Andrew Testa for The New York Times Camden Passage market in Islington.When I went to London in January, my idea had been to build a trip around advice from graduate students living there. After all, who would know more about seeing the city on a pittance than the impoverished intellectual crowd?
They turned out to be quite savvy about finding the utterly cheapest beer and directing me to the best Web sites for theater tickets and using the latest electronic doodads (a k a iPhones) to track down bargain meals at chain restaurants. But after my fourth chain pub, I suspected that I could benefit from some more sophisticated advice – and thus turned to tips from more, ahem, mature sources. They included an Anglophile New Yorker who had lived several times in the city — and an octogenarian cousin who had long lived in London and whom I had last seen when I was 11.
But my first great break came from my habit of picking up a local newspaper as soon as I arrived in town. On my way from Heathrow to a guesthouse, I spotted a banner at the top of that day’s Times of London: “EAT OUT from £5.” It turned out to be quite a deal: you cut out coupons with images of tokens from the paper for three or four days and use them at a restaurants on a huge list the paper published, which offered either a two-course meal for £5 or a three-course meal for £10. (The annual promotion, which was starting when I arrived, is over at the end of this month.)
On the day that I had finally collected enough tokens, my cousin Ruth, an 81-year-old with impeccable taste in restaurants, invited me over to lunch with a friend and with my cousin Lindsey. Ruth and her friend pored over the newspaper’s list, dismissing many of the locations as chain bars and pointed me toward Chimes, which serves English food and hard ciders in Pimlico. Chimes was offering a three-course meal for £10 a person.
I decided to go that evening with Lindsey. The restaurant’s décor was utterly unfussy – with wooden tables and old photos on the wall, it could have been a student bar if the clientele weren’t young couples and middle-aged groups. We feasted on their sophisticated take on British cuisine: stuffed mushrooms topped with hazelnuts, cidered cod and haddock, chicken pie with gooseberries, and bread-and-butter pudding. For £20, we got £50.30 worth of food (I checked the standard menu) and added a “rough, farmhouse style” Weston’s Old Rosie cider for me and a sparkling elderflower drink for Lindsey, which raised the check to £26.
After finishing a meal for grownups, I decided to shift gears to a diversion that none of the students had mentioned: shopping. Fortunately I had copious notes from my friend Lizzie Pergam, an art historian in New York who is such an Anglophile that if you subtitled her speech you’d have to spell flavor with a “u. She also pointed out that I would be visiting London during the winter sales.
First on the list, of course, was Harrods. I was impressed by the doormen in formal green uniforms, and by the elegant interior, putting Macy’s to shame. I even learned some new vocabulary: after reading a sign declaring “No Prams” on the escalators, I was concerned for a moment that I might have a pram in my bag. But I inquired and found out that it was unlikely — it was a British term for strollers.
The vocabulary lessons were free but the sale prices were less than thrilling. Prada shoes on special for £371. A silver tea set for £3,000. Oddly labeled clothes racks that advertised bargains as “up to £50,” when I wanted to see “from £9.99.” Miraculously, I did find something in the men’s clothing section at a reasonable price: Nike gym shorts for £17, slightly less than I would have paid in the United States, and with a bonus: the thrill of carrying around a legit green Harrods shopping bag for the rest of the day.
Andrew Testa for The New York Times A window display at Fortnum & Mason tea shop.Another stop on Lizzie’s list was Fortnum & Mason, the famous tea shop. The place sounded utterly horrible to a shopping-averse latte-lover like me, but it turned out to be a brilliant source of reasonably priced gifts, disguised by ravishingly elegant window displays, crystal chandeliers and wrought-iron railings. Boxes of tea started at around £3, for example, and tea caddies from £10. I may not like tea, but there couldn’t be a more British present – and there were even gifts I’d like to receive, like cutely decorated jars of candy with names like “jolly jelly babies” and stylish liquor flasks, all reasonably priced for the high-rent district near Piccadilly Circus. I made do with a Lincolnshire pork pie for £2.95 from the downstairs prepared foods department.
My shopping spree continued at London’s wonderful antique markets. High on Lizzie’s list was the Camden Passage market, which turned out to be about a 15-minute walk from the 1811 Georgian Town House, the inn where I was staying in decidedly untouristy Islington. I headed there on a Saturday morning – the market also operates Wednesdays – and found a devastatingly charming, narrow little lane and the side streets around it that housed stands of antiques and vintage goods. It felt like a lost-in-time fantasy world of old England — the antiques shops boasting everything from fine silver to vintage Dick Tracy books, and a postage-stamp-size store called Militaria selling things like a Stalin bust and East German banners. Another tiny shop, the African Waistcoat Company, offered classically tailored vests with a twist: they were made from Nigerian cloth in colorful Yoruba patterns. Another twist: they start at £180. Luckily, the eclectic memorabilia at temporary tables feature more affordable stuff, like a vintage Winnie the Pooh girl’s wristwatch for £8.
Eventually, I remembered that I hadn’t had breakfast, and sought advice from shop owners and passers-by. Several pointed me toward the Winchester, a stand-alone enterprise. It also was a perfect combination of traditional pub with hip touches: mismatched chairs, leather sofas and youthful bartenders talking about the high price of movies these days.
The full English breakfast, £5.80, was bacon and Cumberland sausage, impossibly juicy charred tomatoes, a pile of grilled mushrooms, eggs, baked beans and brown toast and jam. It was gorgeously laid out on the plate and obviously freshly made (The Winchester is also a rocking night spot, I would find out when I passed by on the way home that night at about 1 a.m.)
Andrew Testa for The New York Times Sculptures at the Victoria and Albert Museum.Every single student I asked had impressed upon me how utterly free London museums are, they hadn’t given me much to go on. My friend Lizzie, on the other hand, had left me with a long list that detailed the museums to see and what to see there. Among them: the Victoria and Albert Museum, where without her I wouldn’t have known to look for the Donatello sculptures, or the wide range of decorative arts and fabrics from around the British Empire. I went with Lindsey, and we got lost amid the collections of old shortwave radios, the absurd mid-20th-century furniture, all kinds of treasures from India, and O.K., the sculptures as well.
Also recommended by Lizzie was the National Gallery, whose Renaissance paintings she assured me were in a “wonderful space.” I finally made it there on my final day in town, escaping a January rain and depressing gray skies to to see the Michelangelos and da Vincis and Raphaels, and, despite my utter lack of knowledge of art history, had to agree with Lizzie. This was a beautiful space. I was especially struck by the lighting – something I’m not often struck by – which brought out the deep, rich colors of the walls and had me stopping and lingering at the details of works of Leonardo, Titian and Raphael far longer than my own very limited patience (and even more limited art history background) would normally allow.
This lighting and color observations perturbed me a bit. I had always considered myself a youngish traveler, able to toe the line between student and sophisticate. Was Lizzie’s and cousin Ruth’s London, of nice restaurants and tea shops and well-lighted Renaissance masterpieces, actually more my style than those student-led finds of cheap beer in rowdy pubs?
I shouldn’t have worried. As soon as I stepped out into rainy, dismal, Trafalgar Square, I realized that a sudden obsession with lighting and color had nothing to do with maturity – it was just the natural reaction to the contrast between the museum’s sumptuously colorful halls and London’s dreary gray January weather. With not enough Times of London coupons for another classy meal, I happily headed to a chain restaurant for dinner.
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