5/30 Check another one off my bucket list! The Ceremony of the Keys.

Yesterday, Saturday, was cold and rainy, a perfect day to stay home, read, blog, email, etc.  I did more "etc" than anything else.

However, we did have plans for the evening and I was excited.  We had tickets to go to the Ceremony of the Keys - the nighttime lock down of the Tower of London.  You have to request the free tickets months in advance because it's a very popular venue and they only allow a certain number of people in.  All we had to do was get there at 9:30 PM - on the dot - or we'll be locked out - and I wanted to be locked in.

We decided to go to The George Inn for dinner first.  This is probably my favorite place in London and since we discovered it we go every time we are here.  The George is the last coaching inn left in London.  As you might imagine, a coaching inn is where the coaches pull into the courtyard of an inn and deposit or pick up their riders, change horses (I have never figured out how that works - how DO they get their horses back?), get a drink or a meal and of course, since it's an inn, some sleep there.

It's off High Street near London Bridge and other than the pub sign high up on the building, you wouldn't be able to find it.  The entrance is narrow - wide enough for a carriage or a small car - and it is gated with tall iron gates.  Once in, you are in a large courtyard which in "the olden days" would have been much larger - large enough for several coaches to turn around, passengers to disembark.  The inn itself is on the right, the ground floor dark in color, the upper two levels which are partially balconied are white with lots and lots of flowers hanging. It's closely hemmed in on two sides by office buildings so you have this interesting contrast of old and new.  When we go in the afternoon, you can see people working in their offices on their computers while we sit where Shakespeare might have sat while computing with his quill pen.  Those poor folk who have to sit up there looking down on the George while they work!


The restaurant is upstairs in what used to be the sleeping areas.  The skeleton of the walls is still there and the fireplaces.  Downstairs are small rooms with fireplaces and higgledy piggledy furniture.  I remember a great afternoon we spent with our son in this room.  We had the place all to ourselves and it was sweet!

We left the house around 5:45 for our 7:00 dinner reservation.  We decided to take the tube to get to the George and then on to the Tower.  Wrong decision!  Unknown to us, we were about to encounter another London experience!  There was a big football (soccer to us) game that afternoon and the fans from the winning team - all 30,000 of them - were on their way home and they were happy!!  The Underground had not added any trains or cars and The fans were crammed into the tube cars so deep that you couldn't get on.  Train after crammed train went by.  Sometimes when the doors would open the fans inside would break into song - drunken song!  Finally, one train stopped and some got off opening up a bit of space so we squeezed in.  Mistake #2!  We only had to go three stops but after the first one, the train stopped between stations because the car in front of us with the drunken singers was causing so much ruckus that they stopped the train.  That meant they stopped ours, of course, and who knows how many more behind us.  We were crammed into this train and when you are that close to other people you begin to make many new friends!  This picture doesn't convey the warmth of the bodies that we were feeling at this point!  Nor the claustrophobic feelings I am sure some might have been experiencing.

One close to us, actually under John's arm as John was holding on to the bar above him, was Japanese and said this was nothing; in Japan, the conductors push you in to fit in as many as possible!  Another man and woman we were pressed against and began talking to (I mean, what else are you going to do?) were really nice and when the train finally moved enough to get to the next station only for us to be told that they were closing down the WHOLE line because of the rowdies on the trains, these two said "Follow us, we'll show you how to get where you want to go, it's only a 15 minute walk."  Everyone streamed out at once.  All the way through the station and up the escalators, these two kept looking back to make sure we were nearby because there were hundreds of us trying to get out and when we finally did and could breath, they walked us up the sidewalk a bit until they could point to where we needed to go.  We walked on to The George to enjoy our dinner only 30 minutes late for our reservation.  That means an almost two hour jaunt to get there.  Steak and mushroom pie with George Ale gravy and puff pastry on top, though.  Worth it.  Yummm.

After dinner we walked to The Tower of London via the Thames Walk which is a "pathway" along the Thames amongst the office buildings.  We knew we were headed in the right direction because every once in a while we could see the Tower's towers on our left and the river to our right.  But before we got on to the Walk, we had to cross the London Bridge and we saw an iconic British sight.  This is a shot of the Tower Bridge with the HMS Belfast in the middle of the river and a tour boat about to dock.  The Tower of London would be to the left of the bridge toward you.

The infamous Gherkin also seen from the London Bridge as we crossed it:

When we arrived at the Tower about 30 minutes early, many had gathered and you could feel the anticipation to observe this old tradition.  We could also feel the rain - cold and wet, no surprise - we are in England.  Precisely at 9:30 - as they said it would be - our names were called, our tickets shown and we were inside the Tower.

Now, I've been in the Tower several times and I'll probably go again on this trip but I'd never been there at night.  It's a bit spooky and I can't imagine being a prisoner there waiting for the day when my head would be chopped off!  This locking ceremony has been going on for over 750 years and not a single night has been missed - not one! Not even during the blitz in WWII when one was 20 minutes late.  This made me think about Princess Elizabeth who was imprisoned here in the 1500's by her sister Mary, the bloody Queen Mary. She may have been watching this ceremony from one of the windows above us wondering what her sister's plans were for her.  She certainly could have heard it.  That's just remarkable to me - 750 years - and so English.

We were escorted in by a Beefeater, a Yeoman Warder, one of 35 who guard the Tower and the Queen's jewels and now act more as tour guides than as guards. The Beefeaters live in the Tower with their families and have to have had at least 22 years of service to qualify.  In his booming and officious voice, our Warder got us all acting like privates in an army, under control and very quiet.  He gave us the outline of what we were going to see and what we should do.

About that time we saw a glow at the end of the dark lane near the gates to our left and heard the clop, clop of heels on stone walking toward us.  It was another guard in a red coat, wearing a squashed top hat and carrying a lamp lit by a candle and the keys.  He met a guard of 4 soldiers, one unarmed, and he handed the lantern to him.  Pictures were not allowed from this point on because of the Queen's copyrights!  This explains the lighting on this one that John snuck in and actually, this is how it looked to us.  I was in the front row right in front of these fellows so I really had a great look at it all - in the dark!

The five of them retraced the Warder's steps back to the first gate which was so far away from us we could hardly see it.  But we could hear it slam closed and the key turn - it's a big key, about 8" long and it is the original key, although the locks have been replaced several times - and then they marched closer to us and locked the inner gate.  As they began to march toward us again, another guard approached from our right and through an arch to demand "Halt, who comes there?"  The response was "The keys."  "Whose keys?" he asked.  "The Queen's keys."  Proceed, they were told and they went up the stairs in front of me toward the inner courtyard and the White Tower to be met again by another set of guards.  Just as those guards began to ask their questions, you could hear 10:00 being pealed by the Tower bells.  Somewhere the phrase "God save the Queen" was said and prior we had been instructed to yell "Amen!" which we did.  By 10:05, as we were told and right on time, the procedure was over, the soldiers had dispersed and we were allowed to leave.  We all wondered how since they had just locked us in!!  Well, just for this reason, small doors had been cut into the original huge gates so we could duck through and get out.  Whew!  But, oh, the price for tourism..

As we left, we could still hear revelers across the river celebrating their win, but whew, again, we had an uneventful trip home.