Something old, something new, something red

When I first arrived here, I got the impression of a good old, yet modernized highly industrialized place. Maybe it was because we have been travelling from Heathrow to the inner city via the Tube, and there is something industrial about the old train tracks. Also, you get an immediate insight in how the city’s infrastructure is organised and is maintained - alongside the tracks you constantly see different kind of cables, that sometimes are going a bit chaotic on the walls next to the train rails. Clearly the city grow went a bit out of hands already long time ago … This impression holds throughout my whole experience in this amazing historical city where all kinds of people come together and live together.

I’m not gonna cover the default London things like Big Ben, Tower Bridge, ecc. Those have been exhaustively covered, I’m not gonna compete with much more talented people, who can do those things just much better than me. I’m gonna write through the humble eyes of a somewhat confused traveller discovering a huge city.

# The tube (London Underground)

London’s tube is old. I mean it was the world’s first underground passenger railway, starting in 1863. In contrast to other subways I cannot shake the feeling of, that it would need some kind of modernization: You struggle more than once, if you try to get your 20+kg suitcase up a stupid staircase … Even more when you are used to have escalators everywhere, like it is pretty much the default in plenty of other places … At least my fitness-tracker is super happy about the number of floors you do throughout a day. I guess it’s because the tube has already been there for quiet some time and it’s very difficult to change or modernize the fundamental structure, as it would be required to put escalators everywhere.
Apart from that, it’s also sometimes pretty much slippery, when it’s raining. And, because it’s England, that occurs not just occasionally.

Well, at least, they take everything with the right amount of British Charme :-)

What I’m a bit missing in the tube, are the always present food and coffee stands. I guess for some reason they have banned them, and it’s something that I really miss. There was always something nice about the bakeries and the coffee-to-go stands in underground/subway/metro stations, because it was a pretty reliable supply of breakfast and coffee for the tired traveller. I really miss them already, and it was day one, when I wrote this down!

All in all, the tube provides very good transportation, and the Oyster-Card is a super convenient method of having an anonymous pre-paid card for your inner-city travels.

# Something old, something new, something red

Wherever you are, you will always find something old, like a industrial brick-stone building, a old sign or a old-looking bridge or passage and something new and modern, like a skyscraper a very modern bridge (Millennium bridge) or a new startup forming somewhere.
And this throughout whole London.

It’s apparently a very busy and fast moving city, where lots of new start-ups are founded that try to somehow merge into a historic place, that was the foundation place of the industrial revolution.

And then, of course, you will always find the typical red telephone boots and the very typical red double-decker busses. They are just everywhere.

That’s for now, I hope to have the time to write some follow-up posts. For now, I’m in the Peaks and don’t want to waste the whole day messing around with the bazillions of pictures I made during the last days