Fiona MacLeod guides the uninitiated beyond the tourist circuit to the London that Londoners actually use
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The conventional London tourist itinerary is well-established and not without merit. The Tower of London is genuinely impressive. Buckingham Palace is genuinely large. The National Gallery contains genuinely extraordinary paintings that you will walk past too quickly because you are simultaneously navigating a map on your phone and avoiding other people navigating maps on their phones. These things are worth doing. They are not the only things worth doing, and they will give you a version of London that is real but incomplete — the London that was designed for visitors rather than the London that was designed for the people who live in it.
What follows is a guide to the neighbourhoods that make up the latter London: the areas that most first-time visitors skip because they are not on the standard itinerary, that most travel publications undercoverage because they lack the landmarks that generate photography, and that most Londoners would tell you about if you asked them where they actually spend their time rather than where they take visitors.
Bermondsey and London Bridge: The Food and Drink Borough
Bermondsey, on the south bank of the Thames between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, contains what may be the highest concentration of quality food and drink producers in the city. The railway arches along Bermondsey Street and Druid Street house a collection of craft breweries, wine merchants, and food producers that on Saturday mornings become the Maltby Street Market, a genuinely excellent food market that has maintained a working character — the businesses there are actual businesses that operate all week, not purely market stallholders — that distinguishes it from the tourist-oriented markets of Borough and Camden.
Bermondsey Street itself is one of London’s most pleasant streets for an afternoon: independent restaurants, a fashion museum (the Fashion and Textile Museum, in a building painted orange in a way that is either brilliant or excessive and I have been there three times and still cannot decide), a good bookshop, and enough cafes for multiple stops without planning. London Bridge station is five minutes on foot and Bermondsey tube is a short walk further. It is not on anyone’s standard list. It should be.
Stoke Newington: The Village That Forgot It Was in London
Stoke Newington is a fifteen-minute bus ride north of Liverpool Street station in a direction that most visitors never travel. It has a high street that has maintained a genuine mix of independent shops, restaurants, and services that the areas closer to the tourist circuit have largely lost, a large reservoir with pleasant walking paths, Clissold Park which is excellent, and the Church Street restaurant strip which on a warm evening rivals anywhere in the city for the specific pleasure of sitting outside with a glass of something and watching people walk past.
It is also home to a secondary school whose alumni include a disproportionate number of British creative and public life, which is either evidence that the area produces interesting people or evidence that interesting people are drawn to it, and the direction of causality matters less than the result, which is a neighbourhood with more going on than its postcode (N16) suggests to anyone who has not been there.
Walthamstow Village: The Oldest, Least Visited
Walthamstow, at the end of the Victoria line, contains what is claimed to be the longest outdoor market street in Europe (Walthamstow Market on Walthamstow High Street), a medieval village centre with a half-timbered ancient house that regularly surprises visitors who did not know medieval London extended this far east, and the William Morris Gallery in a beautiful house that was Morris’s childhood home and that contains his wallpaper designs, textiles, and an account of his life and work that is fascinating even if you arrived knowing nothing about Victorian design and arts and crafts philosophy, which describes most visitors and which the gallery handles well.
The village section around Orford Road has developed a cluster of independent restaurants and coffee shops over the past decade that has attracted the kind of coverage that Peckham received ten years ago. Unlike Peckham, it has not yet been fully absorbed into the tourist circuit. It will be. The time to visit is before it fully is.
Practical Notes for the Visitor
All three of these areas are accessible by Oyster card on the tube or bus network, which is how Londoners travel and which is what you should do. The Visitor Oyster card, available from airport kiosks and Oyster ticket stops at major stations, loads credit for pay-as-you-go travel that is capped daily at a level significantly below what the equivalent taxi travel would cost. It is the single best practical tip for any London visitor and it is slightly buried in the official guidance, perhaps because the official guidance does not want to say plainly that the tube is usually better than a taxi for everything except the airport run and the very late night.
None of these neighbourhoods require a map beyond the standard tube map and your phone’s walking directions. None of them are particularly risky. None of them have queues for the things worth seeing. These three qualities together — accessible, safe, unqueued — are rarer in London than they should be, which is an indictment of the tourist circuit’s traffic management and an opportunity for the visitor willing to take the tube two stops past their comfort zone.
Fiona MacLeod writes about London travel for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/fiona-macleod.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/london-neighbourhoods-nobody-tells-first-time-visitors-about/
