My advice to Radio 4 would be to find someone, anyone, that moves to New England but isn’t a poet, and make a show about that, because when the poet talked about the history of logging in America he was a hell of a lot more interesting than when he was reading poetry about chainsaws. Pick out the best bits for yourself here.

Now, this isn’t a blog about logging (although Log Blog was a tempting title), but I wanted to share something fun that I heard.

Firstly, the phrase “it’s all gone haywire” comes from the way that haywire was used to fix literally everything in the logging operations of years gone by. Whenever anything split, or fell apart or just disintegrated through old age, the men on the lumberyards turned to the wire wrapped around the bales of hay. Loggers, clerks, cooks, doctors, everybody was keeping everything together with haywire, and the places that used the most haywire were those that had seen the most things go wrong.

When I say haywire was used for everything, I mean everything. One man, I’m calling him John T. Badass, went out hunting with his family one spring, and shot himself a bear. In the process of bringing this mighty beast down, he lost his false teeth, so when he butchered the bear he saved the animal’s teeth. Using wooden plates and the ubiquitous haywire, John fashioned himself a new set of falsies, got the frying pan out and sat down to chew on a bear with the bear’s own teeth.

Beat that.

Kingsbridge estuary from Overbeck’s, Salcombe.

It is also a picture of a man about to leave his wallet on the car roof before driving up and down the twisted roads along that coast. That wallet contained over £200 in holiday spending money, all of his cards and, crucially, his wife’s bank card.

This could well have been the last photo ever taken of this man.

Obviously the wallet fell from the car roof. So, we had no money and no bank cards. Cue two hours of driving, walking and running up and down those twisted roads, re-tracing steps and swallowing accusations.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. I’ve lost a lot of stuff. I left this very wallet in a cab with over £200 in last year and was lucky enough to have it returned. I got lucky again this time. A gentleman staying at the very swanky South Sands Hotel in Salcombe handed my wallet in at reception. They rummaged through it, found my business cards and called my office. A colleague sent Mrs W a message on Facebook and the holiday was back on track. I’ve never used those cards for actual business, only to retrieve a wallet that I can’t get rid of, no matter how hard I try.

This is a photo of a man that has taken his wife and friends on a walk from Bantham to Bigbury-on-sea. When the tide is out, “you can definitely walk across the sand to Bigbury.” Er, no, you can’t. Yes, the sea moves out, but the river Avon doesn’t. It stays there, separating Bigbury and Burgh Island from Bantham and me. “Er, let’s just wander up and down the river for an hour and then go back and play National Trust Monopoly.”

My friends Sarah and Phil forlornly consider what might have been.

This is a man about to take his wife on an eleven mile walk around the river Avon, from Bantham to Bigbury-on-Sea up and down the Avon estuary. A quick pint in the Pilchard on Burgh Island and then the ferry back across the river back to Bantham in time for tea.

Raring to go.

Actually, it is a photo of a man that couldn’t be bothered to check the ferry timetable, causing him to miss it by twenty minutes. Faced with the prospect of walking all the way back up and down the estuary (totaling 23 miles), and having already suffered burning sun, pouring rain and spiteful hail, I called Bigbury’s two taxi firms. One has gone bust and the other one’s only cab was in London, about half an hour from where I live, but five hours from where I was. Never have I come closer to attempting to swim across a river. Good sense prevailed and we walked the 11 and a half miles back. Mrs W didn’t say much, but I could tell there was something on the tip of her tongue the whole way back.

Despite doing as much as I possibly could to screw up most days of our holiday, we actually had a lovely time at Clematis Cottage in the village of Bantham. Apart from the brilliant village pub, The Sloop, there’s not a great deal there, but it’s perfectly placed near to an enormous beach where the Avon runs into the sea. This makes it ideal for surfing in front of the atmospheric backdrop of Burgh Island, where Agatha Christie set her murderous And Then There Were None. So the scene is one of dogs bounding after balls,watched by lazy cricketers, children channeling the water through the sand with spades, and surfers  being whisked around by the wind and the waves in a sort of modest regatta.

Clematis Cottage, Bantham

Avon estuary and Burgh Island in the late afternoon.

Overbeck’s in Salcombe is worth a visit for the views from the garden alone, although perhaps only if you’re a National Trust member as the views are about £7 cheaper (free) further up the coast. The garden itself is lovely, though, and the house reveals another one of those stories of batty men from days gone by, who happened to be very wealthy and in possession of a fine house and a ton of curious stuff.

Overbeck’s

Otto Christop Joseph Gerhardt Ludwig Overbeck, made his fortune through his electrotherapy device, the Overbeck Rejuvenator, and attempted to establish an underlying “theory of electric health”, which he advocated in his text A New Electronic Theory of Life (1925). In this book, Overbeck linked all manner of ailments with an imbalance of electricity. Restoring the natural balance of the electric body, Overbeck argued, could overcome all illness apart from those caused by germs or deformity. Even in his lifetime, he was widely considered to be eccentric and if you Google ‘Overbeck’s rejuvenator’ now, ‘Quack Medical Device’ is the top result.

Nonetheless, Overbeck sold enough to buy a beautiful house outside Salcombe. Here, he collected all manner of natural historical artefacts, and gathered specimens of tropical plants from across the world, opening the gardens to the public. He left the house to the National Trust on the condition that it was used for young people, so most of it is used as a Youth Hostel, which is as good a use as any. One of the lovely young men working there crawled underneath my car to look for my wallet, bless him.

Overbeck’s Rejuvenator. Quack device perhaps, but it has financed an idyllic youth hostel and tropical gardens.

My favourite curiosity was the set of handcuffs worn by John Babbacombe Lee, AKA The Man They Couldn’t Hang. Lee was famous a century ago for surviving three attempts to hang him for a murder that he was eventually cleared of. In 1885, he was convicted of the brutal murder of his employer, Emma Keyse, at her home at Babbacombe Bay in November 1884. The evidence was weak and circumstantial, amounting to little more than Lee having been the only male in the house at the time of the murder, his previous criminal record, and being found with an unexplained cut on his arm. Despite this and his constant claim of innocence, he was sentenced to hang. On 23 February 1885, three attempts were made to carry out his execution at Exeter Prison. All ended in failure, as the trapdoor of the scaffold failed to open despite being carefully tested by the executioner.

As a result, Home Secretary Sir William Harcourt commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Lee continued to petition successive Home Secretaries and was finally released in 1907. The incident helped lead to a standard gallows design to prevent a recurrence.

The hand cuffs of John Lee, The Man They Couldn’t Hang.

At the end of this holiday, I felt a bit like Babbacombe Lee. I’d lost my wallet with all my wife’s holiday money, I’d tried to walk her and our friends into the river Avon, I’d force marched her twenty three miles to an island where Agatha Christie had plotted mass murder. Three times I’d risked the gallows and each time I survived to enjoy myself in a very special corner of England.

The Red House, Kent

Home of William Morris, founder of the Arts & Crafts movement.

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Hanbury Hall, Worcestershire

Beautiful William and Mary-style house built in 1701.

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Osterley Park, Middlesex

Spectacular mansion surrounded by gardens, park and farmland; one of the last surviving country estates in London.

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

I was recently asked which is the best historical site that I have visited this year. Without hesitation, I named Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, by far the most impressive and interesting place I’ve been to. The Royal Navy has an 800 year old history, and provided the clout, the romance and often the sinister side to many of the most famous episodes in British and world history. It’s all at Portsmouth, and you can see it from the decks of some of the ships that created history’s greatest maritime empire.

I expected the highlight of the day to be HMS Victory, and it is indeed a special experience to walk the decks of the world’s most famous ship, where Admiral Nelson simultaneously achieved his finest hour and fell to a French sniper at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

HMS Victory, Nelson's flagship, was home to a crew of 820 men and 18 nationalities. 57 were killed and 102 wounded at Trafalgar on October 21st 1805.

Nelson, hit by a marksman from the Redoutable, smiled, "Hardy, I do believe they have done it at last… my backbone is shot through."

A wounded sailor in Nelson's navy could expect treatment from the most up to date surgical equipment of the age.

However, the real gem is HMS Warrior, the loudest and final word in the naval arms race with France that took place in the mid-nineteenth century. When completed in October 1861, Warrior was by far the largest, fastest, most heavily armed and most heavily armoured warship the world had seen. She was almost twice the size of La Gloire and thoroughly outclassed the French ship in speed, armour, and gunnery. Such was the brutal scale and unprecedented combination of steam engines, rifled breech-loading guns, iron construction and armour, Warrior never had to fire a shot in anger. No other navy would have dared to cross her, and Britain was able to re-assert the superiority that Nelson and his contemporaries had secured at the beginning of the century and ruthlessly exploit the resources of her ever-increasing maritime empire.

The magnificent HMS Warrior is a fascinating step back into the world of the nineteenth century navy.

Warrior never fired a shot in anger, such was her superiority to the ships of Britain's rivals.

Gun in a cabin or bed in a gunroom? Nothing compromised the demand for firepower on HMS Warrior.

When you're sick on a naval warship, it's important to rock with the waves.

A relatively friendly looking Tudor soldier.

Musuem of London Docklands

With Mrs Woodall away for the weekend recently, I took the chance to get my pirate kicks at the Museum of London’s Captain Kidd exhibition at their Docklands site. As this exhibition closes on October 30th, I urge anyone that has been meaning to go to set sail immediately. If you’re not sure if you can be bothered to make your way down to Canary Wharf, I share with you the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, introducing Treasure Island…

To the Hesitating Purchaser

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of to-day:

—So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studious youth no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave;
So be it, also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
Where these and their creations lie!

In other words, if you love adventure and romance, you’ll love this.

When you're a grown man alone in a museum, you only get one shot to photograph yourself in a pirate's hat.

The exhibition focuses on how Captain Kidd went from privateer to pirate and how he was betrayed by men at the centre of the British government looking to save their own necks and fortunes. There are plenty of tales of derring-do, murder and betrayal, and plenty of dark and splendid characters to read about. Kidd is obviously at the centre of it all, firstly serving greedy merchants and politicians as a pirate chaser, then as an accused pirate himself. Finally, he is condemned by Parliament, abandoned by those he had served, and hung in a gibbet to swing  at Tilbury Point for three years as a warning to future would-be pirates. Kidd himself said as he was being tried: “There is nothing in the world that can make it appear that I was guilty of piracy.” This may be stretching it a little, but he was a contemporary of some unscrupulous men, who saw him hang with a heavy sigh of relief.

Hanging of William Kidd (The Pirates Own Book, Charles Ellms)

Here are a few dodgy pictures of things I saw:

Ancient Jolly Roger

Pirates had a surprisingly generous compensation scheme amongst themselves.

There are plenty of Cap'n Kidd's ill gotten goods to see.

Ancient and modern are never far from each other in London.

We’d planned a City of London based itinerary, including seven buildings. Starting from Lloyd’s of London, we planned to walk west and finish at the house of fellow Lichfield man Dr Johnson, via Leadenhall Market, the Bank of England, the Guildhall, St Mary-le-Bow and Fleet Street.

After I shared our plans, I was quickly told how ambitious it was to aim for seven buildings in one day. Apparently the queues at Lloyd’s alone were going to scupper the itinerary. I took this as a challenge, dragged Mrs Woodall out of bed an hour earlier than planned and headed into town…where we fitted in a grand total of three visits, to Lloyd’s, Leadenhall Market and the Bank of England.

So, yes, Open House London is very popular and the queues to get in to many of the properties are very long. We’ll go back next year with more nous and a better plan. In the meantime, we’re determined to return to a lot of the places we didn’t get to see as soon as possible, and tell our friends about the places we did, which is presumably exactly what Open House London is all about.

I have posted pictures of Lloyd’s and Leadenhall Market, but photography was not allowed in the Bank – presumably to prevent you casing the joint. So, you’ll have to join the queues next year to see inside this ten floor, fortress like labyrinth of stone corridors and grand rooms. The 30 minute tour takes you through the Governor’s office, some very fine recption rooms and the garden, which has survived due to occupying a consecrated former churchyard. The visit finishes off in the excellent museum, which is open all of the time and offers the opportunity to handle a gold bar – currently worth over £400,ooo.

The Lloyd's building is known as the Inside-Out building, as its staircases, lifts, electrical power conduits and water pipes are on the outside, leaving an uncluttered space inside.

Lloyd's, founded in 1688, is the world's largest insurance market and is famous for insuring anything - from the maritime trade that built the British Empire to a grain of rice with a portrait of the Queen and Prince Philip engraved on it.

Inside Lloyd's - one can only speculate whether weekdays witness a hushed reverance or organised chaos.

Lloyd's has a long tradition of backing maritime trade and the navy, and houses many fine items such as a letter sent by Nelson from HMS Victory eleven days before his death at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Leadenhall Market, a classic cast-iron Victorian covered market.

Queuing for the Bank of England took up to three hours, but offered a fine view of the Royal Exchange (shown here) and Mansion House

Three great British institutions - the Bank of England, rain, and an orderly queue

Charles Wade's slightly unusual bedroom

It is very hard to do justice to what lies behind the doors of Snowshill Manor, a Tudor house with a half Georgian appearance. To my untrained eye, the collection was overwhelming and my impression of the collector was that he was a brilliant oddball, a classic British eccentric, and truly unique. However, his collection is too large to catalogue, comes with little explanation of the objects themselves, where they came from or how he got them. For many of the objects, the story of how they came to be in Britain alone is a fantastic story. Almost all of the 22,000 objects were bought in Britain, including the staggering amount of Japanese pieces, including several full sets of Samurai armour. This is the single largest collection of Samurai uniforms outside of Japan, in a small Gloucestershire mansion.

Every room is a feast for the eye

So, suffice to say, this is a wonderful place, an enormous Granny’s cabinet for the grown up Charles to walk through and marvel at the model ships, the armour and weapons, aristocratic portraits, hand made tools and so on and so on. If you’re ever in the area, do yourself a favour – hear a moving story and see a unique collection and a lifetime’s work.

One of several handmade model ships at Snowshill Manor

Samurai warriors guard dozens of Japanese antiques

The arrival of the Samurai is a fascinating story

A few bikes, model carts and another ship in the attic