Westminster

Big Ben, with amazingly no other people really in shot

Houses of Parliament

We went for a bit of a wander around Westminster the other day.  I'll have to work out if we are ever able to actually get inside the Parliament. Westminster Abbey was completely packed, so we decided to leave that for another day.  Checking my guide book, which finally arrived from Australia, it seems that we can at least visit the galleries of Parliament so I might have to pop in there one of these evenings.  It looks like it's open until 10:30pm which is pretty good for those people who are working.

This is going to be a bit more of a photo post than anything else, as I think I'll wait until I actually visit before I write anything more.  I have a feeling that by the time I get around to going the weather is going to have deteriorated dramatically, so perhaps it's best to show the buildings in the best light.

St Margaret's Church, slightly overshadowed by Westminster Abbey next door

Entrance to the Department of Defense

One thing I have noticed living here is the excessive numbers of CCTV cameras which are everywhere.  It is very much a big brother kind of state here, but then I'm dubious as to whether they are in fact effective.  A lady was pushed onto the rails at one of the tube stations one night recently, and the psycho who did that I don't think has been caught, don't worry she wasn't harmed at all, but still pretty crazy behaviour.  And yet the tube stations have a particularly high density of cameras. 

To the left is the entrance to the Ministry of Defense, this was certainly the holy grail of CCTV cameras, and what is shown in the photo is only a tiny percentage of the number of cameras which were actually there.  I didn't want to take too many photos, mainly because I knew every shutter click was being captured in multiple angles and quite possibly high definition.

The Thames and the London Eye