This summer, instead of spending a week at a holiday cottage in Dorset as we've done for many years previously, the Johnses decamped eastwards and, by way of our favourite stretch of motorway (meaning the M25, naturally), arrived in London last Thursday.
I'd been to London twice before, but, as one had been a school visit to the two Tates and the other a journey on a supporters' coach to a third-round FA Cup tie with Arsenal, I'd never explored London at large, so to speak. On this occasion, we planned to be proper tourists and enjoy all the sights the capital had to offer.
From our hotel out at Dagenham (some of my mum's side of the family lives in Essex, so we stayed quite close to them), we were able to catch the c2c service into Fenchurch Street, thus avoiding the underground, I think mainly for Mum's sake. When we alighted, almost our first sight of London was the imposing Tower Bridge and its much older namesake, which we visited later in our stay.
Although we were armed with a mini-map of the city, we didn't have much idea of how best to get to our first destination, the Natural History Museum, and our family tends to be rather lacking in the leg department anyway, so walking from Tower Hill to South Kensington probably wasn't a realistic plan. But our parents wisely invested in tickets for a tour on an open-top bus (later hilariously called a 'topless bus' by our proper-East-End great aunt).
We disembarked the Big Bus near Hyde Park and walked the rest of the way to the museums, past dozens of embassies and their suited-and-booted drivers. Surprisingly, the queue for the NHM was quite short and moved quickly, so we soon found ourselves in Earth Hall, on the eastern side of the museum. Aside from the amazing exhibits, even the building itself is impressive; it was purpose-built in the 1870s, although the guidebook says that many people ask what it was used for before it became a museum - a question we were also guilty of asking!
Some of our favourites among the exhibits were the skeletons of a giant sloth, a plesiosaur and a diplodocus (such a teeny head!), prints from John James Audubon's Birds of America (the most expensive book in the world), my new friend Charles Darwin and a first edition of his famous Origin of Species.
Such was the scale of the museum and its vast array of content that, although we spent most of the day there, we still didn't manage to see everything and our plan to visit the neighbouring V&A has had to be postponed until a future trip.
Worn out from several hours walking around the NHM, we hopped back onto the hop-on hop-off topless bus to finish our tour and (hopefully) end up where we started, back at the Tower of London. Once we were safely installed on the correct bus, we discovered that our tour guide was the very amusing Phil from Yeovil, who knew all about Plymouth and was even familiar with such highlights as Mutley Plain; for such a small city, Plym is hard to escape!
Passing by Marble Arch, Trafalgar Square (and its big blue Fourth Plinth chicken) and St Paul's Cathedral, we returned to the Tower and then eventually to the hotel in Dagenham after an exhausting first day in London.
The following morning, we arrived back in central London to pick up just where we left off:
After disembarking at Fenchurch Street once more, we followed the Thames Path as far as the Millennium Bridge, which, to our relief, no longer wobbles as violently as it once did, though it's rather slippery when wet, to quote Bon Jovi.
We had a good look around Bankside, now home to the formidable former power station which houses the Tate Modern, and the replica of Shakespeare's Globe theatre. Unfortunately, the last tour of the day had just left as we arrived and we didn't manage to catch one later in the week, so that's on the list with the V&A for a future trip.
As we hadn't been able to see the inside of the Globe, we carried on along the Thames' south bank until we came to... Southbank. Of course.
Full of shops, cafés and street vendors, it was the most vibrant part of London we encountered on our trip (I have no doubt that there are other bustling, arty places, but the general tourist route probably doesn't include them). Particularly interesting was the selection of bookstalls set up beneath Waterloo Bridge, selling vintage books and magazines - even Rupert the Bear!
But the main reason that we had trekked so far as Southbank was to visit the now-iconic London Eye. Luckily, we were able to get fast-track tickets to avoid the veeeery long queue which had formed below the wheel.
Going on the Eye actually wasn't at all scary, because you almost don't notice that the pods are moving - they're very smooth and slow, although the half-hour it took to get around seemed to go too quickly!
And thus ended our second day in London Town.
To be continued...
(: xx
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