Around St. Paul's Part One

Of all Sir Christopher Wren's churches. St. Paul's Cathedral is the most famous, and one of the most famous in the world. No one needs me a photo from me to know what it looks like, so I haven't taken one. But I do have images of all the surrounding streets.

The following two images are on an unmarked lane/street just off Paternoster square, so I assume it to be part of the square. Having photographed the square a couple of months ago I could have simply moved onto the next street, but you can see why I didn't. The two sculptures are actually air conditioning cooling vents, and amazing ones at that.

And then I took another image of the sculpture from Amen Corner.

The road going from left to Right in the above picture is Ave Maria Lane, of which there is not too much to talk about, other than the sculptures.

At this southern end of the lane is Ludgate Hill to the West and St. Paul's Churchyard to the east, which goes straight past the main entrance to the Cathedral. Of course the obvious thing to do here was to photograph someone holding up a big advertising board for a fish and chip restaurant. I have no idea what the fish and chips are like, but just follow the arrow to the right and you will find the restaurant on Carter Lane.

Just off Paternoster Square and going around the north side of the cathedral is Paternoster Row.

This then turns back into St. Paul's Churchyard according to the maps, and then depending on which map you look at back into Paternoster Row. However the street sign on the wall just by where I took this shot said it was St. Paul's Churchyard.

Off the row and leading heading north to Newgate Street is Queens Head Passage.

Jumping around a bit now back to Ave Maria Lane which heading north turns into Warwick Lane.

Just off of here is a little Square called Warwick Square, where I have a rare shot in colour.

More jumping again and back to the south side of the cathedral. Peter's Hill leads you down to the Millennium  or Wobbly bridge. What appears to be just one street is actually with Peters' Hill forking to the west to become Sermon Lane. You could easily miss this uninteresting fact, as I did previously when I photographed the "hill" but I had to come back to get Sermon Lane.

At the top of the above image is another tiny little street I also hadn't noticed before. It has the great name of Knightrider Court, and if you are of a similar age to myself you will no doubt be humming a theme tune from a time when David Hasselhoff was cool not just in Germany.

The court is no longer than what you can see in the image above. The figure above is heading down the similarly greatly names Knightrider Street.

One final jump takes us to the also wonderfully named Old Fish Street Hill which is Just off Queen Victoria street and leads up to Cannon Street and St. Paul's Churchyard via Distaff Lane.

And that takes us up to the end of April, so still a fair bit behind on this blogging lark.

More half days - Part 1

I had a few days of holiday carried over from last year which I had to use up by the end of March so took a couple of half days vacation in the afternoon to take photographs of the city. 

This post will focus on one of those half days, but first of there are a few shots from a late lunchtime walk. The first shot is from Bread Street, which is fairly close to St. Paul's and runs from Cheapside down to Queen Victoria Street. Bread St is the principal street of the Bread Street ward and the name originates from it being the main market place for selling bread in days gone by.

At the western end of Cheapside is New Change, which borders the edge of St. Paul's cathedral. The following shot was taken right on the corner with Cheapside.

The final image from this brief walk was taken on Paternoster Square.

On my two half days off I wanted to concentrate on the areas furthest away from my office that were still to be photographed - the streets on the east side of Farringdon Street from Holburn Viaduct all the way down to Blackfriars Bridge.

My starting street was the interestingly named Turnagain lane. The name apparently comes from the fact that the street did (but no longer) lead to the Fleet Rive. Bit since there was no bridge to cross, if you wished to cross, then you had to turn back round. Less interesting were the photographic opportunities and I came away with a rather disappointing image.

The next street on the east side of Farringdon Street (heading South) is Newcastle Close.

Next up was Bear Alley, a dreary looking dead end of a street. The name would seem to come from the the Bear Inn once located here and the one popular sport of bear bating.

I then came to another dreary looking dead end, Old Fleet Lane. Leading from the lane at the side of an office block where some steps that are the start of Fleet Place. It could be questioned which street this image counts towards since the steps of Fleet Place could be considered as the main subject matter, but the image was taken whilst standing on Old Fleet Lane and the foreground is also on the lane. However it's my project and my rules.

The steps are definitely part of Fleet Place and the following image was taken from the bottom of the steps looking up. It was quite a busy passage and I had to wait about 10-15 minutes to get the shot I was looking for.

 Next was Old Seacoal Lane, a challenging place to get a decent picture.and I don't like this particular image. The street gets its name from the time when barges transporting coal from the Thames and along the river Fleet would unload here. Oliver Golsmith the novelist, playwright and poet once resided here.

The road leads round to Limeburner Lane, which was only constructed in the 1990's. 

At the end of this lane and parallel to it is St. George's Court, whose existence seems only to serve an underground car park.

At the same end of the lane is Old Bailey, the location of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales. The original medeival court stood from at least 1585. It was destroyed in the Great Fire of London and rebuilt in 1674, with several re-buildings since. The image below shows the main entrance to the courts.

Close by at the top end of Old Bailey are  Bishop's Court and Green Arbour Court. I covered a couple of more streets on this day but will leave those for the next post.