Some musts....

The fun of living in any city is in many ways that of making its unique culture and offerings part of your daily life. Here are a few of the special pleasures of London.

  • Wagamama, a very popular, very affordable, very hip Japanese restaurant in the heart of Bloomsbury.

  • London's many open air markets. Great bargains on everything from antique jewelry to new leather coats. Each has its own day of the week and its own personality--visit them all, and don't forget to haggle over prices. It's expected, it's respected, and you can walk away with treasure for a song.

  • Books! From Dillons, Blackwell's, Foyles, and Waterstone's to the hundreds of used book shops scattered across the city (they are especially dense around the British Museum and in Cecil Court), you'll never run out of stuff to read, to browse, and to covet.

  • London is that rare urban combination: a truly huge, busy city with lots of huge, peaceful parks. It's actually possible to escape the noise and bustle of the streets within central London. Take a walk, take a book, take a picnic, and unwind.

  • Cadbury chocolate. Puts American chocolate to shame. Cadbury machines beckon on every tube platform--a most excellent perk of the Underground.

  • Newspapers. London probably has more papers per capita than any city in the world. No matter what your politics or your mindset, there is a London paper that suits you. Favorites include The Guardian and The Times.

  • BBC--entertaining, intelligent TV and radio.

  • Kew Gardens. Go. Smell the roses, sweat in the tropical greenhouse, and then take yourself off to tea at nearby Maids of Honour. Ambrosia.

  • London is a great place to go gravehunting. Highgate Cemetery, where George Eliot, Karl Marx, Leslie Stephen, and Herbert Spencer are buried, is the most popular of its many graveyards, but it's also the most commercialized. Kensal Green, a cemetery of the same Victorian vintage as Highgate, is a vast, unkempt, truly remarkable place to visit. You won't pay admission, and you can walk the grounds at will, where you may stumble over the graves of Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, William Thackeray, and Charles Babbage. Also worth a visit: the much older dissenter's graveyard at Bunhill Fields. Blake is there, and so are Defoe and Bunyan.

This page was last modified on Saturday, 18-Jan-2003 07:23:29 EST.
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