More London

The first time that I visited London during my stay in England, I was plain relieved. We lived in a quiet little suburb outside Birmingham called Solihull and the initial excitement at discovering peace and quiet and the simplistic esthetics of red brick houses began to wear off quickly and was replaced by a deep craving for the chaos of a metropolis. The only two places I have lived in are Bangalore and Mumbai and it is only natural that total silences and sparsely populated neighbourhoods make me feel unsettled. The one thing that I didn’t quite get used to in Solihull till the very end was how all commercial set-ups closed by 5 pm and how the roads wore an eerily deserted look by 6 pm, except of course, on Fridays. My first visit to London coincided with the Thames River Festival and it was all that I had been pining for- lively, crowded, noisy and stretched till late into the night. I was also lucky then to have two very enthusiastic sets of friends, both card-carrying (the Oyster card I mean :p) Londoners, showing me around town.

Ever since that first visit, London became my biggest addiction and my panacea to all my troubles- from severe stress to a little boredom. Looking back, I am now glad that I had the chance to discover London and its different avtars in my several trips. I have stayed in Woolich Arsenal, a relatively new residential locality in Zone 5 where a majority of its residents work for the financial organizations in Canary Wharf, in the Halls of the London School of Economics near the Tower Bridge with a dear dear friend from college just when she was about to graduate, in Watford, a picture perfect suburban locality where all the houses had a front lawn and a driveway and finally, in an apartment in a tiny lane near the London Bridge tube station after the friend from college had moved out of the Halls and started work (sigh! how quickly these things happen!). I did the touristy bits- the London Eye, the Original Bus Tour and the River Cruise with my mum when she visited me in the UK and I was pleased to see mamma dearest being as smitten by London as I was.

My most enduring memory of London is walking across the Millennium Bridge after attending the midnight mass at St. Paul’s Cathedral on Christmas Eve. I remember how the huge metal spider on display outside the Tate Modern (part of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective on show at the modern gallery) looked surreal and wondering how they got the lighting just right for the voyeuristic pleasure of the few pedestrians who would walk by it after sun-down. The other memory I have of my visits is of running late for my return train/bus in every single one of these trips since I had to reluctantly drag my feet out of London just before leaving it. And I mean running in the literal sense - with the different sets of friends I visited helping me with my luggage; we ran by the Thames near Westminster Pier, we ran along the London Bridge and we ran on the platforms of the Marylebone station just so that I could catch the last train to Solihull.

Here’s to London- the city that was my happy-place for 6 months. And just in case there’s any of my friends from London reading this- you know how I nod understandingly when you complain about how London is not as great as it seems to an outsider and how life there can get to you? Well, that’s just me pretending- I still completely fail to understand how everyone is not as big a fanatic about the city as me! Woolich Arsenal- England's ammunitons
factories during World War 2 were located here.
The factories have now been smartly converted into
apartment buildings with the original structure intact.

Graffiti in London- none of which I understood

From the London Eye

From the balcony of the Tate Modern

The Tower Bridge