When I happened upon London the first time, I landed in a city experiencing a record heatwave with daytime temperatures topping 37 degrees C. An American from the South, one who is well acquainted with bone-shriveling heat and debilitating humidity, I yearned for the storied London of fog and damp cobbled streets. With its noisome sidewalks and self-conscious posing, the London of the late twentieth century met me with an iconoclastic mixture of the past and present. It read like an old familiar book wrapped in a youthful, hard binding.
With the aplomb of women embarking on a globe-trotting jaunt, we reserved a room in a world-class hotel in the upscale Kensington district. In other words, our educational travel company booked a double at the Hyatt-Regency as part of an all-inclusive package. Since that time, I have bypassed the services of an agency, opting for the adventurous way to travel—through local recommendation.
Air conditioning as we know it in the States and ice machines were hard to come by in those days, and remain a conceded luxury. Thus, in our four star hotel, a star removed for said reasons, we found ourselves none too comfortable. We leaned from our tenth floor windows like ladies of questionable repute, airing our sweaty faces from a room the size of a glorified closet. I reiterate the value of investigating your lodging ahead of time.
After navigating The Tube for a day, we managed to find most of our must-see attractions without too much fuss and reveled in the auditory “Mind the Gap” recordings. (The smooth warning is found throughout the world in albeit different forms such as “Attention a la marche” in France and in Athens, the descriptive, “Mind the gap between the train and the platform,” spoken in both English and Greek, but I digress.) The use of slightly curved platforms that create gaps between the concrete and the straight lines of the train advocate the verbal and printed caveats at stations. Numerous vendors and t-shirt suppliers stake their success upon a continuing fascination with three simple words.
If you visit London during a heatwave, the coolest place on the Underground is a standing position from which you may catch a cross breeze. Otherwise, try to blend in with the stoic commuters who, in order to remain properly fashionable, sport trench coats and jackets and wipe the sweat from their brow with dainty linen handkerchiefs. Whatever you do, do not succumb to the stereotypical “ugly American” antic of peeling down to your wife-beater tank top and exclaiming loudly, “Man, it is freaking hot!”
One thing to remember is the English are the politest people on earth. God love them. To make a fuss is considered the rudest of actions, and if undertaken at all, must be delicately, and almost imperceptively, done. I once was seated on an airplane between an Englishman and a strapping guy from Australia. The Aussie vocally berated the fact that he was in a window seat, suffered from back problems, and preferred the aisle. The gentleman from Yorkshire, who had a leg in a cast, not once made a quip about his uncomfortable aisle seat where both flight attendants and children continually bumped his injured foot. One of the many attributes I have come to love in the Queen’s country.
To become acquainted with London, put aside your need for such trappings like ice and brave a cuppa (it means so much more than “a cup of”) tea, steaming hot with milk and real sugar (no Splenda, please.) Dive into a local pub, not a tourist-filled, fish and chip hole, but a true and vanishing species of a more civilized time.
One thing I noted on my original and subsequent visits is the quickly vanishing, ever morphing nature of historic London into the steel megalopolis it is today. If you have been putting off a trip for some time, do not delay. The London of lore slips away each hour into a maze of aesthetically painful girders. Unlike the percipience of Paris, which guards and maintains its historic integrity, London, the fast spinning lady of modernity, keeps barreling ahead into the future. My first impression was one of a perennial past superseded, but not quite replaced by a youthful velocity.
That being said, on my initial trip, my companions and I heeded the echoes of long-ago London and found celebrated conveyance into a world of Henry VIII, Charles Dickens, and Admiral Nelson. With thousands of Japanese students, chattering and snapping cameras, we, nevertheless, were transposed to another era at The Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, and the Marble Arch. London’s legendary sites thrilled us newbies who gazed at Big Ben with virgin eyes and strained our jaws and necks at the expansive beauty of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral.
At this point, a word of caution is necessary. Be forewarned that one trip to this magnificent city usually does not suffice.
Newly minted Anglophiles, more often than not, find themselves booking another British Airways flight to Heathrow. On subsequent journeys, the familiar tourist train loses a bit of its allure while the returning adventurer scampers into the byways of a London known by the melting pot that dub it home. It is here in the places Londoners shop, eat, rest, and live, that the true charms of the city creep under your skin and keep you returning for more. Cheers!