She Loves London

Author: She Loves London

14 Things Every Londoner Knows Not To Do, Even In An Emergency

There are things you know when you’ve lived in London for a bit.

Not just the obvious stuff like standing on the right, walking as fast as humanly possible at all times, or forming orderly queues everywhere (unless you’re at a bus stop or waiting for the tube; in which case please form a restless, passive aggressive crowd instead).

What I’m talking about are the unspoken things that you just don’t do – not because there’s signs or announcements or years of etiquette telling you not to – but because as a Londoner, you simply know this city better than everyone else.

Put simply, you’re wise to it. They can’t fool you. Whatever it is, you already know it’s futile.

So get ready to look smug, shake your head despairingly and roll your eyes. Because never would you ever…

1. Change at Bank.

Oh, Bank Station. Where all that separates you from your next train are 50 spiral staircases and an estimated ten miles of mind boggling, vaguely signposted tunnels to oblivion and maybe, possibly, at the very end of your sanity, a Central line platform.

2. Call Holborn or Bloomsbury “Midtown”.

A while ago, they put up a load of orange flags, hired orange-clad power rangers and set about rebranding Holborn, St Giles and Bloomsbury into a fashionable, funky, rejuvenated orange coloured area called “Midtown.”

Four years later, I can officially report that as a direct result of all these marketing efforts, the areas once known as Holborn, St. Giles and Bloomsbury are now known as… Holborn, St. Giles and Bloomsbury.

Glad we’ve sorted that out then.

*slow clap*

3. Feed the pigeons (/ squirrels / tube mice).

I’m pretty sure London’s sizeable vermin wildlife population are doing ok without your discarded Pret-crumbs, and London’s human population can do without pigeons ambushing us in Soho Square on our lunchbreak. Thanks tho, save the whales ‘n’ that, peace. xx

4. Use the zebra crossing at Abbey Road.

Less a zebra crossing, more a prolific no-go area for two reasons:

– If you’re driving, you’ll be stuck for hours waiting for tourists to finish reenacting the Beatle’s famous album cover.

– If you actually want to cross the road, there’s a high chance of getting hit by a car that can’t be bothered to stop for tourists reenacting the Beatle’s famous album cover. Spend five minutes watching the Crossing Cam and see for yourself.

Abbey Road: no ordinary zebra crossing

5. Shorten it to “Carnaby”.

London’s re-branding departments strike again, this time trying to give an entire area behind Regent Street a collective term it doesn’t really require or need. What’s wrong with plain old “that street just off Carnaby Street near Miss Sixty”?

Image: James Butler

6. Walk between the Piccadilly and Jubilee lines at Green Park.

Wars have been fought, lost, re-fought and won again in the time it takes to change lines at Green Park station.

Instead, go with the advice of London transport geek Diamond Geezer, who says: “It’s probably quicker to ascend to the ticket hall and come back down via the main escalator instead.”

It is also probably quicker to go to space, but your monthly travel card won’t cover that.

Green Park station, aka The Never Ending Story in tunnel form. Image: Matt Buck

7. Eat bagels in evening dress on Hackney Road.

If you’ve walked past any new housing developments in east London recently, you might have seen billboards promoting activities that your average Londoner would never do. I mean perhaps people eat bagels in evening wear in, like, Notting Hill, but in Hackney, this doesn’t really tally with the current vision of casually dressed hungover people in pyjamas eating kebabs at 10am on a Sunday. But hey, don’t let that reality get in the way of your terrible marketing campaign, Mettle and Poise.

wtf is she doing

8. Spend the day staring at the inside of a hat.

Again: people on Kingsland High Street don’t tend to spend much time gazing at the inside of their flatcaps, despite what Time Out might have you think. But with the arrival of these new £500k one-bed flats, clearly all that is set to change.

wtf is he doing

9. Sit on the pavement on Kingsland Road.

Seriously, are you nuts? Trust me, Dalston Curve, you don’t want to advertise this behaviour. Stand up, woman. You’ll get kebab on your coat.

why is she sitting on the floor

10. Queue for an escalator.

Big shout out to TFL staff member Leon at Brixton tube station. He was on a one-man morning motivational mission to get commuters to walk down the one working escalator for the last seven months while disastrous queue-forming repairs were carried out. Your local community salutes you, sir.

11. Ask people who don’t live in Battersea to come to Battersea.

No one knows where it is, and no one can get there except for you. Abandon ship.

12. Pay £75 for Secret Cinema

Look, no one’s saying you shouldn’t go to these excellent immersive cinematic events. You totally should. What I’m saying is for gods sake, let’s just make it a nice round £100 per person and be done with it. In other news, still tickets left, guys.

13. Get involved with the “PR stunt of the day”

“We’re building a rainbow out of television screens on the Southbank to celebrate National Banana Day and new shiny technology, we’d love you to be part of the magic! There’s something for everyone!”

And finally…

14. Stand on the top deck.

Hell hath no fury like the “No standing on the UPPER DECK or STAIRS PLEASE” announcement. It’s a folly reserved for Tube Strike refugees and tourists. Although, as everyone knows, there is a way round it.

So there we have it.

If I’ve missed anything crucial, let me know. Otherwise, as you were, London. You may get on with your day.

9th July 2015
This is What Happens When You Get a Night Bus in London

Let’s talk about night buses.

For the uninitiated, night buses are pretty much how everyone under 35 gets home after 12am.

It’s well documented that people over that age don’t leave the house after dark, or if they do, and by some huge critical error they miss the last tube, they’ll pretty much only travel in a black limousine or Uber XL and that’s just how it is.

The truth is they’re missing out, because night buses are a London institution.

A world unto themselves, everyone’s got a night bus story because they have the potential to be either the very worst or very best thing you’ve ever encountered at 3am, depending on:

1) how much you’ve had to drink

2) whether the person sitting next to you is awake, asleep, vomiting, singing, or trying to chat you up

3) whether you fancy them

Case in point, my mates Beth and Alf actually met while waiting for a night bus in Dalston. Three years on from that blissful journey they can now hold up their very own baby human as proof that the 243 to Waterloo can successfully get you home and help you tick off some life goals at the same time.

So quite frankly, cheers to that.

It wasn’t always like this though.

If you’re the rare type of Londoner who once lived in the north west area of Zone 5 before moving more centrally, perhaps you too can relate to a time when night buses were absolutely not the first resort.

They were the very ultimate last resort, and for good reason.

~~(Knives)~~

Back then, nights out in London always involved going somewhere a bit crap because you didn’t know anywhere better than Storm in Leicester Square, or Jewel in Piccadilly Circus, or even worse, Cargo in Shoreditch, but on top of that you’d always have the massive hassle of getting home to suburbia, via either

1) The Last Tube

= night spent in a state of low level anxiety, alternating between power-drinking, obsessive time checking, and attempting to calculate whether you could have one more vodka before catching two tubes and the last Metropolitan line train from Baker Street at 11:54.

2) The First Tube

= brilliant idea at 2am; becomes markedly less brilliant when the club shut at 4am, leaving you and your waning enthusiasm outside Farringdon station in the cold for a two hours before boarding what would inevitably be a Sunday rail replacement bus service back to the sticks.

3) Cab

= half an hour of running up and down High Holborn trying to locate a black Vauxhall Zafira before your phone battery gave out, then sinking into a Magic FM induced coma on the A40 clutching a box of cold chips you weren’t allowed to eat.

And if all those failed, then there was always one final choice:

4) The N18

= two hour bus journey through the bowels of North West London.

Choose this, and you’ve basically opted to spend 45 minutes searching the sky for Nelson’s Column – the drunk Londoner’s compass point in the days before the Shard – and making your way to Trafalgar Square ready to commence a two hour hell-traverse through Stonebridge, Harlesden, Sudbury, Wembley and Harrow on the Hill.

In short, no one would choose that.

No one.

Photo: Nico Hogg (Flickr)

But once you live in central London it’s a different ballgame.

Journeys are shorter; more convenient.

Play your cards right and a night bus will get you home, or at least to the next bar, with a new group of temporary party mates.

Besides, as anyone in east London will tell you, you haven’t really lived until you’ve got a story about that time the entire top deck of the N76 erupted into a Disney singalong led by a man known by his friends as “Pesky Dave”.

But in all the journeys home on the local night bus, none have ever come close to what I’m about to show you.

Because a few weeks ago, I shared my night bus home with this.

I can’t remember if this photo was before or after the dog chased the rabbit around the bottom deck of the bus at full speed, darting under seats and generally running amok.

All I know is that the moment this dog and that rabbit got on the same seat will remain etched in my memory forever.

See? What did I tell you:

Night bus + Life goals = Complete.

Seen something better? Tell me immediately. I need to know.

19th June 2015
How to Be Alone in London (Despite the 8,173,941 Other People)

It’s physically impossible to be alone in London.

Not “alone” as in oh, I feel so ALONE – haha! no! You’ll always have that.

I mean you’ll never find yourself lacking in a defined amount of space or time that is amazingly, gloriously, joyously, incredibly, brilliantly lacking in other human beings.

Because in London, other human beings are everywhere.

So instead you have to make do with finding little areas of the city where it feels like you’re alone, and then spend a vast amount of time imagining that happy day when London resembles the beginning scenes from 28 Days Later.

(Minus the whole everyone’s dead in the aftermath of a terrifying killer virus apocalypse bit.)

(Obviously.)

Finding a bit of space in London is reaaallly difficult.

In deciding to live here, you essentially gave up all rights to your personal space between the hours of…well… all the hours.

For starters, if you’re 20-50 something and single, you’ll probably have to houseshare with at least 58 other people in order to afford a place to live.

But even when your housemates are out, the flat’s empty and it’s just you, a packet of Monster Munch and back-to-back episodes of Dinner Date for company, you’ll still find yourself surrounded.

That’s because every living space in London is actually eight houses stacked on top of each other, which means your life will be forever soundtracked by the click-slam of your building’s communal front door, a patter of footsteps above, below, and either side of you, and snippets of distant, drunken, passing conversations punctuating the day and night.

Naturally, this won’t apply if you live in Hampstead, Knightsbridge or one of those posh new developments along the Thames, because in that case your neighbours will all be in Russia.

Ah, London housing. Happy days.

Alone together in the park

But although it’s impossible to be alone, it’s also really easy to be on your own.

By this I mean if you want to spend the day rolling solo, bothering no one and having no one bother you, then London’s pretty much the best place to do it.

One of my favourite weekend things is seeing a film upstairs at the Prince Charles, because on a Sunday it’s always half full with other people who’ve pretty much just hung a “do not disturb” sign around their neck prior to leaving the house, too.

Likewise, London’s bookshops are always pretty busy; they’re the only places where you can legitimately loiter, talking to no one, gazing at shelves, or sitting around on the floor for hours on end without raising any suspicions.

Eating alone isn’t even a big deal now either.

The whole no reservations, communal seating or sit-at-the-bar malarky means you’ll probably even get to consume actual food on an actual chair without having to eat your own actual fist in a two hour long queue first, which definitely wouldn’t happen if you turned up at any remotely popular restaurant in Soho with mates.

My point is, we’re all in the same boat. Or tube carriage. Whatever.

London always gets called out for the fact that no one talks on the tube, aside from sporadic tuts, sighs and calls of “MOVE DOWN, YOU BASTARDS”.

And perhaps it’s a sign you’ve lived here too long when you can’t come up with one single reason why that might be a bad thing.

But it’s not like taking public transport is an active choice for most of us; we don’t wake up and wonder whether we’ll drive into work today instead.

Our silent tubes are more an implicit agreement: it gives fellow Londoners a bit of space in a city where we have none.

So the next time you want a bit of time to yourself, rest assured. You might be surrounded by other humans, the bus will be packed and the museum will be too.

But don’t worry.

For non-talky down time, simply go outside and walk around with everyone else. The feeling will be brilliantly mutual.

5th May 2015