Return to Smoldering London

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If I'd never heard anything about London's weather, I would say it’s broiling hot based on my experiences there. It reached 100F for the first time ever during my stay in 2003 and passed 40C (104F) for the first time in history yesterday.

Of course, these temperatures at only 20% humidity wouldn’t be anything special in New Delhi or Dubai or Houston, but London isn’t at all built for it. Even places with air conditioning like department stores and museums didn’t have the BTUs to keep up.

We had to come south from Edinburgh early because trains were projected to be canceled due to the tracks buckling. I don’t know if the train lines in Spain (much hotter) are made of different materials?

Luckily, we stayed in a major hotel and were comfortable enough inside. But since London is so expansive, we either had to pack into the stuffy, hot tubes or walk long distances. We stayed in the Kensington area, which mostly kept us away from the tourists and allowed us to find our own local pub, The Scarsdale Tavern, in a beautiful upscale neighborhood.

We were also close to Kensington Gardens, Holland Park and Hyde Park, which allowed us a little relief from the heat, though they weren’t all that shady, perhaps since normally Londoners are trying to soak up what little sun they get.

Since it was far too hot to watch King Lear at the open-air Globe Theatre which is outside, we went to the Duke of York’s Theatre to see Amy Adams in The Glass Menagerie. The current plays and musicals being performed were mostly the same ones you could see in any mid-sized American city, which was a little disappointing.

Peggy got out some cash when we first arrived, but cards are so ubiquitous in London that we had to plan out how to spend it all. Many shops and restaurants were card-only. Like NYC, you can just tap your credit card to board the metro. Even 20p restrooms had card readers.

I'm confident that Pittsburgh will award me with 100+ Londonesque days in the year to come.

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Photos

30 Rock Fans?
I had no idea who he was. Peggy just turned to him and said, “Hey, what are you doing here?” and I went along with it.

Local Pub
“You haven’t even been to Scarsdale!”

Comments

[D MJ Binkley]

St James Park
You may want to jump in that water in the heat.