by Lian Nami Buan
UNITED KINGDOM – London is a great city for tourists, that fact has been well-established. It is home to iconic landmarks such as the Big Ben, the London Bridge and the London Eye, and is nothing short of a visual delight thanks to victorian architecture that decorates its streets.
If you’re traveling to London, there is a compulsory tour of the sites mentioned above, which are accessible by underground train or if you want convenience, the hop-on-hop-off double decker tour bus. Once you’ve made the “tourist” round, you may want to try out this off-the-path itinerary of an extraordinary city that always leaves you wanting.
The first thing you should do is get yourself the underground map. These are available in any train stations or can be downloaded on the internet. You can also download a City Mapper app which gives you specific travel instructions. Nevertheless, London is very easy to navigate, and that’s coming from a person with zero sense of direction.
You should also buy a day travel card, which will allow you to take as many train and bus rides as you like within the day around London. It costs around £17 or P1,000, more if you get it before 9 am (peak time), but worth every pence as you discover the ins and outs of this city.
What you should remember: all train lines are interconnected as you will see in the map above. The key to getting where you want to go is just to find out which station you’ll be hopping off, which line will take you there, and how to get to that line from your jump-off station.
First stop, let’s get you to the famous River Thames.
RIVER THAMES
One way of getting there is through Blackfriars which is along the Circus and Picadilly lines.
If you’re religious or just appreciates classic architecture, you could drop by the St. Paul’s Cathedral, which is easy to spot once you’ve gone out of the station. If you want to go inside, as you would St. Peter’s in Vatican, you’d have to pay a precious price of £18 per person. This comes with a trip to the Cathedral floor, the underground crypt, and three galleries up in the famous dome 111 meters above London.
If you can’t shell out that amount and find yourself just settling for a photo from the outside, you can quench your thirst for Culture and the Arts by crossing the river (through a bridge not a boat don’t worry) to the Tate Modern Museum, which you can enter free of charge.
International modern and contemporary art are on display, and you’ll get the chance to come face to face with a Picasso and a Monet. They sometimes hold rare, traveling exhibits and those are the ones you have to pay for, but even without those a trip to Tate Modern is well worth it.
When you’re done with Tate Modern, you just walk further along the river to get to Globe Theatre, where William Shakespeare first staged his plays. An exhibition and theatre tour costs £15, and comes with an audio guide tour that narrates stories from 1599, its reconstruction in 1900s and how it works today as a theatrical space. A cafe and a restaurant are found inside the theatre, but if you’re looking for a richer gastronomic experience, walk further along until you’ve reached the Borough Market. It’s a food market of dynamic options, from local produce to international cuisines, made even more interesting for its environmental stance. Borough Market stalls and restaurants support the Slow Food Movement, which promotes low impact on food production.
CAMDEN
When you’re ready to go shopping (and some more eating), then go to your nearest station that would connect you to the Northern line. If you can spare some more energy for walking, go to Monument station where you can easily interchange to the Northern line. Your destination from there is Camden Town, where you would find a bustling shopping district fit for the Asian shopper in you.
Get lost in the mazes of stalls that sell just about anything, from clothes to trinkets to books to art and everything you can imagine that’s worth your hard-earned pounds.
If I may recommend, this is where you buy your souvenirs, for your friends or for yourself. My favorite purchases from Camden are the reproduction of Banksy art on wooden blocks, and the metal street signs similar to what you actually see on the streets of London.
NOTTING HILL
If you’re a fan of the movie Notting Hill, then you might not mind going on a side trip and experience for yourself the Portobello narrative that William Thacker so enthusiastically described in the opening of the movie.
From Camden Town station, you hop on en route to Tottenham Court Road where you can change into the Central Line, where you’d find your train that would take you to Notting Hill gate.
Explore the area according to your liking and do some more shopping if you’d like.
London is a walking city and a full day’s itinerary will leave you exhausted, and there’s nothing more fitting to ending the day in London than with a delicious meal and maybe drinking later.
So from Notting Hill, take the train to Holborn where you can interchange to the Picadilly line, and a station away is Covent Garden. Step out to see more shops and restaurants, whether you’d like Chinese or Japanese or classic English.
My personal choice in Covent Garden is Big Easy BAR.B.Q and Crabshack. For £20, you get a giant lobster, chips, salad and beer. I don’t know about you but that sounds just about perfect for a day in London.
And you know what they say, you have not not experienced London fully if you haven’t been inside a pub. And pub you can find easily in Covent Garden, or just about anywhere really.
GOOD TO KNOW:
Philippine Airlines has daily direct flights to London for PhP 19,000+ (one way) while rooms in Airbnb cost as low as PhP 600+ per night.
