Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

Sorry to finally be blogging about Wednesday’s events today, the new blog link wasn’t working last night. The number of interesting trips and tours have begun to snowball this week, and blogging about them in a timely way has gotten a bit more difficult.

That said, I feel as though I must write about my experiences on Wednesday, which for me included both Westminster Abbey and the Churchill Museum/Cabinet War Rooms. I’ll echo what I think everyone’s opinion of Westminster Abbey was: unfathomable, in both size and historical importance. I had not realized just how much of the church is dedicated to graves and memorials. It felt overwhelming to be walking from Newton to Darwin to Elizabeth I while flying past David Lloyd George, Edward Elgar, and other very important people for whom the tour just had no time. Certainly no public building other than Westminster Abbey gives an impression of the richness and grandeur and power present in the totality of English history.

And yet, personally, I think I probably got as much out of the Cabinet War Rooms as I did the Abbey. One of the most amazing things about World War Two, I’ve always thought, was that something as powerful as 20th Century Great Britain was brought so close to annihilation, and survived not through brute force but rather determination, cooperation, and strong and unwavering leadership.

Seeing the Abbey and the War Rooms in the same day meant seeing Britain’s at its most epic and powerful and at its simplest, starkest, and truly finest. (Here I’m using juxtaposition, a strategy never before employed on this blog). The Rooms themselves, for those who’ve not yet seen them, are presented with simply an audio guide and some signage, (rather than overblown multimedia) which I think serves them well. Even recreated, they do not appear visually impressive as they were reserved for the PM, the Cabinet and important staff, and there was a minimum of space under the concrete/steel buffer. If one didn’t know the decisions made and the speeches given from that place, one might find it unremarkable.

I might not have recommended the Churchill Museum adjoining the War Rooms if it were on its own. It does gloss over the poorer choices of his career and has quite a confusing setup and superfluous multimedia. My favorite part, frankly, was the loop of video from his remarkable memorial service.

On the tube home I was thinking how tremendous it is that the nerve center of Britain could be confined to those dozen or so rooms in 1940, and only 13 years later it could be back in all its splendor at Westminster Abbey for the coronation of a new queen (with nary a toilet flush to be heard).