How to tour London
Living in a tourist city, you may well find yourself someday a tour guide to scattered friends and family showing up for a visit. Having passed our one year London residency milestone late this Spring, our organised tour is becoming increasingly standardized but with a few different loops.
Dai Meng Guo, a white guy from Erie, Pennsylvania, with a Chinese name, stopped by London recently. He, along with his girlfriend, plus Christine and Bobby, went on my Westminster Tour.
Westminster circuit
For the Westminster Tour, we started at Trafalgar Square, saw that old one-armed admiral on a pole (Horatio Nelson), walked down Whitehall, past 10 Downing Street (of course barely visible behind the security establishment holding back Theresa May's thronging fans), to Westminster Bridge (from where one can catch a good view of the Thames as well as the Palace of Westminster/Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, also the site of a recent terrorist attack), then back past the palace/parliament and onto Westminster Abbey. Move along, find Buckingham Palace, then down the Mall. Notice the red paving? Apparently it is supposed to look like a red carpet for the ceremonial processions leading up to Buckingham Palace.
Turn left from the Mall on Marlborough and head toward Piccadilly. You'll see Berry Brothers and Rudd, which is a purveyor of wines to the court but is also a decent wine shop with a decent website for us plebeian drinkers. Pass St. James Palace (and just look around to glimpse from outside the life of the old aristocrat and now the nouveau riche), past the former Texas embassy (you know how Texans like to remind you it was formerly its own country, nay, failed state) up to Piccadilly, past some more fancy buildings, and ending at the circus with the big tvs (no points for guessing its name). For extra credit we could have continued up the curve of Regent Street to Oxford Street, which truly is not worth visiting (unless you want to buy Chinese made souvenirs from an Indian guy); however, there are some good restaurants in the area: Bobby and I one time spent almost US$50 on tacos for the two of us. Just to the east of the stately splendor of Regent Street -- it is tough to believe -- is the formerly bohemian Carnaby Street, home of 60s swinging London, where the hippest fashions of the day were on display, and the Rolling Stones and Austin Powers were having a groovy time. Just to the west of Regent Street are the famous suit makers on Savile Row, and now -- can it really be? -- and Abercrombie and Fitch?
During the tour, look around at all the buildings; royalty and aristocrats have owned this land for centuries and continue to rent it to building and road owners; in this way the predatory elites continue to fund themselves by extracting wealth from the people. And speaking of mingling with elites, at St. James Place, I recommend a stop at the pretentious Duke's Cocktail Bar in the Duke hotel down one of those several exclusive alleys you would have seen along the way. They may be the most expensive cocktails you've ever had, but they may also be the most proper. Ian Fleming enjoyed a tipple here and may have drunkenly wrote a few words of one or two James Bond novels. Don't fall foul of the dress code: smart casual, with no t-shirts, shorts, or sandals.
Many of my tours include at least one meal, or at least a pint of beer, at a pub. The pub is a classically English institution; spending some time there will help you go capture the spirit -- wooden bars, chairs, and walls; gross carpet; a musty stale beer smell hanging in the air; "cellar temperature" non-carbonated beer ("warm and flat" to American palates) pulled from a tap and often manufactured by the pub's owner (often a corporate, chain-owning entity these days). With Meng Guo, we made a quick stop in a Westminster pub, but finding the wait for food and drink too long, we abandoned that dream and went to Tesco Express instead. At Tesco Express we bought packaged ready-to-eat foods, which is a modern English experience in of itself, given such foods' popularity here. (Recall that relatively recently Tesco entered the US market selling small food packs and prepared meals and failed.)
I also offer several other tours.
City circuit
There's the City tour. It starts or ends at Borough Market (a consumer gourmet food market, formerly a wholesale food market for hundreds of years, just outside the City), travels across London Bridge into the City, and goes on to encompass several historic pubs (Jamaica Wine House, located through labyrinthine alleyways and founded in 1652 as London's first coffee house, and the Counting House, a pub inside a grand, old, disused bank lobby) and a market (Ledenhall, now all cleaned up and consumerish) and a pub inside an old market (a couple inside Ledenhall), Lombard Street (sort of like London's Wall Street but much older, original home of Lloyd's famous old coffee shop), and a good view of the Bank of England (there is a small specie museum inside!). Lombard Street apparently got its start in commerce when, according to Wikipedia, one old aristocrat in 1537 suggested to another they set up a formal financial market, which would become the Royal Exchange (also on the tour): "make a goodely Bursse in Lombert-streete, for marchuants to repayer unto."
Borough Market is notable to me because it is, I believe, one of the first in the current wave of gourmet food halls, having only over the past twenty years (or so) began focusing on consumer food rather than wholesale food; now, such gourmet prepared food halls are found throughout London, Europe (ok, the gourmet food hall goes way back in France), and increasingly in the U.S. See my entries on Lisbon, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, etc. I realize my history of gourmet food markets is not excellently informed, but I think I have some broad strokes correct -- gourmet food kiosks were not de rigueur in city centers in 1999.
As a coda to my City tour, we can catch the 76 bus at Bank and ride it right by St. Paul's (£20 to enter; wave on your way past) to the Middle and Inner Temples on the western edge of the City. This is nearby where I work, which is a sort of lawyer ghetto near several different courts. Hopping off the bus where Fleet Street intersects with Chancery Lane, you can meander northward through the warren of alleyways to my firm. Down one of the alleys is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a famous, old, and strange pub sprawling through basement cellars and good for at least one touristy pint. Doubling back to Fleet Street and across, find your way into the Middle Temple and Inner Temple. These are two of the Inns of Court, peculiar and ancient societies of barristers, or the elite lawyers in England and Wales who have permission to argue at court. Inside their grounds are mazes of old brick buildings, housing barristers' chambers, and small parks in courtyards; the grounds are peaceful compared to the cacophonous rumble of the bordering roads, Fleet Street and Victoria Embankment (i.e., highway along the Thames). The peaceful, rarefied air of the Temple is alluring though out of reach for a wayward lawyer like me.
This tour is getting long. Please stay with me a bit longer: heading back out to Fleet Street and turning west, Fleet turns into the Strand, a road where you can find many old and attractive English institutions: Somerset House, Bush House (from where BBC used to broadcast), Simpsons-in-the-Strand (one of England's oldest traditional restaurants, featuring meat, lots of meat), the Savoy Hotel (claimed by some to be London's most famous hotel, includes the American Bar, voted from time to time as the best bar in the world). Before too long, this course down the Strand takes you to Trafalgar Square, where the Westminster tour has been known to start. Now well out of the City, you can end this tour at Gordon's Wine Bar, claimed to be London's oldest wine bar, housed in cellars that are probably pretty grimy, but the candlelight keeps it too dark to know for sure; plus you're drinking wine so maybe not focused on the grime; like a lot of historic London, it is "Dickensian."
There is also the Holloway tour. Basically, this tour consists of our favorite places nearby our apartment, mostly focused on the parks and food and beverage establishments around Holloway Road. House of Hammerton deserves special mention. Hammerton is an Islington microbrewery with a long history and a tap room down the road from our apartment. We just love having delicious fresh beer on tap nearby!
Holloway Road's streetscape is rather bland compared to the City or the Strand. There's nothing on the ostentatious scale of the baroque Somerset House (except for the ultra-modern Emirates Stadium where Arsenal plays). Islington was a place of factories and housing for their employees before the factories gave way to public housing (called council housing here) and now gentrifiers and the service industry; some of the neighborhood was literally bombed out by Nazis (and that's how we got clearing for Paradise Park nearby). We would love to take you to Ley Ley's for cheeseburgers, but Ley Ley's was only a pop-up and plans to close before the end of August 2018. Final stop would be at our apartment, where, weather permitting, we could sit with wines and cigars on our small porch that overlooks the the tall buildings of the City; it's especially great on Fireworks Day.
It is the quotidien qualities that make this tour interesting. It is a real life neighborhood to live in. No one wants to walk out their front door and land on the madness of Trafalgar Square; no one wants to wait through four traffic lights just to get to a filthy Tesco Express to pick up a liter of milk for the babe. After all, the Holloway tour is what Airbnb is promising tourists: "live like a local." There is something fascinating about this adventure; Mum and I seek it out when we travel, always auditioning cities as potential places to live.
Why don't you come visit London and live like a local with us?
Dai Meng Guo, a white guy from Erie, Pennsylvania, with a Chinese name, stopped by London recently. He, along with his girlfriend, plus Christine and Bobby, went on my Westminster Tour.
 |
| New friends, plus old friends from undergraduate Chinese class at University of Pittsburgh. Notice Big Ben all bandaged up while he gets a face lift -- same for Parliament. |
Westminster circuit
For the Westminster Tour, we started at Trafalgar Square, saw that old one-armed admiral on a pole (Horatio Nelson), walked down Whitehall, past 10 Downing Street (of course barely visible behind the security establishment holding back Theresa May's thronging fans), to Westminster Bridge (from where one can catch a good view of the Thames as well as the Palace of Westminster/Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, also the site of a recent terrorist attack), then back past the palace/parliament and onto Westminster Abbey. Move along, find Buckingham Palace, then down the Mall. Notice the red paving? Apparently it is supposed to look like a red carpet for the ceremonial processions leading up to Buckingham Palace.
Turn left from the Mall on Marlborough and head toward Piccadilly. You'll see Berry Brothers and Rudd, which is a purveyor of wines to the court but is also a decent wine shop with a decent website for us plebeian drinkers. Pass St. James Palace (and just look around to glimpse from outside the life of the old aristocrat and now the nouveau riche), past the former Texas embassy (you know how Texans like to remind you it was formerly its own country, nay, failed state) up to Piccadilly, past some more fancy buildings, and ending at the circus with the big tvs (no points for guessing its name). For extra credit we could have continued up the curve of Regent Street to Oxford Street, which truly is not worth visiting (unless you want to buy Chinese made souvenirs from an Indian guy); however, there are some good restaurants in the area: Bobby and I one time spent almost US$50 on tacos for the two of us. Just to the east of the stately splendor of Regent Street -- it is tough to believe -- is the formerly bohemian Carnaby Street, home of 60s swinging London, where the hippest fashions of the day were on display, and the Rolling Stones and Austin Powers were having a groovy time. Just to the west of Regent Street are the famous suit makers on Savile Row, and now -- can it really be? -- and Abercrombie and Fitch?
During the tour, look around at all the buildings; royalty and aristocrats have owned this land for centuries and continue to rent it to building and road owners; in this way the predatory elites continue to fund themselves by extracting wealth from the people. And speaking of mingling with elites, at St. James Place, I recommend a stop at the pretentious Duke's Cocktail Bar in the Duke hotel down one of those several exclusive alleys you would have seen along the way. They may be the most expensive cocktails you've ever had, but they may also be the most proper. Ian Fleming enjoyed a tipple here and may have drunkenly wrote a few words of one or two James Bond novels. Don't fall foul of the dress code: smart casual, with no t-shirts, shorts, or sandals.
Many of my tours include at least one meal, or at least a pint of beer, at a pub. The pub is a classically English institution; spending some time there will help you go capture the spirit -- wooden bars, chairs, and walls; gross carpet; a musty stale beer smell hanging in the air; "cellar temperature" non-carbonated beer ("warm and flat" to American palates) pulled from a tap and often manufactured by the pub's owner (often a corporate, chain-owning entity these days). With Meng Guo, we made a quick stop in a Westminster pub, but finding the wait for food and drink too long, we abandoned that dream and went to Tesco Express instead. At Tesco Express we bought packaged ready-to-eat foods, which is a modern English experience in of itself, given such foods' popularity here. (Recall that relatively recently Tesco entered the US market selling small food packs and prepared meals and failed.)
 |
| The view downriver from Westminster Bridge. Bobby still naps on the run in his Ergo Baby if we time it right. We're lucky to get one full hour. |
I also offer several other tours.
City circuit
There's the City tour. It starts or ends at Borough Market (a consumer gourmet food market, formerly a wholesale food market for hundreds of years, just outside the City), travels across London Bridge into the City, and goes on to encompass several historic pubs (Jamaica Wine House, located through labyrinthine alleyways and founded in 1652 as London's first coffee house, and the Counting House, a pub inside a grand, old, disused bank lobby) and a market (Ledenhall, now all cleaned up and consumerish) and a pub inside an old market (a couple inside Ledenhall), Lombard Street (sort of like London's Wall Street but much older, original home of Lloyd's famous old coffee shop), and a good view of the Bank of England (there is a small specie museum inside!). Lombard Street apparently got its start in commerce when, according to Wikipedia, one old aristocrat in 1537 suggested to another they set up a formal financial market, which would become the Royal Exchange (also on the tour): "make a goodely Bursse in Lombert-streete, for marchuants to repayer unto."
Borough Market is notable to me because it is, I believe, one of the first in the current wave of gourmet food halls, having only over the past twenty years (or so) began focusing on consumer food rather than wholesale food; now, such gourmet prepared food halls are found throughout London, Europe (ok, the gourmet food hall goes way back in France), and increasingly in the U.S. See my entries on Lisbon, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, etc. I realize my history of gourmet food markets is not excellently informed, but I think I have some broad strokes correct -- gourmet food kiosks were not de rigueur in city centers in 1999.
As a coda to my City tour, we can catch the 76 bus at Bank and ride it right by St. Paul's (£20 to enter; wave on your way past) to the Middle and Inner Temples on the western edge of the City. This is nearby where I work, which is a sort of lawyer ghetto near several different courts. Hopping off the bus where Fleet Street intersects with Chancery Lane, you can meander northward through the warren of alleyways to my firm. Down one of the alleys is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a famous, old, and strange pub sprawling through basement cellars and good for at least one touristy pint. Doubling back to Fleet Street and across, find your way into the Middle Temple and Inner Temple. These are two of the Inns of Court, peculiar and ancient societies of barristers, or the elite lawyers in England and Wales who have permission to argue at court. Inside their grounds are mazes of old brick buildings, housing barristers' chambers, and small parks in courtyards; the grounds are peaceful compared to the cacophonous rumble of the bordering roads, Fleet Street and Victoria Embankment (i.e., highway along the Thames). The peaceful, rarefied air of the Temple is alluring though out of reach for a wayward lawyer like me.
 |
| As he is a lover of parks, we took him to run around on the Temple grounds one summer evening in Spring. I told him if he chooses to study law, he must succeed where I failed; he should strive to join an inn, rather than just doing law partially like me. |
This tour is getting long. Please stay with me a bit longer: heading back out to Fleet Street and turning west, Fleet turns into the Strand, a road where you can find many old and attractive English institutions: Somerset House, Bush House (from where BBC used to broadcast), Simpsons-in-the-Strand (one of England's oldest traditional restaurants, featuring meat, lots of meat), the Savoy Hotel (claimed by some to be London's most famous hotel, includes the American Bar, voted from time to time as the best bar in the world). Before too long, this course down the Strand takes you to Trafalgar Square, where the Westminster tour has been known to start. Now well out of the City, you can end this tour at Gordon's Wine Bar, claimed to be London's oldest wine bar, housed in cellars that are probably pretty grimy, but the candlelight keeps it too dark to know for sure; plus you're drinking wine so maybe not focused on the grime; like a lot of historic London, it is "Dickensian."
There is also the Holloway tour. Basically, this tour consists of our favorite places nearby our apartment, mostly focused on the parks and food and beverage establishments around Holloway Road. House of Hammerton deserves special mention. Hammerton is an Islington microbrewery with a long history and a tap room down the road from our apartment. We just love having delicious fresh beer on tap nearby!
Holloway Road's streetscape is rather bland compared to the City or the Strand. There's nothing on the ostentatious scale of the baroque Somerset House (except for the ultra-modern Emirates Stadium where Arsenal plays). Islington was a place of factories and housing for their employees before the factories gave way to public housing (called council housing here) and now gentrifiers and the service industry; some of the neighborhood was literally bombed out by Nazis (and that's how we got clearing for Paradise Park nearby). We would love to take you to Ley Ley's for cheeseburgers, but Ley Ley's was only a pop-up and plans to close before the end of August 2018. Final stop would be at our apartment, where, weather permitting, we could sit with wines and cigars on our small porch that overlooks the the tall buildings of the City; it's especially great on Fireworks Day.
It is the quotidien qualities that make this tour interesting. It is a real life neighborhood to live in. No one wants to walk out their front door and land on the madness of Trafalgar Square; no one wants to wait through four traffic lights just to get to a filthy Tesco Express to pick up a liter of milk for the babe. After all, the Holloway tour is what Airbnb is promising tourists: "live like a local." There is something fascinating about this adventure; Mum and I seek it out when we travel, always auditioning cities as potential places to live.
Why don't you come visit London and live like a local with us?
Comments
Mengguo
Love you all, miss you all, anxiously awaiting your US tour later this year.
Aunt Mawti