London, first impressions

One of the joys of academic life is the opportunity to take the occasional sabbatical – a semester or a year away from the home university, focused on research without the day-to-day obligations of teaching or committee service. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to spend my past sabbaticals abroad: as a Fulbright Fellow to the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) in 2008-09, and as a Visiting Professor at ETH (Zürich, Switzerland) in 2019-20, leading to some fabulous scientific collaborations and personal/family adventures, which I’ve documented in this blog. Well, here we go again! this time, in London.

On the first of September I landed in London to begin a year-long sabbatical in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, one of the world’s leading STEM-focused universities. I am fortunate to have been named a Royal Society Wolfson Visiting Fellow, a competitive fellowship awarded by the UK’s leading scientific society, which will support my research and my travel throughout the UK this year.

It has been a busy month, so in this post I’ll share just a few ‘first impressions’ about life in London, accompanied by a photo gallery with snapshots of the familiar and the mundane.

• My biggest first impression results from my personal transition from life in a small, rural, New England town to a huge, urban, global city. What strikes me most profoundly is the incredibly international, cosmopolitan nature of the place… any walk down the street or commute on the Tube leaves me awash in a dozen languages, many of them unfamiliar.  I’m not talking about thick Scottish brogue or deep Cockney accents – which I rarely hear – I mean a rich mixture of continental, middle eastern, Asian, and African languages, many of which I do not recognize. Fascinating!
• Some of this linguistic diversity is a result of the tourists – of which there are many – but mostly of the people I encounter on my daily commute who, like me, are expats going about their everyday life.
• The Brits seem to have borrowed many place names from Vermont and New Hampshire :-), like Putney, Norwich, Orford, Thetford, Manchester, and more. And when they run out of names to borrow from us, they give their villages curious names like Westhumble. (Yes! I went to Westhumble on my first hike outing; more to come on that!)
• At every turn there are grand old buildings, dating from many eras, often tucked beside a modern residential area or adjacent to a modern glass-and-steel office building. Churches, government buildings, and monuments abound, some centuries old; this place is drenched in history. After all, London was founded by the Romans as Londinium around 47 CE.
• We live in a small corner of the west end, between Victoria Station and the Thames River, called Pimlico. We’ve rented a delightful flat that overlooks a quiet courtyard garden.

• As I wander the streets – quiet lanes adjacent to lush green parks, and busy commercial streets with busy office buildings – I am grateful for the ‘walkable’ city London seems to be. I can walk five miles through neighborhoods, across the vast Hyde Park, and reach my office at Imperial, quite comfortably. The roads and streets are well marked, with signs on nearly every streetcorner.
• If I don’t fancy walking, rentable bicycles are plentiful.
• Many of the small city-block-sized parks are private, accessible only to those who live around that square, but there are many public parks. The largest, like Regency Park, St. James Park, and Hyde Park, include opportunities for horseback riding, pick-up football matches, boating or swimming in the pond; people clearly love these parks, they are beautiful, and peaceful.

• It is possible to walk across town on small streets and quiet alleyways, often along ranks of nearly identical apartment buildings built with elegant design. Each neighborhood is a little different.
• Indeed, the city is busy making some streets narrower by widening the sidewalks to enable greater pedestrian access and more sidewalk cafes – a lesson learned from Covid when people craved outdoor dining.
• Food! my favorite; one can find every cuisine in the world!  Where we live, just in one block I can choose from Thai, Indian, Mexican, Cuban, two Greek, two Chinese, two continental, a Brazilian steakhouse, pizza, grill, casual, a half dozen coffee shops, and two corner pubs.  And Starbucks 🙂
• Most pubs sell proper cask ales, hand-drawn pints in the traditional style. Fabulous! on the other hand, I’ve been surprised by the limited beer selection; there are few brands, and even fewer styles.  Heck, the Hanover Coop at home has a greater selection than all the London stores and pubs I’ve visited.
• Shopping – I’ve seen every sort of specialty shop, and all the luxury brands.
• Theater – oh my gosh, an incredible variety, and we are right in the middle of the action. Wicked is just down the street and Hamilton is around the corner, not to mention dozens of other plays and musicals showing across the west end.

To be fair, not everything is wonderful, or beautiful.

• Although the air is clean, it’s hard to walk the streets without wading through frequent pockets of micro-pollution: the number of people smoking cigarettes, or vaping, is astonishing. Hold your breath! Vaping seems especially pervasive.
• Although many neighborhoods are pretty, the busy streets and sidewalks are littered with trash. Some of the train and Tube stations are rather dingy. This trashiness seems especially surprising in the touristy areas, where one presumes the city is putting its best foot forward. Similarly, graffiti is common.
• Sadly, one encounters many unhoused people, especially around Tube stations. Very sad situation.

The photo gallery includes a (rather random) assortment of photos from our first weeks in London (all of September, and the first two weeks of October). You’ll see photos of our flat, of Imperial, a few famous sights around London and Greenwich, and assorted curiosities seen on the street. I’ll soon post about my first trips outside London, for hikes in the countryside.