NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE I ’m back from nine days in London with my family — wife, son (26), and two daughters (24 and 17). It’s the first time I’ve visited the U.K., a trip we had originally planned for the summer of 2020 for our 25th wedding anniversary, before history intervened. My only prior trips outside North America have been to Ireland (1995, for our honeymoon) and China (2011, for a business trip too brief to even see the Great Wall). While I’m sure this is old hat to quite a few of our readers, and probably comical to our readers in Britain, I thought I’d share my impressions, and maybe a few lessons learned for those considering the trip.
For the first-time American traveler, there are two Englands. One is modern England, subsumed wholly into Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia”: high finance, ethnic restaurants, dance clubs, and cutting-edge theater, as well as the more traditional English pubs, sports, parks, gardens, tea, scenery, and other entertainments accessible to tourists. There is even a Legoland wedged between Windsor Castle and the Ascot. If you can spare the time, there is also Scotland and Wales — but these are more than a day trip from London, six to seven hours each way. Forget what the map might tell you about distances as the crow flies: By modern transit, Paris is closer than Wales.
For American travelers like us of a historical and/or literary bent, there is another, older England. It is the England of Churchill and Shakespeare, the Beatles and the Stones, King Arthur and Robin Hood, Disraeli and Gladstone and Thatcher, Richard the Lion-Hearted and Queen Elizabeth (both of them), Newton and Faraday, More and Newman, Burke and Mill, pals battalions and the Blitz. It’s the England of Conan Doyle and Rowling and Monty Python, Dickens and Austen, Tolkien and Lewis, Keats and Orwell, James Bond and Paddington Bear. It’s the England of my mother’s father, who joined the Royal Navy at 13 during the Great War. The country is laid thick with history, and the American visitor can scarcely take in today’s England without first absorbing its past. On a first visit, those first things must be taken in first.
Arriving: The latest outbreaks of history (e.g., the pandemic) may have subsided, but one of the first signs at Heathrow is a reminder that history continues:
We planned to get an Uber from Heathrow upon landing, and this turned out to be a bad idea. Unlike in big American cities, Ubers are scarce at the airport after 10 p.m. Being unwilling to navigate unfamiliar reaches of the Underground with all our luggage, I got stuck with an enormous cab fare.
The People: The visitor to any place encounters the local population at an inconsistent distance and gains random and often unrepresentative impressions. We found the British to be rude and belligerent drivers (likely exacerbated by our being unsuited to drive on British roads — more on that below), but extraordinarily polite and friendly in nearly every other situation. When we were stranded with a flat tire, the man whose house we were in front of offered us tea and biscuits, and the tow-truck operator sent by the rental-car agency refused my offer of a tip, telling me, “You’ve had a bad run.” A cabbie in Windsor gave us useful instruction on rules of the road in Britain that the rental-car agency had neglected, such as where it is and isn’t legal to park.
The Place: We stayed in an Airbnb rental in Kennington. It was a nice neighborhood by day, and Tesco was the equal in price and selection of most American supermarkets we’ve been to (other than Publix, which has no peer I know of), but I went to Nisa Local (a British answer to 7/11) to get some groceries and wine after dark, and I had to crawl under police tape to get out because somebody had been stabbed on the steps during the ten minutes I was in the store. When I Googled the next day to see if there were press reports of the stabbing, I instead got stories about four teens being stabbed in a gang fight less than a month earlier. Even with that and the challenges of learning to operate British appliances, the Airbnb experience was more authentic, spacious, and affordable than staying in a hotel or resort, and more convenient for tourism than staying far outside the city.
Aside from the Shard, a pyramidal skyscraper, the towers of London’s business district were mostly unsightly and nothing much to look upon compared with New York. But unless you’re traveling on business, the attraction of London isn’t office towers. Most of the city’s residential area is composed of attached townhouses rather than the sorts of apartment towers one sees in Manhattan. Real-estate ads make clear how expensive per square foot those are. We saw ads for “Manhattan” apartments, which is apparently how Londoners describe a studio apartment. The narrowness of many streets is a legacy of being inhabited before automobiles. Graffiti is epidemic outside of the nicest neighborhoods, but with little of the pervasive filth and pot smoke that characterize New York.
For the most part, the city felt more civil, clean, and orderly than New York, but then, so do many American cities. In spite of its massive size, London may seem less foreign to Americans from Boston or mid-size cities than it is in comparison with New York. It proved difficult to get dinner after 9 p.m., and almost impossible after 10 unless you were eating at an American chain such as Five Guys or Pizza Hut, which are welcome alternatives in a pinch. The major non-American chain we visited was Nando’s, a South African–based chicken place.
The Transit: If you’re staying within bus or train ride of London, you can learn your way around; it helped that my older daughter had been there twice on school trips. Americans may think of the red double-decker buses as a charming anachronism, but until you’ve been to London, you may not quite grasp how ubiquitous they are, and how integral they remain to daily London transit. While both the buses and the Underground are nice — and the Tube is truly a tube in every sense, given the circular design of both train tunnels and passenger walkways — the Underground is frightfully expensive, closer in cost to an American commuter rail than an American subway. It is worth taking only when time is of the essence. The world’s oldest subway system by nearly half a century (it was opened in 1863), it is also where an American in summertime is most rudely greeted with the near-total absence of air conditioning in Britain. Passengers are recommended just to open the windows for the breeze of a moving train.
American culture asserted itself in the most garish ways. For example, we saw taxis and even a London bus decked out entirely in pink as rolling advertisements for the Barbie movie — in a too-perfect juxtaposition, I caught one of these in between a red bus and the statute of Churchill:
We rented a car, which went badly. Driving on the opposite side of the road was an adjustment, and the GPS quoted distances in yards rather than feet, but that was just the start of it. British drivers park without regard to whether the car faces the same way as traffic, so cars were literally parked facing one another. Roundabouts were pervasive and incomprehensible, whether navigating by map or by GPS. I already hated roundabouts from driving in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, but this was much worse, not least because they go backward from an American perspective. After going through the same roundabout four times on the way to Windsor Castle, I concluded that the most realistic cinematic portrayal of England may well be Chevy Chase getting trapped in an endless roundabout in National Lampoon’s European Vacation. Had Dante been an Englishman, he’d have organized hell into roundabouts rather than circles.
After the flat tire, the rental-car agency assigned us an electric car, which had its own issues. Electric cars simply don’t have the mileage yet to go more than a day of travel without refueling, so there was a constant scramble to find places to recharge. This was easier said than done. We found many broken chargers, extremely slow chargers, or places that wouldn’t scan our credit cards (all the readers were based entirely on passing an RFID chip over an optical scanner). In one desperate case, we followed a Google Maps recommendation to an EV recharger inside a paid parking garage in suburbia — and it didn’t work. Renting an electric car in an unfamiliar foreign country is a recipe for disaster.
If you want to visit Stonehenge — which really is essential viewing — you can’t get there by mass transit, but are probably best off just booking a bus tour. All of that said, having a car to visit on our own schedule was a major asset in seeing Windsor and Dover.
The Sights: We scheduled too many events into too little time, with some bad side effects. Unlike in New York, where you can pay admission on arrival for most sights if you’re willing to wait online, far too many things in London require tickets in advance, which are typically keyed to a half-hour window for arrival. That makes for stressful travel trying to get from one event to another, and it also tends to push you to go through the sights too quickly. We scheduled the Churchill War Rooms, the Tower of London, and a Thames river cruise between noon and 5 p.m. on the same day, and ended up with too little time at the first two.
The Castles and the Tombs: We toured the Tower of London, Windsor Castle, and Westminster Abbey. I would highly recommend all three, which include the burial sites of various monarchs. Due to time constraints, we saw only the exteriors of Buckingham Palace and Parliament and missed Highgate Cemetery.
We spent an hour and a half at the Tower of London, which is more a fortress than a tower, and could easily have spent more than twice that. I’d recommend setting aside at least half a day. You could spend an hour just exploring what used to be the moat. Tours are led by the Yeoman Warders or “Beefeaters,” who are all distinguished military veterans (our guide had spent 36 years in the RAF and wore his military decorations). The chapel is the last resting place of St. Thomas More, patron saint of my former profession as a lawyer, and thus is de facto a Catholic holy place in addition to an Anglican chapel. It was striking to see a fully intact early medieval fortress, the origins of which date back to William the Conqueror, in the heart of a bustling 21st-century city. Contrast this with Manhattan, where Alexis de Tocqueville complained in the 1830s that the city’s unimpressive skyline lacked landmark buildings.
Windsor is surprisingly open for a still-current royal residence, and its tombs include that of Elizabeth II, which can be seen, but not approached, from the tour. Among the people buried in its chapel is Napoleon IV, the son of the last reigning Bonaparte, who died in British service fighting the Zulus in 1879. The inside of the palace — itself a formidable medieval fortress — is a match for many art museums. The walls are adorned with numerous original paintings and busts of British and foreign monarchs as well as distinguished figures such as Wellington, who commands the place of honor in the Waterloo Chamber, mounted above even the kings. There are many fine paintings of Charles I, all with his head still attached, as the monarchy would prefer to remember him. For a statue of Cromwell, one must go nearer to Parliament.
Westminster Abbey is overwhelming, and feels like a scavenger hunt for British notables buried or memorialized in the floor or along the walls. Visitors line up for headsets for an audio tour, and the line forms over Gladstone’s tomb. I suppose England’s own Great Commoner, once the most famous of all Liverpudlians, would consider it apt and maybe even just to have common tourists step on him all day:
Elizabeth I, buried with her sister, is perhaps the most impressive of the tombs, while George II merits only a tile in the floor barely legible after all these years. One can find, among many others, Cromwell, Wilberforce, Darwin, Livingstone, Faraday, Newton, Watt, Tennyson, Olivier, Dickens, Kipling, Handel, Lewis Carroll, C. S. Lewis, Roger Bannister, Captain Cooke, and — if you look really hard — Chamberlain and Baldwin. I rather liked Stephen Hawking’s inscription: “Here Lies What Was Mortal of Stephen Hawking.” Churchill is right in front of the entrance, between the coronation chair and the unknown soldier of the First World War. Mountbatten, the favorite uncle of the current king, is in a similar place of honor, undoubtedly in part as an eternal rebuke to the Irish Republican Army.
So far as I could tell, the only post-1776 American honored inside Westminster Abbey is Franklin D. Roosevelt, with an inscription recalling him as a true friend to Britain in its greatest hour of need. We saw two other Americans memorialized prominently in London: Abraham Lincoln has a statue in the square near Westminster, and the (extra-price for admission) upper tour of the Abbey has a gallery of martyrs that includes Martin Luther King Jr. The most interesting attraction in that upper gallery was Queen Mary’s wooden coronation chair from 1689 (England’s only dual coronation).
The grave of Richard I cannot be found in Britain — he’s buried in pieces in three sites in France — but the greatest of medieval warriors still stands guard on horseback outside Parliament, alongside the very much living men with automatic rifles.
The Museums: I’m partial to war museums, while my wife and daughters are more partial to art museums, so I skipped their tour of the Tate Modern and went to the Imperial War Museum (where I could have used more than 90 minutes). We saw the National Gallery (which was closed the first time we saw it because a guy was on the roof threatening to jump), the Churchill War Rooms, the Wallace art museum, and the Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221b Baker Street. All met expectations. Baker Street was a small tour for the money, but if you’re a Holmes fanatic (I read my youngest daughter the entire collection), it’s a must, set in apartments built in 1815 that look authentically like where Holmes would have lived. The Churchill War Rooms, which include both a preserved layout of Churchill’s underground bunker and a Churchill museum, are a must for students of history, and it’s prudent to reserve tickets in advance and allocate at least two hours. It’s a sign of the epic sweep of Churchill’s career that his Nobel Prize is easily missed in a back corner of the museum.
The Parks: London’s parks are a major, must-visit part of the experience, and they represent a big part of what the monarchy has given the city (don’t ask where the Crown got some of the land). St. James, Regent’s and Hyde Park are lovely and well-groomed, while Hampstead Heath is a wild, natural park. Entirely by accident, we stumbled on a house immediately adjacent to the lattermost in which George Orwell lived in the mid 1930s and wrote Keep the Aspidistra Flying before leaving for the Spanish Civil War.
The Play’s the Thing: We went to two shows in London: The Crucible in the West End (yes, we flew across the ocean to see one of the most American of all stage plays), and Macbeth at the Globe, the restored replica of Shakespeare’s original theater. The Crucible was outstanding and faithfully done, and remains timely. Macbeth was well performed with all the original dialogue, and the intimate setting even had the players wading through the standing crowd. Given the setting, it was a bit off-putting to see it performed in modern costumes and with a few excesses of modern casting — one would think that, of all the places on earth to see Shakespeare done as designed, it would be the Globe — but it didn’t ruin the show.
Outside London: Finally, we saw Stonehenge and the white cliffs of Dover. While you cannot get close enough to walk amongst its stones, there is no photographic substitute for seeing Stonehenge in person, wandering its expansive grounds, and pondering the people who put the stones there — as well as the efforts it took and the purposes for which they were put there, both of which remain unknowable and the subject of nothing more than educated guesswork.
Dover is stunningly picturesque, rivaling the Irish cliffs of Moher and with the added bonus of being able to see France if (as it was for us) the day is clear, as well as watching the ferries ply the Channel. It has its own medieval castle, which we missed. It was worth a reading of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”
There was of course more to see in London, if we’d had more time and/or more money — for example, I’d have liked to see Abbey Road — but one can never see everything. And the natural end of any foreign travel, no matter how charming, is a reminder that it’s good to be back in America.