Finding London’s sweet spot
Somewhere between iconic and obscure lies an authentic version of the historical city
It’s the ferocious ironmongery that first catches my eye. Gilded sprays of sharp metal atop a fence just down the street from our hotel. Then I notice the oversized skulls and crossbones rendered in stone above the gate. This I have to see.
The fence encloses the postagestamp churchyard of St. Olave’s, one of the few churches to survive the Great Fire of London in 1666. Diarist Samuel Pepys is buried here, as is Mother Goose — her name is right there in the burial register — not to mention hundreds of victims of the great plague, including Mary Ramsay, traditionally thought to have brought the epidemic to London in the year before the fire. Two centuries later Charles Dickens wrote about St. Olave’s, dubbing it St. Ghastly Grim because of this same macabre fence. My five-minute detour is a typical London experience during our short time in the city: layer upon layer of densely packed historical, literary and cultural significance.
This is the challenge of visiting London. Anywhere else, this nearly 600-year-old church would be a destination unto itself. Here, with so much to see and do, it hasn’t even made the long list.
And forget the idea of somehow going off the beaten path. The whole place has been well trod since before the Romans arrived. Nonetheless, in two short days we want to find London’s sweet spot, somewhere between the iconic — Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard — and the lesser known, and hopefully discover our own version of the city along the way.
London began with the River Thames, so we do too, on an archeology tour led by Fiona Haughey, who has spent much of her career studying the rich evidence of human habitation revealed by the tide-washed estuary that has shaped the area’s history.
Before recent regulation changes ruined the fun, Haughey led visitors down onto the foreshore, offering would-be mudlarks, as Thames treasure hunters are known, a chance to find their own piece of London history, often in the form of disposable clay pipes that date back to when tobacco arrived in Europe during the 1500s.
Nowadays you need a permit, so we stick to the high ground. To cap off the tour, though, Haughey passes around some of the prized artifacts she has discovered. The highlight is a flint pick dating back 10,000 years that she nearly missed amid the mosaic of shoreline detritus while mudlarking one day.
She hovers close by as we examine it, worriedly reminding us to “hold it with two hands please” and wearing the fraught expression of a mother watching her newborn being passed around by airline baggage handlers. The waxy heft of the flint tool fits perfectly into my right hand, but not my left, and Haughey confirms that, yes, it’s a right-handed pickaxe.
Its surprising, ergonomic craftsmanship brings the existence of some early hunter-gatherer on these very shores into sharp relief.
Back in the present, a Thames Clipper rumbles by, heading downstream. The fast- moving vessels kick up high wakes that Haughey worries will hasten erosion, threatening the archeological record.
Our afternoon brings us back into the modern era, as we leave the river and head north to Shoreditch, to see the famed street art there. Even a decade or two ago visitors to London would have steered well clear of this suburb, a crowded, impoverished and crime-ridden neighbourhood during the Industrial Revolution, which hollowed out after the Second World War, leaving few residents and many derelict warehouses.
Over the following decades, struggling artists flocked to the area and squatted in the abandoned spaces, using the brick facades of the buildings as canvases for their subversive spray-bomb artwork. In the past 20 years, the neighbourhood has boomed — indeed “Shoreditch” is now more than a place name. It’s a verb signifying the march of gentrification.
Our guide, Henri, leads three tours a week. While he has a degree in art, Henri’s cred is more street than academic. Once a successful painter and designer, he was, until recently, homeless in Shoreditch. Today, he is off the street, thanks to the income from the tours, a social enterprise that gives unhoused people a chance to share a unique perspective on their communities with others.
Henri leads us down alleys and byways emblazoned with street art, sharing not only the history of the area but also wry observations about commercialization, urban renewal, the capricious nature of the arts scene and the politics of poverty and homelessness.
It’s not just the walls that attract the attention of the artists. Henri points down at a tiny burst of colour on the pavement. It’s a miniature artwork — one of thousands that artist Ben Wilson has painted on dried chewing gum across London.
The next day we head east to Greenwich, following a route that takes us under the Thames from the Isle of Dogs via the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. A minor marvel of Victorian engineering, this nearly half-kilometre-long pocket Chunnel was hand excavated 15 metres below the riverbed. A Londonbased friend is weirdly pleased that we’ve even heard about it and informs us that when it opened in 1902, the tunnel was the place to see and be seen. Today, not so much.
A local who gives us directions lets us know, not without affection, that the well-used tunnel is “atmospheric.” Between the juglike echoes and the occasional damp stains on the tunnel’s tiled walls and ceiling, I realize that in England this translates as “charmingly dank.”
In Greenwich, we head to the Royal Observatory. My inner junior professor insists that visiting the birthplace of modern navigation and timekeeping is important. Rule Britannia and all that. Plus, it provides the sublime satisfaction of straddling the Prime Meridian in the observatory courtyard.
My compulsion is somewhat vindicated, as I’m not the only one to stand with one foot in each hemisphere, astride one of the world’s more important imaginary lines. In a show of longitudinal innovation, a young girl repeatedly cartwheels along the line. Show-off.
After our fleeting brush with the eastern hemisphere we make our way to Borough Market in Southwark. With roots that go back 1,000 years — unbelievably, it earned mention as a “great trading place” in a Norse saga — today the market is an open-air hive of activity where fresh baking, spices, foraged mushrooms and wheels of cheese the size of tree stumps vie for your disposable income. Alas, no Vikings in sight.
More than a market town, Southwark was also a party town, boasting a centuries-long reputation as a medieval Las Vegas, with theatres, brothels, bear-baiting, riverside stews and other unsavoury entertainments unavailable in staid London. Of course, it also had a prison.
While the Tower of London may be the city’s quintessential jail, it served a classier clientele. A stone’s throw away from Borough Market is the Clink Museum, located on the site of the Clink Prison, built in 1127 and home to thousands of luckless prisoners for more than six centuries.
Without going overboard, the museum illuminates the dark history of the Clink, from the brutal conditions and corrupt jailers to the innovative self-funding model that required prisoners to pay for their own food, bedding and necessities.
After the Clink, there’s one final stop. A muted adventure, the Monument to the Great Fire is still worth the $ 8.50 entry fee and the 311 corkscrew steps up to the viewing platform. Maybe it’s the climb or its unpretentious nature that gives the monument its appeal. There’s nothing to buy, other than a ticket. There are no elevators, rotating restaurants or gift shops, only stairs, spiralling upward.
But the view from atop this modest attraction — once the loftiest viewpoint in the city, now diminished if not dwarfed — brings all of London’s layers, past and present, into focus.
Overhead the gilded flames that top the monument recall the great fire and the renewal that followed. St. Paul’s looms to the west, and beyond the Tower Bridge to the east we can make out the high ground of Greenwich in the distance. North are the iconic skyscrapers of the Banking District and to the south, Southwark and The Shard — the tallest building in western Europe.
Cranes punctuate the view in every direction, evidence of the bustle and growth that has defined this place for thousands of years. In the foreground the reliable and constant rootstock of London, the River Thames, surges to the sea.