Westminster and TARDIS – Part 1
September 4, 2009As today was the last day in London before leaving for Cardiff (returning to London again in about a week), I decided to make a quick trip out to the apparent tourist Mecca of Westminster, home to the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace. As there are quite a few images to show, I’ve split the post up into 2 parts.
Coming out of the tube station at Westminster, you are greeted straight away with a great view of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. Similar to the Tower of London, I think there is quite a bit of restoration work going on at Westminster, they were even rebuilding the entrances and exits to the Green Park tube station near Buckingham Palace to make it more user friendly.
Literally just around the corner from Big Ben and co. was Westminster Abbey, again, like the Tower of London, a place that has hundreds of years of history centred around it. Home to almost every royal coronation since William the Conquer and the resting place of numerous kings and queens, as well as important historical figures.
Walking around the Abbey halls you encounter countless tombs and dedications made to well known figures in history. Poets corner in particular contains at the very least a remembrance display to almost every important author from British history; Charles Dickens, George Eliot, T. S. Eliot,John Keats, Rudyard Kipling, William Shakespeare, Alfred Lord Tennyson and William Wordsworth and the three Bronte Sisters inclusive.
Most of the visitors seemed sucked in to visiting and searching out the famous names of Poets corner, but I was most looking forward to seeking out what happened to be a very quiet and overlooked part of the Abbey where the dedications to scientists appeared.
The monument dedicated to Isaac Newton was very spectacular and takes quiet a prominent place in the main nave, however there are quite a few other notable scientists who make appearances within the Abbey, notably; James Prescott Joule, Paul Dirac, Alfred Russel Wallace, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and the Aussie inventor of penicillin extraction Howard Florey. But the person I had been most looking forward to finding, was surprisingly hard to discover, Charles Darwin himself. Once I had found this monument, I realised why.
Charles Darwin at Westminster Abbey
Originally uploaded by @dino – not my own image
There lay the dedication to someone who made arguably one of the greatest contributions to science, and his grave displays just his name, date of birth and date of death. No mention or reference to his life’s work or accomplishments, as most others in the Abbey received (Dirac’s even had this equation inscribed on his). Surprisingly, this effected me quite a lot. I can understand the reasons why no reference to his work was made, the grave of the man who sparked evolutionary theory laying in probably the most important religious buildings in Europe, after the Vatican, but I really feel he deserves the respect of making reference to his life accomplishments, rather than appearing to ignore it. It sort of soured my visit to the abbey…
