London: A Geographical Recap.

I had a long day at "The Church" which I'll blog some other time about because I just had an idea.

I'm just going to recap some geographical stuff for myself real quick, so If you follow this blog and don't feel the need to read this, don't bother. Honestly it's just a poorly written/summary rant of a lot of stuff I've already said. I'm just dumping this information out real quick so I have it, kind of like notes.


I have less than a week. My friend Kyle moved out to California, and got to drive out west and see areas of the United States I have never seen. I haven't got a chance to talk to him yet, but I saw he penned a few lines on Gerry's facebook wall about what his trip was like. Even in these few lines, I got a really good sense of it, and I decided I should do the same thing. Kyle is an aspiring writer and I was moved by just the short paragraphs he wrote, I really got a sense of it.


I have spent 11 weeks living in New Cross, London. The Street is St James, the area code is SE14 6AD...and late at night at the New Cross Inn, the locals chant "This is New Cross, this is London, SE14!" and they sing and the sound vibrates all around you and you know you are there.
The first thing symbolic of New Cross is New Cross Gate.




This is where I will start. This is a train station, similar to any other train station in the world. It looks a lot like train stations in Boston, not so much in NJ, but it's a normal train station. There is graffiti and signs that advertise British meat. One of the the things spray painted on the cement is "?!". The loudspeakers always say messages like " STEP AWAY FROM PLATFORM 5, THE APPROACHING TRAIN IS NOT SHED-UALED(get it?)TO STOP AT THIS STATION",and you watch a train whiz by. When you get on the train it lets you know what you're doing. The speaker will say, "THIS IS THE 19:20 SOUTHERN SERVICE TO, LONDON BRIDGE", or something like that. There are television screens so you can see if you are delayed. If the train is late, the voice will usually give a reason like, "THE 18:40 TRAIN TO ORPINGTON IS DELAYED BECAUSE OF LACK OF EMPLOYEES" or something literal like that.
When you walk out of the train station you are in the actual gate. You use your travel card/ or your ticket to get through. Inside there are machines where you buy tickets, or you could always buy tickets off the Jamaican guy who sells them dirt cheap like I do. This is about a 3 minute walk from my dorm.
When you leave the gate, you are in New Cross. New Cross smells like french fries and cars that have been running for a long time. It is a smell I love and have gotten used to. When I first got here, I thought all of England smelled like perfume, but the smell went away, maybe I just got used to it, or maybe it's symbolic.
If you observe the street you'll see a lot of activity. People move quickly,or they stand still. There are people standing and smoking or shouting. This is a lower class area of London, it's not the area of big Clock towers and important buildings. It looks more like Brooklyn. The street is filled with shops that sell weird electronics or sofas, or just like used crap. There is a lot of fast food. It's a big mix between college students, business men, and crazy looking bums, all shuffling around not making eye contact with each other. You can see from the street Double Decker London Buses go by, (there is a bus stop on either side), black cabs, and normal looking cars with normal looking people in them. The buildings look run down and modern, but still have something terrifically Victorian about them. They don't have that "Sir Christopher Wren" feel, but there is still something aged about the buildings, something just unamerican enough for me to notice.
If you go West you'll Head toward Elephant and Castle,and eventually make you're way over the Thames toward Waterloo and Westminster, the business district, which connects to Green Park and eventually Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus.This is whats known as "The Strand", where you would go to see like Big Ben and the Parliament Buildings, Westminster Abbey, and follow the park to Buckingham Palace, you know, all the touristy jazz.... but I'm getting ahead of myself. If you go East you'll head toward Lewisam, Deptford, Greenwich, Catford Bus Garage, southern areas, less/more interest sing areas depending on what kind of person you are. These are the areas of Curry Food and minorities.
Ok So New Cross.
Across the street from the train station you are greeted with 'THE HOBGOBLIN". This is a bar I rarely went to, but its a SPOT for college kids and live SPORT on Sundays. They actually have really good curry food too, I know because I sat at the bar by myself one day and ate it. It looks like a real homey place, like A father and his four drunk sons probably own it and they just love their lives. I hate their house beer. In the back is a huge beer garden where everyone smokes and hangs out and rages at each other during drunken college nights. I've gotten to know a few of my closest friends here at the Hobgoblin, in the beginning.

Down the street a bit on my right is my dorm. A big, ordinary looking building that says, "Goldsmiths University of London". You walk down St. James and you can see a church, which I've only been to once, and then you pass security, swipe your card and go in. If you turn around you will see the noodley,famous Goldsmiths building, that I have never been in. Next to that building is the Richard Hoggart Building, which boasts an impressive front lawn that is on all the Goldsmith's brochures. I used to dream about it sometimes before I left for England.

Most of my classes are by this area. In order to get there I have to walk through a very interesting little cottage-like area, where the houses look out of place and suspiciously like Netherlands-style housing. I have only hung out on the great lawn a couple of times.
side note, I was just thinking to myself, I wonder if I can add pictures, and sure enough, I can. Never knew I could do this in my blog. Fuck. Whatever.
Across the street over that way is all my favourite stuff. The New Cross Inn, which was my favourite pub, Goldsmith's Cafe, where you go for a solid English Breakfast and you can't understand a LICK of what the guy says, The Chinese food place Uncle Wrinkle that sucks, my Launderette place, some bad fast food like SEFA that sell donor and kebabs, and Square Pizza. All this food is essentially bad unless you're wasted.
Backtrack. So if you leave St James street from my dorm and go right back on the main road, you will see Iceland, where I did lots of poor grocery shopping. Continue up that way east toward Deptford and you'll see The Amersham Arms, my other favourite pub. Hope on a bus, I think the 179, and you're heading toward Greenwich. Greenwich is not a dump, its a cool place to be, I've blogged about it. If you to to Lewisham its alot like New Cross, just bigger and with a very American looking mall right smack in the center. I went there on Thanksgiving to buy a shirt.

New Cross is artsy as it is poor. I wouldn't mind living here trying to make it with a band. Radiohead played at this place called Venue right down the street when they were getting started, near The New Cross Inn, but the club has been turned into a freaky night club. It's got a bohemian/industrial feel. Dire Straits got started here, lots of bands did the New Cross/Deptford/Greenwich pub scene.

The sky is always gray and it always looks like it might rain, and eventually it does. To generalize, The girls who live at Goldsmiths/New Cross are not necessarily pretty, but you feel like you might want to get to know them better because they are probably really cool or have weird political beliefs. They all seem like, If I wanted to date one of them, I'd have to know a lot about movies like "Meshes of the Afternoon", they all seem really cool and look like they're hiding something. They're the kind of girls who smoke cigarettes on the break during class.

Leaving New Cross, If you take the train to London Bridge, and just get out, you are in Southwark. The main street there is Borough High Street. If you go down there you'll see one of my favourite areas. There it is BUSY. It is the most like New York. There are loads of pubs and music venues and just cool stuff. There will be lots of people with suits. The Borough Market is there which I've blogged about. If you walk west long enough you will come to the Barbican Theater which is a great place to see music and shows because everything they do is International and really worldly,and it's subsidized by the government so we can benefit from it so it is cheap. Further that way toward Waterloo you'll see the London eye, and right now all the Christmas festivals and such. It's funny because in one of my firsts blogs I wrote about how I "got lost" all day in London, well, this is exactly where I was, I can still remember what it looked like when it was unfamiliar....

If you go east you'll head towards like another bad area by the Arcola Theatre past Shoreditch, , and west you're heading toward Waterloo and Baker Street...I think.
If you walk through the market and over the cobblestone streets you will get to the Thames by the Globe. It becomes very pleasant there, cross the millennium Bridge and you are over by my favourite area in the world by the magnificent St. Paul's Cathedral. This area is more ritzy and commercial. There are important looking artsy people running around drinking coffee. The girls there look like ones on t.v. There are a lot of Starbucks and fancier looking pubs, but not clubs. The cars are nicer, it looks more like The West end of New York.
If you go down that way you're heading toward Farringdon, Shoreditch, and Islington. This is like theater world. It also has a really businessy feel to it, but, it is loaded with history. There are lots of ancient hospitals and narrow streets that survived from the Plague, you just have to look for them. There are lots of trendy night clubs and expensive places to eat too of course.
It's weird though because if you go somewhere between Farringdon and Shoreditch you hit Aldgate and Aldgate East. Over there is White Chapel Road which is like Afghanistan. Everything is in Arabic and VERY middleeastern for like a few streets, unexplained.

But anyway besides Aldgate, that is where the actors hang out. You can reconnect with Borrough High Street somewhere that way, but best to take a bus up in the other direction to Trafalgar Square so I can blog about it.
Trafalgar Square is the London that you think of. There is the national gallery and all that, museums, pubs, statues. Piccadilly is the same way, behind Piccadilly is China town, Piccadilly is like the times Square of New York, so is Oxford Circus. It's very international. They are all just, very London. Westminster is more business looking, but they have all the old architecture down there, and big Ben of the Parliament buildings of course. If you walk around Westminster for a while you'll eventually hit Victoria, where there are like "broadway" plays like Wicked and such. The equivalent to Broadway in London is actually Shaftsbury avenue, which is over there somewhere.


Those are the main areas I hung around in. I like Covent Garden but it's just like really upper class and Christmasy. You can get to Covent Garden and Leiceter Square easily on the tube from Piccadilly. I just didn't want to NOT mention it.

I've gone to Arsenal and St John's wood more north, and everything just seems really suburban, so I figure all those areas are a lot like that.

I don't really know what the point of this blog was. I just feel like I'll enjoy reading this one day.

Oh BTW, I wrote this whole thing without a map or a reference. I can't even get around Old Bridge without my GPS.

Things have changed.

Cheers
Andrew