Saturday was our last real day in London – on Sunday we had to be packed up and out, and off to the airport.
I glossed over a particular spot in my previous posts because we didn’t spend much time there, and returned on Saturday. It was St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a small Anglican church off Trafalgar Square. There’s a cafe down in the crypt, where we had chicken chasseur with potatoes and braised cabbage.
It was really good. Apparently it’s not unusual for churches to have restaurants or coffee shops down in their crypts. It seemed kind of weird to us, walking over things like this on our way to the food line:
One of the reasons we went back to St. Martin’s was that I realized we were missing souvenirs for a couple of our friends, and I thought there was a particular souvenir those friends would like that you could get here.
The first time we came through, I did a brass rubbing for my sister.
Basically there are boards with brass plates on them, and you rub them with a piece of hard wax until the image shows through. It was a fair amount of work, but they’re very pretty. This time I did a rubbing of a dragon for the friend who was pet-sitting for us, and my husband did the same one I’m working on above, but in silver, for another friend.
The gal next to us was working on this:
She’s a big fan of Henry VIII-era history, and this is the gravestone of Ann Boleyn’s father. I recognized it right away – my mother has a full-sized rubbing of this stone in black wax on white paper. This version was scaled down quite a bit, and lacked the inscription. The young woman who was doing the rubbing was probably grateful, as the original is life sized. She planned to go over the different areas of the plate in different colors once she had the main outline down in silver. I imagine she was there for quite a while working on it; I hope she was happy with her result.
We also went over to Davenports Magic, which is in the arcade under Charing Cross.
Then we tried for Trafalgar Square again. Guess what? This time the Canadians were gone, but it was still full of revelers! Turns out it was World Pride Day. Oops. So again, instead of being full of pigeons and statues, Trafalgar was packed to the walls with people.
We decided to go back out to Highgate and try for the cemetery before it closed.
Highgate Cemetery is divided into East and West cemeteries. We decided to go into the East cemetery, as there was no line and we weren’t really interested in a guided tour. I’ll let these images speak for themselves.
The cemetery was quite overgrown in some places.
Afterward, we walked down the hill to look for some dinner. The place that had been recommended to me was booked for a private engagement, so we turned to Yelp again. A quick walk over to Kentish Town brought us to the Junction Tavern. We arrived before their dinner service started, but we didn’t mind sitting down with a pint and waiting.
Dinner was fabulous. If you find yourself out in that area, I highly recommend it.
Below, awesome bread, a really delicious (if oddly colored) mushroom soup, and a potato and herb cake with goat cheese and tomato sauce.
We also had a blueberry creme brulee. The top was a little over-bruleed, in my opinion, but the filling was lovely.
Full and happy, we walked down to the Kentish Town tube station and made our way back to the hotel to pack and relax before leaving.
And that was it! We saw lots of things, we walked til our feet almost fell off, and we ate lots of good food. It was an awesome adventure.
Thanks for following along. I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled programming soon – I actually have a few recipes from before the trip that I never got around to posting, and of course I’m always coming up with new stuff. Plus I have some ideas from the trip that I want to experiment with, like homemade Jammie Dodgers! I’m also pecking around the idea of starting up an Etsy shop to sell creepy crafts, so I’ll keep you posted.
