Lessons From Living in London
Andrew Testa for The New York Times
The Millennium Bridge.
By SARAH LYALL
Published: October 18, 2013 1 Comment
How do you make a new city your own? How do you turn it from a place you
know as a tourist into a place you call home? How do you transform
yourself from traveler to resident?
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The things we notice when we visit cities are rarely the things we
notice when we live in them, and so it was for me when I moved to North
London and then West London from New York many years ago. (I have now
moved back, which is a different story.)
I had been to London only perhaps a half-dozen times before I moved, and
so I had lived in visitors’ London: an intoxicating fairy tale of
quirky architecture, treasure-filled museums, theater for every mood,
exotic accents, stately parks, humorous food, royalty looming in the
background and a subway system I could experience as amusing novelty
rather than logistical necessity. Suddenly, all that went away, the days
drew in, the autumn shadows fell, and London became instead about
confronting the daily business of living: finding a decent grocery store
and dealing with the impossibility of the gas company and learning to
say rubbish bin instead of garbage can and having my shoes ruined by the
rain.
New York dazzles with its energy; tourist London is that way, too, but
the buzz dims quickly when you leave the center of town. While most
people in New York live on top of one another in dense neighborhoods
tightly packed together, in London they spread far into the distance, in
discrete neighborhoods like Richmond and Bermondsey and Kennington, too
many to know, each with its own High Street and its own iteration of
the same stores: Boots the chain drugstore, Marks & Spencer the
chain department store and Next the chain clothing store. Yet each
neighborhood also has its own character.
I was lucky enough to sample two: first Islington, where I lived on a
quiet little road around the corner from a bustling antiques market and
the even more bustling Angel Tube stop. If I was in transition, so was
Islington. Its dingy liquor stores, dreary sandwich shops and dodgy
betting parlors were giving way to smart artisanal food shops featuring
focaccia of the day and baked goods at $8 a go.
But my favorite shop has persevered: Steve Hatt’s fishmonger, a
family-run establishment full of siblings and parents and cousins.
Perhaps the high point of my time in Islington, besides the time a duck
came and hatched her brood in our back garden, was when I bought a piece
of salmon that, according to the sign above it, had been caught by old
Mr. Hatt himself — the great-grandfather of the current crop of Hatts, I
think.
Residents tend to feel more connected to their neighborhoods than to
London as a whole, and because it can be an undertaking to travel to
another part of town for a social occasion, geography starts to feel
like destiny. So when I lived in Kensington, I got used to staying
fairly close to home. This meant eating often at Jakob’s, a homey little
restaurant and takeout place on Gloucester Road that sold
vegetable-centric dishes and salads. It meant visiting Itsu, in
nearby Notting Hill, a high-concept Japanese restaurant where the sushi
swirled past on a conveyor belt. Notting Hill also had two beautiful
old movie theaters, the Gate and the Coronet, and all the charm of Greenwich Village, without the crowds (except when Portobello Market was in session, on Fridays and Saturdays).
There was my favorite clothing store on Kensington Church Street, which
sold expensive but mercifully non-ill-fitting jeans, and then Ffiona’s,
where a wholesome meal with enticing meat dishes and fish and
vegetables served family-style was served up by none other than Ffiona
herself. We also had, on Gloucester Road, a Partridge’s store that sold
all the American foods I missed: Skippy peanut butter, Toll House
chocolate chips, breakfast cereals consisting mostly of fluorescent
marshmallows.
Three of the city’s best museums for children — the Natural History
Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and the Science Museum — were short
walks away, and in the park there was a cunning, pirate-themed
playground dedicated to Diana, the late Princess of Wales, that my two
girls loved when they were little.
We ventured farther afield, of course; we liked especially to take the
children to St. Paul’s Cathedral and then across the Millennium Bridge
(the city’s best walk, to my mind) and into the Tate Modern gallery, a
spectacular building fashioned from a decommissioned power station on
the south bank of the Thames. Once we all spontaneously responded to
Olafur Eliasson’s giant sun, positioned on a mirrored ceiling, by lying
on the ground and basking, as if it we were at the beach.
We went to Shakespeare’s Globe, a facsimile of the 16th-century theater,
where seats are cheap and a spot on foot, for theatergoers known as
groundlings, is even cheaper. For a day out we might go to Hampstead, a
little town unto itself in North London with the wildest park in the
city, a place to lose yourself amid the trees.
London grew outward over the years, by happenstance more than design,
and so it feels more improvised and less coherent than New York. The
current mayor, Boris Johnson, whose baroque speaking style, gaffe-prone
behavior and rumpled blond appearance have made him Britain’s most
recognizable politician, has done as much as anyone to bring some unity
to the city (the Olympics helped, too).
But if New Yorkers think of themselves as a group of people standing
together against the world (“We’re New Yorkers, and we are tough,” each
New York mayor says after each disaster), Londoners wear their urban
identities more lightly, living in the city but not necessarily of it.
They tend to belong to where they’re from, not where they are. I never
stopped feeling like an impostor, a New Yorker disguised in a sensible
English raincoat. Even the most familiar things — Trafalgar Square; the
food hall at Harvey Nichols; the best bookstore in the city, Hatchard’s
on Piccadilly — felt at a remove, my participation provisional, my
conversation in quotation marks.
The natives’ reticence, and the prevalence of small buildings instead of
high-rise apartment complexes, promote a feeling of self-containment,
even isolation. In New York you live in one another’s pockets and in one
another’s faces; your business is their business. In London, people
keep themselves to themselves, as the expression goes, and this can feel
either liberating or lonely.
I could stroll the paths at Kensington Gardens, or jog past the statue
of Prince Albert all the way to Hyde Park, and have only the most
glancing interaction with another human being, even though those places
were full of them. So I spent a lot of time lost in thought. It was
freeing to feel so anonymous, so unfettered — but sometimes it made the
heart feel a little empty.
And I got lost all the time. The city’s layout is crazy, as if designed
by a drunken alien with a wry sense of humor. I wandered around with my
A-Z street map book, wondering which direction I was going in and
wishing that the old, strew-breadcrumbs-in-your-wake trick applied to
metropolitan areas. Once I spent 45 minutes trying to get from South
Kensington to Sloane Square, becoming hopelessly misaligned before I
realized I had somehow circled back and was on the same street I started
from. The only recourse: jump into a taxi. Once I was stopped by a man
in Soho who asked where we were, and desperately pointed at his map.
Unfortunately, it was a map of Brussels.
Things you learn as a resident: the Tube, the world’s oldest subway
system, is full of jolly announcements exhorting you to “mind the gap”
and to not leave your personal belongings unattended, but doesn’t go
everywhere; don’t expect, for instance, to travel to Putney or Richmond,
without being prepared to walk a great distance to your destination.
Many places (restaurants, dry cleaners) don’t deliver, and shopkeepers
are either oleaginously sycophantic or icily contemptuous. I could not
have been much older than 35 when I suddenly became known as “madam,”
and no one says “madam” with more disdain than a 20-year-old working at
Topshop, where, unfortunately, my teenage daughters loved to shop for
clothes that would have looked more appropriate on prostitutes.
An inch of snow causes chaos, shutting down traffic across the city.
Most stores close by 7; large stores, including Whole Foods (yes, they
have come to London) and your local Sainsbury’s supermarket, are open
for just six hours on Sundays. It is hard to find a good salad bar,
though some areas — around big train stations, in Chinatown — are filled
with serendipitous food shops. When using an escalator, stand to the
right but walk on the left. We say “mall” to rhyme with “paul;” they say
it to rhyme with “pal.”
Harrods is fit only for tourists and the wives of foreign commodities
magnates, and the statue of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed downstairs
is creepy. Go instead to the shops down Kensington Park Road in Notting
Hill, or along the narrow streets of Seven Dials in Covent Garden, or to
the crazy stalls of the outdoor market in Camden Town.
Stay away from Buckingham Palace when the changing of the guard takes
place at midday — it wreaks havoc on the traffic and they won’t let you
cross the street. See as much Shakespeare as you can in the West End,
but also at the Globe and in little experimental places like the Print
Room, a minute gem of a theater in Notting Hill.
Try not to read The Daily Mail, with its mean stories about immigrants
and its lurid pictures of celebrities who have gained or lost weight;
read Private Eye magazine, and soon you will delight in its very English
cleverness. Learn that there are as many meanings for the word “sorry”
as there are hours in the day.
Finally, when you leave the house, dress in layers so that you can add
and subtract items according to the vicissitudes of the weather. Get
detailed directions, or make your smartphone your friend, so that you do
not get lost. And wherever you go, always take an umbrella.
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