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| Canterbury |
You’ll be reading a lot in this blog about our recent trip to England, so ‘s a brief overview. We were based in London, aside from a two-day stay in York, hence these thoughts are geographically skewed. I’ve spent more time in Scotland than in England and am more comfortable in the land of my ancestors, so this too colored my perceptions. (“If it’s nae Scottish, it’s crrrrapp,” as SNL once joked.)
It had been nearly 15 years since last we were in London and even longer since our previous visit to York. It is safe to say that a lot has changed! Change can be a mixed bag and one’s reaction to such things are often a matter of preference.
Highlights
Travel begins with people. We were not on a tour, but a definite highlight was seeing old friends. Valerie jetted over from Geneva and spent a day with us at the Victoria and Albert Museum at London. Chinwags, lunch, and warn beverages on a cool day in William Morris-styled tearooms lent a pleasant atmosphere to catching up.
We spent another day with Derek and Jenny who live just outside of London. We rendezvoused at Black Heath for a very long walk that began in the village and across the heath and Greenwich. Mist, open land, coffee and cakes at a garden house, a stroll through an instructional farm to visit critters, and a train into London’s upscale Docklands area. We gabbed, gabbed, gabbed and ended the day at a nice Indian restaurant.
We found English people unfailingly kind and polite. As older (yikes!) travelers, younger folks offered us seats on the Tube (subway), helped us work out ticket machines, and committed small acts of kindness. I’m no expert of Britain’s racist/anti-immigrant Reform Party, but London is the most multicultural city I’ve seen in recent years. There are interracial couples of all sorts and a noticeable lack of anger on the faces of English people of color. Brexit and Reform aside, their followers are spitting into the wind; immigrants are tightly woven into London culture.
The Sights:
1. If museums are a passion, London caters to so many tastes that we largely confined ourselves to art–Tate Britain, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Modern, the Tower of London–and the anthropological wonders of the British Museum.
2. Green spaces abound. Walking through St. James’s Park near Buckingham Palace was amazing. We were promptly greeted by a rather imperious white pelican, as well as magpies, moorhens, and parrots. I struck up a nice conversation with an elderly Chinese gentleman with a cloud of parrots around him. He told me he is retired and that he comes every day to feed his “friends.”
Feeding his friends!
3. You can
still find free house pubs serving cask ales. Be wary; not all are good.
4. An evening at Wilton’s Theatre for a singalong of Cockney, music hall, and selected pop/rock songs was a gas. Tom Carradine and his China Plates are a throwback in a positive way. Tom dresses in Victorian garb most of the time, sports a waxed mustache, and has a devoted following in a run-down venue whose condition parallels Preservation Hall in New Orleans.
5. We found (in order) Canterbury, York, and Oxford much more “charming” than London. Also, more historical and less frenetic.
The Lows:
1. Once-familiar landmarks are now “buried” in London’s go-go building boom that pays very little attention to planning. Dizzying skyscraper complexes have Manhattanized London with insufficient attention paid to the surrounding area. The pickle-shaped “Gherkin” has been followed by the “Shard” (think Superman’s Fortress of Solitude on Ozempic), and a hulking skyscraper Londoners have dubbed “the Walkie-Talkie” and I think looks like a Bose speaker. I like bold design (though the reflections from the Gherkin have allegedly induced skin burns), but poor placement invites lampoon. The Docklands is impressive, but generic. Its web of private moorings makes mockery of where laborers and sailors once toiled. Gentrification and genericization abound.
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| The "Gherkin" |
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| From the South Bank bridge. Note how close the "Walkie Talkie" is Tower Bridge |
2. London has become unaffordable. A cup of coffee can set you back $7 when you do the conversion. A simple meat or veggie hand pie is ₤16-17 (as much as $23!). We were staying in Earls Court where each townhouse had cars such a Lamborghini, a BMW, a Rolls, or its ilk parked in the drive. Our rental was in a townhouse carved into postage stamp rooms. The galley kitchen was jammed into a hallway with cupboards that reached to the top of 12’ ceilings. The same was true of the shower, whose head would have made for a lovely fixture for someone 11’ tall.
3. The class system is alive and well, though it is now an aristocracy of money rather than birth. Upscale stores such as Harrods and Liberty are absolutely disgusting is their worship of conspicuous consumption. I looked at a light wool scarf in Harrods that would have set me back $600. London's main shopping district is strictly show-off stuff for the millionaires and tchotchkes from Marks and Sparks for the masses. I literally fled from Harrods.
4. There’s not much new in the theatre. Revivals everywhere, even off the Strand.
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