That London

I decided to take a day to visit England’s capital before spending time with family, and spent my time there with only a vague plan of my visit: walking around the centre of the city that I knew so well in the 1990s. With my trusty X100V over my shoulder and a determination to look at the city with a fresh eye.

(This post was originally dictated into my phone at the end of March, as I was sitting in a hotel room in west London, packed and ready to head on to my next stop after spending an afternoon pounding the streets.)

Last time I came here, 11 years ago, I went to places that I knew very well when I was younger. I went to the old haunts where I used to do street photography, I returned to shops and street markets that I used to enjoy, and I had fish and chips by the river. But for some reason, and despite the huge amount of things I saw, that visit left me feeling a little dissatisfied. Trying to revisit places from the past is so often a futile experience when so many of your memories are based around former friendships and different times.

My life has become so much more than cities these days, having lived in the mountains for over 24 years. It’s been nice to get back to a city which is always changing, though: familiar and yet different, somehow smaller than it has been in my mind’s eye. Instead of going back to the places that I’ve visited so many times, I decided to go to a few unfamiliar parts of the city, given that my time there was restricted to just a few hours on a March afternoon.

I started off my afternoon by taking a grotty and graffitied Tube train along the Circle Line to Notting Hill Gate, to go for a walk around the back streets and find a potential photographic viewpoint which I found on Google Maps. Although that viewpoint was no good, I enjoyed wandering the streets and instead of continuing my journey on the Tube, I decided to enjoy the crisp sunshine and walk from Notting Hill through Bayswater to the edge of Hyde Park. It was interesting to walk through streets I’d never seen and plenty of the architectural details and vignettes of everyday life caught my eye.

Hoping for a wide range of experiences, I wasn’t disappointed: instead of the ubiquitous takeaways and grotty, plastic-fronted shops which have spread throughout British towns and cities over the last thirty or forty years, these streets were varied and filled with small white and pink and blue terraced houses, white Georgian mansions and small, gated park squares kept largely to a high standard. Small, well-maintained pubs remain tucked into the corners of ornate red brick apartment buildings whilst quirky shops and cafes reflect the varied nationalities of the local residents.

I wanted to go to a particular shop near Covent Garden so I hopped back on the Tube at Lancaster Gate because of time constraints and stopped off at Tottenham Court Road station to take a look at the Elizabeth Line platforms: part of the first new Tube construction since the Jubilee Line extension in the 1990s. London street photographers seemed to be very excited about the opportunities of the passageways and new architecture within these new parts of the underground network but although I was (and continue to be) boggled by the achievement of driving such huge complexes through such a rabbit warren of other tunnels, the actual experience was that of so many other large stations I’ve been to.

By the time I’d surfaced at Charing Cross Road, city workers had finished their daily grind and the pubs were starting to fill up, with dark interiors blocked by groups of smokers who had been banished to the slivers of rapidly-retreating sunshine. By this time, it was getting close to to the point where I would need to find some dinner: something which I find somehow tricky when alone. Even though there was an almost infinite number of restaurants and cafés and bars surrounding me, there didn’t seem to be anywhere appealing.

Instead of just going to a burger joint and determined to make a vague attempt at remaining healthy—something which seems oddly difficult in British cities—I chose to walk down St. Martin’s Lane to the river by way of Trafalgar Square, where the usual horde of tourists was milling around and sitting on the steps looking at the view down Whitehall to Big Ben. From the main square I ducked down a little stairway into the underpass leading to Charing Cross train station, and spent 15 to 20 minutes waiting for the stairway to clear so that I could take a fresh photograph of the underground sign which I’ve been capturing since the 1990s.

With the sparse warmth of the day gone after sunset and with my tummy rumbling, I put on my jacket, walked to the river and across the Golden Jubilee Bridge to the Southbank. This is one of my favourite parts of London and one to which I have always returned when visiting the city. I decided to have dinner in one of the Italian restaurants there, for the sake of ease more than anything else, and sat there for around 45 minutes to take a break and to give my feet a bit of a rest. I then walked along to another favourite viewpoint, where you can see all the way to St Paul’s Cathedral, took a couple of snaps, and then turned on my heel and headed to Westminster Bridge.

There are so many views and photographs to be taken around this area, but I’ve been visiting since I was a child so I can usually resist the urge to just take the standard snapshots these days. Instead, my eye was drawn by particular lighting effects: interactions of tourists with the lights casting great shadows onto the pavement and rotating coloured floodlights on County Hall and the London Eye. Before heading back to the Tube, I stopped to take a single shot of Big Ben through an archway underneath the bridge: dingy as always but also incredibly photogenic.

Pausing to contemplate the hospital where I came into the world and the large number of (to me) new buildings along the river at Chelsea, I went back underground at Westminster Station and took the direct District Line train back to Ealing.

The Central Line and District Line used to be the clean and modern lines when I used to visit in the 1990s, but these carriages probably hadn’t been cleaned or de-graffitied since then. But the seat was comfortable enough and the other passengers were absorbed with their phones and books. With my feet aching a little from 11 kilometres of pounding tarmac and concrete, I walked briskly back from Ealing Broadway station through the streets to my hotel and spent a very large number of hours asleep.

Anyone that knows me well will tell you that I can be too reminiscent for my own good. I made a special effort at this trip not to do be reminiscent but to visit the city as a tourist: to go and see things that I wanted to see rather than try to revisit “old haunts”. Despite spending most of my time in the mountains, I’m actually slightly more of a city person than a countryside person, although writing this is a bit like saying you’re a dog person rather than a cat person. People are rarely exclusively one or the other, and so it is with me. Over the years, the difference has become minimal.

I’ve come to realise over the past twenty-four hours that it’s been too many years for a return to London to feel anything like a homecoming. But that’s fine. Removing reminiscence allowed me to enjoy this short time here and to see many more interesting facets of the city for what they are.