The Overground train station at Highbury Islington is hidden in behind the Post Office and across the road from a park. Not a bad place to begin. The coffee from the little mobile coffee van is good and the park is relatively quiet. A good place to check the map and decide where to go. We decided to follow the route of the 30 bus and head southwest. A shop selling expensive shoes, another clever greeting cards and an up-market bakery mark a little pocket of gentility in amongst the relentless red, white and blue chicken shops – all of which somewhere use the word ‘American,’ ‘Southern,’ or ‘Kentucky’ at least once – and the endless betting shops. How many expensive greeting cards do you think they have to sell to stay in business? What’s the markup on those things?

From there to the Islington Town Hall which boasts not only a toilet, our real reason for visiting, but also a beautiful cupola, that produces a very calming atmosphere, important for all of those intense council meetings where the fate of ratepayers is in the balance.

From there to the shops on Essex Road. There is, it seems, a fine line between antique shop and junk shop. There is a place on Essex Road that could go either way. It depends chiefly on the value a person might place on a rusty, child-sized tractor or an old pedal dentist drill, both of which stand amidst piles of other moldy detritus that stands on the footpath as if it had been vomited from the store’s dark interior.

From there a walk through Angel past the huge stainless steel halo, the busy Tube station and a beautiful empty butcher’s shop that advertises itself as open at four AM and closed by one. From there a walk past Saddlers Wells, all quiet in the early afternoon. Perhaps the chorus for the evening’s performance are at their shop and café jobs dreaming of their big break and the principals are abed surrounded by throat preparations and atomizers. Down the hill to the Yorkshire Grey pub, a corner Victorian pile with a statue of a Hussar mounted on a horse mounted on the corner. Inside it is stripped out now in the usual ubiquitous style. imagine Rene Macintosh holding hands with Damien Hurst on a visit to IKEA.

Across the road from The Grey is an art book store filled with gloss. You know the sort of thing long-winded tomes about conceptual art and books of photographs of photographers holding up their photographs for the cameras of other photographers. We left feeling uptight and anxious about all that we do not know.

From there we walked to the Chancery Lane tube station in the shadow of one of London’s few remaining Tudor buildings. We emerged a few minutes later in Little Venice, a kind of cul-de-sac on the Regent’s Canal. Many stout and worthy Georgian buildings, one small and neatly trimmed park, some brightly colored silent narrow boats and a few swans. It is hardly the glorious, ruined, decedent spectacle that is big Venice but it is pretty enough. We walked up the canal to a little café on a bridge spanning the canal.

Then to the huge Victorian shed that is Paddington train station. To get there we had to cross the A40 which slices through north London with 6 lanes of tarmac fumes and traffic and along another canal through a business crowd freshly released from their cubicles.

From Paddington down into the bowels of the Underground to the Indian restaurants of Brick Lane where we slalomed through the eager restaurateurs desperate to steer us through the door of their particular ‘restaurant of the year.’ We dogged them all and headed for the Indian grocery where 10 kilo bags of turmeric line up with 20 liter tubs of ghee. Two French girls put us in front of their camera and asked us why we shopped there. They were filming for a French TV documentary series. An Australian shopping at an Indian supermarket in Shoreditch and presumably translated into French…

From there to the ‘Rootmaster’ a vegan restaurant inside an old Routemaster bus where we had diner with a friend. And then home one the 242 bus.

The Borough Markets for breakfast after a 40-minute trip on the 48 bus. We got to the Borough around 9:30. It was quiet. We found out later that the markets don’t get going much before noon on a Friday. Neal’s Yard Dairy was open of course so we got ourselves a couple of hunks of cheese and a loaf of sultana and walnut bread, found a sunny spot in the Southwalk Cathedral yard and had ourselves a fine breakfast. A coffee at Monmouth Coffee and we were off for a Flaneur east past Tower Bridge to the City Hall. Sitting like a glass bee-hive on the south bank of the Thames, the ramp that sweeps up through the inside of the building toward the Greater London Authority Chamber offers great views across the river toward the City, the Tower of London, the Gherkin (built, like City Hall by Foster and Partners) and St Paul’s.

From there we walked across Tower Bridge, hoping its drawbridge would open up while we were on it but as every time I have been across it, it remained firmly shut. We Flaneured from the Tower of London, with it gold weathervane on top of the White Tower glinting in the sun and its hundreds of tourists tramping the battlements, up to London Wall, the road that traces the foundations of the old Roman Wall built around Londium (the Roman name for London). On the way we visited St Olav’s church, frequented by Samuel Pepys and Ledenhall Markets, once a meat and cheese wholesale market now beautifully restored and filled with up market chain stores. It was lunchtime. It was Friday and the place was filled with pink-shirted, pinstripe-suited ‘blokes’ taking the long lunch.

West along London Wall got us the Museum of London with its display of the Great Fire and it’s fine Roman artifacts. From there it was west again in the general direction of Lincoln’s Inn Field where, in the grand British tradition, the lawns and the beautiful old trees are fenced off. Only the squirrels and small dogs get to sniff around the spring daisies coming up through the lawn. We stopped at the Seven Stars pub off Chancery Lane, behind the Royal Courts of Justice for a pint and leant against its 400 year old walls. It was one of the few local buildings to survive the Great Fire.

From there a short walk to Covent Gardens and Paul Patisserie for some chocolate tart to take home for tea and then, via the miscalculation of going completely the wrong way at Seven Dial, we caught the bus home.

Today we started at Kings Cross Station where we dropped an Australian friend for her train to Yorkshire. We wandered through the newly refurbished St Pancras Station next door and stood in front  Midland Great Hotel that is the front facade of the station. It always looks like something that Walt Disney might have designed if he was a Victorian eccentric over fond of opium.

Next door to the station is the squat and dull British Library. In the shadow of the Midland it looks like a Seventies shopping center. It’s better inside and not just because it houses the Lindisfarne Gospels and the lyrics of ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, scribbled on the back of an envelope by John Lennon. It is a big open space with lots of places to sit and think and learn

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From there we headed west and within a few streets found ourselves at Euston Station. Why is it that there are three major stations within a few yards of each other? Euston was badly damaged in the war and in the 60s was replaced by the usual black and white tiled, low ceilinged grim modernist toilet block. It is about as welcoming as a bus station locker. The wind was cold and it started to rain as we stood in the bleak courtyard. I thought we were on the set of The Bill. And we might have been.

Heading west again we wandered through some streets of nondescript office blocks and found Regent’s Park, one of the great royal parks, where we saw wedding parties waiting for the wind to drop so their photographers could corral them together to immortalize their clothes.

Through the park and we were on Baker Street where loitered a man in a deer-stalker hat with an unlit meerschaum pipe. He was wearing a pair of jeans and sneakers and standing in front of Sherlock Holmes’ ‘House,’ with a sign offering Sherlock Holmes tours…  We took a left into Baker St tube station. Inside we thought we had gone back maybe not a hundred years but at least 60 years. The station looks like it has not changed since the war. I expected to hear the muffled reports of guns and the sounds of a hundred people lying in long rows in the gloom. But there were only comuters, like us, glad to be out of the cold wind and heading for home.

Late morning. Kensington Gardens. A picnic. In front of us, Kensington Palace, where Princess Di used to live. Behind us, half a mile a way, is Hyde Park corner where the motivated and the mad will tomorrow be filling their lungs with cold air and offering the milling crowds the benefit of their obsessions. Half a kilometer to the west is Whole Foods, the gourmet and organic food supermarket and playground for anyone who loves to eat. We started at Whole Food and grabbed some good bread, some wonderful 5 year-old Gouda a salad and a bottle of wine. Some chocolate brownies too but they weren’t a patch on the other things. Rain was threatening so we found a shelter and ate looking toward Kensington Palace. I wondered if the royals ever looked at this little old shelter and wondered what it might have been like to just sit here unnoticed. The rain started and our shelter filled with sudden, sodden companions who dispersed when the sun shone again.

After our lunch we walked through the gardens and down to a coffee shop off the High Street, surrounded by BMWs and Mercs. We wandered through the back streets of Kensington where the gardeners were out in force and the windows were all huge and sparkling and into Holland Park where the tulips are colour-coded.

From there to the train station and the train to Camden Markets. Camden, with its goths and punks and unbelievable tourist crap has another side. The Stables Markets and the Horse Hospital markets are filled with vintage clothing. Rows and rows of cheap second-hand leather jackets. And cheap food too. From there we flaneured Camden a bit and then the train home.