London Calling
In this newsletter, I puzzle over the time-machine effect of last month’s trip to London, UK, and recommend a few things to eat and to visit.
The Conversion
Can you feel at home in a place in which you’ve never lived? What about in a city you loved to hate? One where you felt bored (or worse) at your job or where you rattled around as a grad student whose research seemed peripheral to many of your peers and colleagues?
The answer is yes, apparently, if that place is London. For years I worked and studied there, escaping every evening by train to enjoy cleaner air, lusher greenery, and more affordable housing. But I was not a Londoner. I just worked there - or so I thought.
My conversion to London began later, in 2009, at a concert at the Barbican Centre, long a favourite haunt (pennies permitting). Orchestra Baobab, an iconic Senegalese band from the 1970s, had re-formed; the concert hall was packed.
At the start of the first number, some dude in a shirt and tie sitting in the centre of the front row stood up and started dancing. He was soon joined by scattered dancers around the hall, easily visible to me from a restricted-view seat - an absolute bargain at £13 - off to one side and up a few tiers of seating.
A guy in a tie, dancing! At 7:30pm, mid-week, in a concert hall, to a Senegalese band! In that moment, years of job and student toil in London receded, and all the concerts, museums, and winding streets rose out of the attics of memory.
This was the point of London - this was what London was that some commuter town was not, for all the space and gardens and the evening quiet in which you could hear owls hoot and swoop through branches, and the panicked, truncated squrlt! of their prey. That evening, I became in my psyche a Londoner (or at least a wannabe), just one who had never actually lived there.
Nostalgia overload
Since 2012, London has no longer been a short train ride away. From my new perch in Connecticut, USA, it became a place to be remembered and anticipated: a place of once or twice-yearly pilgrimage - if I was lucky, which was not always - on which I inhaled The British Library by day and wallowed neck-deep in theatres, museums, and sights in off-hours.
For years I stayed pretty close to the BL on these short visits en route to somewhere else. From outside my tiny lodgings I could almost see both the BL and Waitrose (a supermarket that has no rival) by turning on the spot.
Walking between the BL (where I was once a curator), Bloomsbury (where I had been a grad student and a postdoc), and the West End (the closest place that felt like I’d left work behind), years after leaving the UK, was a peculiar mix of the new - look at that shiny extension! - and the old. Turn a corner: feel like a grad student again, with all the mixed feelings that entails. Walk a little further, and see the biggest bookshop in Europe - Waterstones Piccadilly - which I remember from when it first opened, twenty years ago.
But nostalgic time-travel gets old. On the last couple of visits, the city had started to feel like a zombie. It put on its past faces at unexpected - sometimes uninvited - moments, not able to be itself in the present but somehow puppet-mastered by my own emotions into replaying its past.
A couple of years ago, no longer separated from London by an ocean (but merely by a pandemic), I resolved to break free of the emotional palimpsest of Bloomsbury, and to centre my wanderings and archival scavenger hunts elsewhere.
New beginnings
Last month I finally ticked “stay somewhere that isn’t Bloomsbury” off my London bucket-list. Bayswater, in west-central London, is walking distance from the Science Museum and the V&A, yet a short metro ride to the likes of the Wellcome Library and even the British Library.
The area’s foodie haunts include an Ottolenghi (sampled), a Masala Zone (discovered too late to visit, although I did enjoy lunch at their Covent Garden branch), and the occasional caviar emporium (at which I rubber-necked while scurrying past).
It turns out that if you reach the BL via a route entirely different from countless visits in past lives, you still time-travel… but to the future, instead of to the past. For the first time since forever, London prompted me to think about adventures still to plan and to experience, instead of playing yesteryear reels while half-wishing for do-overs that had ended differently.
Where to eat in London
Here’s where I betray my inner tourist, a gastronomic moth to the flame of central London’s incandescently good, better-known eateries. If I ever end up living in London, my takes and recs would no doubt become more obscure, but here are last month’s favourites:
Puppets hanging from the ceiling - millions of them. A starter popping with pomegranate, tamarind chutney, herbs, and fried things. Main-course thalis: tray-sized banquets that let you taste All The Things. Nobody batting an eyelid as I masked between mouthfuls. Best combined with absolutely anything else you may be doing in the neighbourhood.
Dishoom, Granary Square , King’s Cross
I remember the aughts, when the opening of a Pizza Express and a Starbucks opposite The British Library counted as exciting. The moving of the Eurostar terminal to St Pancras, the next block over, in 2007, was another highlight. Yet the area north of King’s Cross/St Pancras today has changed so much in the past five years that it felt as if I’d been transported to the moon - or to the future.
The (now) cryptically titled Coal Drops Yard shopping centre was, once upon a time, where coal from Yorkshire was dropped off. Today, warehouse-y areas house restaurants and the fancier sort of shops and piazzas like Granary Square.
I knew of Dishoom from its Covent Garden locale. Discovering that there was now a branch close to the (why am I talking about it again) British Library was a game-changer. The house chaat is a glorious assemblage of raw shredded beet, radish, carrot, and pomegranate atop fried sweet potato, chutney, and yoghurt.
The black chickpea and kale salad could convert anyone to superfoods. The mango lassi was the best I’ve ever had: barely sweet at all, elevated to someplace mysterious by a sprinkling of fennel. They will give you a box for leftovers, so greedy eyeballs can go wild.
Current museum exhibits
The exhibits I saw deserve newsletters of their own, but if you’re heading to London in the coming weeks you might like to check out the following:
V&A Museum, South Kensington:
Africa Fashion. Until 16 April, 2023.
Hallyu! The Korean Wave. Until 23 June 2023.
The British Museum, Bloomsbury.
Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt. Until 19 Feb, 2023.
The British Library (yet again), St. Pancras.
Alexander the Great: The Making of a Myth. Until 19 Feb, 2023.
That’s all for now. Thank you for lending me your eyeballs!
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
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