Books By C. LItka

Books By C. LItka

Friday, February 10, 2023

Exploring London From Home

 


The future has proven to be something of a mixed bag for me. Still no Jetson style flying cars, and, to be perfectly honest, I’m getting a little discouraged about that. I’m beginning to think that I may not live long enough to own a flying car. On the other hand, we have the internet, and YouTube. YouTube allows me to travel without leaving my house, which is the way I like to travel these days. 


A west end residential street

As I have posted several times before on this blog, I’ve been traveling all across Europe in the cabs of trains for the last three or more years, thanks to the train drivers who record their trips and post them on YouTube. This winter I’m only spending half an hour pedaling my bike on a stand in the house and virtually riding the rails as I do so, so I am rather slowly making my way around the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal, so it may take me most of the winter to travel all the routes I can find through those countries.


A small town center absorbed into Greater London

However, I have found a new place to explore, in a new, virtual, way. London. And from the upper deck front seat of London’s iconic double decker buses. It seems that people take videos of their trips across London on its hundreds of bus routes and post them on YouTube. So far I am riding along with only one of these passengers, whose channel is called Wanderizm. You can find their videos here:

https://www.youtube.com/@Wanderizm/videos

Wanderizm also post videos of walks through various neighborhoods of London as well, if you want something more relaxing and detailed. There are other people posting bus ride videos as well, but Wanderizm posts a map of the bus route at the beginning of each video, and I am recording the routes I’ve ridden, as I do for my train rides, on a Frankensteinian map of London that I have pieced together from several dozen screen shots of Google Maps at a scale that at least shows every street. This has been a project of its own, but I have finally gotten a system down to keep the scale more or less consistant. Below is a photo of my map, with the routes I've taken in yellow.


Part of my Frankenstein map of Greater London, Routes I've ridden on so far are in yellow.

There are resources on the web that I think I could use to trace the routes that other such YouTubers post, even if they don't post maps, but for now, I’m sticking with Wanderizm until I’ve seen all of his. 

It is important to note that while you can place yourself on any street in London using Google's Street View, moving pictures are at least ten times more immersive than any still photo. The scene becomes truly alive since you can both see everything and everyone moving about, and hear the world you are traveling through. 


Dusk looking south to London from the surrounding hills.

As for London. Well, it’s been half a century since I was in London, and it has changed, like everything else. And it has changed a lot. Almost all of its many high-rise buildings have been built since I was there, and there are lots of high rise buildings these days in ol'London Town. I'm glad I visited it before they became so prevalent. And that I was also able to see a bit of "Dock Land" while it was still docks, and not high rise apartment buildings and such. 

On the other hand, much of it hasn’t changed much at all. There's still a lot of the old city wherever you go. And well, my bus trips have already taken me to so many parts of London that I never experienced when I was there, that every trip is an interesting adventure. I haven’t lived in a big city since Chicago in the early 1970’s, so big city life is a new experience for me. I am amazed at the thousands of small shops you find everywhere in the city, And of course, all those long streets lined with row house, grand, and modest, with long rows of "semi-detached" houses that were built in London's suburbs, as well as all the little town centers that have now been absorbed into Greater London in the last century. What is striking is the English fondness for trees and hedges in even the heart of London residential areas. 

The bus trips take you through rich areas, the poor areas, And you see people from all around the world and the old British Empire. And the fact that you rarely hear English being spoken on the buses. 

I like seeing where people live. I never bothered with museums, castles, and cathedrals when I was traveling about Britain 50 years ago, and it is the residential neigborhoods rather than the familiar hear of London that interest me today as well. So many places to explore…


Not the London I knew 50 years ago...

As for bus travel, well, it’s a whole lot more exciting than train travel. Even stressful. You have cars, cycles and scooters, bikes, lorries, and other buses navigating often very crowded and narrow streets. From the front of the bus, you can observe this often awkward dance of vehicles with a somewhat restricted view due to your position on the bus and the fact that it is being shot with a slight zoom lens, that has you just scraping by a stoplight when the bus makes its wide turn and hides cars and bikes in front of the bus. Plus, you can get stuck in traffic jams that can be annoying, even as a passenger. (Though you can skip ahead or view videos at 2X speed. Just saying.) All in all, a very different kind of travel from the hyper-controlled travel by train, but there’s something new every few seconds, unless you’re stuck in traffic. You can also play games like counting the number of KFC, McDonald’s, Dominoes, Subways or Starbucks you encounter on your trip. All in all, an interesting way to kill time, if you happen to have time that needs to be killed.


A city of shops



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