Whilst living here I’ve made it my business to walk as much as possible. And when I say ‘made it my business’, I mean that I’m too poor to take the bus.
However, this is no bad thing as walking makes deviations possible, and deviations in London are a pleasure. To clean up one of idiot savant Karl Pilkington’s meandering theories, getting lost can be a great adventure of discovery.
Balham High Street, early 1900s. The tram obscures Starbucks
In a city as densely populated as London there are interesting little nooks everywhere – each neighbourhood has its own world of curiosa, with independently-run shops that cleanse the consumer palate after a life of getting worn down by stodgy chain-run stores and restaurants.
Without getting lost you might never find these bazaars, and the excitement of being lost in the city is unlike the bored frustration of getting stuck on some maze-like new-build estate in the middle of Aldershot; there’s the potential of finding a cool little bistro or boutique, rather than being gang eye-raped by curtain-twitching locals who fear outsiders and only trust their hairdresser and the Daily Mail.
In my area, Balham, there are book, charity and coffee shops off the main high street that are great to stumble upon and file in your brain under ‘worth regular visits’. The best thing about them is that you don’t go to them for anything in particular, unlike when you visit HMV, H&M or Ikea. If you wanted a certain best-seller from my local ramshackle book shop, you would need to have some kind of literary divining rod to find it – the store having eschewed the Dewey Decimal System for more of an ‘IED gone off’ organisational ethos. Instead, you are taking a chance – it’s an adventure.
Charity Shops: yet to grasp fundamentals of shop-front displays
Charity shops are the best exemplar of this. No one goes into one for anything specific, as by their very nature they are a random patchwork of the surrounding population’s unwanted clutter (in fact, this makes them a rather nice litmus test for the area – you could lead me blindfolded into any charity shop in the world and I could get a fair idea of where I was just from the amount of shoulder-padded blouses in the place. In Balham, for example, there are more pairs of Armani jeans on the racks than, say, Mecca).
However, despite the randomness, you might go in looking for ‘a book’ or ‘a shirt’, before hunting through the racks and shelves for a lovely surprise. Invariably, you’ll find one and, as you pull on some moneyed banker’s ill-gotten jeans, you realise that it’s the one time the trickle-down effect of wealth actually bears any tangible fruit.
