Урок по английскому языку Лондон

Лекция к уроку английского языка по теме: " Sightseeing in London"

Учитель: Дубянская Валентина Александровна.

The are many sights and memorial places a visitor will want to see in London.

Trafalgar Square one of the tourist'centres of the city. In the middle of the square there is Nelson's Column, erected in the 1840s to celebrate the victory of Admiral Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The north side of the square is formed by the long, National Gallery, housing the national collection of art and containing some of the world's greatest paintings.

Trafalgar Square is a place for rallies, marches and political meetings. It is often the scene of stormy demonstrations for nuclear disarmament, for "Jobs, not Bombs!" On holiday evenings there are crowds in the square, and even on cold autumn and winter nights - like Bonfire Night (November 5) or New Year's Eve - some students will strip and climb on top of the still flowing fountains.

A wide street called the Mall runs south-west of Trafalgar Square. The street is decorated with gilded crowns and banners whenever there is a state visit or any other excuse for a procession. It is the site of several great houses occupied by various members of the royal family (the most important of these is Clarence House).

The Mall leads to Buckingham Palace (known colloquially as Buck House), which is the British monarch's main residence in London. It was built as a country house for the Duke of Buckingham in 1703, and was bought by King George III in 1762.

Today the Palace contains 600 rooms. The interior and the gardens are never open to the public except for those who are invited to Garden Parties or other formal ceremonies. The Royal Standard flying above the east front of the Palace indicates that the monarch is in residence.

The Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace is one of London's most important tourist attractions. It starts at 11.30 a.m. and lasts for half an hour. The troops wear their traditional bearskins and scarlet tunics.

If you return to Trafalgar Square and walk along Pall Mall (a street running parallel to the Mall), you'll come up to St.James's Palace, which was the London home of the British kings and queens in the 17th - 19th centuries. Although the Palace is no longer the royal residence, the court of the British monarch is still officially known as the Court of St.James's. This is an old tradition.

The area around St.James's Palace, bounded on the south by the Mall, on the north by Piccadilly, on the east by Lower Regent Street and on the west by St.James's Street, is one of the very few areas of London whose plan has barely changed from the time it was laid out in the late 17th century. The area is famous for its clubs. These are not open to the public. The exclusive Reform Club and the even more prestigious Athenaeum Club are frequented by famous statesmen, writers and scientists.

The main street running south of Trafalgar Square is Whitehall. There used to be a palace here once (Whitehall Palace), where from the 16th to the 17th century the British monarch lived. The Palace doesn't exist now, and today's Whitehall is a street of government offices. That's why the name "Whitehall" is often applied to the British Government, and particularly to the civil service as distinct from the party government.

If you walk along Whitehall towards Parliament Square, you will see on your right the famous Downing Street, a row of 18th - century houses. No. 10 is the official residence of the British Prime Minister.

Whitehall and Parliament Street lead directly into Parliament Square, with the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. The square has many statues including Richard the Lion-Hearted and Oliver Cromwell, several British statesmen and foreign figures such as Abraham Lincoln.

Seen across Parliament Square, the Houses of Parliament seem at first an incoherent complex of elaborate spires and towers. But their medieval look is misleading. Many people are surprised to discover that they were built between 1840 and 1852, the exception being the genuinely ancient core of the complex, Westminster Hall, which was first built in 1097 - 1099. Westminster Hall was part of an old palace. The present Houses of Parliament occupy the site of the palace and hence received the name Palace of Westminster.

The Palace of Westminster has two miles of corridors and more than 1,000 rooms. When Parliament is sitting, a flag flies from the Victoria Tower (the tallest tower of the complex) and a light shines by night. Victors can watch the Houses of Commons and the Houses of Lords at work from the Strangers' Gallery.

The Houses of Parliament contain the universal symbol of London, Big Ben. This is the name of the 13, 5-ton bell on which the hours are struck. The great bell got its name in the 19^th century after Sir Benjamin Hall, First Commissioner of Works. The bell and the clock are on the clock tower of the complex.

Close to the Houses of Parliament stands Westminster Abbey. The first church on this site was an abbey dedicated to St. Peter. "West Minster" means "western monastery", showing its geographical relation to the City of London.

In Westminster Abbey most British monarchs since William the Conqueror have been crowned, and here you may see the ancient Coronation Chair. Beneath the chair is the Stone of Scone, or Stone of Destiny, which has long been a source of friction between England and Scotland. The kings of Scotland were crowned on it. It was carried away from Scotland by the English king Edward I in 1297 but has, over the centuries, become a symbol of Scottish independence. It has been removed from Westminster Abbey only three times - once Westminster Hall for the installation of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector in 1653; once for safety from German bombers in 1940; and finally, by Scottish nationalists in 1950, who took it far north (it was returned six months later).

Many British kings and queens are buried in the Abbey. Monuments to great figures in many fields of Endeavour are scattered throughout the place: statesmen together with scientists such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Men of letters have their Geoffrey Chaucer, Alfred Tennyson, Charles Dickens and some other English poets and writers are buried; many more outstanding poets and writers, though not buried in Westminster Abbey, are honoured by memorials in the Poets 'Corner.

One of the streets running north of Trafalgar Square is St. Martin's Lane, with its theatres and Victorian pubs. The first large building on the right-hand side is the Coliseum, home of the English National Opera Company. Below St. Martin's Lane is the Strand that goes east. But for a time being we'll turn north-west to Piccadilly Circus. This is a round square from which the best-known streets of the West End radiate - Piccadilly, Regent Street, Haymarket, and Shaftesbury Avenue.

Piccadilly Circus is famous for its lights and for the statue of Eros; it is always crowded, especially on the evenings of big football matches or other events. Now Piccadilly Circus is the punks' favourite gathering ground.

There are plans for the rehabilitation of Piccadilly Circus, and, indeed, many buildings in the blocks immediately roundabout have already been torn down so that the rebuilding can proceed. The transformation will take years yet.

Walking westward from Piccadilly Circus along Piccadilly itself, you will see on the north side Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts. A statue of Joshua Reynolds stands in the courtyard. The last house on Piccadilly is Apsley House, built in 1778. It was the residence of the Duke of Wellington, the Commander in-Chief of British Army in the Napoleonic Wars. The Wellington Museum was opened here in 1952. The building faces Hyde Park Corner, a busy traffic square with a large island of green, on which stands the Wellington Arch.

If you return to Piccadilly Circus and walk north of the square, you'll find you self in Soho, the best-known foreign quarter of London.

No. 28, Dean Street is one of Marx's addresses in London. Here Karl Marx lived with his family in two small rooms in 1851 - 1856. The street is not far from Great Russell Street where the British Museum is situated. Marx spent a great deal of his time in the Reading Room of the British Museum Library conducting his researches. He greatly valued the library's collections of economic, philosophical and social literature. Later, in 1902 - 1911, V. I. Lenin also became a regular visitor to the Museum Reading Room.

Farther north of Soho lie Hampstead and High gate, the two neighboring residential areas of London. Quite near to Hampstead Heath, a large public park, is High gate Cemetery, where Karl Marx and some of his close relatives are buried. In 1956, a monument was erected on Marx's grave.

Now let's return to Trafalgar Square and walk north-east to the City of London.

The first street running north-east is the Strand. The word "strand" means "river-bank", and the street was really once the Thames's northern shore (hence its name). Now south of the Strand lies Victoria Embankment with Cleopatra's Needle.

Walking along the Strand, you will see Somerset House, a building which contains the Board of Inland Revenue and other government offices. There are three theses on the Strand, and off the north there is Covent Garden, or the Royal Opera House. It was named after the famous Covent Garden Market which was situated not far moved to a new site south of the Thames, and since then the area has been redeveloped.

At the end of the Strand there are the Law Courts, or Royal Courts of Justice. They usually deal with civil actions. To get a whole picture of how British justice deals with the man in the street, you can drop in at a magistrate's court, the main one being in Bow Street across from Royal Opera House, or, even better, visit the Old Bailey, which is in the City of London.

On the other side of the Strand there is the Temple, a legal quarter. The name derives from the Knights Templar who lived on the site in the 12^th - 14^th centuries.

The Strand becomes Fleet Street at the Temple Bar, the main gate to the City of London. Here traditionally the Lord Mayor of the City must challenge the British monarch when he enters the City (according to an old tradition neither king nor queen are allowed to enter the City without the permission of the Lord Mayor).

Fleet Street takes its name from the Fleet Ditch, once an open stream, now an underground sewer. When used figuratively, Fleet Street means "the British press", as it is in this street that the publishing houses of most important British newspapers are situated : The Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and many other, though the oldest of them all, The Times, has moved to a massive building on Gray's Inn Road. Fleet Street has such a long association with British journalist that it is often called the Street of Ink.

The City is the oldest part of London, and it contains very many sights: the famous London Stone, a relic of the Saxon times; the Monument commemorating the Great Fire of London; St. Paul's Cathedral, designed by Christopher Wren; the Mansion House, an official residence of the Lord Mayor; the Barbican, a new residential and cultural centre.

South-east of the centre of the City is the Tower of London, which celebrated its 900^th birthday in 1978, taking that date from the year that William the Conqueror began to build on the site. The Tower was first built for the purpose of protecting and controlling the city. In the past it has been a fortress, a palace, and a state prison. Now it is a museum visited by about two million people a year. It is a still a military fortress, and here you'll see the troops of crack regiments as well as the Yeomen Warders.

The oldest part of the fortress is the White Tower. The Bloody Tower is the most infamous, for here many important prisoners in bygone days were confined and tortured. Many dukes, kings and queens, other aristocratic pretenders to the throne lost their heads on the block that stands in the Tower's courtyard Among the famous people who were beheaded in the Tower was the philosopher, creator of Utopia, Thomas More.

You may see the Tower's tame ravens hopping about on Tower Green, the former site of the scaffold. There have always been ravens here, and a legend says the Tower will crumble if they should ever leave. Since their wings are clipped, that's unlikely.

North of the City lies Clerkenwell, a district where working-men's clubs were set up in the 19^th century. No. 37a, Clerkenwell Green is quite well known in London. In the second quarter of the 19^th century it was one of the meeting-places for Chartist. Later this building witnessed major demonstrations in the adjoining square in support of the Paris Commune. From 1893 to 1922, the building housed the press of British Socialists, and here Lenin's Iskra was printed in 1902 - 1903. In 1993, it became the famous Marx House which contains the Marx Memorial Library, a rich collection of books, Chartist petitions and other documents on the history of the labour movement and social sciences. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin are also kept here. A small room on the first floor of the building, where V. I. Lenin spent a lot of time editing Iskra, is now known as Lenin's Room. Thanks to the efforts of local comrades, the room contains the furniture and some of the things that were there when Lenin was working in it. Lenin's Room is open to the public.

North of Clerkenwell Road, at King's Cross Road, is a small square called Percy Circus. V. I. Lenin and N. K. Krupskaya stayed at No. 16, Percy Circus in 1905 for the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The site of the house is commemorated by a plaque now.

Test

1. When was London founded?

1. In 43 A.D.

2. In 43 B.C.

3. In 1066

2. How many parts does London consist of?

1. Four parts

2. Three parts

3. Many parts

3. What is a Bossiness centre of London?

1. The East End

2. The West End

3. The City

4. Where does the British Parliament sit?

1. The Tower of London

2. The Westminster Palace

3. The Buckingham Palace

5. When did "Big Ben" come into service?

1. In 1859

2. In 1919

3. In 1812

6. What is the residence of the Queen

1. The Westminster Palace

2. The Buckingham Palace

3. The Tower of London

7. This part of London is full of richest hotels, largest supermarkets, cinemas.

1. The West End

2. Westminster

3. The City

8. The Tower of London is …

1. A prison

2. A portrait gallery

3. A museum

9. When was the town of London burnt down?

1. In 61 A.D.

2. In 43 A.D.

3. In 61 B.C.

Ответы: 1a, 2a, 3c, 4b, 5a, 6b, 7a, 8c, 9a