Britain Trip, Day 1

Friday, 5 March 2010

We flew into London and arrived around 9 p.m.  It was dark and cold.  Fortunately our hotel is quite close to the underground station, so we didn’t have far to walk.

The hotel is across the street from this seemingly endless row (all along the street) of victorian era row houses.  If you count the basement and attic they’re each 6 storeys tall but they’re only a bay window and a door (three regular sized windows) wide.  Wish I could see inside one.  Many have been converted into hotels or restaurants, but I think some are apartments.  I know why they’re called brownstones now.  A lot of them have brown or dark yellow colored brick on the outside on the upper storeys.  The basements are below street level but still have full sized bay windows.  They have a black iron railing around them, some with steps going down too.  I wonder what it was like when families used to live here.  You can just imagine the servants trooping up to the attic to sleep at night, weary after a full days work and of course going up and down all those stairs all day.  And looking up at the roof with a lot of the original chimneys still intact, I have new appreciation for how dangerous the job of chimney sweep was.  I looked up and up at the roof (some of the roof areas have railings now, but I think those railings didn’t used to exist), and I thought: they used to let kids–no require kids–to climb up and walk around up there.  Such a job was dangerous, sure, but better than starving to death.  Not sure how they cleaned out chimneys that could stretch six floors though.