Likeable London

There’s loads to see and do in London, and if you’re hell-bent on being one of the lotus-eaters, then so much the better!

What I would rate as the best experiences: lounging around in Leicester Square , eating a muffin and sipping a cappuccino while watching the world go by; going shopping in Petticoat Lane ; ogling at everybody from Hugh Grant to Marilyn at Madame Tussaud’s ; wandering through the lantern-bedecked, Peking-duck scented environs of Chinatown on a busy evening; and running the risk of being swamped by pigeons at Trafalgar Square. Going shopping at Harrod’s (at least window-shopping, even if you can’t afford to buy anything!); munching on hot caramelized peanuts as you walk along the Thames, towards London Eye; and much, much more--from Trocadero to the Tower of London, from Westminster Abbey to the British Museum--this city bursts with things to do and see.

Quick Tips:

London’s so crowded with things to see and experience that it makes sense to decide well in advance what you want to concentrate upon--otherwise you may well find the range of attractions too vast to handle in a single trip. Read up beforehand, and once you get to London, pick up a BTA booklet at the airport--they’re very exhaustive and loads of help when it comes to exploring London.

And yes, sometime between the whirlwind of sights--the museums and galleries, the cathedrals and the markets--do take a break. Treat yourself to a picnic lunch in St James Park; get an artist to sketch you at Leicester Square; or stroll down the banks of the Thames near Cleopatra’s Needle--all are very much a part of London’s 'other side'--all experiences worth savouring.

Best Way To Get Around:

London’s famous Tube is easily the best way to make your way around this sprawling city--it’s fast and convenient, and the network’s vast, so getting to any part of town is fairly simple. Buy yourself a day pass (or a week pass if you’re going to be in London for a while), and you’ll find it pretty economical. Both BTA tourist guides and London Underground maps show the location--with reference to Tube stations--of all the top sights, so finding your way around is never a problem.

Fortunately enough, a number of London’s top sights--at least all the ones I’ve mentioned in this journal--are within easy walking distance of each other, and you can combine two or more in a day on foot if you plan your itinerary well.

A month in London, and that too on a shoestring budget, had not exactly endeared us to burgers, fish-and-chips, or even steak-and-kidney pie (believe me, we tried all of them - not bad at all, but not something you can survive on endlessly). So, one dismal evening, sick of what we’d been living on all this while, we decided on something different, and our footsteps (aided by two gourmet friends who are chefs in London) led us to the New Mayflower restaurant on Shaftesbury Avenue.

Chinese, and Cantonese, is the name of the game in this busy, smart restaurant in Chinatown. It’s a large place (they’ve got rooms downstairs, too) and very busy; so busy, in fact, that should you land up here without reservations, you’ll probably find yourself waiting for quite a few minutes before getting a table, and when you do, you’ll find yourself whisked along through a narrow corridor, making your way between bustling waiters, to your table.

We found ourselves seated at a large, round table wedged in next to the wall, but once the food started arriving, that minor inconvenience was swiftly forgotten! The meal was nothing short of a banquet, complete with warm sake to wash it all down. There were five of us, which allowed us a greater range of dishes to choose from, and we ended up sampling some splendid stuff: deliciously crisp lamb spare ribs; scallops with salt, pepper and chillies; egg fried rice; Malayan-style flat noodles; pork cooked with water chestnuts and cashewnuts; fried vegetables; sweet and sour king prawns; chicken with ginger and spring onions; and pineapple fritters to top it all off. And that wasn’t all; just when we thought we’d finished, a plate with huge wedges of sweet orange was placed on the table on the house, a wonderfully refreshing way to end the meal.

Final analysis: smart, good restaurant worth every pound we spent on it!

These guys stay open from 5pm to 4am, and they’re actually crowded till about 2am, so you can imagine how popular they are. Approximate cost for a meal, depending upon what you order, should range between £10 and £30 (between about $16 and $48).

Okay, it may seem silly to go halfway across the world to have Indian food. But we had friends working at Chor Bizarre, and they told us to drop in at the restaurant in the afternoon, "You can have a late lunch, and then we’ll take you around Mayfair." Very well. So we turned up at Chor Bizarre, a slightly more restrained version of the same restaurant in Delhi. The emphasis here is on the exuberance and richness of Indian culture. There are gorgeous pieces of wood carving, painting, antique furniture - all of it, interestingly enough, on sale.

And the food, too, is a merry hotchpotch of styles from all across India. Unlike Chor Bizarre Delhi (which concentrates on Mughlai and Kashmiri cuisine), Chor Bizarre London offers a spread from just about everywhere in India. There is, of course, lots of well-loved Kashmiri and Mughlai food, like tandoori specialties to stuff like roganjosh and mirchi korma,but there’s more, too. There are South Indian dishes like baghare baingan, baby aubergines cooked in a creamy peanut-based sauce, and there’s lots of what’s known as tak-a-tak, vegetables fried on a large, heavy griddle right in front of you so you can choose what veggies you want and how much spice you want in them.

By the time we reached it, the restaurant was nearly empty, and our pals took us downstairs to the basement half of the restaurant (a piece of advice: avoid the basement - although it’s as ornate as the rest of the joint, it’s rather gloomy). We were seated at a glass-topped table, and our pals took it upon themselves to order our meal. What we got was good stuff: Dal makhni, lentils simmered long with garlic and onions, finished with a swirl of fresh cream and a tempering based on butter; murgh dhaniwal korma, a chicken curry with a gravy of yoghurt, brimming with loads of freshly chopped coriander; and mirchi korma, a fiery lamb curry that tasted fabulous with steamed rice. There was murgh malai tikka, morsels of chicken marinated in a mixture of cream, grated cheese, chopped coriander, and green chillies, and then grilled in a coal-fired tandoor. Deliciously creamy! Both my husband and I have a sweet tooth, so we allowed ourselves to be coaxed into having a dessert. And that dessert is something I’m not going to forget for a very long time - it was pure ambrosia. A lovely aam ki kheer, a pudding made of rice that had been simmered very long in sweetened milk unitl the milk had thickened and the rice had softened, melted in our mouths. Kheer is a popular enough dessert in India, but this one had a surprise ingredient: lots of fresh sweet mango pulp had been swirled into it, giving it a wonderfully fruity flavour.

We didn’t go back for another meal to Chor Bizarre. A glance at the menu showed us that it was way beyond our tight little budgets, but this is a restaurant I’d recommend.

Madame Tussaud’s is more than just mannequins - it’s downright historic. All right, maybe not as historically significant as, say, the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey, but historic nonetheless. Moreover, it’s an interesting, and fun, way of getting a close look at London’s history. We visited Madame Tussaud’s on a chilly spring morning and spent a boring 15 minutes waiting in a long queue outside the hallowed (tallowed?!) portals of the famous museum of waxworks. (The museum, by the way, dates back to 1835, when it was established by Madame Tussaud, a Strasbourg-born lady who was tutored in the art of making waxworks by a doctor called Philippe Curtius. She led a very adventurous life, wandering about the continent, getting imprisoned, making death masks of those who were guillotined in the French Revolutionm and other such pleasurable pastimes).

Anyway, back to where we were. By the time we finally entered, our enthusiasm had taken a bit of a beating, but a few minutes of gawking at the rich and famous, and infamous, and we were back to our bubbly selves. The rooms of the museum lead from one into another, all filled with excellent waxworks: pop stars, film stars, sports stars, politicians and statesmen, royal families, historical figures, and more. There’s everybody here: Pele, Hugh Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe, Mahatma Gandhi, Henry VIII and his entourage of wives - each painstakingly crafted from wax and many wearing clothes of the celebrity in question.

The display also has some unusual exhibits that are not waxworks: a fragment of the robe worn by the Empress Josephine at her coronation, a copy of the letter sent by Jack the Ripper to the police, the blade which guillotined Marie Antoinette, and so on. The rooms lead into the Chamber of Horrors, showing forms of torture, crime, and punishment over the years. It’s all dreadfully graphic, with eerie sound effects, moving figures, and lighting guaranteed to make you feel just a little scared.

Once through that, we got onto one of a string of cars on a track for a short and thoroughly interesting ride that took us through what’s called the Spirit of London. It’s a multimedia representation, complete with sound, light, and moving figures - the complete atmosphere - of London through the past four centuries, covering all major eras and events. Neat lesson in history.

Entry to Madame Tussaud’s depends upon what time you visit and ranges from £16.95 to £19.95 per adult. If you’re watching your budget, visit between 5 and 6pm, when admission’s free. The museum remains open 364 days a year - it’s shut on Christmas Day.

We’re on the Tube. It’s a busy Monday morning, and the train’s nipping along at a good speed - nice and smooth. I, hanging on to a steel bar along the inside, stand and watch the tube stations whiz past. The train, although nowhere as full as what I’m used to back home in India, is crammed--but the crowd’s quiet and well-organised. They step on and off the train in a relatively silent mass - black skirts and high-heeled shoes, dark suits and briefcases, laptops and newspapers.

As the crowd surges past, I catch a glimpse of the tube stations through which the train makes its swift way: Baker Street, its walls decorated with huge black-and-white line drawings depicting the adventures of the legendary Sherlock Holmes; Paddington, with its large mannequins of the lovable bear; and Pimlico, near the Tate Gallery, with its walls decorated with copies of the paintings which hang in the famous art gallery... "Ah, this is London," I think. The stuff that legends are made of - historic, dignified, stately. Not infallible, obviously, but perhaps close...

My gaze wanders down to the girl who’s sitting, hunched up in a shapeless overcoat, next to the door. She’s reading a book, neatly covered in brown paper, and I can read the precisely lettered title on the cover: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Poof! There go my illusions. London is, after all, just as human as any other city. As vulnerable, as mundane, as prone to mistakes - as delightfully interesting.

The thought returns again and again. We’re walking through the British Museum when I turn to see a woman stroll past - resplendent in red velvet cloak and mini, all of it liberally covered with huge gilt buttons. And one night, after a long and leisurely Chinese dinner in Soho, we’re standing on the pavement waiting for a cab when a definitely tipsy guy strolls up, looks dreamily up at my friend, and whispers hoarsely, "You wouldn’t have a pound to spare, would you?" My pal, a quiet, bespectacled Sikh with few pretensions to beauty, shakes his head. And the other, after a silent and painful look of disappointment, gazes into my friend’s face again - this time beatifically, almost rapturously - and murmurs, "You know, you’ve got the most beautiful eyes." And then he’s gone, lurching down the street while we stand and stare, not quite sure of anything. And that, actually, is the joy of being in London - of not being quite sure what awaits at the next corner, what delicious surprise will spring up and enfold you in its warm embrace, when you’ll come across something you’ve only read about in books.

Our first day out in the warm spring sunshine takes us to pigeon-flooded Trafalgar Square, where Nelson’s Column towers above the imposing lions at its foot. We dart deftly about, taking photographs and trying not to step on the birds milling around our feet, and then walk on, up to the fascinating National Gallery and its neighbour, the little-known National Portrait Gallery, a fairly comprehensive collection of portraits of Britain’s who’s-who across the ages.

From there, it’s a leisurely stroll to busy Leicester Square, spilling over with tourists, some of them being sketched by artists, others waiting in line for tickets to theatre shows. We lounge around in the central park, sitting on a bench and sipping hot mochas, nibbling at luscious blueberry muffins, and watching London go past.

Another day, another time - and we walk, along with a horde of other tourists, following a red-uniformed Beefeater on a tour of the Tower of London, the ultimate tribute to London’s tumultuous history. Grey and brooding, the fortress - or rather, its oldest building, the White Tower - was constructed in 1078 and has seen everything from the imprisonment and execution of Thomas Culpeper, who scratched a brief, despairing inscription into the wall, to the haughty Queen Elizabeth; from the impressive Henry VIII to his unfortunate wives. We are shown the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, below the floor of which 15,000 headless bodies of traitors - proven or otherwise - had once been buried; we are shown the chopper’s block and the axe used to behead Anne Boleyn, and we are shown the Crown Jewels. Solid gold, heavily bejeweled, there is a glittering, dazzling array of scepters and crowns, jewellery, weapons, and chalices, as well as a solid-gold punch bowl the size of a small bathtub.

Equally dazzling - in a different way - are the huge, hallowed halls of Harrod’s. We wander around the famous store, clutching our thin wallets, gawping at the brocade upholstery, the glassware, the fine porcelain... everything we’ve read about in all those period novels still exists here. There's Sheffield cutlery, Waterford crystal, Wedgwood - "Ooh, look at that vase," I gasp. "Isn’t it fabulous?" The vase in question is a rippling, glorious piece of art, a foot high and swirling like the waterfall it’s supposed to represent.

"Fabulous," agrees my husband, and we step closer for a look at the price tag... and retreat really fast. 2,000 pounds.

We’re more in our element at busy, raucous Petticoat Lane, which we visit on a warm Sunday morning. The wares on sale here are more like what we’re looking at: shoes, 'Been there, done that: London' T-shirts, London snow globes, tiny models of everything from the Buckingham Palace guards to Beefeaters; yes, this is where we’ll buy those souvenirs we need for friends and family back home. It’s a bustling place, stalls squeezing in on both sides, the space between so narrow we sometimes need to walk in single file, but it’s fun - loads of fun. There’s a guy frying huge prawns with garlic and butter while his neighbour tosses popcorn and someone down the lane sells caramel-coated peanuts. The fragrance wafts in the air, making us hungry all over again, even though we’ve just had a hefty breakfast.

We do a round of high-profile Covent Garden too, more for the experience than for actually savouring any of what it offers - which comes with a price tag too high for us. The restaurants here are the type for which people need to book a year in advance; the shops here are the variety where they sniff disapprovingly as we back out, red-faced with embarrassment.

Maybe we’d better stick to the places which don’t need us to spend precious pounds - places like the British Museum, with its amazing Greek, Egyptian, and God-knows-what-else antiquities, which we spend two and a half days in exploring. Or the Tate Gallery, where works of art by all my favourite English painters - Reynolds, Whistler, Constable, Gainsborough, et al - hang alongside Impressionist art, contemporary art, even stuff we don’t really understand but stand and peer at anyway.

And then there’s the quiet picnic in St James’ Park, with wide golden swathes of nodding daffodils all around and the pigeons staring foolishly up into our faces as we bite into our sandwiches. There's the walk across the murky grey waters of the Thames, into the sepulchral gloom of the magnificent Westminster Abbey and its neighbouring church, St Margaret’s, where Winston Churchill was married. The stroll through the impressive St Paul’s Cathedral, and the quiet sit-down in the garden behind it, where pretty cream tulips bloom. There's the 'authentic' steak-and-kidney pie, which I’m warned against but which turns out to be pretty good nevertheless. The trip to Hounslow, where the local tube station has signs in English and - wonder of wonders - Punjabi, the amazingly colourful Chinatown...

Yup, London has a way of getting under your skin. Once you’ve been here, you can never quite get it out of your system. Or stop wishing you could go back - again and again.

If, and there’s a very big if here, I was reborn, and that too as a Brit, and was given the option of choosing whom I’d like to be (fate would have to be pretty crazed to allow me that liberty!), I’d choose to be a policeman. Or a popcorn seller outside the Millennium Eye. Maybe even a busker fiddling away industriously to keep crowds of gawping tourists amused at Leicester Square.

Anything, anyone, as long as I’m not a national hero. A decision I’ve reached after much pondering. No thank you. Not a national hero. Not a poet laureate. Not a battle-scarred admiral. Not a general, a prime minister, or even a grim-faced queen. See what happens if you’re big league and Brit - they put up a statue of you in some park or square for all the pigeons to shit on. You can’t be a hero minus the frills, including the smelly add-ons.

London’s pigeons are all over the blessed city for heaven’s sake. Poor Nelson, atop his column in Trafalgar Square (and the poor lions below the column too); poor Queen Victoria outside Buckingham Palace; poor William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds; poor… oh, well, everybody else, besmeared by hundreds of illiterate and unaesthetic birds.

Other than that, about the only thing our feathered friends seem to spend their time doing is consuming huge quantities of bird feed. No wonder they end up making all of London’s historic old statues a public loo for themselves.

Fortunately, for bird-weary tourists (and Londoners, too), there are places that are, thankfully, bird-free. The Tate Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum: miles of spooky mummies and spookier sarcophagi, famed watercolours and oils, medieval clocks and coins and antique furniture… all, mercifully, barred to the avian community. The same goes for the imposing old Westminster Abbey, the much-admired Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and Madame Tussaud’s. Your camera-toting fellow-tourists will be human, not avian. The Tower of London and the glorious Crown Jewels are also, thank heavens, spared the attentions of London’s feathered folk.

Goofish pigeons, however, still descend gleefully on every edifice, especially the more classic bits of architecture, contenting themselves with shitting on rooftops even if they can’t get inside. All of the city’s outdoor attractions, old and new, historic and contemporary, including Tower Bridge, the Millennium Eye, and Cleopatra’s Needle, bountifully bespattered. Walk down Piccadilly and you’ll probably end up traipsing between overstuffed pigeons bursting with birdfeed. Plonk yourself down on a bench in St James’ Park, take out a sandwich from your bag for lunch, and watch the birds descend.

The creatures don’t even spare travellers on the Tube. King’s Cross, Paddington, Hounslow, Edgware Road - they’re all over. Hop on a train and you may well find yourself seated next to a couple of lovey-dovey pigeons billing and cooing for all they’re worth.

But there’s no beating Trafalgar Square, the pigeon-lover’s pilgrimage. Hundreds of doting tourists, lots of birdfeed, and a tonne of pigeon shit every year. London’s taxpayers actually dole out £100,000 annually to clean up Nelson and the lions. Now, that’s what I call expensive.

Someone, evidently not an admirer of London’s birdlife, said, "To the ordinary passer-by, pigeons appear stupid. This is because they are."

Bit harsh. What would London be without its pigeons? Sterile. Uninspiring. Boring. Dull.

Hmm. Perhaps not. A day of being shat upon; of having to share space, and meals, with pigeons; and I rather think London’s better off without its feather-brained denizens. But, for the time being, they’re there, so learn to cope with ‘em. Here’s a very brief travel guide:

What to bring:

1. Big hat, birdproof

2. Protective clothing, also birdproof.

3. Plenty of money to buy souvenirs, food, entry tickets… anything but birdfeed.

Best time to go:

Any time. Every day is party time for the birds.

Getting around:

It doesn’t really matter. You’ll need to be nimble on your feet everywhere.

.Sights to see:

Anywhere indoors.

Dining and Entertainment:

Breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Trafalgar Square. Excellent birdfeed - nutritious but pricey. Accompanied by show of cavorting pigeons, wheeling, pirouetting, and prancing around.

Welcome to London!