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London's streets! Are there more wonderfully photogenic byways anywhere?! Look down any random street, whether broad avenue or tiny lane, and you will be rewarded with amazing buildings, amusing signs, charming decorative touches—and thousands of photo opps. The streets and neighborhoods aren't always easy to navigate, but if you're not on a strict timetable this is not a burden to be borne but one of the true joys of the city. As Anna Quindlen eloquently puts it, in Imagined London:
"A city first founded in Roman times and eventually encompassing a string of outlying villages has streets that could, most kindly, be classified as organic....Any reader of history knows how stubbornly Londoners have held onto a street grid that seems to have been based on the children's printed puzzles of trying to get from one side of a square to another. 'Right lines have hardly ever been considered,' complained an architect in1766. For a writer, of course, this polyglot landscape is irresistible, right lines not being the purview of the novelist or poet." "There simply could not be a better place in which to set a story....The city that rose from the ashes [of the 1666 fire] rose along the same nonsensical system of country lanes and downhill passages that defined it before. And so it reasserted itself as a kind of mazelike mystery that is irresistable for the imaginative mind." |
In fact, wandering London's streets, just to wander or in search of a particular location, was one of my favorite pastimes while I was there. And these photographs remind me of this pleasure.
In sorting through the photos for this section, I've pulled out the ones where the streets, rather than the sights, are the stars. To keep pages a manageable size, I've divided them into three categories: my neighborhood • famous streets • other parts of town. The pictures on this page are teasers for these groupings.
You can see many more glimpses of streets in the Churches • Architecture • Everyday Life sections of the website. And there are many, many more London street photos in this Flickr set. A special purpose to which the streets of Westminster are put each year is the Remembrance Sunday parade. You can see some of my photos of the parade here.
To see where most of these pictures were taken, or where their subjects are located, check out this map:
View a larger version of this map here.
Looking down Whitehall from Trafalgar Square to Big Ben |
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My street, Finborough Road, with the Finborough Theatre at the tip of the "V" |
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The London Eye from Lambeth North tube station |
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