Blog: London to the Touch

Outside of scheduled posts, I've been moving about just a bit too much to be posting regularly, but that doesn't mean I've nothing to share with all of you.

London is fascinating, mostly because my experience with it thus far is so vastly different from what I'd been expecting. For some reason, in my brain London has always been a metropolitan shanty town. I expected everything to be ruddy wood, smokestacks, cobblestones. Don't ask me why, this is just the aesthetic conglomerate of a thousand books and films' residue upon my mind.

Far from a labyrinth of dilapidated, wooden, dock-bound structures, I found here some of the most impressive masonry I've ever seen. Have a look at what they made of a simple door in the side of the Houses of Parliament:

They've even gone through pains to harness the keyblade for the steeples atop Westminster Abbey:

Admittedly, not all of their decisions yield the best possible outcomes. We've found a fair bit to love and laugh about whilst walking around the Westminster area. There's in fact a rather well-known phenomenon that occurs around midday on Westminster bridge. Fairly hard not to notice as you're crossing, honestly...

More interesting to me than any of this though has been the travel industry here. It's incredible.

In the states, catching a train or a bus is a bit of a production, wrought over with particular schedule windows, locations, much uncertainty and stress about heading in the right direction at the right time for the right price. Here you essentiall pay for a single piece of blue plastic (an "oyster" card), tap it little pedestal as you board any line, and follow it to wherever you'd like to be over about five minutes. You can go to any station you'd like whenever you'd like and be sure a train will magically appear within 10 minutes, which is just shocking.

I was tempted to say that it's all "like clockwork," but it's more than tight and regular—it's constant and vital. It's arterial. It's the circulatory system of London (at least what I've experienced of it).

Nothing painted this image more vividly upon my impression of the place than the belly of Westminster station. After boarding, I felt I'd found myself at the heart of a grand dystopian machine. That's not to say it was really in any way disheartening or evil, only it looked like the kind of structure an industrial tyranny builds to prove their muscle muscle power. 

I could have been a section of the games Myst or Riven. I could have been swallowed by an archaic mech.

Really, I was just trying to board a train.

And this is all obviously in the time before Vidcon officially starts tomorrow.

I'm not sure how much more of London I'll be able to see before then, but I'd like to see my impression of this place continue to branch and burgeon. You can't really understand the texture of something until you feel it with your own fingertips, and I feel I can just begin to describe what Central London might feel like to the touch. 

Expect more reflective minutia in the coming days. I'll continue to take pictures and share them with y'all. I just think it's fascinating how different the modern experience is from what we see in older literature about the place. 

When you're reading Arthurt Conan Doyle and Jane Austen, you forget people are still living here and developing and modernizing every moment.

—Benji