It’s finally time to write about London! In January, I spent three days exploring the city; most of the weekend was spent sightseeing and checking out tourist attractions. While I can now check London off of my travel list, it’s such a wide and diverse city that I’m already planning my next trip back to discover even more of what it has to offer.

Day 1

London is a two-and-a-half hour train ride from Nottingham to King’s Cross St Pancras, and we stayed at an AirBnB in Vauxhal, about a ten minute walk to the London Underground. Our goal was to keep our budget as tight as possible (alternate title to this blog post: Let’s Go To London On a Budget), and our biggest spend on our trip was a 3-day visitor pass for the Tube, coming in at £40.50 per person. Honestly though, if you’re planning on exploring London on foot (which you should, since it’s the best way to see any city), it’s such a worthy investment. It really is a world-class transit system, and kind of acts as a tourist attraction in and of itself.

Our first night in London was spent at a wrestling show: Wrestle Queendom III, organized by EVE Riot Grrrls of Wrestling. Self-described as “Punk, Feminist, Empowered. Women Superheros Come To Life!”, this organization sure knows how to put on an excellent wrestling event. If you’re local to London and into wrestling or female empowerment, see about getting tickets to a show. If you’re not able to get your butt into London, you can watch their shows online through their website. You can find more information here.

Day 2

Sunday was our only full day in London, and it was spent on a walking (and Tube) tour of famous landmarks around the city. Jack planned a route that would take us around the city for optimal sightseeing, but I was going through it a bit blind. This added to the fun, since I didn’t know what we would be seeing next! So what exactly did we see?

We started by arriving at Buckingham Palace at a very un-optimal time: the middle of a special Sunday changing of the guard. While I am a sucker for a good marching band and mounted police, it was next to impossible to get a good look at the Palace, much less a photo. This is a recurring trend for every big tourist attraction: there are tourists everywhere, even in early January off-season.

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I think it’s something that’s normal and to be expected when you’re playing tourist yourself. Even so, I was blown away at the sheer number of people at many of the stops on our little tour. Just something to keep in mind when you’re fantasizing about world travels.

From Buckingham Palace, we walked through St James Park to a large courtyard outside the Household Cavalry Museum. Through an archway leading to Whitehall Road and Horse Guards. All things equestrian stick out to me when I travel since I grew up loving horses and with a horse adoring mother, so I’ve put a mental pin in these to come back to when she comes to visit. Along Whitehall Road we passed the intersection to Downing Street, which is no longer open to pulic access for security reasons. Whitehall Road has beautiful architecture, plentiful statues and memorials along the road, and is a must to walk down. Whitehall Road turns into Parliament Street, which features a monument to Winston Churchill, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, and Big Ben. These buildings are absolutely beautiful works of architecture, and I would have loved to have seen them! Unfortunately, parliament and Big Ben are under renovations, and consequentially under scaffolding.

Womp womp.

Right beside Big Ben is Victoria Embankment, with Westminster Bridge and the River Thames and, if you’re lucky, a man playing Old Town Road on the steel drum. Across the river you can see the London Eye and grab an iconic tourist photo. We crossed Westminster Bridge and walked along The Queen’s Walk to the Golden Jubilee Bridges, and back across the river to the north bank, along Northumberland Avenue to Trafalgar Square. It still blows my mind how many iconic locations are all jammed so close together! Trafalgar Square might be my favourite of the tourist spots in the city. It is absolutely beautiful, with large fountains, various statues, and Nelson’s Column. Even though it’s a busy area, the wide space means it doesn’t feel jampacked with people.

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We didn’t go to the National Gallery, but I would be open to it during my next visit to London. There are so many museums and galleries in the city that it’s basically impossible to visit them all in only one trip. Trafalgar Square did have some of the goofy tourist crap that I associate with Hollywood Blvd or Times Square; in the bottom right-hand corner of the above picture, you can see a “floating” Yoda to take pictures with. Across from Trafalgar Square is the Canadian Embassy, which is super easy to identify because it is completely plastered with Canadian flags. Loved it.

Tucked behind the National Gallery is Leicester Square, and further back the Chinatown Gates. Somewhere near Chinatown we got back on the Tube to Monument Station to see the Monument to the Great Fire of London. It still blows my mind that as far back as the 1600s, people were creating monuments to commemorate historic events. The instinct to preserve human experience is timeless, but the creation of monuments still feels like a much more contemporary action to me! We crossed over London Bridge (truly not an exciting landmark, if you can call it that) with a view of Tower Bridge further down the Thames. From there we walked to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Just around the corner from The Globe is a beautiful piece of street art with a street performer: a tuba player who has fire coming out of his tuba. I saw him on other people’s posts of the street art, so he must be a regular in that particular location!

Near the Globe Theatre is Tate Modern (on my to-do list for next time!) and Millenium Bridge, which we walked across to St Paul’s Cathedral. We got back on the Tube to continue our adventures, but that was about it for our walking tour of London’s sights.

That’s 28 different places we saw, all within like… 4 hours! It never felt like we were rushing through things, or going too fast. It’s just the nature of London, particularly the central area of the city that is just so packed with iconic places. Honestly, it was kind of overwhelming. You see all these places and know that they’re historic or important or iconic, but you’re seeing so many of these places one right after the other. It’s a lot to take in!

We weren’t done day 2 yet though. We spent the afternoon in Camden, taking in the wild shopfronts and market. Though I loved the extreme decor of the buildings on the high street, the shops mostly offered tourist goods or faux-edgy merchandise that plays into Camdentown’s punk roots. It was really neat to see, but nothing really appealed to me in terms of actual market shopping. The area does have a lot of creative and beautiful street art, much of which is focused on Camden icon Amy Winehouse. It’s really beautiful to see how the area preserves her memory.

With our legs very tired from our day walking in London, we went back to our AirBnB and took a nap, then ordered takeaway.

Day 3

Our last day in London started with a view of the city from the sky. There are several options for rooftop sightseeing, including going up The Shard. We chose to go to Sky Garden, which is completely free, so long as you book tickets in advance. It’s right across the Thames from the Shard, located in what’s honestly a pretty ugly building nicknamed the “walkie-talkie”. I’m kind of glad that this was the building we were going up, since we would be seeing all the iconic skyscrapers, and not the dumb walkie-talkie building. The views from 32 stories up was incredible – it really puts into perspective just how huge London really is. It sprawls out as far as you can see in every direction, an enormous mass of city. If you visit the city, you have to see it from above.

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Our afternoon was spent at the Natural History Museum. There are so many museums in London, and I really want to visit more of them next time I visit. The Natural History Museum is such a beautiful building, with exhibits including dinosaurs and fossils, mammals, birds, the human body, geology, and more. I loved seeing the old taxidermied creatures from a time when conservation meant hunting animals and stuffing them for preservation. There’s just so much history to it. I thought it was a nice touch that in the display cases there were notes explaining the worn condition of many specimens, as they had been preserved long ago and were not going to be replaced due to changing ethics in ecology.

In which I go on a tangent about museums

I had a bit of mixed feelings on the Natural History Museum. To be fair, I have a lot of opinions on any museum I visit, because I’m very interested in museum curation. I think that I had built up in my mind the idea that it would be quite traditional in its displays, specimens and artifacts mounted in glass displays with text-based information. As unremarkable as museum displays like this can be, I think there is a type of classic beauty to them that I appreciate from an aesthetic standpoint. And, to be fair, there were some sections of the museum with displays such as this, and sections that were updated in a clean, timeless way. The geological exhibit is a good example of this, and I particularly liked the earthquake simulation! However, there were other exhibits that felt dated from the time they were updated in what had to have been the early 2000s (this may or may not be specifically calling out the exhibit on the human body, whoops!). Dated graphic design, clunky touch screens, and the push for interactive exhibit content are big turnoffs for me when it comes to museum design, and since that was one of the first exhibits we went to, I guess the museum and I got off on the wrong foot. I eventually got to a point of reconciliation with the idea that, while the museum is a piece of history and tradition, it’s also an active research centre with a focus on inspiring young people to get involved in science and ecology. And that can be hard to do when a museum feels dated, because it doesn’t create the atmosphere of science as an active field in which one can participate. The same way that art comes alive in a gallery, and history comes alive in museums, science and biology come alive in museums as well, and they have to appeal to the young people who go to visit them. I get that. And it’s fine. Overall, I think that the Natural History Museum really does an excellent job of combining the tradition of museums and keeping their content fresh and engaging.

One of my favourite exhibits at the Natural History Museum was a small gallery that really payed homage to the Museum’s history. Original plant specimens from James Cook’s voyage to Australia, A skeleton of a dodo bird. An original first edition copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. This appealed so much to my historian’s heart.

We finished off our visit to London with dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe in Piccadilly Circus. Not intentionally though; we hopped off the Tube to see the area on the way to St Pancras, and decided we had some time to kill and needed some food before our train. We ended up at the Hard Rock Cafe as a bit of a “aren’t we the most touristy haha” choice, but the food was nice and we had a great time watching and talking about the music videos they played. We finished our dinner, got some souvenir glasses, and headed to the train.

Our visit to London was less than three full days, but it felt like we had done so much in that time. It was a bit exhausting! And despite having felt like we’d done so much, I honestly feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of London. It’s a beautiful, overwhelming, exhillerating, exhausting, wonderful city, and I’m excited to go back and see what else it has to offer!

Have you ever been to London? What is your favourite thing that you did? What would you recommend? Or, if you haven’t been, where would you like to go?