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Expat Wannabe London

Annotated London: 5 London Things I Hadn’t Heard Of Before I Moved In

posted on August 22, 2014

Just a mishmash of things that caught me off guard.

fivethings

Trains Galore

1. Local transport isn’t twofold: it’s threefold. There’s buses, the tube, and about a million overground trains connecting the inner city with Greater London.

Kings Cross Platforms 9-11

Some are the actual overground, or at least go by that name. There’s a train from Stratford to Richmond that connects Hampstead Heath super well with a lot of far-off areas. There’s the Thameslink, which I found out about the first time I went to Streatham by way of West Hampstead. And then there’s just trains. A lot of trains. Trains is how you get to areas like Tooting, Streatham, Croydon and whatnot, but also how you get to Haringay and Hertfordshire and Surrey. There are nineteen train platforms at Clapham Junction or possibly more — this is based on memory, not factual, and specifically based on the memory of running from platform 17 to platform 1 or viceversa in an attempt to not miss a train by one minute. Because, yeah, trains don’t run nearly as often as the tube does, and a lot of buses are worth tracking online, too, because they’ll show up once every 15-20 minutes.

The only overground train that shows on the tube map is the proper overground — the one that comes to Hampstead Heath — so it was a bit of a pain in the ass figuring out how to get to Streatham the first time I did. The person I was visiting called the train from Victoria the “Victoria line” — but it’s a train, not the tube, and I think it’s the Southern Rail. It’s certainly not a blue line on the tube map.

Then I lived in Streatham for a week, and now I know things like that there are local trains that will also take you as far as Brighton. Also, the area outside Clapham Junction station is bloody beautiful. I wish I’d taken the pictures the day I went down by bus, but I was busy keeping my luggage from rolling down the bus aisle. My bad. I’ll go back sometime.

Hampstead Heath

2. Hampstead Heath is a massive park.

Hampstead Heath on a summer day

[ print available here ]

It has ponds that people can bathe in. It has a reputation for gay cruising, too, I’ve been told. It’s huge. Before I was ever in Hampstead, I thought Hampstead Heath was part of Keats House. Like, I don’t know, a little garden or something. I thought Keats’s house was a proper museum. It’s not. It’s a little house with a little garden, and if you walk down the road, you end up on the southern path of Hampstead Heath. Which is massive.

It’s also a super posh area that people live in. Maybe not as posh as if you keep going south to Belsize Park and Primrose Hill with all the hipsters or whatever — and is Camden Town considered posh or just artsy? — but still pretty posh. I legitimately thought it was a far-out suburb. Now that I’ve lived in Streatham and Crouch End (and Bounds Green back in 2007), I… yeah, not so much.

Also, literally all those areas were new to me. I only knew about Primrose Hill because Nick Grimshaw lives in it, and Annemari is obsessed with him, and we completely accidentally booked a hotel right by Adelaide Road. And then I fell in love with Belsize Park, which I’d never heard of.

And here I am now, trying to achieve financial stability in one of the most expensive areas of one of the most expensive cities in the world.

It is ridiculously worth it.

Don’t Be Silly, Of Course We Have To Talk About the Weather

3. The weather isn’t bad: it’s just ridiculous.

Rain on a window

I mean, yeah, rain, whatever, that’s kind of what I moved here for. I love it. There were some days in summer that were stiflingly hot, and on a couple of them I had to ride buses, and it was excruciating. It’s still not nearly as terrible as the weather in Spain, and look, okay, before you tell me I’m a weirdo for disliking the weather in Spain, try living through a summer in the middle of the meseta without airconditioning. Try to get some work done, too. Then get back to me.

Anyway, here’s what baffles me: actual longtime Londoners heed the weather forecast. Y’all, the weather forecast is literally always wrong. People who have lived here for a long time will cancel a shoot a day or more in advance because the weather forecast says it’s going to rain. It has literally never once rained during the time a shoot that was cancelled for weather reasons was scheduled. Seriously. Sometimes, even canceling on the day is pointless. Last Sunday, Sally and I agreed to cancel a couple shoot in the Bank area because it was pouring rain in the morning. I got up, I went in the shower, and when I came out, the sun was shining into my room. Warmly, even. Bright.

I’m pretty sure it didn’t rain the whole rest of the day, either.

A jacket is usually worth taking with you, especially if you’re going to be out for a length of time. I’ve never taken a jacket with me here and not ended up putting it on. I’m guilty of taking socks with me and putting them on on the bus, too. And at Starbucks.

The Ubiquity of Street Markets

4. Street markets are everywhere. They’re so everywhere they’re like an actual citywide thing.

Spitalfields Market

[ print available in color and black and white ]

Seriously, there are so many. You’ve got normal farmer’s markets, and bigger markets, and flower markets (where Sarah bought these peonies), and markets inside venues, and markets in the middle of the street, and some are over the weekend and some go on all week. It’s not just Camden Town (which is an area, not just a market) and Portobello Rd — which, by the way, is not only up on Saturdays, but Saturdays are the only days the antique stalls are there. Or so I hear. I’ve only ever gone on a Saturday, and it was back in 2007.

Speaking of Portobello Market, though, it’s closed this weekend. For a carnival. This one:

CARNIVALS!

5. The Notting Hill Carnival. Or any other carnival, for that matter, but that’s the one Portobello Market is closed this weekend for.

visuals coming soon: watch this space

Apparently this has been going on for years. Never even remotely on my radar until someone mentioned it in one of my blogger groups, I expressed interest, and I was asked to cover it by a PR company to give you guys a taste and a tour of the new LG G3 smartphone. (Woooooo! And now you know what prompted this post.)

There are also Jack the Ripper tours (not a surprise, but could be fun to go on during daylight as a Name of the Star pilgrimage type of thing — YA >>>> true crime), and Frog Tours (the fuck?) — wait, no, they’re duck tours. My point remains that there’s a lot of weird stuff that are somehow staples in London and I had no idea they even existed.

BONUS! There’s a statue in the skyline graphic on the Westminster borough signs of a dude holding an elephant by the trunk. I kid you not. I’ll get a proper picture of that sometime. I’ve only ever spotted it from a moving bus — where once again I was more concerned with keeping my luggage from rolling down the aisle. It’s in the Westminster skyline, so it has to mean something, right? But no one I’ve asked (no longtime Londoner I’ve asked) has ever heard of it, and it was only built last year. That tidbit of trivia was so hard to find I’m trying to pull it up on google and it doesn’t seem to be coming up anymore. Did I make this up inside my head?

… I found it! I FOUND IT. Dunamis. The dude has a gold cone on its head. Okay, Park Lane, okay.

London, y’all. Bless its little heart.

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6 Comments

« Where I’ve Been This Week
Annotated London: Checking Out The Notting Hill Carnival With LG »
  • Miss Angie

    Lovely! I want to see those things. I need to visit.

    • Lix Hewett

      I know how hard it can be to arrange that sort of thing financially but I definitely find London infinitely worth visiting. And living in. I even find NW3 London worth the even higher-than-the-rest-of-London-zone-2 rent.

  • Zauni – lovezauni.com

    Gosh, this makes me so happy. I’m glad to see you in London exploring and working and just basically being really damn cool.

    I’d love to live in London at some point in my life so all these things are interesting to me. The thing I worry about the most is the weather. I’m used to 90+ degree temps (in Vegas it’s usually around 100, 108 in the summer). I don’t know how I’d feel with so much rain.

    But I love street markets, so having them all around? Pretty wicked.

    Z.
    Love,Zauni.
    Las Vegas Lifestyle Blog

    • Lix Hewett

      :D :D Thank you so much for this comment! I find street markets utterly boring and crowded, ha, but apparently people like them. No judgment here!

      I feel like I’ve barely got to explore much of London or do much in the way of coolness, but I’m getting there. I think. It’s hard for me to see the big picture sometimes, but I still have these moments of utter and complete bliss when I’m walking around the city of my fucking dreams and I realize that I live here. And in an area I adore no less. It’s so amazing.

      I partly moved to England to avoid the Spanish summer, so I’m pretty okay with the rain (though holy shit, I need an umbrella. I nearly put on my witch hat today as it is the only waterproof thing I have that would cover my head. Decided against it but only because I was only coming to Starbucks, which is literally around the corner and across the road) but it can get stifling/tiresome sometimes. It’s probably easiest to deal with if your living arrangement/area works well for you – I remember my week catsitting in Streatham, with the supermarket so far away and the area just not doing it for me and worrying about where I’d go next, and it was a bit gloomy. I haven’t felt that way about bad weather since. I’m actually positively eating it up this month.

  • Karen Peterson

    I went to London last month and absolutely loved it, and I realized how little I actually knew about London when I got there. I’ve seen a million movies and TV shows and read a zillion books that take place in or around London and there was still so much I didn’t know about it. Funny.

    • Lix Hewett

      It’s been such an amazing learning process for me. I seriously hadn’t heard of half of the city before, area-wise. I didn’t know about the everyday stuff like supermarkets and cafés and whatnot. I didn’t know the first thing about the bus system even though I’d used it before. And it’s just a huge massive change when you go from living in a tiny city where there’s nothing to do but everything is within walking distance, to a city where ‘within walking distance’ is equivalent to the furthest out walk within my old city. I happily trot off to Belsize Park station and it takes me the same amount of time as it did walking to the uni campus back in my city, which I constantly avoided. I think it’s good for my legs… probably. I’m so comfy in my Hampstead Heath cocoon that I stopped buying travel passes for my Oyster so I’m constantly trying to save money by walking places I would have got a bus to back in May. I’ve briefly considered learning how to bike but I don’t think that’s going to happen, lol.

Meet Lix

Welcome to my blog! I'm Lix: full-time graphic designer for bloggers and freelancers, and part-time photographer. I'm an unapologetic cat lady and perpetually angry feminist nightmare. I like attention and pretty things, and that's why I run a lifestyle blog. Learn more.
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