Categories: buildings-and-cities
Tags: london, urbanwalks, trains, maps, buses, family
Date: 16 February 2010 05:32:29
To deepest North London to see my daughter who is staying at a friend's house for a while. Walking back to Seven Sisters tube I go another way from the road I came by and misread the map. I don't mean I went the wrong way, but I failed to guess what sort of place I was walking through. There's a circular street called Clyde Circus. On the map it looks like the sort of street plan I associate with 1930s or later council estates. But when I got there its actually very late Victorian terraces and quite posh. I should have paid attention to the words rather than the pictures. Anywhere called "Beaconsfield Road" is likely to be a long straight street of late 19th century "villas" (because almost certainly named after Lord Beaconsfield AKA Benjamin Disraeli, who died in 1881).
North London feels different from South London. (for a valus of "South London" that is I suppose more or less South East London inner suburbia). At any given distance from town it tends to be more inner-urban, with a more developed and denser infrastructure, perhaps more sophisticated, and also somehow less provisional. It feels like they finished building it. And fewer of those dark streets. S
And it really is a quick way back to the tube.
Not that that did any good. Hoping to be back home just after midnight I tried to change to the Northern Line for London Bidge at King's Cross. Arrived on the platform about twenty past eleven and waited, and waited. No southbound train on the indicators. Just when I was starting to think about looking for a bus they did the Inspector Sands announcement, Sensible passengers started leaving immediately. A few minutes later they did the evacuation alarm and we all made our way to the surface. False alarm it turned out but at five to midnight I was at the back end of St Pancras watching the staff try not to have a fight with an aggressive drunk. So out to the bus stop, and three cigarettes later (waiting for 63, 171, 436) was back at Lewisham at nearly half past one.
Then I still had to change the washing in the machine do some other stuff to get ready for tmorrow and fell asleep in an upright chair which is why I am blogging this now.
Can I go to bed and get up in two or three hours? I am about to find out.