Another Day In London

I’m at a seminar tomorrow which starts too early in the morning for me to travel on the day, as a result the trip ended up being crazily expensive as I didn’t realise that this was the end of the school holidays, so the train was expensive and the hotel over twice the price of the previous weeks visit.  

I left St Anne’s early so that I had time for a good break in Caffe Nero Preston and then caught the fast, direct train to London.  I had planned to spend most of the afternoon in the British Museum, but again the school holidays interfered, it was heaving with families so I retreated to another Caffe Nero and re-planned the day.  I decided to explore the route I would be taking tomorrow, first leaving the Travel Lodge and walking to a Premier Inn where I would be having breakfast and then doing the hours walk south to Kings College Hospital where the seminar was being held.

I was pleased I did as the route proved a bit tricky to navigate and I made a couple of wrong turns, I also got to see a lot of the real London, which was an experience.  I enjoyed the walk, even though it created a brooding discontent with London and modern life in general that I then blogged about.  One of the most striking things about the walk was the contrast between the vast levels of investment in new buildings (see photo), especially residential developments and their associated parklands and the poverty, especially the number of homeless.

I decided to pool the money from my transport and breakfast budget, about £25 and spend it on buying meals for the homeless, which was much more rewarding than I expected.  It meant I got in a lot of long walks down busy streets and munched on pork pies from M&S rather than enjoying a Premier Inn breakfast, but it was a good deal for the soul, if not the legs.

The hotel itself was acceptable, a Travel Lodge is not up to the standard of a Premier Inn, everything is a little grottier, but it was clean and warm, sadly after all the walking it didn’t have a bath to soak in or a TV with a HDMI port to relax watching, but after seeing all the poverty I could hardly complain.