London: Cultural Notes
de Tocqueville, I'm Not
One of the lesser-known legal requirements of running a blog (though it ought to be obvious if you watch the behavior of bloggers…) is that if you take a vacation to a foreign country, you are obliged to write something about the experience and how visiting a different culture really drove home just how right you were about all your political opinions. The UK qualifies for this, as demonstrated by that absolutely bonkers essay I linked in the pre-vacation recap post, so lest I lose my license to pontificate online, here are some thoughts prompted by our week in London.
I don’t actually have a grand thesis, though, so this is just going to be a list of things that I noticed that felt different than home in Niskayuna.
— A very small thing: I was struck by the way that basically everyone in a service-industry job in London proper had an Eastern European accent— all the waiters in restaurants, and all the barmaids at pubs, etc. seemed to be from Poland or Slovenia or someplace. Which is perfectly fine, it’s just a little jarring to walk into a classically English pub and have the ale selection described in Mitteleuropean tones.
— Something that the kids also commented on: there are a lot more smokers and vape-ers in London than around here. And a lot more cavalier about it— at one point, we switched tables in a cafe because of the smoke from a couple of guys lighting up right outside the window. As a general matter people mostly weren’t smoking inside, but they didn’t make much effort to get clear of the door— several times I ended up getting a faceful of candy-flavored vape right as I walked out of some establishment.
It was a bit like being in the Colonial Williamsburg version of the US in the 1990’s: just enough smoking to nod in the direction of How Life Used to Be, but not nearly to the choking omnipresence of the historical reality. We were trying to explain the idea of “non-smoking sections” in restaurants to the kids, where there would be an invisible line drawn halfway down the center of a big room that aerosol particles were just… not supposed to cross? I think we just further cemented the idea that our entire generation ate lead paint as children.
— Europeans are forever coming to the US and lamenting all the ways we’re Doing It Wrong with regard to urban life, so let me quickly note two small life-in-the-city things that the US does way better than the UK:
Drinking fountains. For all the hand-wringing from lefty European types about the rapaciousness of American capitalism, you know what I don’t have to pay for in the US of A? Potable water. If there’s a public restroom, there’s almost always free water right next to it. In the UK, the bathrooms all have signs warning not to drink the water from the sinks, so if you’re thirsty in public, you better have a credit card, because you’re going to need to pay for that.
Public trash cans. I did a couple of solo photo walks around bits of London, and I’d find myself carrying an empty paper cup for three-quarters of that, until I got thirsty and stopped to buy water, because there was nowhere to put it. And yes, I know the story about them being removed because of the IRA, but they stopped doing that forty years ago. I think it’s time to move on.
— I’m not sure how much of this is a London thing and how much just a big-city thing, but there were a lot of people sleeping rough, basically everywhere we went. It felt like even more than the most recent times I’ve been in NYC, but it’s a little hard to say. I felt kind of bad because I didn’t have any cash I could give to the many, many panhandlers in parks and on sidewalks, but even if I had been using paper money, I’m not sure I have the budget to cover what I would’ve needed to pass out.
Definitely puts a different spin on one of my favorite tracks from 1000 Years of Popular Music:
(Our hotel was half a block down from Trafalgar Square…)
— Speaking of Trafalgar Square, it’s a good thing the Brits are cavalier about jaywalking, because otherwise nobody would ever get through that place. The crosswalk lights on the circle there are actively timed to strand you on the islands between lanes— if you’re trying to cross Northumberland St., say, and wait at the crosswalk, when the light changes to let you past the cars coming out of the circle, it changes to “don’t walk” for the lane of cars going in. So you have to stand awkwardly on a tiny little concrete island with a bunch of strangers in the same predicament, until the cycle comes around again. It’s maddening.
I started planning walking routes to get a full block clear of the square before I needed to cross any streets, because it was driving me nuts. When we had to be in the square itself, I’d just wait for a gap and cross against the light, which drove Kate nuts…
— While I gather that we were a bit lucky to visit during a window between labor actions, the rail transit system was very nice. The trains and stations are generally clean, and there are a lot of them, so it’s pretty convenient. I still much prefer walking for distances of a mile or less, but it’s nice to have the option. And the tap-to-pay system using our credit cards was very smooth.
— That said, any attempt to give any British company money in a transaction that was not conducted in person was a total crapshoot. I wanted to buy an upgrade to an exit-row seat for the flight to London, and ended up having to do it over the phone because the British Airways web site is an absolute trash fire. And I walked across the river to buy train tickets to Salisbury from a machine in the Waterloo train station the night before our trip because the rail company’s web site categorically refused to accept a US phone number.
— This was a bit of a problem because more or less every tourist attraction now uses timed-entry tickets. There’s no more “Let’s walk up to St. Paul’s and see what the line is like…” because even if the line is short, they’re liable to say “Well, we have some at 14:45…” It makes touristing a lot more stressful, because you feel obliged to wrangle shitty British websites the night before, and ends up knocking out some sightseeing options. We ended up with a couple of free hours one afternoon, and I totally would’ve taken The Pip up to the British Museum to see some looted antiquities, but didn’t want to deal with any kind of ticketing, so we both took naps instead.
— The nap was probably a good thing, because my seasonal allergies kicked up like crazy toward the end of the trip. Probably because the air in Whitehall is 20% car exhaust, 20% cigarette/vape smoke, and 20% pollen from all the elaborate gardens. I’m sure all my sniffling and coughing was pretty stressful for the people riding public transit with me, but I swear to you, it was not Covid, just the same stupid immune overreaction I’ve had a couple of times a year for the last half century.
— Speaking of Whitehall, there were no fewer than six pubs on the Campaign for Real Ales pub finder located on the immediate block where our hotel was, which gave me a nice easy goal for the trip: to have at least one pint in each. Which I did, usually in the evening after the kids went to their room for the night. My two favorites, for the record, were probably Walkers of Whitehall (in the photo below), which is up a small alley from the main tourist drag, and the Old Shades just around the corner (which is a top tier pub name). Nice chill vibes in both, good ales on tap.
I will also note that I like the pub system of paying for food and drink up front, so when you’re done there’s no awkward waiting around to settle up the tab, you can just walk out. One of the few areas where British customer service improves on the US.
And that’s a good upbeat place to end this; I have a lengthy rant about the security check at Heathrow, which was one of the worst airport experiences I’ve had in years, but it’s longer and angrier than would fit well with the rest of this, so I’ll leave it out. Maybe another post, or maybe it’s best left as a story you can hear if you buy me a beer somewhere…
And that discharges my obligation as a blogger. If you want to see what I go on to do with my renewed License to Hold Forth, here’s a button:
And if you want to respond to any of the above, the comments will be open:
On waste bins and water fountains... Yes, there aren't many (London is uniquely bad in the UK for the former afaik). But I've been pretty successful bringing my tin bottle with me into town and just asking cafe staff if they don't mind refilling. Branches of Pret a Manger and other cafe chains often have refil stations anyway. There was some big effort a few years back to publicise places that would refill bottles for you with an app, but I'm not sure what happened to that.
In 2019 I took a one week structured bus tour of london. What I always found fascinating about london is the tour guide made it a point to mention that the financial district of london is called “the city of london” I was just remembered of that today because I started reading Henry Farrell’s book; “underground empire” and on page 21 he writes “the 1960s banking industry was a Victorian survival into the modern era, a clattering steampunk of rusting pistons and guta percha covered cables with a few incongruously modern parts bolted in….banking staff had to hand write payment instructions on a form which they stuffed into a canister and inserted into a partial vacuum conduit that ferried it to its destination (the city of london had built miles of pneumatic tube networks in the nineteenth century)
This is something my tour guide failed to mention.