London Street Scenes:other parts of town

So many different neighborhoods, so many wonderful streets! Anna Quindlen, in Imagined London, has spot-on prose to describe how important the concept of neighborhood is to appreciating London:

"London has nearly as many residents as New York has, yet even its most central locations never feel overwhelming in the way much of Manhattan does, mainly because of ...this ability to step within minutes from tumult into peace. ...London...is a city of neighborhoods, and within the neighborhoods a place of discreet areas, each with its own atmosphere, its own feeling, its own story."

Here are a selection of photos taken around town. Many more can be found in the Flickr set.

We saw this neighborhood (on the left below) near the Barbican Center when we went to the Museum of London and I visited this rather famous East End neighborhood (on the right) with the students' British Culture class.

A closeup of the street sign from the East End photo shows what variety of immigrants (Bangladeshi) are currently living there in great numbers, after earlier waves from different parts of the world throughout the 20th century:

Brick Lane street sign

Bilingual street signs are also in evidence in London's tiny Chinatown, but they're not needed nearby in Soho, where this umbrella shop caught my eye more than once:

Another famous Soho street is Carnaby, whose name still conjures up the swinging London of my teenaged years, worshipped from afar. It's the location of the impressive Christmas balloons that make the title graphic for these "Streets" pages. Here's another look at them, showing more of the street itself:

The umbrella store above is on New Oxford Street, and I think this decked-out-for Christmas store on the left is on Oxford Street proper—a neighborhood shop-o-phobes like myself should really avoid during the holiday season. The picturesque corner shown on the right features one of the many (thousands?) of intriguing-looking restaurants I wasn't able to sample, and is also in Mayfair.

The following two photos were taken in or near the City of London. On the left is a street near the Bank of England, probably Cheapside, and on the right is a glimpse at a bike race held in the area in September. The streets blocked off for the race made getting from point A to point B even more challenging than usual, but it was fun to watch the cyclists.

I took a few junkets north of Regent's Park (which is as far north as my map booklet reached) with different guests. The bus rides I took to Hampstead Heath led past the intriguing Camden Market and so I was glad that on a later occasion I got to explore that area a bit more closely. Here are two views of the Market(s), one from the top of a bus, and the other from street level, followed by a glimpse of the British Telecom Tower taken from one of these bus rides:

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