Monday 24 September 2007

Great Fire of London

Sunday was cycling day in London. And if you know me at all, you know, this isn't something that would miss my radar. But it wasn't in the papers. And it wasn't on the radio. It wasn't on the Internet. Even now if you google "cycle London" you get nothing about Sunday's activities.

And we probably wouldn't have even noticed, to be honest. But this day was also the day that we choose to go into London and see the monument which had been erected in memory of the Great Fire of London.

It took us ages to get to the far side of London where the fire started in Pudding Lane which is in the City of London near the Tower of London inside what used to be the medieval city of London. All major roads were closed due to this cycling event which was supposed to rid central London of cars. Shame they didn't tell the tourists.

Sebastian is learning about the Great Fire of London in school. And given that I was educated in the USA, I don't know much about it. I mean, one can only learn so much about the history of other countries in the 12 years of primary education and 4 years of further education and sadly this didn't make the list.

After educating myself on the salient points on wikipedia, we set off.

After 2 hours of fighting the traffic we finally arrived at our destination only to find that the monument was covered from top to bottom in scaffolding. It is being cleaned and refurbished. We couldn't even get close to it. Luckily for me, I have an understanding son, who along with his mummy and daddy, just laughed about the whole situation.

3 comments:

Janell said...

You must have been sick the day they discussed the fire of 1666 in your American school - I remember learning about it. :)
Then again, History was my favorite subject.

LaDawn said...

Not perfect attendance me....although the years between when you went to school and when I went to school maybe made the fire drop off the bottom of the curriculum! :-)

Anonymous said...

that was not very nice to say, I don't remember the fire either. I remember reading about Dresden, but I believe that was deliberately set...