Tuesday, 24 December 2013

Exploring great places in London

LONDON

     It might be easy to view London's 7 million people and 600-square-mile mass of buildings and greenbelts as an urban monolith. But that's a mirage.

Pockets of individuality survive. In what once were independent villages lies the coin of community: real neighborhoods with attractions that are theirs alone. In them, you'll see England's first public art gallery, bustling markets, spooky cemeteries and more.

London wasn't always huge. Two millenniums ago, it was a Roman colony hunkered behind high stone walls. As population increased and governments changed, the city oozed outward like molasses spilled on a table, engulfing hamlets and farms. The one-time outpost of Rome became, until recent generations, the biggest and most important city on Earth.


 
Ramble now in seven villages of greater London where history is deep but urban hustle feels much farther than a Tube ride away.

Source: http://www.tripadvisor.com/HACSearch-g186338-jpopHigh-London_England.html

BLACKHEATH: Picnic perfect
Ten minutes' walk downhill from the chestnut-studded parking area for Greenwich Park and the Royal Observatory lies the velvety lawn of Blackheath. Families bask in sunshine uninterrupted by trees, children and dogs play until they plop in happy exhaustion, and kites compete with rainbows to color the sky.

History is all around. Armies and rebels have mustered for a millennium on the heath's uncultivated acres, and a crescent of Georgian houses on the green's western edge echoes 18th-century good life.
But where neighboring Greenwich is awash in tourism, Blackheath is a hometown: quiet on weekdays when people are at work, buzzing on weekends when they're shopping on Tranquil Vale (an aptly named main street) and parking is an impossible dream.

After a picnic on the heath gleaned from Tranquil Vale's delightful cafes such as Boulangerie Jade (homemade cakes) and Hand Made Food (banquet-size sausage rolls), slip between the covers of the 30,000 volumes in The Bookshop on the Heath. Step lightly; Amanda, the year-old daughter of owners Jasmine and Richard Platt, may be napping beneath collectible posters of Chairman Mao.
HAMPSTEAD: In famous footsteps
Richmond and Greenwich claim kings and queens, but Hampstead has royalty of its own. Famous poets, artists, authors, scientists, actors, philosophers and financiers have called it home. And, yes, a highwayman or two.
 

This exclusive, free-thinking community northwest of central London is freckled with plaques announcing that "so-and-so lived here." Lace up your walking shoes, fortify yourself with Hungarian pastries from Louis Patisserie on Heath Street, a few steps from the Tube station, then backtrack to High Street. Turn onto Flask Walk to begin a pilgrimage in nearby neighborhoods among the former digs of celebrities such as painter John Constable, writers Daphne du Maurier and Ian Fleming, former French leader Charles de Gaulle and bandit Dick Turpin.

You can't enter most of the houses, but the welcome mat is out at the home of poet John Keats, the handsome Burgh House museum and cafe and the art-studded Kenwood mansion. (Off Fitzjohns Avenue and worth the taxi fare if your feet are weary is Sigmund Freud's final home – and famous couch.)

If you stray from your tour map and lose yourself in the centuries-old streets and alleys, you'll only discover more delights. At the end of the line of elegant Georgian houses on Church Row, for example, is St. John's, an 18th-century church set back to front on its land, the altar unexpectedly on the west. (In the throng of graves outside lies John Harrison, the hero of longitude.) What appears to be a ship's quarterdeck tops a mansion on Admiral's Walk. And oh, those enticing little shops!

Thirsty? The venerable Holly Bush pub, next to a bitty green on Holly Hill, and Spaniard's Inn, where road robbers hid, have served the parched and hungry for centuries.

Even before Hampstead burst into chicdom in the early 1700s as a spa town, its iron-rich water the Evian of the age, the village had a steady stream of visitors to its heath. The great green space, just four miles from downtown London, rolls up and down hills and still offers fresh air and the feeling of English countryside. Trails crisscross the 800-acre parkland, dipping from the summit flagpole on West Heath to the Victorian enclave called Vale of Health, and back up to Parliament Hill.

Just beyond the point that Flask Walk (where the waters were bottled) opens into Well Walk (where spa life was centered) is the Wells Tavern, a gastropub serving well-prepared, energy-reviving meals. The building has seen 300 years of Hampstead buzz. Look out the windows onto the historic streets, and you can almost see it, too.

KEW: Beauty and science
The well-tended Royal Botanic Gardens lies at the junction of science and scenery. It's both botany's bank (with seeds of 14,098 species on deposit) and a seasonally changing palette of flowers and exotic plants.

Record keepers struggled for centuries to put a name on this riverside village. Spilling from their alphabet stew were such eyepoppers as Kayhoo, Keye and Kaiho.
But, really, you spell "Kew" c-o-n-t-r-a-s-t.

Nature flaunts earthbound beauty while technology roars overhead.

The 300-acre gardens are directly under an approach to Heathrow Airport. Flowers and trees fairly vibrate with the growl of jet engines a few hundred feet above. But in the bird song between flyovers, loveliness reasserts itself.

Fifteen miles of paths wind through the grounds, and most visitors navigate by landmarks such as the 10-story Pagoda and the modern Princess of Wales Conservatory, a glass box containing 10 computer-controlled environments. Or, they stalk "celebrities" such as the Temperate House's Chilean wine palm, started from a seed in 1846 and now considered the world's largest indoor plant.
On opposite edges of the gardens are Queen Charlotte's Cottage, most appreciated for its grounds, and Kew Palace, built in 1631 and closed for restoration since 1996. Once King George III's rusty-red family home, it will reopen at Easter to tourists.

DULWICH: Great art, heroes and regular folks
Time was, you had to own art to see it. Dulwich changed that. England's first public art gallery opened here in 1817.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery is deceiving. Its tan exterior is plain, even homely, despite being built by a noted architect, Sir John Soane. Arches are drawn in brickwork on windowless outside walls of the one-story building. Greenhouselike structures sit atop it. The entrance isn't grand.
But inside is a playground of light.

As the sun moves through the day and seasons, diffused light from the glass above changes constantly, creating an ever-new show of the 350 paintings on display.

So effective is the design that the gallery is a reference for museums that followed, including Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum.

The art itself is fit for a king: Poland's King Stanislaus. It was gathered for him by two London dealers, who were stuck with the collection when the monarch lost his throne in 1795 and defaulted on the deal. When England refused to buy the art, the men left it to Dulwich College with three requests: living space for six needy old women, public access to the art and a final resting place for the dealers.

Display space now occupies the women's area, but bathed in golden light in the heart of the museum are the sarcophaguses of the collectors, Noel Desenfans and Francis Bourgeois, and Mrs. D.
The non sequitur mausoleum is a small price to pay for a close look at 17th- and 18th-century treasures by Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Murillo, Poussin, Rubens, Gainsborough, Tiepolo and Canaletto.
But Dulwich (DULL-itch) is more than art. Turn left out of the gate by the museum's cafe, and follow College Road into the prosperous enclave's Victorian center. Sip tea at a sidewalk table and watch schoolchildren streaming for home. Listen to the chatter. Look into the fresh faces. Then head back the way you came, pass the gallery and turn left into Dulwich Common to see evidence of a hero, and a last-of-its-kind.

Beached in the North Cloister of Dulwich College, an exclusive boys school, is the 23-foot-long boat that Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and five of his men sailed 800 miles through mountainous seas to get help for his stranded crew. The rescue in 1916 is one of history's great open-boat voyages and has been retold recently in an IMAX film, books and an A&E miniseries. The boat, the James Caird , and its tattered original sail are testament to bravery and leadership.

Back on College Road and five minutes beyond the boat is Greater London's last operating tollgate. What used to be a common sight is now a relic – and a moneymaker for Dulwich College. Every vehicle that uses the shortcut between major roads pays about a dollar. And if you bring your horse or donkey this way? That will be 6 pence, please.

RICHMOND: Unexpected gourmet
Finding the award-winning Petersham Cafe inside a busy garden center is like discovering Nobu at the back of Home Depot.

But the innovative eatery thrives alongside Petersham Nurseries' seed packets, potted plants, pastel rubber boots, gardening books, tools, topiaries – even fruit-based soaps. From the menu, new every day, might come a smile of roasted pumpkin balanced atop grilled sourdough bread or a round of beef blushing with homemade ketchup. But if the dirt dabblers' takeout is different from the lunch crowd's intake, all feel they've been treated like royalty.

It's a thousand-year-old theme in Richmond, near the farthest reach of the London rail system and cozying up toward the M25 roadway that loops around the capital, as if to rope in its sprawl.
Long-ago and more-recent monarchs and nobility came to the village, upriver and upwind from London, to escape the growing city's pollution and relax beside the meandering Thames. Today's unimpeded view from Richmond Hill, across a bend of the river cupped by woodlands, proves they knew how to pick a pretty place. Reminders of their privileged life are plentiful in this friendly, prosperous town.

Richmond Green's 11 acres are virtually unchanged from the village's earliest days. Where knights jousted, cricketers now play. On the park's western hem is what remains of Richmond Palace. Black diamond patterns in the red brick declare, "The Tudors were here."

Step through the castle's surviving gatehouse and you walk in the footsteps of members of that famous family: Henry VII, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. To the left inside the entry are apartments with serious bragging rights. Originally the Tudors' storage rooms, the flats carry such prestigious addresses as "One, The Wardrobe."

Where little survives of the 16th-century palace, almost everything's intact at Ham House, a short distance upriver. And if it's true that ghosts roam the splendid 17th-century villa of a duke and duchess, they must recognize the place. Furnishings are much as they were when the powerful couple entertained King Charles II and his wife.

Deer jams are the legacy of a land snatch in 1637 by an earlier Charles. Foot and wheeled traffic in Richmond Park is frequently halted by 600 free-roaming bucks and does that leap and lope across roadways in the former royal hunting preserve.

If such wild beauty feels a universe away from London, a view from King Henry's Mound in the park shows how close the big city remains. Peer into the sighting scope aimed through an opening in the hedge and see St. Paul's Cathedral, exactly 10 miles away.

GREENWICH: See and shop
The most important things to see in this storied seagoing town may be John Harrison's four clocks at the National Maritime Museum. Without these groundbreaking timepieces, we might not know where in the world we are.

Harrison's genius solved the problems of longitude and location, but we're on our own navigating Thames-side Greenwich's boatload of sights. We already know those not to miss: the Maritime Museum's singular collection, the beautiful tea clipper Cutty Sark, the splendor of the Painted Hall at the former Royal Naval College, the gravity-defying Tulip Staircase in the 17th-century Queen's House, and the prime meridian at the Royal Observatory, where throngs take turns straddling the line between the Western and Eastern hemispheres.

See all these (a snap, since they're all in a compact area). Then eat lunch at the 150-year-old Trafalgar Tavern on the waterfront, breeze through the art on silk at the nearby Fan Museum and leave the tourist whirl behind to shop the crazy-quilt offerings of the Greenwich Market.

Commerce has raged since 1700 in the covered square a few dozen yards from the Cutty Sark. One day might see fruit and carrots that Peter Rabbit could crave, embroidered hats to block a chilly wind, hand-crafted jewelry, one-of-a-kind handbags, custom chapeaus, sports prints, insect art and more. Another day, a brass band might parade through the stalls, led by a bowler-hatted man pumping an umbrella like a baton.

The market is not just for buying. It's a peephole on the people. Browse the conversations of sellers and shoppers, and hear a Greenwich heartbeat.
HIGHGATE: Grave matters
This is a lively place, with shops garlanding High Street, and clusters of Georgian and Victorian houses. But it isn't the life of Highgate that fascinates visitors. It's the dead.

The 37 acres of east and west Highgate Cemetery, London's most famous dead end, are a spooky welter of tens of thousands of graves. The west area, opened in 1839, is a maze of mausoleums and crypts, some designed in over-the-top Victorian excess. The more-accessible east opened in 1854 when the west had been filled by a stampede of people wanting to spend eternity in fashionable company. Weaving through the east are avenues of moss-grown monuments and tombs heaved upward or sideways by the roots of huge trees. On a cloudy day when chills creep and shadows deepen, you expect a specter to rise up at every turn.

If a ghost does materialize, don't run. Get an autograph. Famous bones are everywhere. In the west, permanent residents include Henry Gray of Gray's Anatomy, poet Christina Rossetti and scientist Michael Faraday. Find novelist George Eliot, choirmaster William Monk who wrote "Abide With Me" and philosopher Karl Marx among those asleep in the east.

All of the villages described are accessible via local train or Tube from central London. Highlights can be seen in a day.

RESOURCES

VisitBritain, 1- 888-847-4885; www.visitbritain.com. Touring information, brochures.

BritRail, 1-866-274-8724; www.britrail.com. Sells passes for the London transit system and national railroads. A three-day, off-peak (after 9:30 a.m.) London Visitor Travel Card for all transit zones costs $37 for adults and $12 for children. It eliminates buying a ticket each time you enter the subway, local rail network or buses. (Individual trips are about $5 each.) Also available: tickets to central London on the Heathrow Express direct train from Heathrow Airport ($88 round trip) and on the Gatwick Express from Gatwick Airport ($75 round trip). The trains offer a considerable saving over cab fare into town. They’re included with BritRail passes.
Though expensive, one way to see and learn the max is to hire a Blue Badge guide for a private tour. I was accompanied in the London area by the knowledgeable Christina Zoltowska. (Her rates range from about $200 for a half-day walking tour to $625 for a full-day driving tour for two to three passengers.) On a previous visit, Mavis Drake was an outstanding resource in the Cambridge area. Information: www.blue-badge.org.uk.



DULWICH
Note: The London transit system doesn’t serve Dulwich. A round-trip national rail ticket from Victoria station costs about $10. The ride is less than an hour.
Dulwich Picture Gallery: www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk. Follow signs from the rail station. Through May 22 is Europe’s first exhibit devoted to the American painter Winslow Homer.
Ernest Shackleton’s boat: www.dulwich.org.uk (click on "history of the college").

BLACKHEATH
Bookshop on the Heath, 74 Tranquil Vale, 011-44-208-852-4786; www.bookshopontheheath.co.uk.
Hand Made Food, 40 Tranquil Vale, 011-44-20-8297-9966.
Boulangerie Jade, 44 Tranquil Vale, 011-44-20-8318-1916.

GREENWICH
Greenwich Market, Thursday through Sunday; www.greenwich-market.co.uk, www.greenwich.gov.uk.
Trafalgar Tavern, 6 Park Row, 011-44-20-8858-2909. Entrees from about $18.
National Maritime Museum, www.nmm.ac.uk. Longitude by Dava Sobel (Penguin, $11.95)
Fan Museum, 011-44-20-8305-1441; www.fan-museum.org.
Maritime Greenwich, a World Heritage Site: www.greenwichwhs.org.uk.
Greenwich attractions: www.greenwich.gov.uk.

RICHMOND
Richmond Information Center: 011-44-20-8940-9125; www.visitrichmond.co.uk. Request online "London’s Rural Thames" map, 2006 visitors guide. Bus 371 links rail station to Richmond Park gates, Ham House, Petersham Nurseries. Or, walk or taxi. Also, two hours by boat from Westminster piers in central London.
Petersham Cafe and Tea House (lunch only): off Petersham Road by Peterhams Meadows, 011-44-20-8605-3627 (reservations); www.petershamnurseries.com. Menu changes daily. Entrees: from $20.
Ham House: 011-44-20-8940-1950; www.nationaltrust.org.uk.
Marble Hill House: 011-44-20-8892-5115; www.english-heritage.org.uk. Another fine old house on the river at Richmond.

KEW
Royal Botanic Gardens: 011-44-20-8332-5655; www.kew.org. Open every day except Christmas and New Year’s. Adults, about $17.50.
Kew Palace, Queen Charlotte’s Cottage: 011-44-0870-751-5179; www.hrp.org.uk. Tickets not included in Kew Gardens fee.

HAMPSTEAD
Burgh House & Hampstead Local History Museum, New End Square; 011-44-20-7431-0144; www.burghhouse.org.uk. In bookshop, Where They Lived in Hampstead list and map ($5). Cafe downstairs.

Kenwood House, 011-44-20 8348 1286; www.english-heritage.org.uk/server/show/conProperty.106.
Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens; 011-44-20-7435-2002; www.freud.org.uk.
Keats House, Keats Grove (half-mile downhill from Tube station); 011-44-20 7435-2062; www.cityoflondon.gov.uk (click on Leisure & Heritage).

The Wells Tavern (gastropub), 30 Well Walk; 011-44-20-7794-3785.
Louis Patisserie, 32 Heath St.

HIGHGATE
Highgate Cemetery tours: 011-44-20-8340-1834; www.highgate-cemetery.org. Very limited parking on one-way (northbound) Swains Lane. Limited tours of west; timing is crucial. East is open more hours. It’s an active cemetery; be respectful.

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