Campervan Therapy

We always think of major cities as pocket heavy destinations. Euston Road bucks the trend. First there’s Gothic St. Pancras Station and hotel, which takes opulence to its extreme and is great for a drink, or to take in the poet, John Betjeman’s statue, or the giant soldier kissing his partner farewell.  

Free entry takes us into the British Library’s Treasures Gallery, where we’re mesmerised by original Beatles’ penned lyrics and Shakespeare manuscripts.

The earliest Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, Jewish and Christian texts are beautiful with their gilded illustrations. It’s a place to read original letters from political voices as well as artistic and literary ones.

Across Euston Road, we sashay into the free entry Wellcome Institute. Apart from the permanent galleries, each month hosts a new exhibition. This month’s exhibition of cartoon characters and giant, multicoloured sculptures is testament to the resilience and courage of a young man, Jason Wilsher-Mills who spent years in hospital due to an autoimmune condition that paralysed him from the neck down. It was in hospital school he learnt how to paint with his mouth, unleashing his creativity, and this installation is the result.

In the Environment Gallery, I’m transfixed by the digital animation White by Danielle Dean. It takes us on a journey through the Taranaki forest in New Zealand before and after it was colonised by British settlers who cleared much of it for dairy farming. As the temperate rainforest and bird calls fade out the screen is filled with white fog, inviting us to consider the effects of colonialism on ‘human-made climate change’. But it’s not a bleak installation, the film loops so that leaf by leaf, tree by tree, the forest returns until the soundscape is full of bird cries again.

A hop and a skip takes us to Euston Station and the Northern Line to Tottenham Court Road where we pick up the Elizabeth Line again, which drops us at Paddington’s Bizzarro Restaurant. This is a nostalgic trip for me, taking me back to the unpretentious Italian restaurants of my twenties. The food is solidly authentic, the whole place oozes La Dolce Vita, not forgetting it serves my favourite dish, which seems to have gone out of fashion in many a London Italian restaurant these days – Crespelle alla Ricotta. Even thinking about those pancakes now, stuffed as they are with ricotta and spinach, nestled in bechamel and tomato sauce has me in such rapture I’m in danger of turning into a florid food writer.

It’s our last night on our three-day break to trace the Elizabeth Line, which of course has unfolded in our usual ramshackle fashion. We’re astounded at how much this east-west bullet of a tube train has allowed us to pack in to three days. London never rests.

We’re amazed at it all: from bustling street food markets to independent bookshops; art galleries to literary treasures; museums to street art. London’s powers of reinvention and creativity are there in the steel and glass high-rises cosying up to gracious old houses and sky-line gardens. We’ve discovered a mere fraction of the city’s secrets – so this is only the start of many weekend trips back to our childhood home.