Yes, I was back in London in the summer of 1973, at the foot of the lions of Trafalgar Square and (practically) in the shadow of the spire of St Martin-in-the-Fields. When I was there in '72 I hadn't expected to revisit London so soon, but a number of friends, both old and new, were planning to be in either England, Paris, Rome or Ireland at various but conveniently spaced times in'73, so I had a chance to meet up with all of them.
In the fall of '72. I began teaching at Northwestern U., in Evanston, IL. My apartment, a fourth-floor walkup at the edge of downtown, overlooked part of the campus. Here is the view in the afternoon and, at some later time, during a sunset:
My office was in the venerable University Hall:
But I spent a good deal of time in the fairly new university library:
Otherwise, I took very few pictures of the campus or nearby Chicago that year. At one point I did take the El to Oak Park to see the famed Frank Lloyd Wright houses and Unity Temple. It surprises me now that I took only three photos. (I would take a lot more on a later visit after I had acquired a better camera.) They certainly aren't my best architectural photos, though I kind of like the biker in the Unity Temple shot. That's the Laura Gale House in the second photo, and I'll include a shot of the Moore House even though there is a strange streaking as if I were behind a dirty windshield (I was on foot).
The only other Chicago photo I have to show you from that first year is of the Loop skyline, looking northward. I must have been at the front of the platform at the Chinatown El station.
In Cleveland I took these family photos at a wedding in spring '73. In the first, that's my Aunt Fanny, her son Angelo and Angelo's wife Lorraine, plus Ellen standing in the middle. In the second it's Ellen, Mom and my sister-in-law Dottie.
And that summer, it was off to Europe, first to meet up with my old friend David Hartwell and his wife Pat. If I recall correctly, David was in England partly on business: he was already a science fiction book editor. We planned to do an excursion by car up to Cambridge and to see a bit of Norfolk before heading west to the home of the SF writer Brian Aldiss, near Oxford. The rest of my itinerary included meeting Mike Bavar in Paris and Rome, then traveling on my own in Florence and southern France, after which I'd return to London to meet up with a Northwestern friend and his family, and finally to Ireland, where another Northwestern couple was staying that summer.
Once again I marked my excitement at arriving in Europe by taking a couple of photos of the first sighting of land:
I may have pre-arranged to meet David and Pat in Trafalgar Square, amidst the people and pigeons. In any case, that's the setting of my first London photos, including one of David and Pat:
At some point we or at least I went to Kew Gardens:
Our trip beyond London began with a visit to the rent-a-car office, on Edgeware Road if I remember correctly, for a convenient exit northward. We planned to rent a more economical stick-shift vehicle, which meant that David would have to be the sole driver; but he had a headache that day and found driving the streets of London too stressful to handle. So after a couple of traffic-packed miles we went back to the rental place for an automatic, which I drove for the rest of the day. Our first stop north of London was in Hertfordshire, at Hatfield House, a stately home open to the public, noted for its painting collection as well as its architecture and gardens:
We arrived in the city of Cambridge at sunset.
That evening, after settling into our B&B, we went to a movie: And Now For Something Completely Different. I had heard about Monty Python from a British friend in New York, but the show hadn't played on American TV yet, so this was our first exposure to the troop--a great experience with a packed British audience. Most of our next day was spent visiting various colleges of Cambridge. Some I can identify: e.g., Emmanuel College in this shot:
And Trinity College:
My favorite was King's College, mainly because of its Chapel with the fan-gothic interior, one of the most beautiful buildings I've ever entered, though my Instamatic wasn't up to taking a picture. In the photos below you see, first the Front Court; then looking up at the Chapel; then the Chapel in the distance across the River Cam:
It was a lovely day, it hardly needs to be added--a great day for punting on the River Cam:
We visited a couple of other colleges that I can't at the moment identify, though the modern buildings were part of a science complex:
Beyond Cambridge, our next stop was Ely Cathedral. Once again I couldn't get any shots of the interior, with the awesome octagonal dome above the altar--but here are a couple of views of the exterior:
We then headed toward the northern coast of Norfolk--I can't remember if we had a specific destination in mind. Along the way we stopped at a ruin I haven't been able to identify:
We stayed the night--I think two nights--in the town of Cromer, an appealingly old-fashioned Victorian seaside resort town (though much smaller and less famous than, say, Brighton). It had an 1890s Hotel de Paris perched above a pier with "amusements":
For some time I was believing we had stayed at the Hotel de Paris--no doubt because I'd taken a picture of it--but as I'm writing this post I'm vaguely remembering a more modest B&B. In any case, we spent a good part of the next day in a shore area a few miles west of Cromer, where there are National Nature Reserves. We rented a rowboat and rowed down an inlet to the North Sea, where there was a vast expanse of beach. The water was a little too cold for swimming, as I recall, but it was a great place to visit:
We also saw a Victorian water tower, part of nearby Sandringham Park (though we didn't visit the royal estate adjoining it). The next morning we began a leisurely drive east and then south, along the curved coast of Norfolk. I can't identify the more ancient tower in the second photo below, but the ruined church is St Andrew's, just south of the border between Norfolk and Suffolk. (It took a lot of Internet hunting to find this one! It appears that the ivy has now been cut down.) At one point we came upon a stable that rented horses for rides down the vast expanses of beach. Pat, an equestrian, took advantage of the opportunity, while David and I wandered around the vicinity.
We got as far south as the fishing village of Dunwich, the supposed setting of the narrative poem The Borough, source of Britten's great opera Peter Grimes. There was no village any longer, just a place to launch boats, but the site had a certain austere grandeur, and dunes to climb:
We also stopped at Blythburgh Priory, and at one of the several old windmills that dot the landscape around the Dunwich area:
At this point we started driving westward toward Oxford. Our one stop along the way (that I remember and took pictures of) was in Buckinghamshire, not far from Oxford, at a stately home called Hartwell House. If I recall correctly, David did not know of any family connection to the Hartwells of Hartwell House, but he thought--we all did--that it would be fun to take a look at the place. Today, I see via the Internet, it is an upscale hotel; then it was still a private residence. I don't recall knocking on the door, but we did stroll around the grounds with some leisure, so I assume that either the place was unoccupied or the owners gave us permission.
Those are the last photos I took of our car trip. We did visit Brian Aldiss near Oxford, but we didn't explore the town or the colleges, or at least I didn't. My next photo is of Paris, so I either took a train back to London or David and Pat dropped me off at Heathrow or back in the city. More about Paris and Rome in my next post.
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