Today was London Day – so everyone also dressed London style ;)
After breakfast in the hall (which seemed to have a lot more people today than usual), we were off on our coach! 2 hours later and we were on temple street, the legal heart of London. I’ve been to a London quite a few times before but never really seen this part. Yet another fantastic tour guide, Kim (she used to work in the European Parliament and then moved into the UK Government. She then become a full-time Blue Badge tour guide in 2001)! The best bits – the middle temple courtyard and the importance it holds, especially the chambers of the QC and visiting the Royal Courts of Justice (And walking past courtrooms with cases in progress). Key trivia here – the courts were built as ‘Temples of justice’ which explains their cathedral-like interiors and design. Note to self: visit another time again to watch a case in progress here and see any famous celebrities exiting by the front or the side entrance (front – open to publicity about affairs in question, side – not and this is respected by Journalists).
We finished at St. Paul’s cathedral for lunch. This is one of my all-time favourite landmarks in London. The sun was out so lunch in the square with all the working people and then some chai in the church gardens under a tree was really quality time reading. I miss this in Singapore where the humidity makes a picnic in the park extremely infrequent. London has completely delighted today – the weather could not have been any better!
Next stop was Lloyds of London- the insurance building. I was really surprised to learn that Lloyds neither underwrites nor does insurance booking, but provides the building for the largest insurance marketplace in the world! 84 underwriters, over 10,000 visiting Brokers (we saw everyone on the escalators just post-lunch), insuring everything from fine art to energy to that holiday home in Florida! Again so much history in one place – and best of all their core business model has remained the same since 1688 when Edward Lloyd smartly set up a coffee house by the Thames where all the sea captains stopped by to get updates on happenings around the world and this then evolved to Edward charging businessmen who came to do business with these captains rent for the boxes they occupied in his coffee house. The building itself isn’t the prettiest (designed by the same architect as for the Centre Pompidou in Paris) but what it includes is cool :) As marine insurance was the core at the start, to this day, the sinking of any ship around the world is recorded in a Lloyds ledger. We were also given a copy of the original insurance for the Titanic! I finally learnt why an underwriter is called as such (want to take a Guess?). As someone working in logistics, the fact that they have a room (the Adam Room) that was broken into 1500 pieces and then moved thrice is pretty neat!
This is why the architecture of London is so fascinating – you can be looking at a historic cathedral, then at something like the Lloyds building and right next to it the Gherkin.
London – you continue to amaze. I’ll be back again soon!
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