oursin | 100 London things: 68 (Reply)

Before I lived in London, my jumping-off point for the Big City was usually Charing Cross Station (in the days before it looked, from across the river, like a gigantic jukebox) - Charing Cross is, not entirely intuitively, the Centre of London for a number of purposes.

Just to complicate matters, that was when Embankment (Tube) Station was called Charing Cross, and the other two stations close by, one at least with an entrance inside the mainline station, were Strand and Trafalgar Square. (I suspect that Charing Cross Tube Station, with its habit of debouching one in places one did not expect, e.g. completely outside the station altogether, and across the road, and its general convolutions, formed the basic pattern for the Tube Station in My Dreams.)

So there was a time when that was the small bit of London I was reasonably familiar with.

O my Lyons Corner House long ago!

And Villiers Street. Where there used to be, on the corner opposite the tube station, an absolutely wonderful small bookshop full of all sorts of unexpected (new) books, where I liked to linger if I had wait for the next train.

There is also Gordon's Wine Bar, the Oldest Wine Bar in London, in the crepuscular subterranean depths of which I have at least once been (and is somewhere else that features in that London interiors book I got partner for Christmas).

The street still has a fair quotient of chain restaurants and coffee shops, but no longer the Golden Egg where I remember eating in my youth.