By SARAH LYALL
Published: April 20, 2008
Correction Appended
THERE are many different Londons, and they appeal to people with many different passions: museum lovers, theatergoers, opera buffs, devotees of royalty, students of history, people who like to walk in the rain. But richest of all, perhaps, is the London for book lovers.
Because the city is the star and the backdrop of so much great literature, it is possible to believe you know it intimately — how it looks, how it feels — without ever leaving your home country, or indeed your home. But it is better to visit, if only for the joy of seeing the landscape of your imagination come to life. How thrilling to happen upon Pudding Lane, where a bakery mishap led to the Great Fire of 1666, after reading Pepys’s account in his diaries. Or to wander along Baker Street, where Sherlock Holmes once fictionally solved the unsolvable. Walk across London Bridge and gaze down, toward Southwark Bridge: this is the stretch of the Thames where Dickens’s sinister characters dredged up corpses in “Our Mutual Friend.”
The city is not so foggy as it was in 1952, when Margery Allingham published “The Tiger in the Smoke,” or as socially stratified as it when Marianne Dashwood waited in “Sense afnd Sensibility” for a suitor who never called; or as greedy as it was in the thrusting 1980s of Martin Amis’s “Money.” But it is all of those Londons, an accrual of different descriptions and eras. It is a city made for description — reread the first passages of “Bleak House,” also on the subject of fog, for a moody introduction — and one that so reveres its authors that it buried a number of the best ones in style, in Westminster Abbey.
There are plenty of organized literary-themed excursions around the city, easily found on the Internet. Or you can ramble idiosyncratically on your own, which is more fun. If you take the Tube or the bus, make sure to carry a book.
Friday
6 p.m.
1) WILDE NIGHTS
Check into the Cadogan Hotel (75 Sloane Street SW1; 44-207-235-7141; www.cadogan.com), where Oscar Wilde was arrested and charged with “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” in 1895 over his liaison with young Lord Alfred Douglas. Elegant, quiet and also a favorite spot of the actress Lillie Langtry, the hotel is in the heart of Knightsbridge, where there is plenty of shopping to leaven even the most serious intellectual pursuit. Poems to read at the bar: John Betjeman’s “Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel,” which dramatically lays out the scene, and Wilde’s heartbreaking work “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” written after he served the prison sentence that broke and ultimately killed him. A double room is £295, or $581 at $2.01 to the pound.
8 p.m.
2) ELEMENTARY, DEAR HOLMES
The Sherlock Holmes pub (10-11 Northumberland Street WC2; 44-207-930-2644; www.sherlockholmespub.com) may be slightly kitschy, but it has an authentically musty-without-being-dingy ambience, enthusiastic service and generous portions of traditional pub food. Enjoy dishes with names plucked from the works of Holmes’s creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — “The Sign of Four,” for instance, signifies the soup of the day, while “Hounds of the Baskerville” refers to toad in the hole, or sausages in Yorkshire pudding — in an upstairs dining room decorated with pictures of the masterful fictional detective. A three-course meal for two is about £46. The pièce de résistance is a meticulously reconstructed study decorated à la Holmes. It looks as if he has just stepped out for a second, laying down his cup of tea and his violin.
Saturday
10 a.m.
3) LAZY MORNINGS
Have breakfast in bed while reading Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” an exuberant hymn to a vibrantly multiracial modern-day London. Or, if you’re motivated, head to the fifth-floor cafe at Harvey Nichols (109-125 Knightsbridge SW1; 44-207-235-5250; www.harveynichols.com) for eggs Benedict and interesting hot chocolate (£12.50).
Noon
4) BOOKS FOR ALL SEASONS
Authors wailed and gnashed their teeth when the history-laden old British Library Reading Room was uprooted from the British Museum and plunked down in a modern brick building on a busy road near St. Pancras and King’s Cross railroad stations (96 Euston Road NW1; 44-870-444-1500). But what the library might lack in atmosphere it more than makes up with the Sir John Ritblat Gallery, where some of the greatest treasures of the written word in fiction and nonfiction are exhibited.
The collection includes much-scribbled-on first drafts of works by authors like James Joyce, and treasures like a 600-or-so-years-old manuscript of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” one of the first illustrated works of literature in the English language. There is also an original copy of Magna Carta, one of four in existence; the crumpled piece of paper on which John Lennon scrawled the first lyrics to the song “Help” (here you learn that the line “I do appreciate your being ‘round” was first written as “I would appreciate your being ‘round”); and the 11th-century will of Aethelstan the Atheling, son of Aethelred the Unready. (He left his worldly goods to, among other people, his friends Aethelweard the Stammerer and Godwine the Driveller.)
3 p.m.
5) A LEXICOGRAPHER’S DELIGHT
As you walk around, you can spot all the blue plaques telling you which writer lived where (there were William Makepeace Thackeray, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, for instance, all living at some point in west London). For a peek inside a writer’s home, go to Dr. Johnson’s house (17 Gough Square EC4; 44-207-353-3745; www.drjohnsonshouse.org), a little gem of a place tucked in a quiet spot near to, but worlds away from, the bustle of Fleet Street. Here Samuel Johnson, critic, essayist and aphorist, worked in the mid-1700s on his famous English dictionary — an effort, he explained in his comma-heavy introduction, to regularize a language that had been “hitherto neglected, suffered to spread, under the direction of chance, into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation.”
How Johnson went about such an imposing undertaking is explained in easy-to-digest room-by-room exhibits, culminating in the attic, where a team of clerks sorted through potential words and their sharp, opinionated meanings. Visitors are allowed to leaf through one of the original dictionaries, published in two volumes in 1755, and find for themselves Johnson’s wry definition of a lexicographer as a “harmless drudge.” (Further investigation shows the truth in the story that Johnson really did define oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.”)
5 p.m.
6) A WALK OF ONE’S OWN
In Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the well-heeled heroine takes a long, contemplative walk through central London, pondering everything from flowers to life itself. Follow along and take in the changing of the seasons — you can tell what time of year it is not only by the blossoms (or lack of them) on the trees in St. James’s Park, but also by the migratory ducks, and the number of ducklings, on hand at any time. Bring a book — maybe “The Hours,” Michael Cunningham’s reinterpretation of the novel — to read quietly on a bench in the park, near the pelicans.
8 p.m.
7) VANITY FAIR
Treat yourself to dinner at the Wolseley (160 Piccadilly W1; 44-207-499-6996; www.thewolseley.com), a glamorous restaurant near the Ritz Hotel beloved by more social members of the London literati. Housed in a large, high-ceilinged space whose previous incarnations include a bank and car showroom, the restaurant has been meticulously refitted to evoke a sophisticated old-word Viennese cafe. The layout gives a feeling of tête-à-tête intimacy while also providing lots of people-watching opportunities. The menu is impeccable — leave room for the rich, beautiful desserts — and its old-fashioned tenor perfectly suits the setting. A three-course dinner is £50 to £100. Alert diners might well catch a glimpse of, among others, the authors Lady Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter.
Sunday
10 a.m.
8) ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE
Go south to Shakespeare’s Globe (22 New Globe Walk SE1; 44-207-902-1400; www.shakespeares-globe.org), a loving reconstruction of a real-life Elizabethan theater. The season runs only during the warmer months, but the theater houses a permanent exhibition devoted to the playwright’s life and times that includes a rotating case of archival material, like the famous will in which “Shakespeare” was spelled three different ways, leaving to posterity a permanent spelling conundrum.
12:30 p.m.
9) ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL
It’s only a short walk to lunch at the George Inn (77 Borough High Street; 44-207-407-2056) a 17th-century coaching inn that is now the only galleried pub — meaning that it has balconies — left in the city. The menu is modern; the ambience is noisy in the downstairs bar, and quieter in the upstairs dining room. Dinner for two is about £45. It’s hard to resist the urge to stand on one of the balconies and shout things — lines from “Romeo and Juliet,” perhaps? — at the people below. Dickens was an enthusiastic patron of the George and mentions it in “Little Dorrit,” which would be a fine choice of reading material, either to read to yourself or aloud to your companion over lunch.
THE BASICS
A number of airlines, including American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and British Airways, fly nonstop between Kennedy or Newark airports and London’s two main international hubs, Heathrow and Gatwick. Fares for travel in late May were around $580 in a recent Internet search.
Express trains run from both airports to the center of town. The Heathrow Express to Paddington is £14.50, or $28.70 at $2.01 to the pound, and from Gatwick to Victoria it’s £16.90. A nonexpress train from Gatwick to Victoria is £8.90, and the Underground from Heathrow is £5.
London is expensive, and one way to save money is to use taxis sparingly. A cab from Heathrow to the city, for example, is between £45 and £70, and from Gatwick, it’s about £85.
If it is not raining, try to walk as much as you can — wear comfortable shoes and invest in a London A-Z map to help navigate the complicated layout. Or else take the Tube. Buy an Oyster Card for discounted fares.
Correction: April 27, 2008
The 36 Hours column last Sunday about London misidentified the member of the Beatles who scrawled on a piece of paper the first lyrics to the song “Help!,” part of the collection at the British Library Reading Room. It was John Lennon, not Paul McCartney. The column also misstated the years during which Samuel Johnson worked on his famous English dictionary. It was published in 1755; he did not work on it in the mid-1800s.
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