London Calling
A travel bleg
I’m going to London next week with my wife and three teenage daughters (ages 18, 16, 13)!
I have never been to Europe.1 In fact, the only foreign countries I’ve visited are Canada and The Bahamas.2 I’m very excited.
So we’re looking for your best London advice. Sights. Neighborhoods. Food. Whatever. But especially stuff that I can’t get from Google or Claude.
We’re going out to Oxford one day. We will hit the major tourist attractions. We like walking neighborhoods. But beyond that, we are wide open to ideas. What should we do?
One particular query: we are going to be there during the England-Panama World Cup game. Which seems like an incredible opportunity. If someone knows the best way to approach watching that, I’m all ears.
So please leave a comment, DM me on Twitter, email me, or leave me anonymous advice.
Thanks in advance.
Unless you count FAKE FRANCE, which I have been to many times.
Which actually doesn’t make me particularly unusual as an American, but does make me an absurd outlier here in professional northern Virginia. I don’t have much of an explanation for it. My parents were See the USA vacation types. And my wife and I really like the national parks, so we have often chosen the American west over international travel. But mostly I just think of it as a failure on my part.
One small, but very cool and easy to miss site in London is St. Dunstan in the East. It is near the Tower of London but is kind of tucked away. It is the ruins of a church bombed in WWII that is basically a park and garden. Quite lovely and a bit haunting. Definitely worth a visit!
Here's a (fairly full) itinerary for a nice summer day in London, based in Greenwich and featuring some aspects of the maritime history of England:
* Take the Thames ferry to Greenwich. Or otherwise arrive at Greenwich, but taking the ferry from, say, Millbank or Embankment allows you to see London from the river.
* Read about the "Great Tea Race of 1872" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tea_Race_of_1872), then look at or tour the Cutty Sark (clipper ship).
* Wander around Greenwich Market. Grab a takeaway lunch at the market and eat it on the lawn at Greenwich Park.
* Walk up the hill and walk around the Royal Observatory grounds. Straddle the Prime Meridian. Maybe see a planetarium show. The time ball on top of the observatory will fall at 1pm daily, if you happen to be there at that time but no need to go out of your way for this.
* Read about the "Longitude Act of 1714" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_Act) and the prizes offered as part of the Act to incentivize the invention of a clock that keeps accurate time at sea, which is needed to measure a ship's longitude. Pendulum clocks don't work very well on a ship! Visit the museum at the observatory, which has some of the early attempts at devising a clock to keep accurate time at sea. Some of these are fairly bizarre.
* Depending on how much time is left in the day, there are other things around the park, including a flower garden and an art museum, but if you want to continue the maritime theme then walk back down the hill toward the river and visit the National Maritime Museum.
* At this point you will be near the ferry dock on the Thames or near the DLR, where you can get anywhere in London for dinner.