I love and hate London in almost equal measure as I’ve said before. This morning, to blow away a few cobwebs while waiting for the train home from London, DM and I did a ‘walk round the block’. We walked out of our hotel, across Piccadilly Circus, ate breakfast in an Italian café (not that there was much Italian about the scrambled eggs, toast, baked beans, tomatoes and mushrooms we hungrily consumed), then strolled up Regent Street, along Oxford Street to Charing Cross Road, down to Leicester Square and back to the hotel.
It was great for a number of reasons….
Firstly you really get a slice of life in London. There are people from the whole world over, mingling and merging together. There are voices speaking in every tongue and faces of every shade. It’s just so fabulously cosmopolitan. We even saw a man walking his husky (as in mush) - I kid you not, across Leicester Square. Classic!
It’s also such a trip down memory lane for me – past Hamleys, supposedly the best toy shop in the world though its size now seems small compared to the invasion of that very unwanted (by me at least) import from the USA, Toys R Us. Hamleys makes me think of being a little girl when a trip to London would include Hamleys – Christmas time was best because then we got to see the Selfridges windows too – for anyone who’s never seen the Sefridges windows at Christmas – it’s well worth a visit to London to see them. The train department in Hamleys used to be wonderful – a huge model train set whirring around. I loved that.
As we were walking along Oxford Street, bemused at how many shops were offering phone thieves ‘unlocking’ services, I noticed another landmark of my youth, the GPO or Post Office Tower – though I’ll bet BT have spent years trying to persuade everyone to call it the BT tower since the two parts of that business were broken apart however many years ago. When it was built, there was a revolving restaurant on top – don’t know if it’s still there. It’s funny how often I walk that section of Oxford Street and never even notice it.
Charing Cross Road is a great favourite of mine, it’s London’s book city and many of the second hand booksellers still exist, as well as the wonderful Foyles. Today wasn’t a day for book shopping though, for those of you who read my plight of having no happy or funny books left in my book pile, you’ll be pleased to know that my appetite for such reading material was sated by a trip to Waterstones yesterday lunchtime and the handing over of one of my birthday book tokens! No matter that there was no book shopping to do, I still just love the street and have such warm memories of my favourite film of all time, 84 Charing Cross Road. Utterly wonderful.
Finally, before we walked back into our hotel to get our suitcases, we walked across Leicester Square and I recounted to David about how Colin, Sharon and I had been to see Big Audio Dynamite at the Ballroom there (can’t remember its name though these days it has a sign calling it the ‘breakthrough disco’ or something similar and looks like no one has ‘boogied on down’ there for many years as it was clearly not functioning anymore) and we’d waited and waited, through seemingly countless acts of guys coming on stage with beat boxes and either rapping or break dancing. It was three in the morning when we finally gave up and went home. The music press reported the following week that they’d eventually gone on stage at 5am……Pah! I did see them play a couple of times eventually but despite loving their album they didn’t endear themselves to me on that night.
By the time we were back at the hotel we were soaked and my feet were dyed black from the dye in my shoes because they were wet and we were ready to leave the city and go home to some clean air.
I'll never see the sight I was photographing two years ago again and last year I was spending time with my lovely friend Patti after a wild goose chase.
