My first visit to London felt like returning somewhere I already knew fairly well. Hearing, reading and watching stuff about London since childhood as we do, the city felt oddly familiar. (Above) The Baker Street Underground station is one of the original stations of the Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863
(Top) The statue of Sherlock Holmes near the station and (above) “Guru tumi chhile bole amra achhi. Aaj amar London asha sarthok holo,” Feluda had said in the book ‘London-e Feluda’. He must have stood somewhere around here when he said this. I was following a route Google Maps showed me to the nearest underground station (Baker Street station, to be precise) on a rainy evening when I realised the Sherlock Holmes Museum was on the next street. I decided I had to take a picture of this door marked ‘221B’ next to the museum
The Bangla Town gate over Brick Lane, known for the numerous Bangladeshi immigrants who settled around here. I had first read about Brick Lane in the eponymous book by Monica Ali and it looked familiar for some reason. The area hosts a big food and non-food market every weekend now, and the food is quite global and not just limited to Bangladeshi cuisine
The pictures everyone takes on their first visit to London — the London Eye and the Big Ben. I walked a lot, ate various kinds of food, saw structures I had read about or seen on screen, caught up with old friends and made a few new ones. At the end of my two weeks in the city, I wished I had more time there and promised myself I’d be back
A London cab waits at a signal with a church in the background. Most of the cabs have adverts on them and fully black ones are not as common as TV series and filmmakers would have us think
I happened to stay very close to Little Venice, which has these long boats parked along the canal with several of them serving as restaurants and other things like a recording studio/radio station. Some people also seemed to be living in them. It is a nice area to walk by or sit, and many people go running and cycling on the narrow path by the canal. With rain being an integral part of the London experience, I realised people didn’t stop doing anything at all because it was raining. You could see people running, cycling, working out at outdoor gyms, and kayaking or stand-up paddling in the canal while it rained a steady drizzle
Borough Market is possibly London’s most famous market. You get a wide variety of food and the crowds often assume Durga Puja proportions
I took an Uber boat from the pier in front of Shakespeare’s Globe (I didn’t watch a play, perhaps next time) and headed to Canary Wharf for dinner and drinks with a friend. The boat passed below the famous Tower Bridge. Travelling by boat, I realized how big the city was. But that doesn’t matter much because the transportation network in the city is wonderful and paying for tickets is a breeze. You just tap your Wi-Fi-enabled card and that’s it. Bus tickets are £1.75 and trains start from £2.80
Ducks in the Round Pond in front of Kensington Palace Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are adjacent and the amount of open green space in the middle of the city is mind-boggling. As a Kolkatan, it reminded me of the Maidan, of course. Kensington has been home to young royals for 300 years. It’s a great place to have a picnic on a sunny day but don’t feed the birds (as the several signs will tell you and explain why)
Hard to imagine there are wild peacocks out in the open in London, but this is Kyoto Garden in the very woody Holland Park. It’s my favourite of all the parks I visited in London
Of course, you’ve watched the movie. And so have the 100 people stuffed inside the shop at this very moment. Someone told me about this bookshop after which I looked it up and found the location not far from my stay. It’s highly commercialised as you would imagine, but the movie has a big following and the store is rarely empty. I found only three people inside a similar-sized bookstore located only 50 metres away
When it’s called London Bridge, you’d expect it to have a little more character. A two-minute walk from Borough Market, this one is just a flat, practical bridge. Meh. That’s me on London Bridge. The Tower Bridge is seen in the background, as is the Shard, the 310-metre skyscraper that is the tallest building in the UK
The Commonwealth Memorial Gates is a memorial for the five million volunteers from the Indian sub-continent, Africa and the Caribbean who fought with Britain in the two World Wars. A total of 2.3 lakh of these “volunteers” were Gurkhas, if I remember the information board correctly