Walthamstow: https://goo.gl/maps/vnT7U85WHH82
About 45 minutes by double-decker bus northeast of London is the village of Walthamstow. Getting there from Gatwick was quite a slog dragging 30 kilos of not-very-many personal belongings, all that you thought necessary to start a new life. That's 66 pounds, which unless you practice a lot, or have wheels on your luggage, is a great deal of weight to carry. Alas, I did not have wheels or practice, a mistake I shall not repeat. My friend had a nice EMS backpack.
It is actually two villages: quaint "old" Walthamstow, whose main street is Orford Road, and the new more modern center of town, about a 10 minute walk westward.
We stayed in Connaught Court, which used to be the town hall on the main street of old Walthamstow, and is now a set of apartments: in front, up top, it has a dark, square, shingled third-story turret with a small fence around the peak that would be appropriate on an old haunted house. Behind that, there are two stories of apartments arranged around a gated square courtyard that you can imagine people riding horses into, cloppity-cloppity-clop, where a groom, probably named Freddie, would hold the reigns while you dismounted, and then walk it off for a good brushing and some oats.
Arriving in 'old' Walthamstow, we were early for AirBnB check-in, and stopped at the pub across the street, called ...the Village Pub. The street 150 yards long consisted of a few residences like ours, and row of shops with residences above, all except ours two-story buildings: 3 pubs, a deli/bakery, a wine store, a small supermarket, 4-5 restaurants/eateries, a sausage store (OMG A SAUSAGE STORE) called the East London Sausage Co., an art gallery, a few package/bodega-like stores (OFF LICENSE... meaning, they have a license to sell you liquor you can take off premises,) and the Queens Arms pub. Apparently, "The Queen's Arms" is an extraordinarily popular name for pubs in the UK. A local street market on Saturdays had many marvelous things, including cheese. a lot of cheese.
We had snacks of "Houmous" and shrimp scampi at the bar, and a couple of decent pints served by a surly Eastern European who seemed pretty annoyed at having to pour beer. Our not-very-modest pile of bags were widely ignored by the locals, as were we. We went and checked in with our host across the street, a charming, willowy 30-ish redhead. We returned only once to the Village Pub, the evening we got Bobbed.
In the event, a few nights later in for a pint of something different than at The Queen's Arms, and oblivious to Rory-the-bartender's urgent warning look, I asked the fellow to my left, Bob, what he thought of the Brexit. I know the words he replied with were technically English, although, a foreshortened, non-rhotic, h-less, T-glottaled, metaphor-filled, alveolar stopless version of English that left it quite a puzzle. Eventually, I think probably that he didn't hold with this whole EU thing, had some troubles getting his pension from the government after a lot of years of service, and there were troubles with the wife.
The Rory-the-bartender rolled his eyes every few minutes.
Bob talked on.
My friend and I exchanged a look about 10 minutes in... no way to get a word in edgewise. Not a chance. We managed to escape politely deep into the teens, or was it more, thanks to a brief opening made by the compassionate Rory. As we hit the street, we heard Bob continuing his curiously dialectic discourse.
The rest of our pubbing occurring at the Queens Arms, where we became regulars, partly because we took the time to learn every staff member's name, and partly because we went there most days for 2 weeks for a pint, or on a few occasions, dinner, and mostly because they had lots of really great beer that was quite cheaper than elsewhere, usually £3, though we got a feeling that we were getting a 'local's price' or maybe a 'not an annoying pain' price of £4,30... our budget was pretty tight. It was clean; lots of parents and children from 4-6 pm, and a good place to stop at on the way home from the bus station after a day of walkabout.
Double-decker buses are fantastic. For one pound fifty (no cash, only your Oyster card please, and keep it topped up,) you can cross all of London in any direction in about two-and-a-half hours. You can sit upstairs in the front with your camera, watching people and bicycles dodging out of the way, a wide variety of ethnic people going about their London day, buildings, neighborhoods, every shop in every town center; you can take different buses with different routes to see different towns along the way, thus expanding your mental map of London, and if you are going to spend a month there, you need a mental map.
Every bus trip in London on a double decker is more than a little like that bus trip at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - the Knight Bus scene. How they turn that large tall vehicle around those sharp corners and hairpin turns, along narrow streets fitting only one bus in one direction at a time, and manage not to destroy people and the bus over the frequent speed bumps, while missing bicycles, other buses, trees, signs, roadside fences, posts, and cars by a very few inches, is more than a bit magical. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FArmRa092H0
Walthamstow 'downtown' has a bus/rail/Tube station. I like the tube, or trains of any sort for that matter, such a pleasant and efficient means of travel. If only all the trains leading out of London weren't such a decentralized, expensive mess. Downtown also has a long outdoor mall, the longest in much of London, which I was assured wasn't nearly as long nowadays, that ran for about 1500 feet.
On the street were many of those blue-tarp tents you see at outdoor markets, hosted by a largely Muslim population: underneath the tents were greenmarket things: fruits and vegetables, a few of them strange and new even to me; clothing; two men who had baskets of every kind of power cable, adapter and charger you could imagine; a wide selection of luggage; household amenities like toothbrushes paste band aids; clothing; cell phone accessories; a few food carts; and other miscellany.
Arrayed in shops behind and in gaps between the tents on the wide walkway are many many shops: banks, cell phone stores, Caribbean/Pakistani/Indonesian specialty food markets, fabric shops, five butchers (four halal, one crowded British, with lots of amazingly priced Scottish beef in oddly-named cuts), two fishmongers, a couple of pubs and countless and diverse small, inexpensive ethnic restaurants. You wonder how they all stay in business.
Days were spent catching the bus or Tube into Central London to engage in the activities outlined in the prior London story. Evenings were spent cooking (pasta, oatmeal), reading, or at the pub: my friend did some Tindering and went out a few times, eventually running off in late December, as our trip wrapped up, with a chef from Plymouth.
Often I'd go across to the (OMG) East London Sausage Co. and look at the 16-or-so kinds of sausage arrayed, with a dreamy trance-like look on my face that annoyed the proprietor; staring at the streaky bacon, a few steaks, shanks, lamb, chicken, eggs... and get some inexpensive garlic or Toulouse or Old Spot or venison sausage from the gruff butcher. With this in hand, and a proper, fist-sized onion, I'd make bangers and mash for us for dinner, along with some Swiss chard, or, surprise surprise, brussels sprout greens, which seemed to come with every order bangers and mash, anywhere. A lot like collard greens, not as soul-destroying as kale.
Lots of exercise walking about, lots of areas of London learned, didn't get to some places I wanted to, namely Trafalgar Square and the Naval Observatory at Greenwich. I did have several very good savory pies. I look forward to returning.
It was nice to be living in an active village, clean, middle class. I could imagine moving there... actually yes, I did imagine moving there.
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