The George Inn, Southwark, London - Anglophile Friday

 The George Inn, Southwark

and nearby,

The Shard, a.k.a. Shard of Glass

95 story skyscraper,
housing offices, restaurants, and hotels.

Photos from March of 2015

Huge red dot marks the approximate location of The George Inn.
I'm going by its proximity to the intersection of A3200 and A3
It could be off, I suppose, but you get the general idea.

 The George Inn Courtyard

The George Inn is located in Southwark, pronounced SUTH-ick (for my fellow Americans who have a tendency to actually pronounce every letter in a given word.) Evidently, there are far too many unnecessary letters in English place names.

The stairway in our house is narrow and steep too,

but somehow doesn't exude that same romantic charm.

From Wikipedia:

"In 1677, the George was rebuilt after a serious fire that destroyed most of medieval Southwark. There had been many such inns in this part of London. Probably the most famous was The Tabard where, in 1388, Chaucer began The Canterbury Tales. The Tabard was also rebuilt after the same fire, but was demolished in the late 19th century.

"Later, the Great Northern Railway used the George as a depot and pulled down two of its fronts to build warehousing. Now just the south face remains.

"The George was one of the many famous coaching inns in the days of Charles Dickens. Dickens in fact visited the George and referred to it in Little Dorrit. It is thought that the Galleried Inns were the inspiration of the original theatres, that the Players were on a dais in the Courtyard with the standing audience next to them and that those paying a premium would be in the Galleries with a better view."

A better view

This was before the wonderful mix of olives

brought to our table, along with a bowl of olive oil

and slices of bread. Who couldn't live off that!

(Maybe a little cheese, too.)

But, of course we didn't stop with the olives and bread.

 It had been a very long day.

We were all feeling a bit blurry.

The whole scene is beautiful at night,

with The Shard rising up in the background

and the lights making everything glow.

It was a nice way to end an evening.

Of course, one expects places like this in London to be old, but take a look at this:

The Pandy Inn in Dorstone, Herefordshire,

has been a free house continuously

since the 12th century.

No kidding.


*** 

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Homeschooling - Making a History Timeline DIY

Believe it or not, that is one segment of a homemade history timeline that our family made during the years we homeschooled the kids (21 years in all!)  The photos below are not in order, and are only a few segments of the timeline, but they give you a general idea of what we did to construct our history timeline.

So why make your own timeline when there are others available for purchase? After all, it's a lot easier to hit the 'Buy Now' button than it is to do the work of actually cutting out pictures and making date tags.

I had seen history timelines that could be purchased, ready to place on a wall. I had also seen timelines that were in book form. BUT it seemed to me that it would be much more helpful to the learning process if we could actually make our own timeline, putting up adding machine tape in rows (7 in all) across  two adjacent walls in our school room, and adding our own tags and pictures.

As we studied something, we would cut pictures out of old National Geographics we got from library sales (not touching their duplicates which sat on our bookshelves), and would staple tags onto the wall. So yes, we still have the bookshelf that contains about 18 linear feet of those yellow-covered magazines.

I'm sure that now we could simply go online and find all the pictures we needed, could download them and print them out. Things have come a long way since we started homeschooling all those years ago.

You can see that the timeline was pretty beaten up by the time our homeschooling years were over. These photos were taken after the homeschooling years, just before I reluctantly removed the timeline from the walls. Of all the objects I used for homeschooling, the timeline we'd made ourselves was the most difficult to part with. At least I have the photos, as long as Carbonite doesn't let me down.

I think some tags fell off this one.

The colored ribbons were stapled from one date to another to indicate the years covered by the reign of that particular monarch.

As I said before, these are not in order. But you will notice that in the years B.C., the dates on the adding machine tape were much closer together than they were between A.D. 1500 and A.D. 1600, for example. We had a lot more information for that time period and needed more space in which to place our pictures and tags. Still, once we went to a wider spacing, we kept that uniform for the remainder of the timeline.

Evidently that poor guy lost his right foot during the Plague that struck London in 1665. A plague and a fire. Why is this making me want to visit England again??

Yes, we did study American history, and those lines ran beneath this timeline, concurrently, so that you could see, for example, what was going on in the world at the time that Jamestown Colony was being established.

Aside:  When Jamestown was established, by the way, Pandy Inn in Dorstone, Herefordshire, had already been a free house for 500 years - and still is. But that wasn't on our timeline.

Pandy Inn, Twelfth Century Free House

Dorstone

Did you notice with what little encouragement my brain turns to England?? It's pathetic, isn't it!

By the way, it's a great idea to make a timeline even if your kids aren't in school at home. It's a fun project for everyone involved, it's inexpensive, and it's a very effective learning tool.

***

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 This post may be linked to some of the following: Mop it Up Monday  and  Cure for the Common Monday and Mealtime Monday and Clever Chicks Blog Hop and Mosaic Monday  and Barn Charm and  The Marketplace  and On the Menu Monday and  Mix it up Monday and Make it Pretty Monday and   What's in the Gunny Sack and  Making the World Cuter Mondays and Make the Scene Monday and  Something I Whipped Up Monday and  Motivate Me Monday and  Making Monday Marvelous and Get Your Craft On and   You're Gonna Love it Tuesday and Creative Showcase and  Tweak it Tuesday and  Coastal Charm Tuesday and  Take a Look Tuesday and  Tasty Tuesday and Tasty Tuesday and Love Bakes Good Cakes and  Tempt My Tummy Tuesdays  and Overflowing With Creativity and Mom on TimeOut  and Adorned from Above and 3boysandadog and Trueaimeducation and Cast Party Wednesday and  We Did it Wednesday  and It's a Party at Creative Princess and Artsy Corner Thursday  and The Self-sufficient Home Acre and  I'm Lovin' it Thursday and  Mandatory Mooch   and Foodie Friends Friday and  Serenity Saturday and Get Schooled Saturday  and Inspiration Friday(ThursNite) and Vintage Inspiration Friday and Photo Friday and  A Favorite Thing Saturday and Sunny Simple Sunday and Market Yourself Monday and  Saturday Nite Special

The Pandy Inn & Bull's Head Free House

 The Pandy Inn, Dorstone

In 2012, because airfare is not coming down any time soon, I will be traveling back to England in photos alone, and reviewing some of my favorites with you. If you tire of seeing these photos, feel free to send airfare from MSP to LON. I'm not picky; either Heathrow or Gatwick will work for me. I will be happy to fly there and take additional photos of the enchanting English countryside, then return to Wisconsin and write blog posts to share with you. It would be a tough job, but I'd be willing to make the sacrifice. :-)

Think about it: This place has been a free house (a pub) since the 1100s!  What else happened in the 1100's? Well, for starters, William the Conqueror's son became King of England, the Crusaders captured Acre, Saint Bernard founded the Abbey of Clairvaux in France, and in the United States of America, we were...oh wait...

The twelfth century was a long time ago, but that doesn't mean the people were less intelligent than today or carrying clubs and grunting at their toothless women with straggly hair. Don't believe it. People were going places and doing things! And some of them were busy establishing this cool little pub in Herefordshire (above).

The village of Craswall is near the Welsh border (see map below).






View Larger Map

photo from The Bull's Head

Photo from Bull's Head, a 17th century pub

Famous old drovers inn in the superb country of the Black Mountains south of Hay on Wye. Now a pub restaurant concentrating on serving good food. Open Friday, Saturday and Sunday lunch. 'The Bull's Head pub in Craswall is one of the best rural pubs in the UK with great food.' Owen Sheers, The Daily Telegraph. - from Facebook






View Larger Map

Point A represents Craswall. Point B represents Dorstone. Now you can see why it took us twice as long to get anywhere in England than what we had planned. At home, if the place we wanted to visit was 60 miles away, we'd figure that it would take about an hour. In England, we would have to figure at least two hours. But I'm not complaining. The journey by car through the English countryside was always worth it!

These aren't the only pubs in Herefordshire, of course, but they're the only ones we visited. We had  lunch on a Sunday at the Bull's Head and dinner one night at The Pandy Inn with friends. There are lots of other places to see, such as cathedrals, castles, and ancient burial sites  - and, of course, the beautiful Golden Valley!

P.S. I'm hoping to keep Fridays as a Travel Blog day. Sometimes England, sometimes Wisconsin, etc. We'll see how it goes.


Have a great weekend, everyone!

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