UNBELIEVABLE! Our dollar has wilted against the British pound, recently crossing the once-mythical two-to-one barrier, where it currently hovers. Never an affordable prospect, a journey to
London – one of New York’s favorite getaways – just got a whole lot more expensive. Today, a one-way subway ride in London is a whopping $8.
A typical espresso drink at Starbucks? That’ll be $7, please (and you thought it was overpriced at home.)
Fortunately, the exchange rate hasn’t affected all the free fun you can have. London isn’t New York – It has a long history of edifying less fortunate ragamuffins. This means that there’s still lots to do without paying anything. Here, twenty distinctly London pleasures for the price of, well, nothing.
WALK ALONG THE CANAL Think of Regent’s Canal as London’s High Line. The historic waterway, threading past the pubs and upscale lofts of Paddington, Camden Town, and Islington, has been a world of its own since 1820. The old towpath is your welcome mat.
DAYLIGHT AT THE OASIS The ideal break from Oxford Street’s crush, The Wallace Collection is a great escape in the heart of Marylebone, a former mansion crammed with the kind of art the National Gallery would love to get its hands on – the result of a finery-hoarding family with a smart shopping sense. The museum’s Cafe Bagatelle, in the stone courtyard, is most excellent
(wallacecollection.org)
STAY UP LATE On the first Friday evening of each month, the British-themed Tate Britain art museum throws open its doors to cocktails, minglers, musicians, and the odd lecturer. Even the paid exhibitions are slashed to half price. Booze and Bacon – gotta love those British museums (tate.org.uk).
SCORE SOME COIN Weekends all summer long, the city throws one party after another on the South Bank of the Thames as part of what’s known as the Coin Street Festival. The summer culminates with the Mayor’s Thames Festival, an all-weekend carnival of public art, food,
fireworks, and music (schedules and details at coinstreetfestival.org).
DO IT FOR SCIENCE The V&A gets all the tourist foot traffic, but around the corner, the Science Museum Is a mammoth repository of science history is equally worthy. See Alan Turing’s computer, the Apollo 10 command module, and the nifty, cobalt-blue-lit Wellcome Wing, where recent scientific breakthroughs are explored
(sciencemuseum.org.uk).
HIT THE RIVER Where once only grubby coal sellers dwelled, on the south bank of the Thames across from St. Paul’s, Londoners now congregate to stroll a string of top diversions (including the Tate Modern and the excellent Borough Market). Things get buzzy on weekends-go early for a riverside seat at the Anchor Bar.
SPEAK YOUR PIECE Sure, every guide book tells you to go to Marble Arch on Sunday mornings, but have you? Here, at what’s known as Speaker’s Corner, blustery nutcases pontificate over topics great (Iraq) and small (’70s music)-if they can hold the crowd’s attention, they survive to speak another day. Hecklers are polite-this is England, after all.
BE GROSSED OUT Thousands of glass jars stuffed with pickled medical oddities. Hacked-up nineteenth-century dissection tables. Napoleon’s bladder stone. We must be at the Hunterian Museum This surprisingly well-heeled oddity museum, run by the Royal College of Surgeons, is delightfully appalling (www.rcseng.ac.uk/museums).
MARKET TIME Though the Brixton Market goes back to Victorian times (and it looks it), the current crowd at Brixton is an exotic melange of Caribbean and African. The aromas of rare produce and seductive spices make the covered stalls feel more like a souk than South London. With box stores stamping out London’s oldest markets with alarming speed, this remains one of the most authentic and least yuppied.
LEARN MORE Unfairly ignored by most visitors, the multilevel Museum of London holds some of the most incredible relics in town. Among them: a Roman oak ladder, a tangle of 3,500-year-old swords found in the Thames, and the Lord Mayor’s coach, which makes Cinderella’s look like a Chevy (museumoflondon.org.uk).
GO WAY BACK Southwark Cathedral, the oldest Gothic church in town appears in every important medieval drawing of London, yet few tourists visit. Right out its back door, in even less visited Lancelot’s Link, excavators have uncovered 2,000 years of history layered in one amazing spot, including fragments of a buried Roman road, a carved stone coffin from the 1200s, and a kiln that made pottery found as far away as Virginia (southwark.anglican.org)
SEE THE NORTH POLE A boring-sounding name – The NatIonal Maritime Museum – keeps most tourists at bay, but in fact, this palatial place has tons of ghoulish exhibitions to keep kids titillated, including relics from the Titanic and Horatio Nelson’s bullet-riddled death garb. It even has the actual North Pole-the first one ever planted there. Cool! (nmm.ac.uk)
ACT LIKE A KID The toys-and-games wing of the Victoria & Albert Museum (known as the Museum of Childhood) has way more to show off than you’d guess, and it’s in many way far more interesting to browse than its statue-obsessed sister, although it’s tough to get over the urge to fiddle with the collection. The building just received a lavish, multimillion-pound renovation (vam.ac.uk/moc)
WHAT’S ON HIRST The cozy, no-frills, it’s-about-the-work White Cube gallery space was designed so make it easy to focus on the art, so contemporary artists love to show here. This summer: A hotly anticipated showing by the bad-boy prince of Britart, Damien Hirst. It’s a platinum skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds, expected to fetch more than $100 million after the show (whitecube.com)
HEAD EAST FOR ART Whitechapel Art Gallery Is the East End’s pre-emininent, pioneering art space has been debuting new artists, designers, and architects since 1901-Rothko and Kahlo were introduced to Europe here. The joint is run like an ongoing festival; shows change often and free talks are frequent. The free galleries of the East End are nearby (whitechapel.org).
CHECK OUT THE WIGS Also called the Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey Is where visitors are invited to line the old wooden galleries and observe bewigged barristers peacock around the courtroom. The only thing crustier than these guys is a Yorkshire pudding
(cityoflondon.gov.uk)
.
WINDOW SHOP Wander idly into Sotheby’s in New York, and you’re likely to receive an icy glare. But in London, schlubs like us can be millionaires too, and the big auction houses welcome visitors who want to peruse the big-ticket collectibles that are about to go under the hammer. See anything from Old Masters paintings to the castoffs of a dead celeb – think of it as a sort
of museum where the collection rotates constantly (sothebys.com; christies.com).
Ye Olde cheese
THE fact that travelers can’t afford the admission hasn’t kept the city’s biggest tourist traps from flavoring their old exhibitions with new slices of cheese, so undiscerning tourists still have somewhere to waste cash.
The sputum-obsessed London Dungeon ($40!) has added Extremis, an indoor free-fall ride. The blackness disguises the fact the trip is only about 20 feet. Lame.
Across town, Madame Tussaud’s wax museum (also $40!) has turned its Stardome (really a ’50s-style planetarium) over to a short celebrity-laden animated movie by Wallace and Gromit’s makers-the dispiritingly stereotypical Disney-style “Spirit of London” cart ride precedes it.
But the most head-scratching new London-area tourist oddity is Dickens World ($25), southeast of town, in Kent (pictured above). There, you can explore a “Christmas Carol”-themed haunted house and see the cranky scribe’s grotty London of yore on “Great Expectations,” an indoor boat ride. It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times. Wait. Just the worst.