The place I needed to be was the London Metropolitan Archives, somewhere that's been on the periphery of my things to do list for a long time, but I've never had a real reason to go before. One of my activities outside of the day job is as a church organist. I play regularly at St. Paul's, Harringay, which was accoladed last year as one of the top ten best modern churches in Britain. In order to get a modern church, either someone has to decide to build one where there wasn't one before or something has to have happened to an older one - in this case, it is the latter, and the old church burnt down in 1984. The new church has no war memorials in it so, in this year of the commemoration of the start of the First World War, we want to find out whether there were any memorials in the old church and, if we can, work out what happened to them. I had done some searching online and found out that some documents that might be helpful were at the London Metropolitan Archives.
The LMA is only open one Saturday a month (it's open on other days too, just not weekends!) and it just so happened that today was the day, so off I went. The LMA is just off Rosebery Avenue, near Sadlers Wells Theatre. My main geographical issue was turning off my autopilot when going around Newington Green when I had to take a different exit from the one for my route to work. However, I had plenty of other issues - my gears were a bit clunky, I'd got to the point in Finsbury Park where I usually remember to turn on my sports watch when I realised I'd forgotten even to put it on and when I was over halfway to the LMA, I realised I'd forgotten my phone (during the course of the day I also managed to spray cola all over the visitors' lounge at the LMA and drop my bike on its side when the saddle pack was open, thereby littering my belongings all over the street...). I had been a bit concerned about where I would park my bike, but the LMA has bike racks out the back and a very nice guard who will show you where they are.
Now, I knew from my pre-trip research that you need a "History Card" to access the original documents in the archive and that you can pre-register to save time on arrival (which I had done). However, what the website does say is that they will take a picture of you for your card. They also don't tell you that the perfectly lovely man taking the picture will not mention to you that, having cycled nearly five miles to get there, you have a red stripe across the middle of your forehead from where your cycle helmet has been. The result of this is that you end up with your History Card looking like this until 2017:
Once I'd made all the notes I could and seen all the documents I had the time to review, I set off back again. I stopped on Essex Road to visit one of my favourite fabric shops (oops!), which also allowed me to hop (on foot, but not literally hopping) around the most hideous temporary traffic lights known to man - I'd figured out that the best way to deal with it was to walk to the other side of the junction and set off when the cars going the other way through the lights had a green signal. This helped me to miss the seemingly millions of buses that were queuing up to make my life a misery, and I set off back towards home with relatively little of note happening.
This is the first time for a very long time that I've cycled this kind of distance two days running, so I was quite pleased with the way it went. The total distance there and back was 15.68km so, with 8.01km ride home yesterday evening, my total for cycling is now a humongous 122.96km!
No comments:
Post a Comment