The East End to Highgate

When both rain and wind are missing from a January day in London, it's definitely a good reason to spend time outside--which is exactly what we did on this sunny Sunday. Our first stop was a return to Brick Lane, this time during official market hours. We saw a beautiful chest of drawers at a shop cutely titled The Furniture Café, but for the high price they were asking, we kept walking. Actually, there was no shortage of coffee at the market, as many shops offered it, usually in conjunction with another unrelated product (furniture, books on film and design, clothing), but coffee wasn't what we were after today! We wanted to make a return visit to Beigel Bake, this time to try the famed salt-beef and mustard bagels, and we weren't disappointed. I got to see people making bagels in the back (the proper way, I might add--boiling them first and then baking them to get that glorious chewy texture), we stood outside the shop eating our delicious bagels, and we even got a half-dozen bagels to take home.

After Brick Lane, we headed over to Spitalfields Market, one of my favourite London markets, always crowded and full of a wonderful variety of new and used merchandise, much of it made or reworked by creative young designers. There's also a tempting variety of food (which we didn't need today, after our Brick Lane yumminess) and a lot of great people-watching to be had. But we didn't stay long, because along with our return visit to Brick Lane, we wanted to go back to Highgate, this time for the 1:45 P.M. walk put on by London Walks. Our guide, Tom, did a lovely job of balancing history, humour, and asides to make sure it was two hours well-spent. Here he is (in the leather jacket):

The view from Highgate is lovely, especially on a clear day like today: This row of twelve old almshouses, previously allocated for single mothers, has been converted into six flats, with two doors per flat:Coleridge lived in Highgate,

right next door to a house now owned by Sting:

How's that for spanning a range of trivia? We also walked by an exclusive Highgate school, at which T.S. Eliot was once a teacher, and where the current annual fees for one child are around £25,000.
One house we saw was unlike any we've seen in London:
and Tom told us that the owners couldn't get permission to tear the existing house down, since it is within the Highgate Village Conservation Area, so the architects just built up the new house around the existing house. Apparently the owners are not keen on people like me snapping photos through the gates, and planted the fast-growing birch trees in front of the house to provide privacy. Oops! And double oops, since I fell behind to take pics of this house and realized that Tom was waiting for me to catch up. "Come on, Vancouver!" he yelled with a smirk on his face, as everyone watched me run toward the group. Continuing on our walk, I enjoyed the simple options presented by this road sign: It was a perfect day for wandering around under the blue skies,
and playing a bit of that Sesame Street game, "One of these things just doesn't belong," although I suppose that this particular view does fit into the reality of London in 2007: