If you’ve been to London, you’ve probably seen Battersea Power Station. The massive brick structure with its four distinctive chimneys (or smoke stacks, as we Americans usually call them) sits directly across the Thames from the exclusive borough of Chelsea.

Yesterday, my wife and I got to have close-up look around the London landmark, and I’m glad we did.

At the start of our tour, the view across the property to the power station.

Construction on the power station began in 1929. It began generating in 1935, and was continuously expanded and upgraded right through World War II until the final chimney was added in 1955. In any context, it’s an extraordinary building. Turbine Hall A was panelled with Italian marble. An auxiliary control room was done in stainless steel. It’s one of the largest brick structures in Europe.

It stopped generating in 1983. And despite two redevelopment plans, it has site idle ever since. Well, maybe idle is too strong a word. Each of the two failed redevelopment plans did some work on the structure — mostly demolition. The roof over central boiler house was removed. Large pieces of the walls have been taken out. Heaps of spoil adorn the site.

In short, Battersea Power Station is today more ruin than destination, but it is still an astonishing building deserving of restoration.

Turbine Hall A is but one example of the power station’s sad condition.

The folks from Treasury Holdings have a plan. Purposefully embracing the ironic, they are planning to convert the power station and the surrounding property into a massive, modern multi-use complex that will be one of the most environmentally friendly in the world. You can get all of the details here, but suffice for me to say that I was blown away.

The developer’s model showing the power station and surrounding area after redevelopment.

It’s the Treasury Holdings redevelopment proposal that opened the power station’s grounds to visitors. You see, the developer is working hard to attract support for their plans, and must undertake a public consultation as a part of their efforts to win planning approval.

The grounds are open to visitors on each Saturday during July and August., and as a result, thousands of Londoners who come to check out the landmark building are also being exposed — and solicited for feedback — about the redevelopment proposal.

It’s brilliant. The building is amazing. And thanks to Treasury Holdings for going to considerable expense to allow people to see it.

For what’s it worth, from my review of the redevelopment proposal, I hope it goes forward. It looks extraordinary. And it will give future Londoners the chance to not just see, but also to enjoy the famous power station.

UPDATE: You can see all of my photos here.

This morning I departed from St. Pancras Station in London for Brussels via the Eurostar. (That’s the Chunnel if you’re confused.)

Every time I go through St. Pancras, I’m more impressed by it. For me, I can’t imagine a more spectacular example of a wonderful Victorian-era structure. St. Pancras is like a temple to the golden age of railroad.

This time, I finally remembered to bring my camera, and was then blessed with a sunny morning.

Here’s the full set on Flickr.

And here’s a tease:

Last weekend, I took a couple of days off and went to Scotland to visit friends, play golf and drink gin. I’ll bore you about the golf some other time. For now, I’m going to focus on the coming and going, and mostly, the wonderful experience I had on Britain’s rail system.

Let’s start with the decision: planes, trains or automobiles?

I could have done a discount airline like EasyJet or Ryanair from London to Edinburgh for £50 or so. But that would have meant taking a train to either Heathrow or Stansted, which, in either case, would have added another £30 or so roundtrip. Then there’s the time. The trip to Heathrow nets out to an hour. Stansted is much further. On the Edinburgh end, I’d have to hang around baggage claim for 30 minutes or more waiting for my golf clubs. So, all in all, I was looking at a door to door travel time of about 3 hours.

On the other hand, I could do the train. National Express runs a train from King’s Cross Station in London to Edinburgh and Glasgow every half hour. With a few stops along the way, it takes about 4 hours to get to Edinburgh’s Waverly Station. But there’s no security line, no limits on the use of electronic devices, and no cattle call for boarding.

Then there’s the experience. On the way north, I took a window seat. The journey through north England on a sunny, summer afternoon was lovely, with everything all in green. But that wasn’t the highlight. It was the trip from Newcastle, through Berwick-on-Tweed that was amazing. Every inch was along the rocky channel cliffs. The North Sea was just out the window. And the farms of southern Scotland looked lush with their alternating fields of grain and grazing sheep.

And did I mention the free wi-fi? I was online and getting juice from a standard power outlet throughout the journey.

On the return, I discovered the dining car. Every had a freshly cooked steak on Ryanair? I didn’t think so. But I had one on my southbound journey. Along with mashed potatoes and vegetables. And a salad. And dessert — fresh strawberries with cream and meringue. All of which was prepared for me in the fully stocked kitchen on board by a real, human cook. And I ordered my dinner from a diverse menu of selections. Tough to imagine a travel meal where you’re faced with a hard choice about to what to eat? It was for me, too.

Not everything was perfect. It is, after all, a train. The cafe car, where I chose to eat on the northbound trip, was truly abysmal. Microwaved panini and crisps just didn’t get it done.

So, what was the damage for all of this apparent luxury? £73 round trip. About the same cost as flying. (My dining-car meal cost about the same as a comparable London restaurant at £25, so add that in if you think it makes a more genuine comparison.)

On balance, the train so thoroughly thrashed its airborne competition, I am genuinely flummoxed at why anyone would fly. Moreover, its common practice for natives to complain about their train service. And in some areas, it is occasionally spotty. I’m sure I’ll experience some rail debacle or another in the coming months.

For now, however, given the choice, I’ll take the train.

P.S. — I wrote this post while beneath the English channel en route from London to Brussels on the Eurostar. Another example of rail’s superiority over air travel. I’ll bore you with the details of that trip some other time.

If you think the U.S. government is meddlesome and intrusive, the EU will knock your socks off.

Lately, EU bureaucrats have set their sights on health and safety in hotel kitchens, and their resulting regulations, as ever, put a metaphorical stick in the eye of the principles reasonableness and common sense.

The issue? Dogs in homes. Specifically, homes that also rent out rooms to vacationers and feed their guests breakfast each morning during their stay.

Thanks to the EU, these bed and breakfast owners may soon have to choose between the family business and the family pet.

Owners of bed and breakfasts have been banned from keeping dogs in their kitchens under a European Union ruling that could see hundreds of family-run businesses close.

Officials claim that the animals pose a potential health and safety hazard to guests’ food. However, bed and breakfast owners vowed to close rather than turn out the family pet.

Oliver Letwin, the former shadow home secretary, called the legislation “barking mad”.

Someone far smarter than me once said that the problem with legislators is that they’re always legislating, and the problem with regulators is that they’re always regulating. That stands to reason, of course. If they aren’t, they literally are failing to do their job. The question of whether it’s a good idea to legislate or regulate never seems to enter their mind.

The result: Stupid, wasteful, insulting, freedom-sucking mandates like this one.

Why do I love London?

During the recent campaign for mayor, then-candidate Boris Johnson pledged that if elected, he would ban open containers from the London Underground (aka: the Tube). He won. And he did. So effective last night at midnight, consumption of alcoholic beverages on board any Transport for London service became a criminal offense.

What did Londoners do about it? They threw a massive party on the Tube, of course. So massive, in fact, that it made this morning’s Washington Post.

The party was largely organized via Facebook, and the police were out in force. There was some trouble, but not a massive amount, given the number of people and amount of booze involved. Needless to say, not everyone had a good time, and, this being London, there was a bit of hooliganism thrown in.

But coming from Washington, DC, where one can literally be arrested for eating a french fry on board a train, the never-hesitate-just-do-it spirit behind this mass action was darned impressive.

It’s amazing how travel can be so exhausting. I travel a fair amount, but in relation to some of my colleagues and friend who travel a lot, my travel burden is relatively light. Somehow, though, when I am called upon to hit the road, it often seems to come in waves.

This week, I’m in the midst of one of those waves.

On Saturday, I flew to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. From London, where I live, it’s an eight hour flight. Which means overnight. Which means I only get to sleep two or three hours if I’m lucky. Now, when road warriors hang out together in bars, we talk about all the different ways we beat exhaustion and jet leg. It’s modern man’s tale of the campaign. But instead of recounting men stricken by our swords and wounds narrowly avoided by a swift parry or a thrust of our shield, we brag about being able to fly all night and deliver a superb PowerPoint the very next morning. As much I would wish it were so, it isn’t. It can’t be.

I flew home yesterday (Tuesday). That’s an eight hour flight heading west. Which means an entire day in the air, and arriving home looking forward to only one thing: collapsing into a familiar bed.

I’m writing this today (Wednesday), en route from London to Warsaw. By distance, it’s akin to flying from Washington to Memphis or Dallas. I’ll land at half past ten in the evening local time — assuming we’re on time — and head for my hotel. But my body will think it’s 9:30 p.m. Or perhaps, given my trip to the Middle East, 1:30 a.m. And that’s the point. It won’t know. Sleep cycles are disrupted. Mealtimes thrown off. And the body wears down.

So I confess: I’m tired.

Maybe someday, Scotty really will turn up with his transporter. Because right now, I can’t imagine anything more exciting than the idea of being “beamed” from one locale to the next, even if I lose a molecule or two along the way.

I had some time to myself last evening and didn’t feel like working, so, for reasons that aren’t important here, I embarked on bit of research.

I was interested in discovering where in the UK my family last called home before crossing the Atlantic to the New World. I wasn’t terribly interested in doing a full genealogy in one evening — and didn’t really want my evening research project to become an on-going burden — so I focused on my paternal descendants, the ones responsible for my last name.

I began with enough knowledge to take me back to the American civil war. And, because my civil-war era descendant was an officer in the Confederate Army, I knew from the regimental history that he hailed from Brunswick County, VA. So, I started Googling.

I wasn’t expecting much.

But thanks to others who have made genealogy their hobby, and then published their findings online using services like ancestry.com, I quickly found a great deal of information.

Within minutes, I had identified my line of anscestors back to a John Manson, who lived in York County, VA around 1700. And I was further able to determine that his father also lived in York County, VA and was a land owner who married one Elizabeth Chapman, but I wasn’t able to determine his first name.

Interestingly, I found two descendants named Thomas Manson. The first was born in 1757, and his son, Thomas James, was born in 1804. (My full name is Thomas Marshall Manson.)

Seemingly at a dead-end, I discovered that the fine folks at Virtual Jamestown have been busy putting their records online. While they don’t have court records done yet (which would have been the most helpful resources), they do have a searchable database of indentured servants who came from Britain the New World between 1654 and 1686.

I ran a search.

And I found one Thomas Manson, who came to Virginia as an indentured servant from the English port of of Bristol in 1674.

Now, Manson is Scottish name, and the Mansons were a sept, or division, of the Gunn clan. According to a couple of sites that specialize in heraldry, the Mansons come from Caithness, in extreme northern Scotland. By the census of 1881, Mansons were spread all over Scotland. Most remained in the north, but significant pockets had come south to Glasgow and Edinburgh. It’s reasonable to assume that after the English civil war that drove so many Scots to the New World, Mansons were, even then, coming down from the Highlands.

In 1674, most ships to Virginia started their journeys in London. But if one wanted to get from Scotland — most likely Glasgow — to the New World, traveling to London would have been difficult and expensive. Instead, it’s far more likely that a Scot setting off for Virginia would take passage by ship down the coast to a port like Bristol.

So, given the continued use of Thomas as a first name down through the generations, it’s not an unreasonable guess that the Thomas Manson who came to Virginia in 1674 as an indentured servant was my great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather.

Unfortunately, even that conclusion doesn’t answer my question. I still don’t know where Thomas Manson came from. Did he come down the coast as I’ve assumed? Or did he live in Bristol or even somewhere else? And if did come down the coast from Scotland, where in Scotland did he live? And why did he leave?

Those questions will be left, I suspect, in the cloud of history. But I’ve written all of this for three reasons: First, to memorialize my research. Second, to testify, once again, to the power of the Internet. And third, to thank all of the real genealogical researchers who spent days determining their family trees and then had the generosity to publish their work online.

All in all, it was an interesting and fun way to spend a couple of hours, and I’m glad I did. Whether or not my conclusion about the first Thomas Manson is correct, I learned a lot.

Well, with Jim back from Turkey, it was time for another On Tapper to head overseas. This time, it’s me. As of last Friday, I’ve relocated to London. I’m still working for that big P.R. firm, helping clients with digital / online communications. In fact, starting today, I’m blogging at our firm’s new blog. It’s called Authenticities, and you can check it out here.

Not to worry, though. For both of our remaining readers, I’m going to keep chipping in on U.S. politics, sports and all the rest here at On Tap. Excepting the occasional rant about life in the UK, I’m hoping you won’t notice too much of a change. And, as always, the three of us plan to continue our virtual bar chats. Keep reading and commenting. And thanks for sticking around.

Yesterday, the Post ran a column of sorts from a guy name Chris Richard, who had lived in D.C. his whole life, but recently moved to New York. It was his list of things that he had to do one last time before leaving his hometown behind. The concept of the story hit home for me as I am about to move to another great capital city in a couple of weeks after 11 years in Washington. But Richard’s list for the Post was, I thought, pretty lame.

So, I’m crowdsourcing a list of my own.

What’s the one thing I should do in D.C. and its environs before leaving for London?

Jim: Tough call, and ironic, since I faced the same decision a few years ago. Right around the same time of year. Spring and fall in DC are strikingly nice, but February is pretty blah…

I would say Fado’s in Chinatown, but you actually won’t lack for pubs in your new home… I’ll bet southern barbeque is hard to find in London, so I’d hit Old Glory one more time to devour all things pork… I want to hit Palace of Wonders again, for its surreality… Mrs. Campaignspot and I hit Jaleo Sunday night and enjoyed it a great deal, but again, finding good Spanish food might not be too tough in London; if all else fails, it’s a short flight away.

Cam: I suppose “unpacking” isn’t an option? Let’s see… you made it to the Mardi Gras party, so that’s taken care of. Good bar-b-que IS going to be hard to find, so definitely eat some before you go. I’m guessing good Tex-Mex is also going to be hard to find, but then again, I haven’t found good Tex-Mex here to begin with.

How about one last night at Union Street with Jim and me since I won’t be able to make your happy hour tonight?

A quick thought. If the airport in Quito, Ecuador can have free wireless, why can’t airports in the U.S.?