Fiona MacLeod on five museums, five pubs, five transport tips, and the ongoing problem of weekend tourists
Filed through Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Sunday Morning, a Park Bench in Regent’s Park, the Ducks Are on Strike, the Notebook Is Open
I am in Regent’s Park on a bench overlooking the boating lake, and there is a family of four Americans sitting two benches over, and the father is trying, audibly, to work out whether London is “doable” in 48 hours. He has a paper map. He has a guidebook. He has the specific expression of a man who has been assured, by a woman at the American Airlines check-in desk in Raleigh-Durham, that he can “see London in a weekend.” I am listening, as a professional, and I am taking notes, as a journalist. The conversation he is about to have with his wife is, in essence, my column this week, and he is writing it for me for free.
The wife, wisely, has suggested they “pick three things.” The husband is arguing for eleven. The son, who looks about fourteen, is arguing for none. The daughter, who looks about eleven, is arguing for “the one with the wax people.” The family will compromise on six. They will, by my estimate, execute four. They will go home with a slightly defeated sense of London and will tell their friends in Raleigh-Durham that “London is great, but you really need a whole week.” This is, in the travel writing trade, the single most common sentence uttered by American tourists returning from London, and it is almost always symptomatic not of a London problem but of an American-scheduling problem.
The rule of fives
I have been developing, for my column this week, what I am calling the London Rule of Fives. Five museums you should actually visit. Five pubs you should actually drink in. Five transport tips you should actually follow. Five things you should categorically ignore. And five walks you should do instead of most of the things in your guidebook. The five-fives format is, in my opinion, the single most useful organisational device for a London weekend, because it forces the visitor to pre-commit to a small number of specific choices, which is what Londoners themselves do every weekend.
The five museums: the British Museum, the Hunterian, Somerset House, Sir John Soane’s Museum, and the Geffrye (now the Museum of the Home). All five can be done free or near-free. All five will change how you think about the city. None of them requires you to queue for more than fifteen minutes if you arrive at the correct time, which is, for all of them, within ninety minutes of opening.
The five pubs: I have named one in my last column, The Lamb in Lamb’s Conduit Street. I will name two more here: The French House in Soho, which has not changed since roughly 1949, and The Harp in Covent Garden, which has the best selection of real ales in central London. The remaining two, as before, I will not name in print, because naming them would spoil them.
Shakespeare’s house, the new tourist economy
The Shakespeare house story has, as I predicted in my last column, produced an entirely new tourist itinerary within weeks. I have been to the site. It is, on inspection, a quiet street corner with a small plaque and a large amount of architectural conjecture. It is not a visitor attraction. It is a historical marker. And yet, last Saturday, I counted fourteen tourists at the site, eight of whom were taking photographs, four of whom were listening to guided audio, and two of whom were doing what I was doing, which was just standing there trying to imagine what he would have thought about any of this.
If you are coming to London specifically to see the Shakespeare site, do not. If you are coming to London and you happen to be in the area, walk past it, touch the plaque briefly, and move on. The real Shakespeare of London is not the house. The real Shakespeare of London is the Globe, and the Southwark he knew, and the walking route from London Bridge to Borough Market, which is, by a wide margin, the most historically dense twenty minutes of walking available to a visitor with no archaeology degree.
Decline, managed or not
I read, over breakfast this morning, Bohiney’s piece on Britain managing its decline. The piece is dark. The piece is also, in the specific context of London tourism, weirdly encouraging. The city that Bohiney describes as scheduling a meeting about decline is still, simultaneously, the city that has the best theatre scene in the English-speaking world, the best pub culture in Europe, and, per head, the most substantial museum collections on the continent. London, for all its rent crises and its bus strikes and its trainer obsessions, is not declining in the way a visitor from Raleigh-Durham will experience it. It is declining in the way a Londoner experiences it, which is a private, administrative, slow-motion exhaustion that is invisible to the tourist.
This is the paradox I am trying to land in my column. London is, for a weekend visitor, still magnificent. London is, for a weekday resident, quietly fraying. Both are true. The column will, I hope, make this comprehensible to an American father on a bench in Regent’s Park who is about to ask his wife whether they can also fit in the London Eye.
The afternoon
I am walking from Regent’s Park to the Wallace Collection, which is my favourite small museum in central London and which does not, in my experience, appear in any major American guidebook. I will file 1,400 words by Tuesday. I will describe the Wallace Collection with sufficient affection that one or two readers will take the walk. The ducks will remain on strike. The family on the bench will, I hope, pick three things.
For further symptoms of the same disease, see Waterford Whispers News.
