Retake the City: London

by Alex in United Kingdom, Retake the City

Tower Bridge. The London Eye. Big Ben. London is littered with famous and instantly recognisable landmarks, making it one of the most iconic city skylines in the world.

But, who cares about them? They're boring!

Nothing to see here! photo by:@Doug88888

That was pretty well my first thought when we stepped off the train from Gatwick Airport, after our (very) early morning flight from Copenhagen. (Okay, I tell a lie - that was my second thought. My first thought was probably more along the lines of, "Buuuuuuuuh?? Find... find hostel... sleeeeep..." But that's not nearly as poetic, is it?)

As well as being one of the most historically, economically and architecturally significant cities in the world, London is the home of Harry Potter, Sherlock, Doctor Who, Jekyll... All of this makes London a mecca for massive nerds, which the observant among you may have noticed includes us. So in between filling in forms and queueing up in the Irish embassy trying to get our visas, we made plans to hit the nerdiest, cheapest things we could find. And so, with no further ado, I'd like to offer my nerd's-eye-view of London - places to go, things to see, where to shop, what to do and, most importantly, where to find the good pizza.

 Stay

To be perfectly honest, there's not really any part of London that's cheap to stay in. When we first arrived, we found a dorm room in a hostel/pub near London Bridge for around £30 each per night. For that price, we got a hostel where the reception desk was in a completely separate building half a block down the street, above a pub which had loud music playing every night until 4am. The food at the pub was good, if slightly expensive - although there was a nightly special for hostel guests for £10. After five days there, we had to find new lodgings, and looked for the cheapest beds we could find, while still being near to an Underground station. We ended up in a terrible, dive-y hostel above a bar in a seedy suburb of South London, where we got snubbed by the staff, yelled at by the long-timers and generally feared for our safety. And we still ended up paying £20 per night for the cheapest place we could find.

After coming back to London, we did have a bit more luck with our accomodation. Sick of having to commute back and from the Irish Embassy every day - and the huge expense that entailed - we decided to look for a hostel only one or two tube stops away. We ended up in the London branch of the Meininger chain hostel, paying around £25 each per night. This hostel, which shares its building with the local Boy Scout and Girl Guide hall, was the nicest place we'd stayed at in London. Clean, tidy, modern and comfortable, with friendly reception staff and an elevator. An elevator!! After months and months of lugging our bags up and down countless flights of stairs, being able to stand in a metal box and have it take us to our floor with the push of a button felt like some Star Trek-level sci-fi. Still no kitchen, but the front desk staff were happy to call for a pizza and deliver it to our dorm for us, which helped make up for it.
 

Also we were right across the street from the Natural History Museum!

Eat

While we're staying in hostels, we prefer to cook our own food rather than eat out for every meal - and for one simple reason. It's much, much cheaper. In South East Asia it was more difficult, simply because of the scarcity of kitchens in places where we were staying, but it was great to get back to having a kitchen of our own while in Denmark. In London, however, we encountered the same problem as in Asia - we had no choice but to eat out, because there was no way for us to prepare our own meals. The second hostel we stayed in did technically have a kitchen, but since all it had was a microwave and a single hotplate - and while there I got screamed at by a long-termer for trying to use "his kitchen" - it might as well not have.

There were a few places to get decent food for not-too-expensive, though. While we were walking around the town, near the Gower St tube station, we found a random little pizza joint on a corner, called Icco Pizza. We were prepared to just walk on until we took a look at the prices through the window, and - seriously? We'd never seen any food this cheap in London anywhere! A 16" pizza for £5 is too good a deal to pass up, no matter how bad the pizza may be. So, therefore, it was just a bonus that the pizza was good - so good that we ended up going back there 6 times in 2 weeks.


As a quick aside: Despite the dish's somewhat iconic status overseas, avoid the fish and chips in London. No matter how hard we looked, we didn't find one decent fish'n'chip emporium in London - actually, we didn't find a single one in the UK. The best fish and chips that we've found so far has actually been in Killarney, Ireland - but that's a tale for another time. 

Get Around

The main way to get around London is on the freakishly extensive Underground subway system - "the tube", as it's known. Stations are practically everywhere, and are clearly identifiable with the distinctive circle-and-label signs that adorn all of London's public transport systems. Be aware, though - maps of the Underground are not to scale, and plenty of stations within the inner CBD are close enough that you could walk between them in a matter of minutes. In fact, there is one pair of stations on different lines which are actually connected - you can walk from one station to the other without actually having to come up into the street.

Just look at that bewildered little face!

For most of the central suburbs of London, the city is quite flat and very walkable - provided you have a map or a GPS. The streets are generally quite wide - although can be swarming with people during peak hours - and there are tourist maps scattered around the city which can help you if you get turned around. Which will probably happen. The streets, particularly on the north bank of the Thames, can be somewhat twisty and labyrinthine, and some of the street signs can be a bit hard to spot, but there are enough recognisable landmarks in London that you should be able to find yourself fairly quickly. And if not, there's never a tube station that far away!

If you are taking the tube, you will probably want to invest in an Oyster card. These cards are sort of like preloaded electronic tickets - you top them up with a certain amount of money, then touch on and off when you travel. Single-trip tickets are also available at every station, but they're not as convenient, particularly when you're in a hurry. Oyster cards can be bought from any station for £7, and we ended up spending an average of £10 per day on transportation (this does include going to the embassy and back every other day).

Note: Aside from the Underground, there is also an extensive Overground rail network, as well as London's famous black cabs and red double-decker buses, but we never found the need to use either of these.

See

There are a million things to see and do in London, to suit every taste. Our tastes, obviously, run toward the nerdy and sciencey, and for that, there was one above all else that London had to offer us: Museums! We actually spent 3 days in only a handful of museums, but you could easily fill a week - if not longer - with all of the history and art and science on display in the city. Most of the museums are free, with a £5 donation encouraged, but not necessary.

We went to the Natural History Museum - which is awesome, because dinosaurs. What? You want more than that? Okay, there's heaps of awesome stuff, like biology exhibits and geology collections and interactive kids' stuff, but the highlight for us was the extensive collection of dinosaur fossils and such, most of which made appearances in the BBC's Walking With Dinosaurs documentary series. Also around the corner from there is the Science Museum - If you know the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, basically imagine about 3 Powerhouses stacked on top of one another. 6 storeys of planes, cars, spacecraft, engineering machinery and heaps and heaps more. Unfortunately, we happened to go to the Science Museum on the day that every school in London was having an excursion to the museums. The Science Museum's 45-minute queue was certainly preferable to the Natural History Museum's 3-hour one, but we still didn't get to see and explore as much as we would have liked, because it was so full of noisy children.



The crown jewel of museums in London, though, has to be the British Museum. The museum is located square in the middle of London, in the middle of 4 Underground stations, and you should go there. "Why?" ...Seriously? You need me to sell you on going to the British Museum? Okay, fine - it's the top-ranked museum in Britain, the second-highest ranked IN THE WORLD, its 92,000 square metre facilities house a collection of approximately 8 MILLION artefacts, home to some of the most significant finds in archaeological history, and besides that, it's the BRITISH. FREAKING. MUSEUM. Get your ass in there already!!

The other one I want to mention is the Tate Modern, a modern art museum on the south bank of the Thames. We didn't go in, which was a shame, but  it's not on this list for that. It's here because of its distinctive tower, looming over the city like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. And we didn't notice it. For a week, we completely failed to notice this tower, right up until we did. And then we couldn't not see it. No matter where you are along the river, you can see this huge, featureless tower jutting up into the sky. It almost seems darker that whatever's around it, cloaked in its own shadow like the tower of Barad-Dur. And you know, you just know that it can see you. It looks out over the entire city, a view that spans for miles in every direction, and it's looking directly at you. Watching you. Judging you.

...or is that just me? - photo by: thewolf

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