Bright lights, big city
IT’S 9.30pm on a Friday evening and Soho is thumping. After-work crowds surround pubs like moths at light bulbs, waiters are starting to sweat, and a street performer is teasing passers-by outside Covent Garden Market. Potential is in the air, like the smell of fresh pretzels.
We’ve been walking all day, and we’re hungry, so we step into Duck Soup. Leaving Dublin that morning, I tweeted about travelling to London, looking for restaurant recommendations. Niamh Shields, the Waterford ex-pat and blogger behind EatLikeAGirl.com, said Duck Soup had just opened on Dean Street. “Arrive early, or be prepared to queue.”
We arrive late, and queue. It’s a buzzing joint, with whitewashed walls, a bar taking up half the room, The Doors playing on an old record player on the shelf. Beside us, three girls are ripping apart a full John Dory served with half a lemon. The drinks list is scribbled in black marker on white tiles. It includes one bottled beer: a German brew, called ‘F-king Hell’.
When in London, and all that. I get one. Moving to the basement bar, we order a ‘whole crab + mayonnaise’ from a menu written in biro. It’s exactly what arrives. An unadulterated creature of the deep, glowing from its time in the pot, served with cracking tools and a dollop of mayo.
London, baby. There’s nowhere like it to make you feel alive. It’s easy to get to, with more direct flights than any other destination from Ireland, and its highlights span from Soho to the Tate Modern, from cocktails at One Aldwych to the psychedelic Camden Market.
Sure, London can be crowded and pushy. The Tube always seems over-heated and under construction. When you’re tired, there’s nowhere like it to make you feel broke, fat and boringly-dressed. That’s not even starting on the expense (£28.80 for Mme Tussaud’s? Sheesh!). But then you sit down, pick the sweet meat out of a crab’s legs, Facebook a picture of yourself holding ‘F-ing Hell’, and you’re raring to go again. London is so big, it’s impossible to do it all. It’s a Heraclitean river of a city, always changing, impossible to see the same way twice.
New for us on this visit is St Martin’s Courtyard, a slick and glossy shopping oasis laced with the whiff of freshly-swiped credit cards. Near Covent Garden, it has its own spa and labels like Sienna and Savannah Millers’ Twenty8Twelve and Duo, which fits boots according to a whizz concept — 21 different calf sizes. It’s a whole other kind of boot camp.
St Martin’s Courtyard is also home to one of the newer branches of Jamie’s Italian, the celeb chef’s eleven billionth business venture — an affordable restaurant chain.
It’s a pleasant surprise. We step in expecting to see Jamie’s face in every poster space, but the branding is subtle and the production clicks, from the bread-cutting island to the hanging hams, from the NYC deli-style tiles to the chilli-red metal chairs.
I go for the pasta special, a nest of homemade spaghetti with lightly-fried aubergine in a tomato sauce — heavy on the garlic and crowned with a sprig of basil. For £10.95/€12.70, it ain’t half bad. The aubergine is slithery and smoky; the homemade spaghetti drives home just how crap pasta from a packet can taste. Jamie’s an institution, but that doesn’t mean he can’t cook.
Back outside, we push on through Leicester Square, buzzy with tourists queuing for cut-price tickets to West End shows, the hammer of all-night construction, the garish baubles of M&M’s World. We float through Piccadilly Circus and turn that elegant corner onto Regent Street.
It’s window-shopping central. In the National Geographic store, we feel like out-of-towners agog at the hero wall, gigantic maps of the world, naff safari shorts on fake cargo cases.
Nearby, the Liberty emporium is straight out of a kid’s pop-up book. Dating from 1875, but rebuilt in mock-Tudor style in the 1920s, it’s a magical department store, full of bags and clothes and beauty products, but also a stationary trove and a nook for French publisher Assouline, with sumptuous books on subjects like Cecil Beaton, Barbie and vintage cocktails.
Watch out for Liberty’s ‘National Treasures’ too — a once-off product line supporting British charities by asking well-known figures to design furniture.
Next morning, I take the Tube to Notting Hill. Strolling through the plush terraces, I watch autumn leaves slip crisply from the trees, landing on the bonnets of vintage Mercs and the odd, waist-high Maserati. Dapper residents are out pushing buggies, grabbing fresh pastries from Ottolenghi, browsing boutiques like Reiss and Marie-Chantal.
It’s the perfect location for the Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising, squirrelled away in a mews off Ledbury Road. Based on a private collection of 12,000 posters and products, the museum is a zigzagging time tunnel, suavely packing display cases with the story of how brands evolved, and how we evolved with them.
It’s a nostalgia-fest, with brands like Bovril, Guinness, Disney, Fry’s, Colman’s and Heinz linking the Victorian era to the present. “Lots of people reach a point where they start recognising things from their childhood,” the attendant says. “It’s like, ‘oops, it’s in a museum now’.” For me, it’s the Star Wars figures — unchanged since the late 1970s.
Somewhere unchanged since the 1600s is Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub. Hidden away down a Fleet Street alleyway near the dome of St Paul’s, where the Occupy London protestors have been camping out, the illuminated sign here has a strange claim: ‘Rebuilt 1667’.
Step inside, and you’ll find a warren of rooms with walls so black you’d walk into them, age-old ‘gentlemen only’ signs, and a frothy selection of ales. Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese has seen 15 monarchs come and go, was patronised by Charles Dickens, and you’d imagine punters quaffed through the 1948 Olympics in the same way as they will in 2012. That’s what I love about London. It’s big enough for you to feel anonymous, but full of individual nuggets. It’s a melting pot of cultures, traditions, fresh-from-the-packet openings like Duck Soup, or grimy institutions that last upgraded after the Great Fire of London.
Walk down the street and you’re as likely to pass a punk with a two-foot hairdo as a city slicker in a Savile Row suit. You can eat Lebanese in Marylebone, or Indian in Brick Lane. Yet punctuating it all are those stereotypical symbols of England — the black cabs, red buses, the royal souvenirs, the pigeons of Trafalgar Square, the beefeaters at Buckingham Palace.
The weekend is over, and we’re rushing to Paddington to catch the Heathrow Express. London, baby — and we loved every minute.
We flew with BMI (flybmi.com) direct from Dublin to Heathrow. It’s a good airline for shopping trips, because 20kg of checked baggage is included in the ticket price. Aer Lingus and Ryanair also fly direct from Dublin and Cork.
The Heathrow Express costs £18/€21 one-way but it gets you to Paddington Station in 15 minutes. In central London, public transport is the quickest and cheapest way to get around. A day ticket on the Tube costs £6.60/€7.70 and allows unlimited travel inside Zones 1 and 2, where the vast majority of attractions are found. It saves a fortune in taxis.
We stayed at the Marylebone Hotel (doylecollection.com) on Welbeck Street. Standard rooms from £155/€180 per night.
Two Irish photographers — David Creedon, Cork and Kenneth O’Halloran, Clare — have been selected for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery (npg.org.uk; free). The exhibition runs until February 2012.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum (Sherlock-holmes.co.uk; £6/€7) at 221B Baker Street serves up a feast of Victoriana. Fans shouldn’t miss it.
Dover Street Market (doverstreetmarket.com) is what happens when a department store and an art installation collide. Four floors of cutting edge brands mash together in “beautiful chaos“, as they put it, and if you’re not careful, that’s what will happen your credit card bill too.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
