Whilst we are on our slightly odd six-week work “holiday” on Eastcheap, I wanted to make sure I visited the area as well as I could reasonably manage. It’s odd, as I’ve been to this area on occasion over the years, but don’t feel I know it at all. A stone’s throw from Moorgate and Liverpool Street, and not far from London Bridge, but it’s all a little different.
Some bits I remember in a weird way – I remember schlepping into an Orange shop in Leadenhall Market, all the way from Reading, in order to buy the highly desirable new Nokia 8210 handset (so I guess towards the end of 1999 or early 2000). I can’t remember why I’d been there, I guess for a course or something, but I’d asked the guy to put me on the mailing list when they got some new ones in. How far away twenty years ago was.
Always nice to see the Lloyds Building too, which looks as cutting edge now as it did then (from the outside, at least). Leadenhall Market looks both touristy, kitsch and tatty, while also being less useful than I remember. It seems to consist of eateries, many of them chain establishments, packed with monied suits. There did look to be an excellent booze shop, and a nice-looking Spanish ham-oriented deli/restaurant, but it was less of a destination and more of an unusual food court.
I clearly am not going to visit the Tower of London while I’m here, as I’d like to go with the kids sometime soon. So, on my little list I have a few places to tick off before 1st August brings our move back across the river to Bankside/Waterloo. So far, I have successfully managed to visit the London Mithraeum, with a cheeky hello to the “London Stone” along the way. To be honest, I may as well have visited the Old Rope Museum and paid handsomely for a ticket.
Skipping over the London Stone, which after all, is just a stone, I really want to talk about the Temple of Mithras, or the “Mithraeum”. It’s allegedly a religious site to a pretty ancient cult from Roman London, but once you’ve spent some time there, it feels like you’re being indoctrinated into a cult yourself, as it’s clear no-one has any idea what it was for and it all seems very much based on trust and blind faith. Mind you, the venue is extremely impressive, even more so for being carved out of Bloomberg’s European HQ, and Joanna Lumley has been drafted in to do the five minute voiceover which also features a few experts humbly admitting they have no idea what the Temple’s purpose was, who Mithras was, or pretty much anything. Their guess sounds a lot like it was a forerunner of the Freemasons, i.e. a social club for well-meaning and well-heeled blokes in London. Plus ça change. I’ve never submitted a Freedom of Information request before, but this place almost made me do so, as I’m intrigued how much of London’s money, rather than Bloomberg’s, went towards buying/protecting/preserving/promoting this site. Fair enough, take the excavated bit of sculpture and what-not and stick it in the Museum of London or wherever, but what on earth does preserving a prime bit of real estate right next to Bank station achieve, unless Bloomberg are paying full market rate for the privilege?
Timsformational 