Back from the UK

I'm back home in Brooklyn after my architecture-nerd summer school program, and I now have the daunting task of making sense of my experience, e.g. trying to remember all the places and things we saw and learned about, sorting through more than 900 photos (ah, the Digital Age!), and deciding on which "highlights" to share on my blog.
So I think I should start with my first day in London, which consisted of a reunion with Alexander and Anette (plus Lois), a much-needed nap, a pasta dinner, and a jumpin' Congolese pop concert at Southbank Centre, a gloriously '60s arts complex of theaters and plazas perched above the south bank of the Thames. What I should really be posting is a photo of Alexander African-dancing on stage with the Congolese pop band, but I must have been too busy with my own dancing to capture the moment. Instead, here are some photos I took outside the concert venue, Queen Elizabeth Hall, which is a fantastic Brutalist-style concrete pod dedicated by Her Majesty in 1967. The evening was lovely, with soft breezes and creeping dusk, and Southbank Centre was alive with people outside on the plazas drinking, socializing, strolling, and people-watching. I couldn't have asked for a more auspicious beginning to my trip.

Photos as promised...

Train stations, seaside resorts, country houses, and Chinoiserie

It looks like this will be more of a retroactive blog than I was hoping, because our daily schedule is so tight we barely have time to catch out breath before racing to the next house museum or train station! Some highlights for me in the last three days were: seeing the vast, cathedral-like interior space of the Tate Modern, the old Southwark power station (1948, Giles Gilbert Scott) on the south bank of the Thames that stopped service in the 1990s and was adaptively reused for the museum, opened in 2000; walking from St. Paul's Cathedral to the hostel where we're staying in Euston Square, photographing terrific vernacular buildings like a French Second Empire-style complex of market buildings from 1881, a terra-cotta cold storage building from the 1910s, and beautiful "terraces" of Classical townhouses with ornamental ironwork; and visiting King George IV's Brighton Pavilion (1818-1822, John Nash), a psychedelic fantasy of a building, Indian on the exterior, Chinese on the exterior. Tomorrow morning we will have a guided tour of Westminster Palace, Thursday we put on our finery (coat and tie for men) for a tour of London's clubs (Reform Club, Oxford & Cambridge Club, and Landsdowne Club), and Friday it's off to the north for a five-day tour of the monuments and 19th-century curiosities of Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool. Stay tuned for pictures...

Summer School in London

I arrived this morning in London with my friend and co-worker, Lois, to begin our two-week summer school program with the Victorian Society in America. I thought this trip would be a good opportunity to start blogging, and over the next two weeks or so I'll be posting photos and updates so you can see what we're up to in the way of Victorian London, its buildings, monuments, parks, and museums. Right now we're staying with Alexander and Anette in their cute flat in Finsbury Park, right around the corner from our cousin Nina and her three kids. This evening we're going to a Congolese concert in Waterloo, and tomorrow Lois and I meet up with the rest of the summer school group, settle into our lodgings at the Methodist International Hostel near Regents Park, and have a couple of lectures: "Victorian London", and "Great Exhibitions"... or is that Great Expectations?

More later...