"The one dark spot on my stay in that neighborhood was one night I walked to a pharmacy a few blocks away from the hotel, and two men on a motorcycle drove up on the sidewalk and tried to snatch my phone out of my hand."
Lovely to read this travelogue, but my heart sank when I read this, as it's an unfortunate reality of living in London at the moment. Thankfully the author was quick enough to evade them.
Be careful about using your phone on the street, day or dark, as it's extremely obvious from far away (eg for somebody sat on a moped pillion) when a potential victim is engrossed in their phone-work and not 100% attending to their surroundings.
Many friends and colleagues have suffered from this scurge, and the moped oiks really have no scruples (one friend was heavily pregnant when she was mugged).
Take care, but don't let that put you off enjoying a great city.
Yes this is getting bad. It happened to my father a few years ago as well when he was sitting on the side of the road answering a phone call with the window open in Chiswick. Fortunately he grabbed the guy and shut the window on his arm. He got free but not until he'd got a couple of broken fingers.
Police did nothing because the bike was stolen. And thus the cycle continues.
She got a bit unlucky tho I must say. I've lived there for 10 years, and have never seen it happen. I can only think of two friends who've been mugged during that time as well. Assuming 30 friends that's 150 man years per mugging :)
I think it depends on the area - I've seen it happen twice in broad daylight on Clerkenwell Road near Farringdon station over the last couple of years and it's happened to a friend of mine near Waterloo.
I've been living in central London (zone 1) for 3 years now and never had any issue (nor my partner, nor anybody I know).
It might also be due to the area being touristy or not.
I remember a crime map (I can't find out this link anymore...) showing that the side of London bridge which faces Tower Bridge had a high crime rate whereas the other side was absolutely safe. So if you want to cross London Bridge without taking a picture of Tower Bridge, pick the correct side :)
London is a big city though. As most big cities, I would never expect it to be totally safe.
Do you live in central London? It's hard for me to imagine you wouldn't come across it if you lived within Zone 2, say - I only lived in London a relatively short time, but some guys tried to mug me (I didn't have my phone out), I found a phone on the street and returned it to its owner, and I lost count of the friends it happened to, the incidents on the road I lived on, etc.
I've seen it happen once & heard of it happening to a couple of friends of friends. Probably depends on the area - the one I saw was on City Rd which is known to be bad for it.
My mother in law warned us that we cannot go to Warsaw because it's the criminal capital (she moved to Germany 30+ years ago); turns out it's probably the safest capital city among Berlin, Paris and Rome by such a large margin that it's not even funny.
In response to this the British police have recently changed the law allowing them to chase and hit motorcyclists with their cars. Last year, the gangs would ride scooters without wearing a helmet. This would mean that the police weren't authorised to chase them, as chasing them could cause them to drive dangerously and harm themselves
Being pedantic, but it is an important point in a free society: the Police cannot change the law. They have changed their rules of engagement for particular officers, but the relevant law is still the same - and might well be tested in court: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-46440172
"The one exception was a brief stint walking around the South Bank, which was full of bland office spaces with little ground-floor retail or neighborhoods"
As indicated in her update elsewhere in her notes, the best waterfront bank in London is the South Bank, and the best way to see the South Bank is to walk along the actual waterfront bank, i.e. along the river.
The northern side of the river is a mess of blocked off stretches and vehicle roads. Whilst the South Bank is a lovely continuous pedestrian stretch with plenty of food places and small parks along it.
I frequently walk from Waterloo station along the bank to either Millennium Bridge, or onwards all the way to the Borough Market by London Bridge. Lovely stretch of the river.
There are some other nice parts of the South Bank, and I can see on her map she walked through the Cut, but I agree apart from the actual waterfront bank the rest is mostly dire.
Hammersmith has a lovely path along the Thames, with pubs and restaurants. It is truly great, especially in summer. Definitely not the most touristy area but it's a gem for locals like me.
I used to live near Baron's Court, around the back of Charing Cross Hospital. My favourite walks were either down to Putney - that stretch after Fulham's ground near Bishop's Park is glorious during the Spring and Autumn in a tunnel of leaves - or go the other way towards the Fuller's brewery and take in some of the pubs en route.
I now live over in Twickenham which has even finer walks along the river or across Richmond Hill, but I always thought it amazing that those vistas over to the Wetlands were available in the heart of Zone 2.
That’s an easy route to take for tourists, it’s what three miles from London Bridge to the Eye, and along the way there’s Southwark Cathedral, the Golden Hind, Borough Market, Tate Modern, the Globe, the National Theatre, Heyward Gallery, Festival Hall, and the British Film Institute.
I think planners have put a lot of emphasis on getting public rights of way running along the rest of the Thames, but maybe at the cost of real public spaces for sitting and enjoying yourself.
Even decades ago, I recall from memory a gorgeous nighttime view of parliament, lit up in gold-ish tones, with an emerald green lighting the bridge underside in the intermediate foreground. I'm pretty sure I have a couple of slides of it, somewhere...
When I see pictures and video now, I wonder how much the view behind me would have changed.
Walking London was a cornucopia of experiences, from being treated by an erstwhile stranger to a great dinner on the backside of Chinatown, to being scammed out of 20 pounds -- and getting off lucky it was only that much.
(After a cold winter in Germany, it was a bit like being let out of the pen -- and into an abnormally gorgeous week of April good weather. Although, in reality, my German friends expressed a closeness, and -- I can actually use the word -- Gemuetlichkeit, that a frenetic London could not entirely substitute.)
--
P.S. This was back when, IIRC, the well-known book had rising to "London on £15 a Day". Or maybe it was £10 -- that sounds right. Anyway, £20 was substantially more than an inexpensive dinner -- or even shared lodging with an English breakfast. Ah, well -- lesson learned, and without physical injury.
The Thames Path runs from the Thames Barrier (London's flood protection barrier, a few miles downstream from the centre but still within the city proper) to Thames Head, the (traditional) source of the river in the Cotswolds. Through much of London it's actually two paths, one on either bank.
Outdoors they don't even increase friction. If you're wearing normal shoes and it's raining, the reduced contact surface because of the bumps makes them slippery.
> One-trip tickets on the Tube were surprisingly expensive, £4.90. This is likely a form of price discrimination for tourists, as the cost for the Oyster and Contactless payment cards is much lower.
My understanding of this is that its actually price discrimination against people buying paper tickets, as they're more likely to have problems at the gates and result in a queue backing up.
That seems a bit steep, a day ticket is only a few pounds more.
As for recommendations for tourists, Oyster is great, but, there's really no need, a contactless bank card is capped at the same day and week rate as Oyster.
I've been commuting for the last year on my bank card, it's not the most financially efficient way, but it's not a lot more expensive (than a pre-paid pass).
Also bear in mind that a bank card will take ~2 seconds to scan at most stations' gates, versus milliseconds for an Oyster. It might seem trivial but at London rush hour it's an annoyance for you and everyone else.
One thing people also don't know is that at most stations, your card won't scan if you're standing between the gates, step back and scan or you'll just hold everyone up until you give up and walk away.
It's designed this way, I imagine, so that you don't scan while someone is still paying through the gate and have it close on you before you pass through.
I got an Oyster when visiting London a few years ago and taking public transit was still by a large margin more expensive than any other European city I've been to (and IIRC when available transit in the US is generally cheaper than in Europe).
I was really surprised at how expensive it was! Especially as the pound's value at the time was quite a bit higher than today.
I don't know how it works in London, but I just moved to Cambridge from Canada. Our contactless cards would not work on the bus system. We had to pay cash until we got our UK banking sorted out. That's not an option on TFL, so visitors just have a plan B if you plan to use your bank card.
It's a tactic to discourage the use of the paper tickets; they want to get rid of them, the Oyster card allows for much faster movement of people inside the stations and due to the gates much lower fraud.
In NL we've moved to a card system like that some years ago; the amount of people traveling without a ticket in the subways and trains has declined by a lot, and consequently, crime and violence against the train staff that fined them if they were checked. Likewise, staff could be reallocated from appearing as a big gang of ticket checkers at the exits of random stations to other tasks.
They do tend to put at least one guy near the gates though, for one to help out people that have trouble with the system, and on the other to discourage people jumping the gates. They're quite high so that's quite a feat, but there's also a builtin system so that it opens if pushed hard enough (in case of emergency).
Anyway. Ticket machines are big and expensive machines.
The person near the gates is mandatory (a legal requirement), if the staff aren't available to provide that person the gates will be switched off (so you can just walk through) or they close the route entirely (and if it's the only route that also means closing the station).
The gates are designed so that an adult can force their way through despite the gate being closed, but nevertheless in a fire or other emergency situation you don't want to wait for fleeing people to force the gates, so there must be a trained human available to command the gates to all open immediately. In a tube station there will be a control booth with CCTV of all areas somewhere to direct operations - the gate still must be supervised by someone physically nearby, not solely from the booth. Flow controls that don't prevent you fleeing from an emergency (e.g. the "Do Not Enter!" flashing signs at some tube entrances that can be activated to prevent overcrowding, or the changeable internal direction markers that let them send unfamiliar users over a longer alternate route to their destination) are controlled from the booth though.
It's a bit of both I reckon. Even a lot of non-London Brits don't realise how easy it is to get an oyster card in the station, and very few know that you can just use contactless payments.
I think it's because they have to maintain ticket machines for the people who choose to buy single tickets rather than use their Oyster/Contactless. It means maintaining the legacy ticket infrastructure which is less efficient and more time consuming. Anyone can get an Oyster card at a vending machine and most people in the developed world have a contactless payment card.
They are designed to discourage you, and to push you towards solutions that are better for TfL and the environment: contactless cards.
Get a contactless bank card, Apple or Android pay on your phone or smart watch, or buy an Oyster card.
If you know you'll be travelling a lot for a week or two, look into a 7 day travel card which you load onto an Oyster card, and gives you unlimited travel for the zones you're interested in.
You can still travel outside those zones, but will pay a fare increment.
This reminds me of the Swiss system, where there's a notion of the "half fare card" which is conventionally supplied by companies in Switzerland to their workers. 50% of the ticket price is essentially a "tourist tax", which is unavoidable by buying a different kind of ticket (like an Oyster card) at the station. I think it's pretty smart.
There is nothing to stop visitors from using either contactless card payments, Android/Apple pay, or an Oyster card. Oyster cards are easily purchased from all stations, especially places many people arrive like Heathrow Airport. They're promoted on websites aimed at tourists like visitlondon.com, and covered in every guidebook to the city. The £5 deposit and any remaining balance is refundable at many machines, and doesn't expire.
At this point contactless has enough consumer adoption to be the easier option. If you're a tourist and don't have a contactless card you can use Google pay etc.
I didn't even realise you could buy paper tickets. You can use contactless credit cards and apple pay directly on the gate, so there's no reason to buy one.
I usually had a paper ticket in London because I’d be coming in from Guildford - the mag strip on the paper ticket you buy for your commute into London also encoded a travelcard for tube usage.
I love the comment on sun-bleached black paint on the upper floors, but it's completely wrong. These black bricks are not black because they've been painted - they're black with coal soot from before burning coal was banned in the 1950s. If they're less black on the upper floors, I guess it's because 60 years of rain eventually has some effect.
Until relatively recently, most of the tourist postcards of London you could buy in the tat shops in town had old photos where the buildings were all blackened. I'm not sure when they were cleaned, some time in the late 70s or early 80s perhaps. A dramatic difference!
A little off-topic, but it's nice to read some positive news about the UK (and England in particular). I feel that we get a lot of bad press, which is a shame as really the UK isn't such a bad place overall.
I have spent 2 years (on and off) in various parts of England and it was the most amazing time of my life. Life is a bit expensive over there but it's well worth it if you consider the positivity that people display, the very special sense of fashion and of course the accent (I find british people to be very well spoken in general, which helped me a lot in improving my understanding of the language). I'm a bit worried about brexit because I'm seriously considering moving back there for work.
I keep thinking about leaving - I'm a NZer in London, but I fucking love living here.
There is a serious problem with the way the elite treat this country though. It becomes more apparent the longer you live here, with the way David Cameron handled the EU ref being the perfect example. They're so sure of themselves, they've never really experienced a situation where they haven't been in the advantage, and they have 0 empathy. Then they fuck things up royally.
This is the absolute #1 downside of this country, and I say that as someone who would probably be counted as one of the elite for having gone to Cambridge. I did not however go to Oxford and do PPE, which is the prerequisite course for running the country.
The narrowness of the elite and their supporting media organisations (including the ones run by overseas tax exiles) causes a terrible inward focus. Entire regions of the country end up feeling forgotten, with good reason.
Also an NZer in London, and I am leaving, though to Berlin, not back to New Zealand. Berlin (and Germany) aren't perfect - far from it, but they haven't yet damaged themselves as badly as the UK has.
I love the UK, and am actually going there tomorrow.
...and that’s exactly why I feel so strongly that they are being idiots. Nobody would care about an actually terrible country ruining its future and descending into madness.
Brexit has done a lot of damage, at least in EU countries (and not in all circles), to the image of British people as reasonable, realiable, level-headed fellows.
But apart from that, I'm not sure what bad press you get?
> I enjoyed nearly all of the neighborhoods that I explored. Bloomsbury, Hyde Park, Soho, Notting Hill, and Mayfair were especially pleasant.
i.e. the 5 richest areas of the city. Definitely not representative of the real London. Head to Camberwell, Manor House, Ealing and Walthamstow next time to see where "regular" people are living.
London is one of the most unequal cities on the planet. You get this surreal mix of wealthy billionaires and poor migrants living hand to mouth. The upper classes protect and segregate themselves from the riff-raff through pricing. My experience was that London is not actually a community, the cultural and socioeconomic rifts are so profound that random people seldom interact, there is little small talk to be had with strangers.
Tourists thoroughly enjoy the central areas but seldom realize they could never afford a home there of any decent size.
London is a rich person's theme park to which tourists are permitted some restricted access, for an exorbitant price. ("tourist" includes people renting for the short to mid term, who simply could not afford to buy, and will move out of London to do so)
Most unequal on the planet? That is ridiculous. Even SF with its thousands of dotcom millionaires and thousands of homeless is worse, let alone places with proper inequality like Mumbai or Lagos...
Readit News
Lovely to read this travelogue, but my heart sank when I read this, as it's an unfortunate reality of living in London at the moment. Thankfully the author was quick enough to evade them.
Be careful about using your phone on the street, day or dark, as it's extremely obvious from far away (eg for somebody sat on a moped pillion) when a potential victim is engrossed in their phone-work and not 100% attending to their surroundings.
Many friends and colleagues have suffered from this scurge, and the moped oiks really have no scruples (one friend was heavily pregnant when she was mugged).
Take care, but don't let that put you off enjoying a great city.
Police did nothing because the bike was stolen. And thus the cycle continues.
Actually, is getting better [1]. Somebody posted the link right above your comment.
> It happened to my father a few years ago [...]
And you assume that nothing changed since then.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/nov/23/met-police-s...
EDIT: she
I remember a crime map (I can't find out this link anymore...) showing that the side of London bridge which faces Tower Bridge had a high crime rate whereas the other side was absolutely safe. So if you want to cross London Bridge without taking a picture of Tower Bridge, pick the correct side :)
London is a big city though. As most big cities, I would never expect it to be totally safe.
Around 50% of Islington's population are in social housing < 20% of whom work.
Dead Comment
As indicated in her update elsewhere in her notes, the best waterfront bank in London is the South Bank, and the best way to see the South Bank is to walk along the actual waterfront bank, i.e. along the river.
The northern side of the river is a mess of blocked off stretches and vehicle roads. Whilst the South Bank is a lovely continuous pedestrian stretch with plenty of food places and small parks along it.
I frequently walk from Waterloo station along the bank to either Millennium Bridge, or onwards all the way to the Borough Market by London Bridge. Lovely stretch of the river.
There are some other nice parts of the South Bank, and I can see on her map she walked through the Cut, but I agree apart from the actual waterfront bank the rest is mostly dire.
[1] https://www.thames-path.org.uk/thames_putney_richmond.html
[2] http://www.gps-routes.co.uk/routes/home.nsf/RoutesLinksWalks...
I now live over in Twickenham which has even finer walks along the river or across Richmond Hill, but I always thought it amazing that those vistas over to the Wetlands were available in the heart of Zone 2.
Ancient things are always turning up. Here's the twitter account of the London Mudlark community: https://twitter.com/LondonMudlark
Rules and regs: https://www.pla.co.uk/Environment/Thames-foreshore-access-in...
I think planners have put a lot of emphasis on getting public rights of way running along the rest of the Thames, but maybe at the cost of real public spaces for sitting and enjoying yourself.
When I see pictures and video now, I wonder how much the view behind me would have changed.
Walking London was a cornucopia of experiences, from being treated by an erstwhile stranger to a great dinner on the backside of Chinatown, to being scammed out of 20 pounds -- and getting off lucky it was only that much.
(After a cold winter in Germany, it was a bit like being let out of the pen -- and into an abnormally gorgeous week of April good weather. Although, in reality, my German friends expressed a closeness, and -- I can actually use the word -- Gemuetlichkeit, that a frenetic London could not entirely substitute.)
--
P.S. This was back when, IIRC, the well-known book had rising to "London on £15 a Day". Or maybe it was £10 -- that sounds right. Anyway, £20 was substantially more than an inexpensive dinner -- or even shared lodging with an English breakfast. Ah, well -- lesson learned, and without physical injury.
https://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/thames-path
Edit: Apparently TfL thinks the Thames Path continues in London: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/walking/thames-path
Similarly there are other paving slabs with ridges, and the direction on the ridge relative to the path tells you if it’s for cyclists or pedestrians.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactile_paving
My understanding of this is that its actually price discrimination against people buying paper tickets, as they're more likely to have problems at the gates and result in a queue backing up.
As for recommendations for tourists, Oyster is great, but, there's really no need, a contactless bank card is capped at the same day and week rate as Oyster.
I've been commuting for the last year on my bank card, it's not the most financially efficient way, but it's not a lot more expensive (than a pre-paid pass).
Also bear in mind that a bank card will take ~2 seconds to scan at most stations' gates, versus milliseconds for an Oyster. It might seem trivial but at London rush hour it's an annoyance for you and everyone else.
One thing people also don't know is that at most stations, your card won't scan if you're standing between the gates, step back and scan or you'll just hold everyone up until you give up and walk away.
It's designed this way, I imagine, so that you don't scan while someone is still paying through the gate and have it close on you before you pass through.
I was really surprised at how expensive it was! Especially as the pound's value at the time was quite a bit higher than today.
In NL we've moved to a card system like that some years ago; the amount of people traveling without a ticket in the subways and trains has declined by a lot, and consequently, crime and violence against the train staff that fined them if they were checked. Likewise, staff could be reallocated from appearing as a big gang of ticket checkers at the exits of random stations to other tasks.
They do tend to put at least one guy near the gates though, for one to help out people that have trouble with the system, and on the other to discourage people jumping the gates. They're quite high so that's quite a feat, but there's also a builtin system so that it opens if pushed hard enough (in case of emergency).
Anyway. Ticket machines are big and expensive machines.
The gates are designed so that an adult can force their way through despite the gate being closed, but nevertheless in a fire or other emergency situation you don't want to wait for fleeing people to force the gates, so there must be a trained human available to command the gates to all open immediately. In a tube station there will be a control booth with CCTV of all areas somewhere to direct operations - the gate still must be supervised by someone physically nearby, not solely from the booth. Flow controls that don't prevent you fleeing from an emergency (e.g. the "Do Not Enter!" flashing signs at some tube entrances that can be activated to prevent overcrowding, or the changeable internal direction markers that let them send unfamiliar users over a longer alternate route to their destination) are controlled from the booth though.
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/contactless-top-line-figure.pdf
I'm not sure contactless is as ubiquitous as we think it is.
They are designed to discourage you, and to push you towards solutions that are better for TfL and the environment: contactless cards.
Get a contactless bank card, Apple or Android pay on your phone or smart watch, or buy an Oyster card.
If you know you'll be travelling a lot for a week or two, look into a 7 day travel card which you load onto an Oyster card, and gives you unlimited travel for the zones you're interested in.
You can still travel outside those zones, but will pay a fare increment.
There is nothing to stop visitors from using either contactless card payments, Android/Apple pay, or an Oyster card. Oyster cards are easily purchased from all stations, especially places many people arrive like Heathrow Airport. They're promoted on websites aimed at tourists like visitlondon.com, and covered in every guidebook to the city. The £5 deposit and any remaining balance is refundable at many machines, and doesn't expire.
Do you mean "avoidable"?
A transport network needs to be designed so that everybody can use it - that means being able to access it with cash.
Even Oyster’s £5 deposit per card can be an issue for some people.
10 Downing Street is an example and there’s something about it in this piece on its reconstruction: https://history.blog.gov.uk/2017/07/19/rebuilding-no-10-down...
Well, it's their language, at the end of the day. You'd expect them to be well spoken, innit? :p
There is a serious problem with the way the elite treat this country though. It becomes more apparent the longer you live here, with the way David Cameron handled the EU ref being the perfect example. They're so sure of themselves, they've never really experienced a situation where they haven't been in the advantage, and they have 0 empathy. Then they fuck things up royally.
The narrowness of the elite and their supporting media organisations (including the ones run by overseas tax exiles) causes a terrible inward focus. Entire regions of the country end up feeling forgotten, with good reason.
...and that’s exactly why I feel so strongly that they are being idiots. Nobody would care about an actually terrible country ruining its future and descending into madness.
But apart from that, I'm not sure what bad press you get?
i.e. the 5 richest areas of the city. Definitely not representative of the real London. Head to Camberwell, Manor House, Ealing and Walthamstow next time to see where "regular" people are living.
Tourists thoroughly enjoy the central areas but seldom realize they could never afford a home there of any decent size.
For the roughest and poorest areas try Harlesden, Tottenham, or Edmonton. (Or don't, because they're dangerous.)
That's not a complete list, but they'll certainly give visitors a different view of London.
I would argue that the neighbourhoods above are just representations of the other side of the spectrum. Not where "regular" people live.
There is a far easier way to _roughly_ date buildings.
o English bond: pre georgian to early victorian (1650-1840)
o Flemish bond: victorian to ~1930s
o Stretcher bond: anything with a cavity wall, so 1950>
If the brick is glazed its ~1870-1930
see https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Types_of_brick_bon... for what the bonds look like