please empty your brain below

You're making me homesick, damn you.

Can I have this on a t-shirt?!

Amen to all that - could somebody set this to music please? When Ken makes us an independent city state it can be our Citional Anthem.

Where are the links to past posts today? ;)

Happy Decade!

Lovely post, DG.

"crossing Westminster Bridge at night on the back of a bike" - a BIKE? an actual bicycle? But you HATE bicycles :)

dg writes: I never said it was a bicycle :)

...and gin! Best city in the world, for all your reasons and the millions of others.


I like the fact that one of the things you like is at the end of my road. I half expected this post to end with some momentous announcement....

As lovely as this all is, it's sounding a little valedictory...

Brilliant. I was welling up towards the end. But I have got a cold

Aw, that’s made me feel all warm inside that has. Lovely! I’ve lived in London all my life and do take it for granted sometimes. We’re damned lucky. London is also a better place for having you here DG.
Respect, as ever ;)
Cxx


Thank you :)
Switzerland is all very nice, and is almost becoming home... but it isn't >home< the way London is.
Oh. Plus going to Battersea for a visit to the Dogs' Home, reminiscing on where the funfair used to be in the park, and later having a Lebanese meal in Battersea Square :)

Reads like an extended 12", remember them, version of Reasons to be cheerful, nice one.

Harringtons pie and mash Tooting, the view coming in from Archway.

Maybe you should start up a cafe press business with all that on a t-shirt or coffee mug!

Personally I'd add curry at Tooting Bec, summer flowers bedecking pubs and watching hopeful souls on mopeds taking 'the knowledge'.

^^ All of what Chris said... Congrats on the decade DG - here's to many more...?

Suburban for years but still love to come "up to town". Theatre, dinner, shopping, .......

Makes me smile. I see the view from Greenwich Park almost every day and I could never tire of it. Hoorah for the canals too! Best cycling routes in London, a delight that not enough Londoners appreciate. I am glad you came DG and even gladder you stayed.


Completely agree (apart from the Arsenal thing). There is one thing in there that ensures your blog will always be brilliant and obligatory reading "the fact there's always somewhere new to discover".

Yes, yes... oh, and add 'dg' to the end. And Saml. Johnson certainly was right - I just wish I could accidentally overhear him in a dingy pub now. Perhaps I shall if I sit there with my pint for long enough.

Thanks. You made one worried soon-to-be Londoner a tiny bit less worried.

The Jews have the saying "Next year in Israel..." Well I have the saying "Next year in London...."
After 17 years it's finally coming true! By this time next year I'll be home again!
And this post reaffirms the decision!

Taking into account dg's sense of irony, I predict that there will be a somewhat contrary post tomorrow.

We didn't start the Fire Filked (poorly)

Life, nightlife, history, Big Ben, cup of tea
Metro-land, world cinema, Covent Garden, DLR

Flypasts, Tate for free, postcode identity
Low tide, mud larks, lost rivers, Green Park

Eel Pie Island, villages and farm land
Farthing Downs, tube signs, GOOD SERVICE ALL LINES

I might have added a few things ...

In addition to the 200 things you've mentioned, I would like to add Covent Garden Market, being able to smugly give clueless tourists directions to the London Eye, the hot air balloon mosaics on the Piccadilly line platforms at Finsbury Park tube station and the spectacular view you get from Waterloo Bridge.

London really is a great city, isn't it?

Usually when I visit, I pay well under £100 a night. I also read your blog, so i'm really not a regular tourist...

By the way, let me use your englishness to my advantage, if possible.
I usually bring "PG Tips" tea back home. Do you have a preference for a particular tea brand and why? Other users are invited to comment too (casually retreats, waiting for incoming tea mayhem)...

Oh and btw:

...Limehouse to Little Venice...

I've done that walk through Regent's canal twice at least and also the circular walk that BW leaflet called "Walking the East Ends's canals"(the waterscape website is a bit awful tough - I kept my printings of the pdf leaflets and went to the BW boat to get those that were still in stock, including a very decent and somewhat comprehensive "Walking and cycling on London's Towpaths") and enjoyed it thoroughly - the East End's canals walk has an incredible amount of diverse scenery. You're right. It is/was a bit hard to negotiate the Bow roundabout. But now at least there is a McDonald's :-) Just teasing.
Do you happen to know anything about a housing estate that is on top of one of the tunnel routes that looks quite old (small flats two to three floors high, geometric blocks, open air corridors and stairways, not that "round" estate)and was probably a percursor for other estates of the like? Or is it just the aging/colour of the brick that tricked me and it is in fact a relatively recent development? I'm sorry for the double (and boring) posting but my memory is not very good (my coherence also suffers a bit especially with written text).

I told you my memory wasn't good:

Ten years more at least, please.

Thank you for your passion in bringing a bit of London and yourself to all of those who read you. You are truly inspiring and knowledgeable.

Great stuff, DG, it makes me want to move back immediately from my exile in Dublin.
I guess this means that you started blogging less than a year after moving to the Smoke. I meant to put up a comment on your recent post celebrating nine years of blogging but somehow missed out. It was nice to see that the article you linked to, which commemorates my very early blogging activity, is still up there on the Grauniad website.
I would add to your list: the view up river from the top deck of a northbound 76 bus going over Blackfriars Bridge on winter evenings.

Charles

It must be at least twenty years since you could do that - the 76 now takes the long way round by Waterloo Bridge and Fleet Street.

The only reference I don't get is Longplayer ..

dg writes: Longplayer? That'd be Longplayer.

Beckton ALPS, please! It's a plural, even if there's only one of them.

You are severely tempting this Lancashire lad.

Caravelle, you should try Yorkshire Tea. It should be available in any largish supermarket (ie, not a Sainsbury's local or Tesco Express) - try the Camden big Sainsbury's, which is fairly central and in an interesting place to visit. It is infinitely better than PG Tips, and I have honestly known grown men go weak at the knees for a cup o'Yorkshire Tea, and fight over Yorkshire Tea-brand mugs.

@ILoveFroms

Thank you for you input. I usually shop at Cromwell Road Tesco and Sainsbury's so it should be available there.

Exactly why I don't want to downsize and move out to the country

Timbo --

yes, it must be about 20 years. I've been 14 years in Dublin and the 5 years before that I worked in Islington. You'll be telling me next that the 149 no longer goes over Southwark Bridge!
In fact it doesn't really matter which bridge they cross, the view of the river at night from the top deck of any London bus is superb.

Oh yes. X 200.

Very well put, DG.

dg - in my slightly depressed moments I just wonder when a list of 'Things That Piss Me Off About London' will appear - but generally I feel fine, helped by your uplifting list of 200 plusses.

It's fantastic to find a British person around my age who so deeply loves the city, heritage, environment, buildings, history, views, culture, etc., and is proud to proclaim it, describe it, publicly explore it.

For reasons I partially don't understand, it seems to be uncool for Brits below 55 or so to notice this type of thing or think it's special or enjoy it overmuch.

---
When I dropped into Portcullis House without having planned to on Open Day weekend, I explained to the two handsome, sweet, and engaging "guides" (civil servant types who work for the House of Commons) in the Wendy Deng-martial-artist/Murdoch shaving-foam-pie-in-the-face meeting room (the one with the red artwork on the front wall that always strikes me as foreboding, aggressive, and suggestive of prison cell bars) that when I had to leave London after 11 years here to take care of my mum in America, I cried on the plane, not because I was going to miss any particular person here, but because I was going to miss the city, which was my companion, my joy, my fascinating live-in gigantic museum, the place that cost me some mighty high 'opportunity costs' in life to reside in.

Later when I went to San Diego for the first time for a few days of work, I walked around the city one evening and felt contempt for it because it was so new, surface-deep, balmy, characterless, and even a bit sinister (to me; I had a particularly awful last 2 days there, though); contempt that it was not London.

---
"Longplayer" was also the one on your list that stumped me the most. I'm glad you provided a link to their site here in the comments.

I found their "survival strategies" page poignant because I fear that humanity will not survive until 2999, let alone this art project.

Lovely list. I am quite homesick now.

Thanks dg made me feel homesick too.

Glad I got to see a lot of that on yer blog... thanks!


Surely it needs a follow-up of 200 things you hate about London











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