Would the Tudors have switched off the lights?

What did the Tudors ever do for us?  I’m being England-centric of course, but I think most of us would suggest that they came up with a lot of important stuff.  Apart from sectarianism, greed, identity politics, slaves, wars and so on, they also contributed literature, poetry, drama (albeit the bane of most modern school children’s lives), a debate on how to pronounce ‘renaissance’ and a whole clutch of modern historic novels. 

A collection of 16th century talent. From left to right - Sirs Walter Raleigh, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and Thomas Wyatt. Only Sir Thomas appears not to be a fashion victim.

As far as I can see, they also sustained a degree of complexity, intrigue, misinformation and complications which we would readily recognise today.  I’m sure they would have handled the global nuances of climate change no better or no worse than we will attempt to do, this coming weekend. 

But what started this train of thought? It all commenced with a day out in London and a visit to the British Library to view its ‘Elizabeth and Mary’ exhibition: ‘Royal Cousins, Rival Queens’ (https://www.bl.uk/events/elizabeth-and-mary).

Those Tudor complexities impacted on the day immediately. There are three Queen Marys in this exhibition - the eponymous Mary Queen of Scots, her mother Mary of Guise (Queen Consort to Scotland’s James V), and Mary Tudor (Elizabeth’s half-sister and Queen of England and Ireland from 1553 to 1558).  We just about managed to cope with all this, but even our historian companions acknowledged the degree of confusion, as well as the need for transliterations of the Library’s very generous display of Tudor documents.

Staggering out, we came upon a different complication: where to sit to rest our weary backs and eat a much needed sandwich.  When you find an empty bench, there is plenty of splendid stuff to look at, but the British Library is visually dominated by a sort of frieze or human tapestry of mini work stations all crammed with – presumably – students making use of the free electricity, free heating, free wifi and clean toilets, things which student accommodation may not always provide.  No readers’ card is required for this area!

What does this cost the British Library? What is the benefit?  I doubt this audience spends much in the café and nothing in the shop.  It’s obviously popular but, although it is obviously valued, does it make sense in terms of energy consumption and carbon reduction?

After an afternoon spent in the wonderful carbon sink which is Highgate cemetery – a light canopy of ash with an understorey of grave stones – we ended up in the Sky Garden at around about dusk (https://skygarden.london/).  This is probably a very good time to visit as London is beginning to twinkle whereas it is quite difficult to see the garden.

Yes, we were all underwhelmed with the design and content of the latter.  A heavy dependence on Liriope, ferns and palms did not compensate for the prices at the bar.  It appears static, uninviting, inaccessible, dense and dark.  Perhaps it looks better in broad daylight but the photograph below right seemed to sum up the approach - a green background for the views of London and some expensive ‘hospitality’. 

London-by-dusk, however, was a wholly different experience. The images, below, which range from south west to south east, do their best to replicate our - enjoyable - experience.

Top row: left - view down the Thames with Southwark Bridge, the Millennium Bridge, Blackfriars Bridge and Waterloo Bridge; centre - London Bridge and tower blocks; right - London Bridge station and the Shard.

Bottom row: left - HMS Belfast and City Hall; centre - City Hall and Tower Bridge; right - Tower of London and Docklands high rise

It’s spectacular, popular, and a real, capital city draw. One amongst us commented that when he started work in the area in the early 2000s, the newly completed Gherkin (centre of the image on the left), towered over all the surounding buidlings.

But it did make us ponder our carbon bank balance, and we will probably need to make some huge changes. The, ‘Oh it’s all right we’ll just use hydrogen’ perspective will, it seems, only make a modest contribution to the problem in the short term. So we are faced with compromises and decisions on what it is we value and what we choose to change or do without. Terroir is happy to live with wind turbines, for instance, unless and until something better can be organised. To us, knowing their contribution to ‘green energy’, is part of their human value in the landscape. Other’s would disagree, of course.

We enjoyed lit-up-London. Do we enjoy it enough to sacrifice something else so that we can keep the lights on, so to speak? We enjoyed the British Library experience. Did we enjoy it enough for the BL to keep the students and their laptops fired up, as part of that experience?

What would the Tudors have done? We’re pretty sure they would have kept the Tower of London. But we daresay they would have blown out most of the candles.