Snaps around the Southeast

Yesterday my travels took me to Hertfordshire, a part of the country I know very little indeed. Some years ago I went to a memorial service at St Albans Cathedral but that didn't leave me with much chance to look around; yesterday was much more leisurely. The Cathedral nave is immensely long but what impresses most is the massive Norman crossing which seems strangely un-English with its polychromatic stone. There were no fewer than three windows depicting St Catherine which I will post separately.

The city clambers up and down a steep hill and is wonderfully picturesque as a result. 

I think the City Museum & Art Gallery has recently opened, or re-opened. It's an amazing space with very little in it. Its main treasure derives from the fact that the Town Hall, where it's situated, also housed the City law-court and the lock-ups underneath it. The courtroom is now the Museum café, and you can emerge from the cells below straight into the dock via a short, and terrifying, flight of stairs.

I suppose it's good that St Alban's Well does exist in a 'restored' form, but it's pretty grim.

I spent a wonderful evening with friends, having tea with Ms DarkMorte in Stevenage and dinner with her and Lady Wildwood in Welwyn. I had no idea Stevenage had an Old Town: it's only one street, admittedly, but it's a nice street. I saw a Dalek holding a bucket outside an ironmonger's.

Today I was in London, looking around St James's and having tea in Crown Passage, meeting Ms Sepiatone for lunch, and walking across town in the heat of what the media was describing as 'Thermos Friday', via the legal quarter around Lincoln's Inn, to visit the Old Operating Theatre Museum in Lambeth.

St James's in Piccadilly:

The fountain at St Paul's Covent Garden:

You enter the Old Operating Theatre Museum via a staircase of 53 steps which is an affecting experience in itself. The centrepiece is the 1822 operating theatre of old St Thomas's Hospital, accidentally preserved in the attic of St Thomas's Church (now a bar) when the hospital relocated, and you can only wonder at what may have gone on on those scrubbed tables with medical students clambering around the seats. The display space, though, is the most chaotically-organised I've seen in any kind of national museum context. It's like an antique shop crossed with a witch's storeroom, which I suppose tells you something about pre-modern medicine. The main impression I took away was thanks for living when I do.