A Short Post Between Papers

Where did February go? I am utterly shocked that it is already March.

I am quite sorry that it has been nearly two weeks since I published my last post. In the week ending this Thursday, I have approximately seven thousand words worth of assignments to submit for various classes. That amounts to just over forty percent of the length of the current collected posts for this blog. As a result, I have had less time for exploring the city than in previous weeks and, as a result, less material to write about. However, there are a few things that I would like to be sure to share, with highlights including a tour of the Theatre Royale Drury Lane, a Saturday morning visit to Borough Market, and a trip to Lloyds of London with my economics class this past Monday.

On the weekend immediately after my last post, I did not take a Saturday trip out to an idyllic town with a castle. Instead, I kicked off a quiet weekend of working days and social nights, such as yet another Saturday night cooking dinner. My Mexican lasagna has become very popular.

Tuesday afternoon brought a second theater tour in as many weeks, this time at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in Covent Garden. Although the current building only dates to the early nineteenth century, it is the fourth theatre at the location since Charles II permitted the construction of a new theatre on the site in the years after the fall of Cromwell’s strict protectorate. The theaters on the site have hosted every conceivable type of entertainment and have a strong history of Shakespearean theater, although today the theater produces major musicals.

Two staff members led our class around the theatre, trading off throughout the tour to disappear and change costumes, allowing them to appear as several different ‘characters’. Despite these unnecessary theatrics, they did provide a thorough tour. Following a short introduction in the lobby, we walked upstairs and into the royal box, which, though decked in gold, did not live up to the extravagance of royal residences such as Windsor Castle. In particular, I thought that the painted marble columns seemed unusual in a royal box. We next moved into the balcony inside the theater itself. On either side of the room, the four levels of ornate boxes seemed as prominent as the stage itself, recalling a time when the aristocracy gathered in those boxes to perform as much as the actors on the stage. From the theater, we made our way through the prince’s box – a significantly less extravagant room built after a major fight between King George III and his son, the prince, in the lobby of the theater – and into the basement of the building, where we saw the massive steel beams and the combined hydraulic and electric systems used to move the stage from below ground. Backstage, we saw the standard work area behind the very deep stage as well as the door cut into the back wall to allow an elephant to enter the stage before concluding in the lobby where we began.

That evening, I attended yet another performance, this time south of the river at The Young Vic Theatre. From the exterior, the building seems more like a restaurant and bar than a theater, as a two-story restaurant with big glass windows looks onto the street, hiding the smaller theater in the back of the building. Their prices were fairly reasonable, so I bought a drink before the show, a very popular satire called Vernon God Little, which tells the story of the media circus surrounding a young man accused of aiding a school shooting perpetrated by his closest friend. At the time, I did not particularly enjoy the show – the acting was disappointing, as everyone seemed more interested in perfecting a Texas accent than in acting the part – although in retrospect it did certainly succeed at satirizing the media frenzy surrounding tragic event of that nature.

With my first paper due on Thursday, my week quieted down after that busy Tuesday. On Thursday night I cooked yet again, attempting to make hamburger stroganoff. Unfortunately the sauce never thickened (I realized too late that I should have just added more flour, which I did not think to do at the time), although it did, somehow, taste right.

Friday featured a full day of work and research at the British Library, so I rewarded myself on Saturday morning by finally visiting Borough market. Known for the quality and character of its shops, it lived up to much of the hype despite the fact that it was raining. Located next to Southwark Cathedral just south of the Thames, Borough Market consists of groupings of stalls underneath a railway bridge. The owner of each stall sells his or her particular specialty item, creating an environment where people are selling high quality breads, cheeses, jams, and sauces, among a wide variety of other items. Even better than the presence of all of this food, though, is the fact that every stall offers free samples – the ultimate draw for college students living on a tight budget.

When I had finished making the rounds on free samples, I bought a brownie that was really more fudge than brownie and then took the Tube over to the London Centre, where I spent the rest of the afternoon working. Late in the afternoon, some friends happened to stop in the library while I was working, so, content with my output for the day, I joined them for happy hour at Tiger-Tiger, a bar between Trafalgar and Piccadilly Circus, where we shared a Long Island Iced Tea pitcher five ways. Afterwards, they had tickets to a show, so I returned to the flats, and, later in the evening, finished a little bit more work.

I followed a Sunday full of yet more work, this time on a paper about Keynesian economics, with a Monday afternoon visit to the Lloyd’s of London insurance market with my economics class. Although I still cannot adequately explain what they do, in general, Lloyd’s provides a building and organizational structure in which brokers representing clients seeking insurance policies can meet with underwriters willing to accept such risks in exchange for premiums. As a result of this flexibility, an extremely high percentage of the total volume of insurance deals worldwide use Lloyd’s. In practice, this means that, as our guide told us, the saying goes that you can have (almost) anything – ranging form your oil tanker to your water skiing elephant but not including your government – at Lloyd’s. Arriving in small groups, we met a guide in the reception area. He took us upstairs to a conference room where he explained the history of Lloyd’s and the work that Lloyd’s does before giving us a tour of the building. In addition to seeing the underwriting floors, we also saw some of the major historic artifacts in the building, such as the Loss Book – which harkens back Lloyd’s origins as a market for marine insurance and records all total losses at sea – and the rostrum bell – once used as a signal of information about late arriving ships, now used to indicate major world events, such as the 9/11 attacks.

In addition to the remarkable business that goes on at Lloyd’s, the building is like few others in the world. Designed during the late 1970’s and built in the 1980’s, the building feels more like a building from the past decade than from either of those eras. Lloyd’s desired a building with wide open spaces for the vast underwriting desks and simple floor plans that easily convert between open floor and offices. Consequently, the architect chose to place many of the traditional internal systems – elevators, plumbing, air conditioning, etc. – on the exterior, leaving the building wide open on the inside. Concrete pillars form the core of the building, running all the way from the third floor up to the great glass windows at the roof, creating an enormous central atrium. Natural light floods this core of the building and runs across the wide-open underwriting floors. With nothing but floors, furniture, and light fixtures on the inside, the building feels incredibly open in its simplicity. Although the aesthetic of this interior simplicity does not carry through to the outside – with its bulging pipes and the building systems – the building nevertheless feels incredibly futuristic. We concluded our visit with a ride in the class elevators, which took us above the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral just down the road and gave us a beautiful, if short, view of the whole south side of London.

That, too, is where I will conclude this post. I have one more paper and one CORE band application to finish, and then I get to reward myself by going to Paris for the weekend.

I think it’s a good trade off, and I look forward to sharing the stories and pictures from that trip in my next post.

Until then,

Joel