London is an incredibly city. There is no doubt that it has an intensity, energy and aura that make it special. We felt captured by it as soon as we first hit the street. Everything seems to buzz by at a million miles an hour.
The tube is a revelation. Again, to quote Bill Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island:
I turned my attention to the greatest of all civilities: the London Underground Map. What a piece of perfection it is, created in 1931 by a forgotten hero named Harry Beck, an out-of-work draftsman who realized that when you are underground it doesn’t matter where you are. Beck saw – and what an intuitive stroke this was – that as long as the stations were presented in their right sequence with their interchanges clearly delineated, he could freely distort scale, indeed abandon it altogether. He gave his map the orderly precision of an electrical wiring system, and in so doing created an entirely new, imaginary London that has very little to do with the disorderly geography of the city above.
All this despite it being unpleasantly hot and feeling like you need a shower when you return to the surface due to the dirty air. Monique was in her element navigating us from one end of London to the other with a little map constantly at hand. She is also quite enamored by the very quaint and peculiar station names, including: Chalk Farm, Tooting Broadway, Wapping, Elephant and Castle, Headstone Lane, Swiss Cottage, and Totteridge and Whetstone!
As we sign off on the UK, the first three and a half weeks of our trip and been beyond our wildest expectations. At the same time it feels like it has gone by in a flash, and yet life in Melbourne feels like a lifetime ago. We have seen some truly beautiful places and learnt a thing or two about life in hostels. We are now looking forward with great expectation to what lies ahead. We pick up our campervan in France tomorrow and the fun will start again from there.
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