The Thursday of my week in the UK Chris and I walked over 24,000 steps.
Our original itinerary was:
- Leadenhall Market for coffee and pastries
- Walk across London Bridge
- Borough market for brunch/lunch
- Walk along the Thames to the Tate Modern art museum so that I could pick up a t-shirt in the gift shop for the daughter of a friend
- Shopping on Oxford Street so that I could get a certain coffee mug I wanted that could only be found at a store called John Lewis (coffee mugs are a weakness of mine, and all I wanted as a souvenir of this trip was this coffee mug)
- Self-guided tour of Westminster Abbey and Evensong
- Dinner at 7:30 in Soho with Chris’ brother and sister-in-law and our nephew Steve and his fiancé.
It was an ambitious list.
I can’t remember how I found out about Leadenhall Market, but I was proud to have found a place in London that Chris had never heard about. It’s a covered market (celebrating its 700th anniversary this year) with restaurants and upscale shops. I really just wanted to visit it to admire the architecture, which is stunning, but then I found out that there was a bakery there (link here) that specializes in meringues. I have a thing for meringues. I needed to go there. Luckily they also serve coffee.
From Leadenhall Market we wandered in a southerly direction, crossing over the Thames on London Bridge and ending up at Borough Market, one of my very favorite places in London. I wrote this post a while back about a fabulous day I spent in 2013 with my friends Dave and Sarah – buying all sorts of things at Borough Market and having not one, but two picnics in different locations in London. That was a great day. On this particular day, though, I really only wanted two things – a beef and vegetable pasty (for my non-British readers, pasty information here) and a meringue as big as my head. I got my pasty, but was heartbroken to find that the head-sized-meringue-selling-bakery-stand was no longer there. So I had fudge instead – not the smooth, creamy sort of fudge we’re used to in the States. This is a fudge that has origins in the Devon region of the UK and it is crumbly and firm but melts in your mouth. Looooooovely. I was able to pick my own little bagful of fudge chunks with a pair of tongs – ginger, orange-chocolate, clotted cream, salted caramel. My broken heart, it turns out, was easily mended.
Around 2:00 we had a re-think of our situation. We were both getting tired. We had a firm 7:30 time when we had to end up at a certain restaurant in the Soho section of the city, which meant that we had 5 1/2 more hours of walking around. We decided to get my coffee mug at John Lewis, take the Tube back to our hotel, and chill out for a couple of hours before heading back downtown for dinner. It was easy for me to cut out Westminster Abbey – I had already been a few years ago for both the self-guided tour and Evensong. I knew that Westminster Abbey was more my idea than Chris’. I also knew that after I left him on Saturday Chris had 8 days in a row of a very punishing recording schedule (he ended up working 82 hours during that timeframe) and I didn’t want him to start that 8 day stretch already worn out. We had already decided that the next day, my final day in the UK, we would just casually explore “our” neighborhood of Hampstead.
Happy Thanksgiving to those of you celebrating the day! I will be back tomorrow with my Hampstead post and over the weekend I will finish by posting a bunch of random photos I took during the week.
Love,
Michelle xoxo
P.S. Dave, you’re right – I should have shown the mug! It’s by Emma Bridgewater Pottery, made in Stoke-on-Trent. She had a real moment about 10 years ago – there used to be EB stores all over London, but all the London stores are now closed and now John Lewis is the only place I found her pottery in London. It may not still be in vogue, but I still love it.
