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home elsewhere london

vintners hall

Click on the thumbnails to get a larger picture, then on on the top LHS of the screen to return to this page.

Although the map above is big, it will enlarge more if you click on it, the gps map of the sites of photos below is very sparse

 

Blackfriar PH

St Andrews Hill

Good reflections

Wardrobe Place

"The Centre Page" corner Peters Hill

We visited Wardrobe Place and I took the same picture at:  http://www.catfan.co.uk/1.Catfan_around-stPauls.htm

St Paul's

Invader is the pseudonym of a French urban artist, born in 1969, who pastes characters from and inspired by the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders, that are composed of small coloured square tiles forming a space invader character mural mosaic.

On our last visit this mosaic was in place;  someone has since taken it down or pinched it...

On Peters Hill

My favourite 'The Razor'  or Strata SE1 peeping over

Vinyl Bar

Good reflections

More reflections - An HSBC Office

Dwarf on a clock

The Barge Master and Swan Marker by by Vivien Mallock

Trinity Hall

Reflections

We waited in Vintners' Hall for the tour to start.   There was an excellent loo down some handsome stairs

St Martin of Tours

This enlarges enough to read the labels

The Five Kings stained glass & the main stairs

A cygnet which comes out on ceremonial occasions

Main pictures William III and Mary II  in the Court room

 

The Dining Hall

Swan detail below

With Steve

The Drawing Room

Distillers Company banner

Claret the cat slept in the Silver Case and caused mayhem at a dinner when scared by pipers

French wine tasters

Livery Hall of the Worshipful Company of Vintners

Livery Hall

Traffic halted to let this Bentley through

We had lunch at Ye Olde Watling - a Nicholson PH

Pastel St Paul's

A cordwainer was a shoemaker who made shoes from new leather from   Cordoba in Spain.   The leather was particularly prized thanks to a process that softened the hides using alum from a secret method imported from Africa by the Moors.   Cobbler's were restricted to repairing shoes.

HSBC HQ, looks like a prison...

"Forgotten Streams" a representation of the River Walbrook which has become an underground sewer

Crossed ladders?  No building's reflection

Bloomberg Arcade

Reflections

Office

Lampshade

A ghostly Razor or Strata SE1

Cannon St Station

Mural at the Mithraeum

The Exhibition Space in the Mithraeum on Walbrook

The London Mithraeum, also known as the Temple of Mithras, Walbrook, is a Roman mithraeum that was discovered in Walbrook, a street in the City of London, during a building's construction in 1954.  

Mithras

The mysterious cult of Mithras first appeared in Rome in the 1st century AD. It spread across the Empire over the next 300 years, predominantly attracting merchants, soldiers and imperial administrators. Meeting in temples which were often constructed below ground, these were private, dark and windowless spaces. The mythological scene of Mithras killing a bull within a cave, the ‘tauroctony’ is at the heart of the cult, and its full meaning is subject of much speculation.

Artifacts from the dig

Down to the mithraeum

THE LONDON MITHRAEUM report of the tour by Angela Bellwood
The discovery of the C300 AD Roman Temple of Mithras is one of the most amazing archaeological stories from the City of London. Mithras was originally the god of heavenly light who slayed a bull, from whose blood flowed eternal life. [The marble of Mithras and the bull shown below is in the Museum of London.] The cult of Mithras came to the Roman world from Persia and the eastern Mediterranean and was organised as a secret society for men only, with seven grades of attainment. Popular with the army, Mithraism demanded honesty, purity and courage from its followers.

The modern story of the Mithraeum starts in 1952 with the first glimpse of the temple in a narrow archaeological trench in the bombed-out basement of a building on the banks of the Walbrook river. It was excavated in 1954. The whole ground plan of the Temple had survived but it was only on the last day of the planned excavation that the marble head of Mithras was discovered and the dedication of the temple was confirmed. Public interest led to a twoweek extension to the dig. More sculptures were uncovered and are now in the Museum of London. After a long debate about the future of the structure, the site owners, Legal & General, solved the problem by offering to dismantle the temple, store the stone and tile, and then reconstruct it somewhere else on the site, where the public could see it.
The temple was eventually reconstructed and opened to the public in 1962 on a podium in front of the new Temple Court building and there it remained for the next 50 years. It was said that the final result was far from what it ought to have been.
In December 2011 work started on dismantling the reconstruction. A team of masons from Nimbus Conservation worked through the winter carefully cleaning and packing each of the 4,500 pieces recovered. It was impossible to rebuild the temple exactly as it was found, but there is one element that can be matched; the threshold for the eastern entrance to the temple. Amazingly as the stones were cleaned and prepared for lifting, the original Roman iron collars for the doorposts became apparent. Not only have these survived 1,700 years in the ground, but another 50 years of London’s rain.
I thought our visit was going to be a disaster when I arrived to find the entrance door locked. So I knocked on the door and was told they were closed, to which I replied that they couldn’t be because we had a tour booked! It turned out that they had school parties visiting and we shouldn’t have been able to book, so our little group ended up having a private visit. (Apologies to my second tour party who just got the ordinary tour.) Page 8
The Temple is 9 metres below ground at Roman ground level . It’s a faithful recreation of the ruin discovered in 1952. All the stone and most of the bricks are from the original structure, but the mortars and renders on the walls and the timbers are new. And it was an impressive sight. The lighting started out dark and gradually lightened to reveal the Temple with a clear perspex screen at the end with a drawing of Mithras killing the bull.

The Temple is rectangular with a central nave where it is thought the rituals took place, with seating for a congregation of around 30, separated from the nave by sleeper walls and seven columns. Unusually, it had a rounded apse at one end that would have featured a statue of Mithras on a raised platform. The stone head of Mithras found in 1954 is likely to have been used in this statue, with the rest of the body and the bull made from plaster.
The temple would have had no windows and would have been lit by lamps, torches and braziers. Four small holes behind the statue plinth may have carried torches, creating lighting effects (replicated now) while a timber tank or simulated well held water used in rituals.
Upstairs there is a big glass case with artefacts discovered on the site. More than 14,000 artefacts were recovered (including 405 wax tablets), 63,000 sherds of Roman pottery and three tonnes of animal bone, providing evidence of trade, food and industry.

Mithras

Final picture of the tapestry

Interesting decor in this office

Incongruous little house

St Stephen's Church Walbrook by Sir Christopher Wren

St Stephen's Church Walbrook

St Stephen's Organ

The Walkie Talkie- 20 Fenchurch Street

St Paul's

The "Young Lovers" by George Ehrlich.

Blue lights

The YHA hostel on Carter Lane was St Pauls Choir School in Victorian times

We retraced our steps to Blackfriars and caught a train home.