One Evening in the City

In which The Author explores more dusty corners of London

The weekend before last I spent a night in London, which is something I haven’t done for about twenty years. My friend Andrew C. had booked a hotel room for work purposes, and then discovered that he wouldn’t be able to use it after all. Unable to get a refund at short notice, Andrew offered the room on Facebook on the Friday morning.

I saw his posting a couple of hours later, and sent him a quick message to ask whether the offer still stood. I imagined that by this time he’d have been inundated with messages, and the room would have been snapped up within minutes.

But this is Aberdare, remember. At least half the people I know would see a night’s stay in London as equivalent to Major Tim Peake’s recently completed mission in space – a nice idea in theory, but completely beyond their reach. On the other hand, I’d missed on a trip just after Whitsun, and I still needed something to compensate for the disastrous trip on my birthday.

Nobody had taken Andrew up on his offer in the interim period. He gave me the details of the hotel, and arranged to pick me up just before midday on the Sunday morning. By this time I already had the Megabus booking form open, and it took me a minute or so to finalise the journey home.

I made my way into town early on the Sunday morning and had breakfast in Thereisnospoon. A late breakfast would set me up for the day, and save me having to take a packed lunch. I wouldn’t be short of places to have something in the evening, so the plan was coming together nicely. Andrew and his partner Dawn picked me up outside the pub, and we drove to Pontypridd to pick up Steve H. and the ‘works van’, for want of a better term.

The boys were filming in Imperial College London late in the afternoon, so they were heading for Cromwell Road. This is the area which contains ICL itself, as well as the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the V&A. It’s not exactly central, but it’s close to Kensington Gardens and a short tube ride from the West End. We got there at about 4.00, the lads dropped me off and headed for their rendezvous.

I headed straight for the Science Museum, which is another place on my list of things I haven’t done in London. Unfortunately, there was a queue of kids a mile long waiting to go inside. There was also heightened security at the entrance, with one person searching everyone’s bags on the way in. I decided that if I hadn’t been inside in thirty-two years, another couple of months wouldn’t make any difference. I headed to South Kensington station, topped up my Oyster card, and caught the tube to Victoria.

I thought I might have more luck with the British Museum, so I jumped on a 73 bus and sat upstairs to watch the city unfold before me. The first thing I came across when I reached Tottenham Court Road was a fairly large branch of Waterstones, so I called in. In particular, I was trying to track down Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War, as background material for a project I was just finishing off. I drew a blank there, but I had a nice cup of hot chocolate and checked out the hotel in my trusty A–Z.

Andrew had told me it was on ‘the other side of Hyde Park’ and ‘near Paddington’, which doesn’t really narrow it down much. It turned out to be in Sussex Gardens, which is pretty convenient for the station.

With that sorted out, I walked across to Waterstones near the University of London. I didn’t find Thucydides there either, but I picked up a remaindered book on the Great Fire of London, and Tom Bolton’s walking guide to the lost rivers of the city.

It struck me that the shops stay open much later on a Sunday than they do in Aberdare, and quite a bit later than they do in Cardiff. The mystery was solved when I saw the opening hours on the door. They don’t open until midday, and close at 6.00 p.m., which seems a lot more civilised and user-friendly than the 10.00–4.00 arrangement in Aberdare, or even the 11.00–5.00 arrangement in Cardiff city centre. Then again, when you’ve got public transport that operates pretty much 24/7, it doesn’t make a great deal of difference. And it was these extended running hours that enabled me to take full advantage of the evening in the city.

It was too late to bother with the museum by the time I came from the shop, so I ducked into the Museum Tavern to dodge a sharp shower of rain. It's not bigger on the inside, and it was crammed with people who'd had the same idea about avoiding the weather. It charges about average London prices, and allows families in for meals, which will be worth bearing in mind for future visits.

I walked back to Oxford Street and caught a 98 bus towards Sussex Gardens. I don't know when it was built (I'm guessing early to mid-nineteenth century), but just about every one of the grand villa-style houses in the street is now a hotel. The place I was staying in was a few minutes' walk from the Edgware Road, with friendly receptionists and a nice comfy room on the ground floor.

The weather forecast had been for heavy showers, but they hadn’t materialised by the time I reached the hotel. I checked in, had a quick look at my bus map of the city centre, and decided to take my camera for a wander around.

The whole area around Paddington Station is being redeveloped as part of the Crossrail project (as is much of London, in fact), so I decided to catch a bus and see where it took me. The first bus that came along was on route 23, heading to Liverpool Street. An idea came to me, so I jumped on and made my way upstairs to get the best view of the sights.

We headed down the Edgware Road to Marble Arch, then turned onto Oxford Street. The whole street was decked with union flags to mark the Queen’s ninetieth birthday celebrations, and I took a couple of photos while we made our way along and then into Regent Street. That was lined with flags, too, and while I’m no ardent royalist it was quite thrilling to see the streets decked out like that.

I was at the front of the top deck, taking photos through the window, when a Japanese girl in her early twenties jumped into the seat opposite and started snapping away as well.

I waved my camera at her and said, ‘We’ve got the same idea.’

She laughed, and we started chatting. It was her first time in London (as I’d guessed at the outset), so I slipped effortlessly into ‘unofficial tourist mode’ and gave her some background as we headed through Piccadilly Circus, down the Haymarket, and into Trafalgar Square. For instance, did you know that the statue of Eros (officially called the Earl of Shaftesbury Memorial) was the world's first statue to be made entirely from aluminium? Neither did I until I read about it Peter Ackroyd's London: the biography.

I didn’t take many photos along this stretch (been there, done that), but I did spot an interesting relief at the top of a building on the corner of Cockspur Street. Quite why there’d be an ancient Egyptian deity here is a mystery.

I filled my fellow photographer in on snippets of history as we made our way along the Strand, through Aldwych, and past the Royal Courts of Justice to Temple Bar. I made her laugh when I pointed to the emblem of the City of London and said ‘Here be dragons!’ Then we headed into Fleet Street, where a remnant of the journalistic profession lingers on in the form of the Reuters news agency.

This area is still fairly unusual in that most pubs reflect the old City working practices: they close early on Friday night and don’t reopen until Monday morning. There were a few coffee shops open (by now it was well past 8.00), but on the whole the place was almost deserted. The area around St Paul’s was crammed with tourists, of course, and my new friend was completely blown away by the size of the place. She took loads of photos as we crawled past, and then picked up speed to descend Cannon Street. Then we hit the inevitable weekend detour, which meant that we couldn’t see the Monument (as I’d intended).

Instead we headed towards the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, which have some of the most impressive facades in the entire City of London. It’s not easy to shoot from a moving bus (even when it’s stopped at traffic lights), but at least I know my way around for the next time I’m exploring on foot.

It’s only a short distance from here to Bishopsgate, and the terminus at Liverpool Street was a couple of minutes away. My travelling companion and I got off here, I told her to enjoy the rest of her stay, she made her way to the mainline station, and I headed out into Bishopsgate. I haven’t been to that side of town for years, and it’s been redeveloped almost recognition, but I walked along the street until I found the place I was looking for.

When Dad was living in Chadwell Heath in the 1950s, and working on the electrification of the Liverpool Street–Shenfield railway line, he and his mates used to call into a famous pub for a pint or two after work. In the late summer of 1985 he took me in there to show me one of his old haunts. I’ve been meaning to go back there for thirty years, but I’ve never got around to it before.

On that Sunday evening, seeing a bus in the Edgware Road heading right across town, I decided I was going to raise an elbow in Dad’s memory. I don’t know why. Maybe in the back of my mind I had the ‘it’s been ten years’ thing going on. Maybe it was just because I was on my own in London fairly late in the evening, which I very rarely am. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. Or maybe after a long day I just fancied a pint.

Whatever the reason, I was really pleased to see that Dirty Dick’s hasn’t been turned into some dreadful theme bar, or a craft ale outlet full of millennial hipsters, or (worst of all) totally unaffordable flats. It’s still an old-school boozer, with a small bar, a TV showing the football, a few tables dotted around the place, and friendly staff. There’s an area upstairs as well, but I didn’t venture up there. I bought a pint, logged into the wifi on my phone, and sent a couple of tweets about having a nice nostalgia trip. I wondered about having a bite to eat, but it was getting quite late and it seemed as though the kitchen was about to close.

I bought another pint and chatted to the barbint for a while. I told her how long it had been since I first went in there for a pint, and it turned out she wasn’t even born then. I went to the gents, and on the way back into the bar I met a chap wearing an England football shirt. We had a laugh about Wales being at the top of the group, and he took it in good part, fair play.

I finished my pint and walked back into Bishopsgate. Only a short distance from the pub I found one of the many mysterious thoroughfares which pepper the City of London, together with its unusual name.

I didn’t walk through this tiny passageway, but if I had I would have emerged in Middlesex Street – the respectable Victorian renaming of Petticoat Lane, probably the East End’s most famous outdoor market. That’s an adventure for another visit, I think.

I caught another bus (route 8) and retraced my journey through the City as far as St Paul’s. The bus took an unexpected turn here, and I lost my bearings for a few minutes. We were in High Holborn before I was able to work out where we'd been. I spotted a Thereisnospoon on the main road, and it was still open, so I jumped off and walked back a couple of hundred yards.

A Thereisnospoon is a Thereisnospoon wherever you are in the country, so I knew I could have something off the ‘Deli Deals’ menu and not spend a fortune. This one is called Penderel’s Oak. Richard Penderel was a Catholic farmer during the English Civil War, and the future Charles II famously hid in an oak tree on his land after the Battle of Worcester. It seems to be one the few places in the City open on a Sunday night. I ordered a snack and found a table near some bookcases full of law textbooks, a fair number of which predate even my time selling them.

There was a group of people in their early twenties, all of different nationalities, on the next table. I guessed they were students celebrating the end of their exams. One of them asked me if I’d take a photo of the whole gang with his phone, which I was happy to do. By this time, the pubs in Aberdare would have been winding down and people would have been heading for home. The gang next to me seemed as though they were just getting started. What a contrast!

I finished up and headed back to the bus stop, hoping to get a service straight back to Edgware Road. I was out of luck, but the first bus (a 55) was heading to Oxford Circus, which was about the halfway point of my journey. I decided it would do. At least the rain had held off, so I didn’t mind the prospect of walking back to Sussex Gardens if push came to shove. Failing that, I could always get the tube to Edgware Road and walk from there.

At Oxford Circus a 98 bus arrived, which was heading along Edgware Road. I jumped on and retraced my steps from earlier that day. As soon as we rounded Marble Arch I was amazed to see the street thronged with people; the bars and restaurants which line both sides of the road were crowded; even the little supermarkets and the chemist were still open. It dawned on me then that it’s Ramadan – many families would have gone out after sunset to break their fast, and would probably stay out past midnight.

Not for the first time I realised how much I miss the varied and cosmopolitan life that London has to offer. On the way up, Steve H. had said something about Paddington ‘being rough at night’. Well, as usual, I felt a hell of a lot safer walking around London at night than I would have felt walking home from the centre of Aberdare.

I got back to the hotel just before 11.00, and couldn’t sleep even though I’d had a long day. I read Mr Bolton’s book on the lost rivers for a while, and finally turned in at about 1.30. I don’t think I slept at all, mind, and I was awake at the crack of dawn the following morning.