"Matt, Take Me To Europe!"

Thurs, 10 March 2016, 12:04 pm: Here we are at the Royal Exchange. The original activities on this site in the 1500s made it London’s very first official center of commerce.

We’ve walked ten minutes west from the Walkie Talkie and are now within teabag-tossing distance of St. Paul’s Cathedral.the top of the building with its Latin script and the “Cheese Grater” (at right) in the background

The red double decker buses run on what seems an endless loop where Lombard, Threadneedle, and Cornhill Streets meet. The Duke of Wellington rides bareback in front of the Royal Exchange.The Royal Exchange was founded in the thirteenth year of Queen Elizabeth and rehabilitated in the seventh year of Queen Victoria, proclaim the Latin words above the columns.

Thurs, 10 March 2016, 11:55 am: You’ve got to walk quite a distance from it before the Walkie Talkie (nickname of the skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street) stops dominating your entire view of this section of London.Walk with me now from the Sky Gardens’ building through part of the business district of London. (Business happens everywhere, of course, but this blog post features photos from The City, the official business zone, if it’s appropriate to call it that.)Here’s another of London’s “we love ’em so much, we give ’em all silly nicknames” new skyscrapers: the “Cheese Grater” (subject of a 2017 Matt blog). I bet if you staked out this red postal box all afternoon you wouldn’t see a soul drop anything in its slot, but there’s a certain satisfaction in seeing relics from the recent past still peppering the modern cityscape.Strolling west on Lombard Street we pass two of London’s oldest churches, each famous among locals but unmentioned in American guidebooks. (See? Stick with me and I’ll take you off the well-trodden tourist path.)

First of the two is called St. Mary Woolnoth.Here is the church known as St. Edmund, King and Martyr, distinguishable thanks to the likeness of the revered monarch, rendered in gold, hanging over the street.

Many of the banks on this street were recognizable by the unique signs mounted to their facades. This cat-with-a-fiddle logo still hangs, but not in its original 1902 location.

Thurs, 10 March 2016, 11:40 am: My eyes were pulled to The Shard as soon as I stepped onto the viewing platforms at the Sky Gardens.

From anywhere on the ground, I just occasionally spot it on the skyline and think, “yep, there’s The Shard.”  It’s taller than any other building in London, but it’s still just another tall building.

And then it compelled me to stare the minute I arrived near the glass walls thirty-five stories above The City. Now I was close enough to it, in height and proximity, to discern the details of its capping razors, the way it jabs the heavens. Atop another of London’s skyscrapers, I was able to really see The Shard for the first time.

In this video, with off-the-cuff narration that I’ll clean up in post, I share those moments with you.