BOXES 239-240: Canterbury 4, with Rochester and London.

You're looking at the great Gate to the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral, with just a glimpse of the Cathedral itself through the gothic archway. And those folks entering are some of our UW-Sheboygan travelers in January 2003. It was our sixth campus trip abroad, and our fourth to Canterbury; after our 80-person Italian trip in 2002 we were back to our usual number of around 45. Those of us like Anne and me who had been on all the previous trips remarked upon the new Starbucks right next to the Gate, where formerly only local establishments were to be found.

My previous post mentioned the task I was facing of sorting through and scanning the many loose slides and unmarked boxes of my final four years of slide-taking (2003-2006, after which I fully entered the digital era). It took less time than I'd expected, and here is the first result: slides of our Canterbury trip, the first slides I'd taken since the May-June 2002 visit to Hawai'i that occupied my previous two posts.

I can hardly put into words how happy Anne and I--and I'm sure some others--were to revisit Canterbury for the fourth time: a bit like getting together again with a very good friend after a year or two's absence. It was a pleasure just to step outside the County Hotel, where we always stayed, onto the High Street in the winter light:

In the above shot you see some members of our party, doubtless on the guided walking tour of the city that was always at the start of our first full day in Canterbury. Very likely they are being instructed to look up at a Tudor-era building called Queen Elizabeth's Guest Chambers. (As with other photos of group tours I apologize for not being able to assign names to all the faces, however familiar they look.) The walking tour always followed the full English breakfast supplied by the County Hotel and talks by the group's leaders--in 2003 Mary Beth Emmerichs and Bob Margrett. The photo suggests that the weather was colder and crisper than in some previous years, though we had walked though a bit of sleet on one occasion. On this trip I didn't turn the camera to what the travelers were looking at, but you can see Queen Elizabeth's Guest Chambers in the lead photo for BOX 207, featuring our first Canterbury trip, 1998. I did, however, take a number of pictures during our 2003 walk as we stopped at places with historical and architectural interest:

Down one side street arose the great tower of the Cathedral in the morning light:

As on one or two previous trips I took a picture of the (to me exotic and iconic) holly tree inside the Gate:

This time I took no photos of the magnificent Cathedral itself but rather of a ruined archway and some stone urns above a gate:

Here's another pic of part of the group looking at something or other:

I can't say any of them look very happy, but of course they're being forced to squint into the morning sunlight. That's Judy Reevesman, my mother-in-law, with the white woolen cap under the dark hoodie, and to her left in the red tartan hat, Jeanette Raymond, who came on quite a few of our trips. Here's one more shot of the group, walking down a Canterbury back street--or, considering the upward slope, could it be the nearby village of Chilham?

A special treat on each of our Canterbury trips--as you may recall if you've been following these posts--was to take a little side trip to Chilham, a short train ride away, where we loved to have lunch and liquid refreshments at the White Horse Inn. In 2003 I took two photos in Chilham, including one of the Norman-era church at the top of the town:

Sometimes Bob gave his own walking tour of the city of Rochester the same afternoon that Mary Beth, or just Anne and I, took others to Chilham. In 2003 Bob's tour was on a separate day, allowing Anne and me to visit both places. Rochester is of special interest for a number of reasons: it has an imposing cathedral near a monumental ruined Norman keep called Rochester Castle; and it has a great many associations with Charles Dickens: places he lived and buildings he fictionalized in his novels. Bob (who if I recall correctly had relatives in Rochester he was in contact with) would be a better guide than I to the slides that follow, but I've managed to ID the locations thanks to Google Lens and Google Maps. First, here's a glimpse of a stretch of the High Street:

Along the High Street is Eastgate House, built in the 1590s and expanded later; it appears under other names in a couple of Dickens novels:

Next to Eastgate House is the Swiss Chalet, which Dickens had had built for himself to use as a study. (It was moved to this location in modern times.)

Another Tudor building said to have Dickens connections is this handsome structure;

Away from the High Street you can find the King's School, said to be one of the oldest in Europe, its origins (though not this building) dating to the 600s:

We're getting closer to the Cathedral and its grounds, including a park called The Vines, named after the medieval monks' vineyard. Across from the park is the Vines Church, unfortunately soft-focused in my photo. Next to it is a place called Restoration House, which Dickens used as a model for Miss Havisham's house in Great Expectations:

The Vines seemed like a charming park, even on a winter day. That's a tree trunk carved to look like a monk toward the left.

Within the Cathedral complex there's a Victorian building called Garth House (to the right). Rochester Castle looms in the distance.

And here is the Cathedral itself, shown in partial views:

My one close-up of Rochester Castle is inexcusably out of focus; a little better is an early evening view of the train station with the Rochester Corn Exchange (with the big clock) to its left:

As we did on previous Canterbury trips, Anne, Judy and I stayed overnight in London at the wonderfully old-fashioned (some might say stuffy) Naval Club in Mayfair, thanks to an arrangement permitting the family of American officers (Anne's father in this case) to stay at a bargain rate. I took a photo of a nearby posh pair of Mayfair townhouses, still with their holiday decorations:

I don't know where I took this next photo, but it looks like another well-to-do district--could that be Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens beyond the townhouses?

It doesn't really matter where the grocery was where I took this pic of the vegetables on display outside:

On one of our London days we made an excursion to a portion of the East End that none of us had visited: Spitalfields Market and Brick Lane, parts of a neighborhood with an ancient past, decades if not centuries of poverty, and recent gentrification. We left the Underground at Liverpool Street Station, just east of the City, where I had this view of Victorian architecture meeting Modern:

I didn't take any photos of Spitalfields Market for some reason, but I did take note of the Hawksmoor-designed Christ Church Spitalfields (completed 1729) nearby:

And I have no photo of Brick Lane, where we bought excellent barfi and other treats at a Bangladeshi sweets shop. (2003 was before the blank spaces of Brick Lane became famous for graffiti art.) But I did take a picture of pink-bricked Georgian townhouses on Princelet Street, where Huguenot refugees once set up their weaving establishments; later it was a working-class Jewish neighborhood, and now these townhouses sell for millions each:

Our walk took us to Whitechapel High Street, where we saw the 1901 modernist facade of famed Whitechapel Gallery:

We either walked or took the Underground to the then-new Millennium Bridge, the pedestrian crossing of the Thames near St Paul's. We passed, and then saw again from the bridge, the new replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (which wasn't giving any January performances):

Here is the bridge itself with St Paul's in the distance under a dramatic London sky:

Swiftly moving clouds in the afternoon sky threw the great dome into shadow and sunlight:

Here's St Paul's from more of a distance, with St Martin's Ludgate, designed, like St Paul's, by Christopher Wren, on the left--with a bit of a moon in the sky!

That night we saw a touring production of the Cirque du Soleil at the Albert Hall.

I took a few more photos of Canterbury before the end of our trip. A Victorian residence called Tower House is near the River Stour--I photographed the front and the back garden:

I took four other photos of the river and its environs, including an archway of an ancient wall, but all are slightly or seriously out of focus. I haven't quite gotten myself to toss them (I like the evening colors in one), so I'll cluster them here:

More successful were two pics of sunset over Canterbury Cathedral--they're nearly identical but I can't decide which one is better to post:

Finally, here is a still life of irises, peaches and, bafflingly, a bag of red chilis, all of which Anne must have bought at a street market. The bank note tells me that I took the photo just before we checked out of the hotel, with hopes that the staff would make use of the flowers and produce as well as the tip.

My next pics are family scenes from winter and spring of 2003--even more grandson photos!--before the lengthy trip Anne and I took that summer to Spain, Venice, Germany and the Netherlands. I'll start showing these boxes in the next post.