• Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey including Saint Margaret’s Church

Visits: 26th-29th June 2006, 12th July 2014, 9th March 2015, 11th April 2015

This is the fourth of the London World Heritage Sites (the others being Kew Gardens, Maritime Greenwich and the Tower of London), yet it has taken me much longer to get around to completing than the others. Why? Just because Westminster Abbey is a popular tourist attraction and was either very busy or closed when we attempted to visit on several occasions, plus the fact that it costs £20 to get in.

Of the three buildings that make up this WHS, I find the Palace of Westminster the most interesting. This is the proper name for Houses of Parliament – the building that houses the House of Commons, the House of Lords and various members’ offices and committee rooms. When I was a sixteen year old looking for a work experience idea back in 2006 I wrote to my local MP, Sir Alan Haselhurst, and was pleasantly surprised when he took me on for a week in Westminster. Like many MPs, he keeps a permanent assistant, whom I shadowed for a week, opening post and other such tasks. This was nine years ago now, but I still remember well the Prime Minister’s Questions I went in to watch, in which David Cameron compared Tony Blair to David Brent: utterly redundant but still hanging around the office (this was before he finally handed over to Gordon Brown).

To be clear, the picture two above is of me more recently, when my brother’s friend took him, Ross and me into Parliament for a tour and a drink. We entered through Westminster Hall, where Ross is standing, which is used for important ceremonies and state occasions, such as when foreign dignitaries are invited to address the British Parliament.

This leads into St Stephen’s Hall, above. Although it looks and feels like a mere corridor, this is where the original House of Commons stood – and its dimensions were exactly the same. St Stephen’s Chapel – as it was known until it burned down in 1834 – was used from the early days of Parliament, in 1547. Imagine the above space with choir stalls on either side – it was this layout that gave rise to the adversarial nature of politics that we still enjoy our current Commons chamber today. It is hard to fathom how, for example, the 658 MPs elected in 1802 would have fit into this small chamber, given that our present 650 members cannot even fit into the new, larger chamber.

On our recent visit there wasn’t anything as exciting as PMQs going on, so we went in for a couple of local government debates in both the Commons and the Lords. It was a strange experience to pass familiar faces in the corridors of power – although they aren’t exactly A-listers by most people’s standards we were sad enough to be impressed by seeing the likes of Norman Lamont and Margaret Hodge just walking past.

Rewind the clock a bit now, and we are back in July 2014, when Natalie and I first tried to get into Westminster Abbey. It was far too busy at the time, so we made do with the smallest part of this WHS, which is St Margaret’s Church. Standing adjacent to Westminster Abbey, it is free to visit and a lot quieter. Since Westminster Abbey was originally a Benedictine Abbey, a church was required for the day-to-day worship of parishioners in Westminster. Both Samuel Pepys and later Winston Churchill had their weddings here, and Sir Walter Raleigh was buried here after his execution for disobeying orders.

The final part of this WHS for me was Westminster Abbey, the 10th century Gothic masterpiece just over the road from the Palace of Westminster. This is a special place for us Brits because it is where coronation ceremonies have been held ever since 1066, as well as the site of at least 16 Royal Weddings (including, of course, that of William and Kate in 2011).

Natalie and I were surprised at the sheer number of tombs that the abbey contains – so many that it feels like its primary purpose is to be some kind of grand mausoleum. Inside you can see the tombs of Henry VII, Richard II, Elizabeth and Mary, among many others. There are also memorials to non-royals, such as Newton and Shakespeare, and a notably large one to that old Angophile Handel. And there is of course the famous Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a simple black marble stone surrounded by poppy wreaths.

The most impressive part of the abbey to my mind was the Henry VII Lady Chapel. Topped with an intricate fan vault ceiling, the room’s stained glass windows allow in a burst of bright, colourful light.

One of the other details I particularly liked was the solemn medieval statuary above the side entrance to the abbey. This was the period in art when two concepts really came together for the first time – the Greek-style depiction of what the artist could see (i.e. realism) and an Egyptian-style emphasis on symbolism (focusing on what really matters in a scene). According to E.H. Gombrich’s ‘The Story of Art’, which I am currently reading and which I would recommend to anyone – it was the Christian artists who began to impart their feelings into their work, to convey the importance of Christ and God to the illiterate masses, newly converted from paganism.

The audioguide in the abbey is narrated by Jeremy Irons, which somewhat softens the blow to your wallet of the high entry price. Having ticked this one off, I am left with only St Paul’s Cathedral on the list of major London sites I haven’t yet visited (also very expensive). In terms of WHSs, I now only have one more left to see in the south of England, and that is Canterbury, which I think we will have to pay a visit to later this summer.

• Maritime Greenwich

Visit: 9th June 2013

By Tom

The day after Kew Gardens we headed to Maritime Greenwich to see the sites that:

symbolize English artistic and scientific endeavour in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The two buildings we visited represent the scientific side of things, being the National Maritime Museum and the Old Royal Observatory.

We went to the Maritime Museum first, which is free to get into. It seems to be mostly divided into exhibit rooms which I would guess are permanent. There are some fascinating exhibits on Arctic exploration, the Arctic Convoys of WWII and the East India Company. Louise saw this photo of a cat smuggled on board a convoy ship. The cats served two purposes: as well as being great company they also kept rats and mice under control on the ships.

There was also a picture of a ship with a plane on a rail. This was used as a last-ditch defence – there were no runways on these ships so after the pilot had been launched from the slingshot and hopefully repelled the attackers he would have to deliberately ditch his plane in the ocean and hope he could do it close enough to the ship to be rescued.

I found this selection of historical ship figureheads pretty interesting.

Ross was taking a look too, and so was this rock and roll granny!

After the maritime museum we went up the hill (a surprisingly steep one) to the Observatory. The view up there is well-known to be a good one.

The observatory costs £7 to get in and is filled with exhibits on timekeeping. The problem that was vexing sailors at the time was their inability to know where they were when out at sea. It was relatively easy to calculate your latitude by looking at where the Sun was in the sky. But nobody knew how to calculate your longitude. The problem was so important that in 1714 Parliament offered a £20,000 prize to the first person who could do so. The solution lay in comparing local time at a ship’s current location (which was easily discerned from the position of the Sun in the sky) and comparing it to the time in London (hence Greenwich Mean Time). Since the Earth rotates 15° per hour, if you know you are 4 hours behind London then you must be 60° West. But this left the problem of knowing what the exact time was in London. There were two main methods proposed to solve this problem.

One was to build accurate clocks that could be carried onboard a ship. The museum has four of the original prototype chronometers built by John Harrison. They are complicated-looking contraptions and seem to have been restored to full working order.

The other main method of determining time in London involved precise measurement of the stars using giant quadrants. In 1675 King Charles II appointed John Flamsteed to be the first Astronomer Royal. From the Royal Observatory, Flamsteed spent four decades obsessively and jealously compiling star charts. Reportedly, Sir Isaac Newton was so desperate to test his theories against Flamsteed’s empirical data that he requisitioned it and published his work without permission. Flamsteed was so angry that he bought up all but 100 of the unauthorised works and burnt them.

A popular tourist spot at Greenwich is the “actual” GMT line. There was a big queue of people patiently waiting to take a photograph there, but Ross found a shortcut.

• Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Visits: 8th June 2013, 1st Oct 2016, 14 Feb 2017, 21 July 2018 … + more

Hello and welcome to the place where we plan to document our ambitious, probably quite unrealistic quest to visit every UNESCO World Heritage Site in the world. We are two friends who are into visiting new places and seeing new things, and we are also not impartial to the odd list. So when I stumbled upon the official list of WHSs it seemed appropriate to set that as a target for us to tick off one by one. If nothing else, it gives us a structure for visits around the world. We will be joined on many of our visits by Ross’s girlfriend Louise, who will be our official photographer and translator. I’m sure there will also be some other people joining us along the way as no doubt every holiday we ever go on for the rest of our lives will now be engineered to include a new WHS!

So without further ado, the first WHS we visited since officially setting out on our challenge was Kew Gardens in London.

Kew is one of those places where you walk down the road and automatically say “I want to get a house here”. Too bad right now, as they seem to be in the £1-2m range. Entrance to the park is £14.50 and we had booked in advance. It’s surprisingly easy to just step over the low fence if you don’t have tickets – I think they could do with toughening up their security a bit as people must take advantage of that all the time. Although I guess there isn’t that much criminality in the horticultural community. But that’s just a guess. Louise, Ross and his mum were already there when I arrived at around lunchtime, and they had picnic!

The gardens were begun in 1759 at a time when many parts of the world were still being explored by the first time by Europeans. Collecting exotic plants was something of an obsession to the travellers of the day, so the Royal Botanic Gardens were designated as a place to keep living specimens. Needless to say, if I’d been around in 1759 I’d have been collecting plants.

The site covers 300 acres and seems to have a dozen or two buildings as well as apparently 30,000 species of flora.

The first place we went into was the Palm House, which contains plants from tropical climates. The giant greenhouse is kept at tropical temperatures by radiators under grills in the floor. Even on a midsummer’s day all the heaters were going at full blast!

There is a small greenhouse nearby containing giant waterlilies.

The Victorian kitchen garden has a Bonsai tree greenhouse at the end. These ones were imported from Japan in the ’60s and are up to 180 years old.

Ross’s brother Dave showed up. Remember what I said about the low security at the entrance? Well he just walked right in.

This Chinese pagoda can be seen from a long way off. Here is the view up ‘Pagoda Vista’. Unbelievably, it has been standing there since 1762. Apparently it was used in WWII for the testing of model bombs.

There is a newish attraction called the Treetop Walkway, which is 40 feet high and lets you walk around in the tree canopy. We couldn’t be bothered to walk up so we took the lift.

Near to the here is a traditional Japanese garden, with neatly raked gravel and an imperial karamon (gateway) that was sent to Britain for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910.

This was one of the last bits we saw, and the we headed back toward the exit and came up with the idea of this blog in the giftshop! After the gardens we went to a Thai restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush for dinner. The starters were nice and the host was a character. I doubt the others agree with me but I didn’t rate my main. Also it was one of those places where you don’t get fresh cutlery after your starter. With chopsticks, that’s fine, but with forks and spoons it just feels not right to me! Is that too pedantic?

Overall it’s a nice place to go on a summer’s day. Just remember to bring your walking shoes.

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Update, 9th August 2018

Since this original post was written a lot has changed, though not for the worse. Ross soon dropped out of contributing to my blog but I clearly didn’t give up the endeavour. He and Louise are now married with a child and I of course met Natalie. The two of us now live a stone’s throw from Kew (just across the river) and have visited plenty of times in the 4.5 years we’ve known each other. We’ve also been to some other botanical gardens together, at Padua and Singapore, so now have some sense of how these places share similarities and differences.

Singapore was particularly interesting in relation to Kew because it was a sort of a subsidiary projects under the command of the “head garden”, with Kew acting as a hub for freshly discovered plant arrivals before sorting and sending off to the satellite gardens in far-flung corners of the empire. All of Singapore’s original senior botanists trained at Kew, and this seems to be pretty much the case today, too.

The most significant change of recent years was the opening this summer of the refurbished Temperate House. Soon after my original visit with the Frenchs in June 2013 the house was closed for five years, during which 15,000 panes of glass were replaced.