{"id":1865,"date":"2025-11-23T18:44:02","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T18:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/?p=1865"},"modified":"2025-11-23T19:28:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T19:28:06","slug":"visiting-the-uk-november-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/2025\/11\/23\/visiting-the-uk-november-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Visiting the UK, November 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I visited recently the UK (London and Manchester) for a two week work related visit. I managed to squeeze in a visit to Leigh-on-Sea, Essex as well to visit the old family homestead on my Mother’s side – the Crooked Billet Pub. My Mother’s family name is Hattox – which got corrupted from “Haddock” somewhere between Virginia and Ecru, Mississippi. Several, several grand fathers ago, our ancestor Sir Richard Haddock lived in the building above in Leigh-on-Sea – right off the mud flats. It is now a very popular and cosy pub. Enjoy the photos<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The view out of my hotel room of the Thames. A very nice place. The Locke at Broken Wharf<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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My walk to work each morning up from the Thames<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The Millennium Bridge from the Tate Modern Museum to Saint Pauls<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Some of the general feel around my hotel on the north bank of the Thames – lots of winding and interesting spaces<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The HMS Belfast, a museum ship moored by Tower Bridge and the Tower of London. She served as a flagship during WW2 mostly in very northerly Atlantic with convoys going past Norway to Russia. Lots of foul weather for a ship with an open to the elements bridge<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The monument to The Great Fire of London of 1666. The destruction of property was extensive and after the fact, thatch roofing was banned for many centuries – only exempted recently for the reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. From Wikipedia<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The material destruction has been computed at 13,200\u201313,500 houses, 86 or 87 parish churches, 44\u00a0Company<\/a>\u00a0Halls, the\u00a0Royal Exchange<\/a>, the\u00a0Custom House<\/a>, St Paul’s Cathedral, the\u00a0Bridewell Palace<\/a>\u00a0and other City prisons, the\u00a0General Letter Office<\/a>, and the three western city gates\u2014Ludgate<\/a>,\u00a0Newgate<\/a>, and\u00a0Aldersgate<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Visiting the Tate Modern on a damp Sunday<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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The former Turbine Hall, where a large portion of London’s electrical power used to generated<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Concrete structure is interesting!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Front and back of a hand sewn quilt from Nigeria<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Saint Pancras train station – showing some amazing Victorian iron work (and several neat public pianos that folks tend to play interesting music on!)<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Last morning, on the way to work<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

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and on a last note – the pubs in Manchester seemed to have a very humorous naming themes going. I particularly liked this one and The Rat and Pigeon – hahaha!<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\n

I visited recently the UK (London and Manchester) for a two week work related visit. I managed to squeeze in a visit to Leigh-on-Sea, Essex as well to visit the old family homestead on my Mother’s side – the Crooked Billet Pub. My Mother’s family name is Hattox – which got corrupted from “Haddock” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1865"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1896,"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1865\/revisions\/1896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sixthelement.org\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}