Remembrance - 11am, 11th of November 2014 - The Great War started 100 years ago this year

poppies for 888,246 dead

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

3rd November 2014 - a grey London Monday morning.

Each ceramic poppy below commemorates a life lost in The Great War by a British or Colonial Soldier...

not the wounded, nor the 'shell-shocked',

nor the German dead, nor the French, Itatian, Russian, Turkish, Serb, Austrian….

We all find very large numbers hard to visualise -

but not today at the Tower of London.

Traitor's Gate engulfed

Spare a quid or two for an old soldier?

The White Tower 1070

Tower Bridge's cast iron balustrade in white, blue and now RED

the 'Walkie-Talkie' afar off

Tower Bridge approach

in Flanders' fields….

***

A hidden gem on the fringe of the City

No 2 Temple Place is, for those who do not know it, worth the detour. Located very close to Temple station it was designed by John Loughborough Pearson for the first Lord Astor in 1895 as his London pad and base from which he ruled his empire once he had been driven from the USA by the fears of kidnapping. It is a sumptuous building both internally and externally which displays a great deal of excellent craftsmanship. It is only open for three months in the year (this is the first year it has been open at all) and currently houses a nice little exhibition about William Morris with significant contributions from Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Philip Webb et al.

Set to close at the end of January, it will re-open in January 2013 with a new but, as yet, unknown exhibition.

The building is now owned and managed by The Bulldog Trust.