London 2012

So after spending most of this year bench-warming (apart from my little flits to Orlando and Cairo documented on here) I got another trip – this time a return to my roots.  England.  Well, London.  Just before the start of the Olympics.

Although I’ve been back a couple of times over the past couple of years those trips were family visits, so I just passed through or around London on my way to smaller and better places.  I’ve not worked in London for three years or so, and even then it was only for a few days, so spending three weeks there has been a bit of an eye-opener.

    
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I caught the earlybird flight from Warsaw, and arrived at Heathrow about 9:30.   That was my first deja-vu in a trip full of them – the wonderful British summer weather.  I had left home at 5:30, to a sunny morning with Warsaw already basking in 25C.  I landed in London to an overcast and damp morning where the temperature was just about struggling up to the mid-teens.    I wasn’t too surprised, as the tv and newspapers and blogs had been full of the British weather (in time honoured fashion) for weeks.  Wimbledon and the Test Matches had suffered their annual rain delays, and even some of football’s pre-season friendly matches had been in doubt due to waterlogged pitches.  The summer, like most that I can remember, was “officially the wettest since records began”…….   So immediately I felt quite at home.

My baggage came through remarkably quickly, and I was very surprised at an empty Arrivals Hall after seeing stories about 2 hour queues to enter the country here, and didn’t even have to stand in line to show my passport.  I was buying my Heathrow Express ticket before most of the other passengers had come up from the flight, I should think.  Remarkable.

The train into Paddington was more crowded than I remember it, but of course there are record numbers of visitors expected for the Games.  Likewise the Tube, never particularly enjoyable, was hell, especially to a home-coming ex-pat lugging a heavy suitcase and laptop bag up and down stairs.  Not a lift in sight of course – the London Underground must be the most user and family unfriendly network in Europe: baggage and pushchairs serve only to get filthy looks from other passengers, and unfriendly unhelpful and unsympathetic staff make matters worse.  For all the Mayor of London’s much trumpeted improvements to Transport for London (as it’s now re-branded), there is still a lot of work to be done.

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My hotel was terrible.  A small and uncomfortable bedroom more like a prison cell, with an almost unusable (because so small) toilet and shower stall was bad enough, the lack of a bar or room service only added to it, and the final straw was the lift.  Again small, and interminably slow, and with a recorded voice telling you the floor and whether you’re going up or down, in the most irritating sub-Sloane Ranger accent I’ve ever heard.  By the end of day 3 I felt like ripping the speaker out of the wall – only I couldn’t find the damned thing.    There was some profiteering of Olympic proportions going on as well – my cell was setting the client back GBP137 per night, but I would be reluctant to pay half that out of my own pocket.    About the only saving grace was the English Breakfast that was included in my rate – very nice it was, but again I question its value.  If ordered separately (if you’re booked on a room only tariff) the charge was GBP15 – there were at least three locations within a couple of minutes’ walk offering the same meal for half that price.  So a Travellin Bob Top Tip – do NOT stay at the Shaftesbury Notting Hill Hotel.  It’s not even in Notting Hill really, barely on the edge – the nearest Tube station is Bayswater – and its 4 Star AA Rating is exceedingly generous.

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Work was in Savile Row, off Regent Street.  It must be twenty years since I last strolled along it, and apart from the addition of an Ozwald Boateng establishment it hadn’t changed a bit.  Bentleys and high-end Mercs and Range Rover Vogues, most of them with personalized number plates and chauffeurs, lined the street.   Tailors still sat in windows at basement level, carefully cutting and stitching suits that cost the earth, and valets man the shop doors to welcome you, complete with tailcoats and bow-ties.  I’ve never bought anything there and undoubtedly never will…..way out of my league! 

On my first lunch-break I had a stroll around the area, as back in the late 80s I had spent 4 years working in Air Street, just off Piccadilly Circus and next to the Café Royal.   The building is still there, but empty of tenants and undergoing some serious looking renovation work.  The Deep Pan Pizza Parlour opposite is no longer there, replaced by an expensive looking sushi bar, but our local pub, the Glass Blower, was at least outwardly unchanged.   Regent Street was draped from end-to-end with the flags of all nations, huge banners stretched across the width of the street every 10 or 15 yards, three to a mast, but apart from a new (and massive) Apple iStore in place of (from my dim memory) a Habitat furniture store the place was reassuringly familiar – even down to the hordes of tourists ambling along.  Piccadilly Circus was as clogged with traffic as ever, and this was exacerbated by some building work going on in the first building on the south side of Piccadilly that was blocking off one lane.

There were plenty of restaurants, a couple of Starbucks (of course….) and a couple of branches of a new sandwich retailer – EAT! – I had never seen before, so lunch times were good if a little more expensive than I had expected.  Starbucks were doing some very tasty hot meatball and cheese ciabatta that I enjoyed, and EAT! had some really good tuna and cucumber and Thai chicken baguettes that went down a treat.  In the evenings, there were pubs close to the hotel, three of them within a hundred and fifty yards in the same road – all served identical menus and identical beers at identical prices.  I longed for a little originality!

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My first weekend, I did some exploring.  It was a wet Saturday, not at all sightseeing weather, but in the absence of anything remotely welcoming at the hotel I had little choice.  I bought a one day travel card and headed off.  I started in Regents Street, as I wanted to get some pictures of the decorations there, and trudged through the rain, sans parasol, trying to get a decent shot not spoiled by some gurning and braying idiot American or group of Japanese tourists bedecked in identical beige baseball caps and see-through umbrellas.  I got a couple, then cut through Air Street into Piccadilly and emerged next to a Starbucks.  The rain was coming on harder so I ducked in for a latte and a warm up.  Opposite I spotted Waterstone’s, my favourite bookstore in all the world, so after my coffee I wandered across and spent a lovely hour or so strolling through four floors of books.  The fifth, top, floor is wonderfully taken up by a café-cum-bar, where you could quite happily spend all day snugly drinking coffee, eating pastries and reading your purchases.  All big stores should be like this….    I added to my library three books, and then headed off again.

                                                                    Regent Street in the rain

Trafalgar Square was full of people going through a rehearsal for some Olympic ceremony or entertainment in the rain, and by the way the choreographer (or whatever he was) was yelling frantically into his bullhorn it wasn’t going too well.  I watched for a few minutes, took a couple of pictures, but as I could not make sense of what was going on, headed off to Charing Cross and Embankment Tube, to get the Circle line to the City. 

                                                                        A dodgy rehearsal

By the time I got to Cannon Street, the rain had stopped, so my first views of The Shard were not spoiled by drizzle.  I had read of this new building and seen pictures, of course, and had an open mind about it.  There seem to be two schools of thought – the first, that it is a masterpiece, the second that it’s a piece of shit.  I fall between the two, I suppose.  Architecturally and in terms of pure engineering, it is a masterpiece, but does not fit in at all well with its surroundings on the south bank of the Thames, straddling as it does a London Bridge station and Cottons Centre that was itself re-developed in the 80s.  The buildings around there are old, early 20^th century blocks and, across the street, the old Victorian Borough Market.  Apart from Cottons Centre, that was developed reasonably sympathetically with the rest of the neighbourhood, the most modern building is the tower of Guy’s Hospital, but that is dwarfed by The Shard across the street.  For all the skill in its glass sided, open topped, tapering 1000 foot tower, it looks completely out of place in this part of town.  It’s more suited to the Canary Wharf development downstream.

                                                         The Shard - masterpiece or piece of shite?

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Which was my next destination.  Again, it was a trip down memory lane – I had spent a mostly unpleasant three years or so working there in the early 90s, when apart from the 1 Canada Square building (the original tower with a pointy top, once the tallest building in Europe – a title now boasted by The Shard) there wasn’t a lot there apart from building sites, Thatcher’s dreams, and a lot of resentment from poorly-paid or unemployed locals.   So I wandered along the Embankment through Cottons, stopped for a beer in a pub there (I would have eaten too, but it wasn’t serving food – odd for a Saturday lunch time), then past the new and ugly City Hall, across Tower Bridge (photo opportunities abound there, with its arches and, now, decorative Olympic Rings), past the grand old Tower of London and onto the Docklands Light Railway to Canary Wharf. 

When the DLR opened, back in 1990-ish with Canary Wharf, it was the first driverless train system in Britain.  It kept breaking down, so the guards all had to learn to drive the trains too, just in case.  Delays were regular (about every third train broke down, ran late and caused bottlenecks across the entire system) and made it a lottery whether you arrived late or on time for work.  There was only one line – from either Bank Tube station or a new Tower Gateway station (adjacent to Fenchurch Street mainline), through Canary Wharf to Island Gardens, at the loop at the bottom of the Isle of Dogs where you could walk through an old and piss-smelly tunnel to Greenwich.    In the intervening years it has expanded a lot – north to Stratford and the new Olympic Park, east through Beckton and the London City Airport, and under the river to Lewisham in the south.  It’s even stopped breaking down now, apparently. 

                                        Canary Wharf - the essence of greed and evil, apparently

Canary Wharf too had changed immensely.  In my day, the Tower had about 4 tenants occupying perhaps a dozen floors out of 55.  Building work was still going on in the Tower, and the fire alarms would go off at least three times a day – we got so fed up with it that one of our traders went around our floor one evening and wedged an empty fag packet in each one to stop them ringing.   We had a fire drill once – our evacuation from the 25^th floor (via the second level basement) was a complete shambles as half of the people couldn’t be arsed to walk down all those stairs.

Over the three years or so I worked there, a few more buildings were completed and occupied by leading US banks (casinos, they would be called now) – Credit Suisse First Boston had one, Morgan Stanley another, and the late and unlamented Lehman Brothers a third – but none of them were more than eight floors.  Today, those banks are still there (except for Lehman’s of course) and in the same buildings but expansion means they’ve taken additional premises on the site.  The Tower itself is full (but my old company is gone, taken over years ago by a competitor who has also been swallowed up), and there are many more buildings towering into the London skyline.  Citibank has its European headquarters there, as does State Street Bank, another US outfit.  HSBC and Barclays are also headquartered in the development in neighbouring towers of 50 or more floors each.  Barclays Investment Bank, our infamous LIBOR manipulators, are in a separate tower block, with delicious irony right next door to the offices of the Financial Services Authority that was supposed to be monitoring its compliance with the law and market regulations.  I can only assume the DLR station that separates the two buildings must have obscured the view….

                                                         Now - what was that rate again?

The DLR station itself has changed too.  When I worked there, the level below the platforms had a half a dozen shops, including a newsagents and a sandwich bar.  The newsagents has gone, and there is now a twin level underground shopping mall stretching the length of Canada Square, filled with expensive shops, sushi bars, coffee shops and so on.  My son recently visited the place, meeting a client, and posted on Facebook that he was surrounded by “the essence of pure greed and evil”……a slight exaggeration perhaps – he’s not seen Wall Street in New York yet – but I can see where he’s coming from.

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Back into the City, this time via Bank and the Central line, to St. Paul’s Cathedral, scene of last year’s Occupy protest and always worth a look in any case.  I came out of the tube station and was lost……the office block that used to be across the street is now a bloody great hole in the ground, presumably the footings of yet another tower block that will change the London skyline again.   I wandered around for a couple of minutes, circling the station entrance, then spotted the Cathedral through some trees.  Paternoster Square, next to it, has been redeveloped since my last visit, and is now very pleasant, with some good looking bistros and wine bars.  The Cathedral is unchanged and as magnificent as ever, towering above the surrounding offices, and untouched by the events of last summer – as I have always said the Occupy Movement is unlikely to make any impression on the grand scheme of things.  It’s certainly made no impression on St. Paul’s.

                                                   The unchanging face of London

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Over the couple of weeks in London I made other little excursions to meet old friends.  I went to a bar in High Holborn, in a block next to the old Prudential Insurance building, a grand old pile with Gothic towers that dwarfs all its neighbours.  The bar we used was probably there in the old days (I’m talking about 1979 or thereabouts, when I worked about 50 yards away) but I have no recollection of it.   The street market is still there (deserted that evening), and the Italian restaurant we ate at later was good .

Another evening I went back to London Bridge to meet up with some old cronies from that same late 70s – early 80s period, in a pub called The Barrowboy and Banker in an homage to Borough Market and the City of London, facing each other across the river here.  I don’t remember the pub at all, but the beer was good.  The three amigos that turned up were all older than me (it made a really pleasant change to be the youngest person in a group!!) and one of them I would not have recognized in a month of Sundays.  But we had a great time, sank a few beers and for once the conversation was not reminiscing about The Old Days (as it usually is when we meet up) but more about Advancing Age (two of my mates are grandparents now…..) and All That is Wrong In the World Today.   We were as fine a group of Grumpy Old Men as you’re likely to find anywhere.  But it was great to see them, and a highlight of my visit.

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So the City has indeed changed, and I will not pass judgment on whether for the better or not.  It was interesting to see the effect of passing time on old haunts, and good to see a lot of them are still there.   The traffic was definitely worse, despite the introduction of the Congestion Charge Zone designed to reduce the numbers of vehicles using the roads.    An already dire situation has been made worse by the introduction of 30-odd miles of special “Olympics Only” lanes, designed to ensure that athletes and officials can get to venues on time – even if it means no-one else can get anywhere on time.  The restrictions came into full effect just after I arrived, and the effect was noticeable immediately, even in the backwoods of Bayswater.  My laundry, due back at 7 p.m., finally arrived at after 11, the excuse given by both the hotel and the (off-site) laundry service being that the delay had been caused by the “new Olympic traffic regulations.”   What a load of old bollocks!  In the first place, the Notting Hill and Baywater areas, in common with most of West London (the exception being Wimbledon where the tennis is being held), are nowhere near any of the competition venues, and hence not directly affected by road closures.   I saw no evidence in the three weeks I was there that traffic volumes increased as a result…..if anything, there seemed less traffic on the roads immediately around the hotel.  In the second place, London was awarded the Games seven years ago, and the proposed travel restrictions have been in place for some time (even if not used until now) so I would have thought that a four star hotel and its suppliers would have had ample time to find  alternative routings to avoid this type of delay.

But the people remain the same, only there are many more.  I make allowances for the additional influx of tourists in this unique Olympic year, but the overcrowding in the Underground cannot all be put down to the tourist trade, nor can the clear evidence of a multi-cultural Britain – there were far more non Caucasian faces and dress than I can ever remember seeing previously.   In the rush hours, people are still frantically dashing up and down congested escalators, desperately trying to get to work on time or home without delay, and they are as rude and arrogant as ever.  One morning, changing trains at Notting Hill Gate I arrived just in time for the Central Line westbound to be closed and access to the eastbound platform restricted because of an incident two stations along, at Lancaster Gate.   We were told some poor sod had ended up under a westbound train (so I assume he was probably dead).   A harassed young lady was trying to explain to increasingly agitated passengers the best alternative routes if they were not prepared to wait the five or ten minutes for the eastbound (that’s towards the City) services to resume.  One guy, who could have been no more than about 26 or 27, clad in pinstripe suit, white shirt, leather laptop case slung over his shoulders, was getting more and more irate, demanding an immediate resumption of services (as if the poor girl could do anything!) as he had “an important meeting at 9”.  The girl tried to explain again, and he interrupted her.

 “Well, really,” he barked angrily, “This is most inconvenient!” 

I’d had enough.

“Look,” I said, trying to stay polite, “It’s probably most inconvenient for the poor fucker under the train too……get over it.”

The guy gave me a filthy look, and stormed off to find an alternative route, gesturing angrily and muttering curses.  A minute later, we were allowed down onto the platform and boarded the resumed services.  I hope the son-of-a-bitch got a cab and ended up caught in the ever-worsening London traffic, and missed his precious meeting.   Some things are more important than business meetings, life being one of them.