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...