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London

I. What historical sightseeings of London do you know? Why are they so famous?

II. Read the text about London and its major places of interest. What new facts have you learned about the history and sightseeings of London after reading the text?

London is a city which was never planned. It has accumulated. For this reason, and also because its development was chiefly guided by mercantile considerations, London is no longer, at first sight, overtly beautiful. Haphazard and shapeless, it offers few fine vistas and has no kind of symmetry. Its component boroughs seem self-contained and unrelated to each other, for once beyond the ancient boundaries of the City proper, and once outside the Government quarter of Westminster and Whitehall, London is nothing but a mass of rural villages – Kensington, Tottenham, Paddington, Camberwell, Edmonton, Hampstead, and so on – engulfed in the tide of two centuries of swift urban expansion. Even Westminster itself was long a separate entity, an Abbey church and royal palace standing high across the water meadows, accessible to Londoners by river.

The Thames in London is now only beautiful at certain times of day, in certain lights, from certain viewpoints – from Waterloo Bridge at dawn or on a summer’s evening for example, and at night from Cardinal’s Wharf on the South Bank. In 1951 the Exhibition buildings for the Festival of Britain may do something to alleviate the dreary aspect of the Thames’ South Bank; but such alleviation, in its essence temporary, is too local and too late to restore to the London river which has lost spaciousness and splendour that once made it rival the Paris Seine.

It is certain that the stranger – English or foreign – must be initially bewildered by his first sight of London; it is unlikely that he may also be disappointed or repelled. It will seem noisy and inchoate, over-crowded, overlarge, and filled with undisciplined-looking buildings, many of them – Caxton Hall, Albert Hall Mansions, the Hotel Russel – in more than dubious taste. However, though we cannot claim for it the immediate fascination of Paris, nor Dublin’s tired chard, nor the stinging stimulus of New York’s first impact, this city contains not only a number of architectural works of the first importance, but a myriad places of quiet, rather melancholy beauty, as well as many hundreds with historical and literary associations for students and lovers of the past.

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The architectural beauties of London are most often unexpected. They are sometimes hard to find. Not many people know that if you push open the high forbidding wooden gates of the Deanery at St. Paul’s, you will find yourself standing in a moss-grown courtyard made dark by plane trees, and facing the dim front of a brick town-house by Sir Christopher Wren. One can wager that many, many Londoners have never seen the sphinxes in Chiswick Park, the Tudor tombs at Stoke Newington, the splendid Norman pillars of Waltham Abbey, the small street sloping down to Saint-Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, the Italian villas on the Paddington Canal, the little graveyard, feathery with sheep’s parsley in summertime, of the Old Church at Edmonton where Charles Lamb lies buried, or that oddest of all Victorian funeral schemes, the Catacombs and Columbarium in Highgate Cemetery.

It is safe to say that the three most famous buildings in England are Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral. In spite of Henry VII’s chapel, the Abbey is not, in its exterior, a very inspired nor in any way a major example of English Gothic; it is the Abbey’s rich contents that make each visit to it so rewarding. Seen across Parliament Square, the Abbey looks overshadowed by its neo-Gothic neighbour, the New Palace of Westminster. It does not stand out. The outlines of the Tower and St. Paul’s, on the other hand, loom along the river, two silhouettes which have come to represent London to people all over the world. The area which these two buildings together dominate – the area of the City, from Blackfriars to Tower ill

– is on in which the feel of old London has lingered longest. In atmosphere the City might be loosely termed “Dickensian”, but the names of the streets and alleys and wharfs, the names of the churches above all, take one back to the Middle Ages, and to the days before the Great Fire1. The City of London scourged by fire in 1666, by bombs in 1940, suffering in the last century from such pieces of vandalism as the sale and deliberate demolition of some of Wren’s churches by the Bishop of London, by day an inferno of petrol fumes and scurrying office workers, takes on an almost medieval immobility by night. When the typists have been drained away to the suburbs by the Underground, and the offices and churches stand locked and silent, the City of London assumes a timeless quality.

If you pursue your way down lower Thames Street, you come at length upon the ruined church, All Hallows Barking, and the Tower. Long, low, irregular, protected by a broad ditch and crouched behind casemate walls, the Tower of London looks sinister by night. A stray light may be glimmering

1 The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London, from Sunday, September 02 to Wednesday, September 05, 1666.

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through a mullion window2, or in some turret. An ugly war-memorial obscures your vision of the scaffold site outside the walls, on Tower Hill.

Although succeeding generations have done many things to the interior of St. Paul’s Cathedral which would have made Wren wince, the Cathedral is unquestionably the finest specimen of Renaissance church architecture in this country. As much as Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s repays a series of visits, for it contains many details which on a hurried visit one might miss.

All through the nineteenth century, London was spreading. It was creeping outwards on all sides, down towards Chelsea, up to Highgate and Hampstead which it quickly swallowed in its maw. Owing to the preservation of the Heath these two places seem country towns rather than regions of London. Heath Street and Golden Yard are more like corners of Tewkesbury or Romsey than parts of a metropolis. Next to arriving in London by air at night, when it looks like a complete continent of lights, you can get the clearest sense of its immensity by standing on Hampstead Heath, and looking down across the leafy countryside to the city below.

London has undergone many changes. Nevertheless, in spite of all that has been destroyed in one way or in another, by war, commercialism or stupidity, its essential character survives unaltered.

III. Put five questions of different types to the text you have just read. Discuss them in your group.

IV. Choose the correct variant for each blank from the box below. Pay attention that one variant is not necessary.

1.The National Gallery of London … many paintings created by the French, Dutch and Italian painters.

2.It … to construct a new business centre on the left bank of the

Thames.

3.During World War II lots of historical buildings located in the City of London … from fascist bombardments and attacks.

4.Earlier London … to the north; however, nowadays it is actively expanding in different directions.

5.By the 21st century such historical buildings as Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral … London one of the most attractive cities in Europe.

2 A mullion is a vertical element that forms a division between units of a window, door, or screen, or is used decoratively.

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was planned, would have made, contains, has been destroyed, was spreading, suffered

V. Make puzzles with the words from the text (ex. 2) using their definitions, synonyms/antonyms or giving some examples when these words can be mentioned. Let your group guess the answer.

E. g.

Dreary

1.Definition: something that makes a person sad or depressed or something gloomy; something boring or dull.

2.Synonyms: wistful, gloomy, grim, somber, dismal, dark; tedious, cheerless, sorrowful, lamentable, sad, sorrowful, mournful, tragic, melancholy/melancholic, dolorous.

3.Antonyms: bright, clear, light, sunny, lively; pleasant, funny, cheerful, blithe, blithesome, buoyant, gay, jocund, jolly, joyful, joyous, merry, mirthful, encouraging, hopeful, optimistic, happy.

4.Examples: this adjective can be used when you speak about bad weather or anything else that makes a person feel sad and gloomy; it can be also used when you speak about something boring and depressive.

VI. Complete the table below using the information from the text you have read (ex. II).

		Area of location	Architectural style	Current function
	E. g.
	Westminster	the City of	English Gothic	cemetery;
	Abbey	London		museum
	the New Palace
	of Westminster
	the Tower of
	London
	St. Paul’s
	Cathedral

VII. Translate this passage from the text you have read (ex. 2) in the written form.

London is a city which was never planned. It has accumulated. For this reason, and also because its development was chiefly guided by mercantile considerations, London is no longer, at first sight, overtly beautiful. Haphazard

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and shapeless, it offers few fine vistas and has no kind of symmetry. Its component boroughs seem self-contained and unrelated to each other, for once beyond the ancient boundaries of the City proper, and once outside the Government quarter of Westminster and Whitehall, London is nothing but a mass of rural villages – Kensington, Tottenham, Paddington, Camberwell, Edmonton, Hampstead, and so on – engulfed in the tide of two centuries of swift urban expansion. Even Westminster itself was long a separate entity, an Abbey church and royal palace standing high across the water meadows, accessible to Londoners by river.

The Thames in London is now only beautiful at certain times of day, in certain lights, from certain viewpoints – from Waterloo Bridge at dawn or on a summer’s evening for example, and at night from Cardinal’s Wharf on the South Bank. In 1951 the Exhibition buildings for the Festival of Britain may do something to alleviate the dreary aspect of the Thames’ South Bank; but such alleviation, in its essence temporary, is too local and too late to restore to the London river that lost spaciousness and splendour that once made it rival the Paris Seine.

It is certain that the stranger – English or foreign – must be initially bewildered by his first sight of London; it is unlikely that he may also be disappointed or repelled. It will seem noisy and inchoate, over-crowded, overlarge, and filled with undisciplined-looking buildings, many of them – Caxton Hall, Albert Hall Mansions, the Hotel Russel – in more than dubious taste. However, though we cannot claim for it the immediate fascination of Paris, nor Dublin’s tired chard, nor the stinging stimulus of New York’s first impact, this city contains not only a number of architectural works of the first importance, but a myriad places of quiet, rather melancholy beauty, as well as many hundreds with historical and literary associations for students and lovers of the past. The architectural beauties of London are most often unexpected. They are sometimes hard to find. Not many people know that if you push open the high forbidding wooden gates of the Deanery at St. Paul’s, you will find yourself standing in a moss-grown courtyard made dark by plane trees, and facing the dim front of a brick town-house by Sir Christopher Wren. One can wager that many, many Londoners have never seen the sphinxes in Chiswick Park, the Tudor tombs at Stoke Newington, the splendid Norman pillars of Waltham Abbey, the small street sloping down to Saint-Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe, the Italian villas on the Paddington Canal, the little graveyard, feathery with sheep’s parsley in summertime, of the Old Church at Edmonton where Charles Lamb lies buried, or that oddest of all Victorian funeral schemes, the Catacombs and Columbarium in Highgate Cemetery.

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VIII. Work in pairs. Make up a dialogue. Imagine that your partner is visiting London for the first time. Now he/she is coming to Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Try to answer his/her questions and give him/her as much information as possible.

IX. Using various Internet-resources, newspapers, scientific journals, popular science magazines and books prepare the presentation dedicated to one of the topics listed below. If it is possible accompany your presentation with posters, tables, pictures, schemes, diagrams, or any other materials illustrating and explaining your statements and ideas to your group-mates.

1.History of London.

2.Westminster Abbey.

3.Westminster Palace and Big Ben.

4.The Tower of London.

5.St. Paul’s Cathedral.

6.The Buckingham Palace.

7.The British Museum.

8.The National Gallery of London.

9.The Tate Gallery in London.

10.Victoria and Albert Museum.

11.The Natural History Gallery.

12.Hampton Court Palace.

13.Historical Parks of London.

14.Bridges of London.

15.London Zoo.

16.Sport Life of London.

17.Theatres of London.

18.University of London.

19.London Underground.

20.Shopping Centres of London.

X. Optional. Translate the following text into Russian.

The City of Sheffield

The modern city, with over half a million people, has grown from the tiny hamlet of Escafeld. Here, from small scattered beginnings, arose the great industries which have made the words “Sheffield, England” famous throughout the world. For the people who for centuries have lived among the hills learned from before the days of Chaucer how to shape metal for the service of man;

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proud of their craft and zealous for its survival they passed on their knowledge and experience from father to son.

The people of Sheffield are fortunate also in their homes, for the lovely hillsides of their widespread city provide them with delightful residential suburbs, and most of the valleys still retain vestiges of the woods which grew close to the hamlet by the Sheaf. But where the Don, the principal river, flows through the modern city, its banks are lined with steel works, products mainly of the industrial nineteenth century. Furnaces give no quarter to nature. First the nearby forests were felled for charcoal; then, in the coal age, the spreading steel works denuded the hillsides of their vegetation. Where the railways run through the Don Valley, there is no beauty save that which, with a splendour all its own, marks the tapping of great furnaces and the incandescent splash of molten steel.

When the casual traveller through Sheffield by rail sees these packed workshops, knowing nothing of the beauty they have marred and judging Sheffield by them, he may perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the whole city is dull and grimy. He is unaware that local people have managed to concentrate their industries in one place, leaving the natural beauty of the other valleys and the hilltops free for their homes and their pursuits. It is this industrial concentration which makes Sheffield unique among English manufacturing towns in allowing astonishing contrasts; for there is scarcely a street in the city’s centre from which green fields and wooded hillsides cannot be seen. Few such cities can boast that grouse can be shot within their boundaries.

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Elizabethan Architecture

What are your associations connected with St. Petersburg?

I. Read the text and say what new have you learned about the Russian Baroque?

The architecture of Elizabethan reign was flowering of exuberant Baroque on Russian soil, similar to the type which may be seen in Southern Germany and in Italy. It happened so that Elizabeth entrusted Russia's architectural fate to Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700-1771), son of the sculptor of Peter's reign. He proved to be the greatest European architect of his age, surpassing his British colleagues in imagination, those of Germany and Austria in grace, and the architects of France in magnificence.

It was fortunate that architectural imagination of Rastrelli matched Elizabeth's tastes. He was able to express in stone and stucco Elizabeth's love of the elegant and playful. And it was under Elizabeth that Rastrelli's genius came to the fore and throughout the 20 years of her rule he was able to realize all the Empress's magnificent architectural schemes.

Rastrelli's early training and background remain something of a mystery. His father brought him to St. Petersburg in 1716. He may have traveled both before and after coming to Russia. He was influenced by the German Baroque and his inspiration he found rather in the works of his contemporaries than earlier masters. He succeeded in fusing the spirit of the Baroque decoration with individual character of Russian architecture. The resulting mixture may be entitled the Rastrelli's style or Elizabethan Baroque.

From the start he gave his palaces an immense frontage with numerous windows of uniform shape and size in rectangular lines. He used this severe background as a base for immensely varied, dynamic, sculptural devices to produce ever-changing effects of light and shade. In conforming with the Russian practice he never resorted to rounded walls. All his buildings are rectangular in plan. Inside they contain a succession of rooms opening direct into one another.

Pilasters became a distinctive feature of Rastrelli's buildings. He made use of them to break up the immensely long and completely straight facades. Some other features of Rastrelli's style are as follows. He used pediment and exceptionally large windows as a means of emphasizing the central block. The use of them in so cold a climate seems no other than impractical. Rastrelli insisted on using them to break the monotonousness of the facades. The use of such windows was possible by the general use throughout Russia of big stoves to ensure heating. Rastrelli adored windows and succeeded in inserting a surprising

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amount of them in his buildings. Besides, in Rastrelli's buildings, roofs are surmounted with a balustrade bearing gilt statues.

Rastrelli's greatest ecclesiastical undertaking was the Smolny cathedral in St. Petersburg. It is one of the finest monastic entities in the world. It was begun in 1750, but its building was impeded by the seven-year war. Rastrelli's design, for reasons of economy, had to suffer certain modifications. Nevertheless, the existing model of the composition is strikingly impressive. The model shows how carefully he intended the general silhouette to resemble the great monastic establishments of medieval Russia. The numerous domes and lanterns would have recreated the impression of churches rising behind their fortified walls. Rastrelli intended to build an exceptionally tall tower, even loftier than the belfries of the old monasteries, which would dominate both the city and the convent (140 meters high).

The cathedral was begun in 1748 and completed by 1764. The Empress Elizabeth intended to end her days at the convent but died before withdrawing from the world. The buildings of the convent were not completed to Rastrelli's design. The cathedral is a five-dome church. The columns of the first storey form clusters with large narrow windows inserted between them. The second storey is decorated with pilasters which continue the columns of the first storey. This construction supports a two-level drum with the dome and four belfries.

Notwithstanding the glory of Smolny, however, it is Rastrelli's secular works that remain most deeply in mind. Rastrelli's preoccupation with designing flowery tracery and scrollwork, curvilinear broken pediments was perhaps a dress rehearsal for his creations to follow.

Rastrelli's style remained dominant over so long a period that it can be claimed that he established in Russia a distinct school of architecture.

II. Say whether the statements are true or false.

1.Baroque architecture was characteristic not only of Russia but also some other European countries in the mid-XVIII century.

2.The Empress’s love of elegant and playful let Rastrelli realize all her magnificent architectural schemes.

3.All Rastrelli’s palaces are of different shape and size.

4.The general silhouette of the Smolny Convent has nothing in common with the great monastic establishments of medieval Russia.

5.Though the buildings of the convent were not completed to Rastrelli’s design the Smolny cathedral is generally considered his greatest ecclesiastical undertaking.

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III. Choose the correct form of the verb for each blank. Pay attention that one form is the odd.

to influence	to complete	to be	to be
to die to surpass	to dominate	to make

1.Rastrelli ………… his British colleagues in imagination, those of Germany and Austria in grace, and the architects of France in magnificence.

2.He ………… by the German Baroque and his inspiration he found rather in the works of his contemporaries than earlier masters.

3.All his buildings ………… rectangular in plan.

4.According to Rastrelli’s design the tower ………… exceptionally tall and ………… both the city and the convent.

5.The buildings of the convent ………… completed to Rastrelli’s

design.

6.The Empress Elizabeth ………… before the buildings of the convent

………….

IV. Translate the following passages into Russian.

1.From “It was fortunate that …” to “… the Rastrelli’s style or Elizabethen Baroque”.

2.From “ Rastrelli’s greatest ecclesiastical undertaking …” to “ a two–level drum with a dome and four belfries”.

V.Make puzzles with these words using their definitions, synonyms/antonyms or giving the examples when these words can be mentioned. Let your group guess the answers.

ex. Palace

1) the residence where the king/ the queen/ the tzar lives and rules the country (the definition);

2) the castle (the synonym)

3) the hud (the antonym);

4) this kind of buildings is often met

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