Test Blog

Next month I will be restricted to the iPad for blog entries as I will be away from my PC. Given that I will be spending a month travelling around London, I should at least have plenty to blog about when I do get around to it so it would be really useful if I get used to blogging with the pad - even if I'm writing my notes up at the end of each day. Hence this blog which is an iPad blog.

When this trip was planned it was with the intention of staying in an apartment in Bloomsbury. Not exactly where I wanted to be but with some the help from Google maps and Wikipedia I soon got used to the idea.   Using maps I was able to focus intensively using the zoom facility on to a the small geographical area where the apartment block is situated.  As with anywhere else maps will then highlight precisely what streets, buildings, and points of interest populate the spot. And with London being London, very quickly I soon began getting excited all over again.  There was a pub very close to our front door: the Skinner's Arms: an old pub which this close to the centre of London is bound to have a story, but nearby in Queen Anne's Square - misnamed because a mistake over the statue in the square in the image of Queen Charlotte.  The Queen's Larder pub - so named after Queen Charlotte who requisitioned the cellar of the building to store food for the ailing George 3rd who was being treated for insanity at a nearby doctors house (now denoted by a blue plaque).

I also noticed under my virtual microscope one of those Hanson cabman's shelter still sited in Russell Square - one of only 13 hat have survived. Weirdly I have loved the idea of these now, listed building, for years and have never seen one. And there was to one within spitting distance if our apartment.

Within the same square there's a school of oriental studies which displays a plaque to TS Eliot. Not of world shattering interest, but now sufficiently interesting enough to look out for. As is the site, also marked out, of a 1694 sword duel between to noblemen John Law and Edward Bear Wilson which ended in the death from a sword thrust by one or other.  There's a house that once belonged to Disraeli's son to look out for and  the very  statute of Queen Charlotte that caused the confusion between how the square was to be named.

There are buildings in the area that were once used by the Bloomsbury Group, and a statue of Virginia Woolf, another of Gandhi, and neurological hospitals which intriguingly link with the George the 3rd story.  A house lived in by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, and an old foundling hospital with its own museum on Coram's Fields.Nearby Torrington Square has a Thursday Farmer's Market, and of course Tavistock Square which is where the bus bomb went off during the tragic events of 7/7.

And I am sure there is much more in this area to be found under the ant's nest scrutiny of Google zoom and Wikipedia, but any research I have done so far has been, if not wasted, perhaps frustrated as the apartment location fro the visit has changed and it is to the east of London I must now switch my gaze.

I suppose London being London, there will always be something of interest on your door step. I'd better take a look at this next one.

The area around Commercial Road is certainly less interesting at first glance and if trip adviser accounts are to be trusted, not particularly pleasant so to continue the exercise of seeking out London.s secret nuggets of interest I will have expand my compass a bit.

Here's a little list I'm going to work with:

Whitechapel Art Gallery, Spitalfields Market, Aldgate Water Pump, Brick Lane Curry Mile,  Christ Church, Spitalfields, the Ten Bells Pub and The Truman Pub (which both have interesting stories to tell )