But it’s not one that a Jack Tar would recognise. Instead of oakham, gunpowder smoke, tobacco and rum, I can smell oak polish, high-end perfume, old wood, and new money. It’s a curious blend, like Chanel No.5 dabbed behind the ears of Admiral Nelson. Continue reading The Liberty Timbers
The glass blade of The Shard glitters above me, slicing into a flawless July sky. From street level, its steel ribs and glass facets look impossibly steep, tapering into a vanishing point so sharp it could pierce flesh. I pause beneath its mirrored flank, framed by the leaves of a London plane tree, and feel the familiar Southwark hum: the rattle of trains, the cries from Borough Market, the old bones of the city pressed up against this gleaming newcomer. Continue reading The Shard
And everywhere, there’s the sense that this is its own place: not just a neighbourhood of London, but a village that happens to have been swallowed up by the city. Notting Hill doesn’t feel like part of the capital. It feels like a walled garden. A stage set. A place apart. Continue reading The London Village
As the line stretched its limbs beneath London, it became a canvas for the city’s evolving narrative. Waterloo Station. Mid-morning, … Continue reading The Bakerloo Line
In my imagination, I can see two worlds: the Victorian and the digital rendered at once in black and white and shimmering colour. Digital screens displaying departure times and advertisements flash alongside the 19th-century ironwork and tiling. Amid the 21st-century hustle, echoes of the Victorian era subtly reveal themselves in the characters around me. The man in the smart suit, intently checking his iPhone, could be a Dickensian bookkeeper hurrying to his cellar-room counting house behind a wooden door with a rattle in its throat. Continue reading In the Hall of the Railway King
Here, in the cathedral’s shadow, I am still enveloped in its hallowed calm, a secular pilgrim at the gates of history. In this pause between the old stones and the sky-reaching Shard, it seems as though the burden of the present is perfectly balanced by the gravity of the past. I am standing at a crossroads in time, the very air around me saturated with a sacred stillness. Here, in the shadow of spires, I discover a sanctuary in the stone and stories, a threshold to the new Jerusalem. Continue reading The New Jerusalem
In their song Jack in the Green, Jethro Tull uses the folklore figure of The Green Man to explore the way the natural world holds sway over the artificial urban world. Jack-in-the-Green is a symbol of nature’s enduring spirit, a guardian of the green amid the grey. He’s the slightly mischievous, unseen force who taps his cane upon the ground, awakening life in the most unexpected places. The fox, the ivy, the dandelions, they’re all part of Jack’s work, his quiet rebellion against the urban sprawl. Continue reading Jack-in-the-Green
London is a living entity where new buildings rise, adding to the skyline, yet the historic heart of London remains. The city honours its past while boldly embracing the future, a testament to human endurance and creativity. Continue reading The Gordian Knot
Our Elizabeth Line train, now at rest, seems to pause and take a breath. Our journey from Heathrow to Paddington has conveyed us from the viridian whispers of London’s periphery to the beating heart of its centre along a seamless conduit through time and space. And here in the Hall of the Railway King, our adventures begin. Continue reading The Elizabeth Line
Tuesday morning on Carnaby Street. The early rain has cleared leaving a bright sky draped with torn remnants of cloud. Puddles gleam in the gutters, sending up effervescent vapour as the sun warms the asphalt and concrete. Reflections shimmer in the pools along the sidewalk: shopfronts and buildings bent and moulded into convex shapes and concave contours. Continue reading Sympathy For The Devil
TravelWriterLife 