london through its neighborhoods: primrose hill & one last look at camden

Ok, honestly – who doesn’t want to live on a street like this?

Everything was quiet, quaint, cool and grey…

Pretty much my idea of a nice place to come home to.

Primrose Hill is the antithesis of its neighbor Camden: prim, proper, quiet and dainty. Also apparently home to a number of local celebrities, although mostly I just saw women taking their children out for a walk in strollers.

One thing that I absoutely loved about all the pubs in London were the wooden boards wrapped around the exterior, right at the perfect height to lean against and rest your drink so that you could enjoy your pint outside.

All the window ledges had tiny embellishments on them!

Regents Park Road was the main commercial block, with tiny local grocers, flower shops, an old bookstore and cafés and restaurants and expensive interior design ateliers – everything for the obviously well-off residents.

Can you tell that I was a wee obsessed with the beauty of that neighborhood?

Way too charming.

I walked through Chalk Hill back to Camden, where I finally found a bomber jacket that I loved (and wasn’t at least 70£!)

And you thought Stables Market was just for the younger generation.

It was my last night in London and I wanted to wander through the vintage stalls once more before I had to leave…

(and by that, I really do mean stalls – Stables Market isn’t just a name!)

Home to Kew, and the next morning to Heathrow.

And now that you’ve seen what I loved about London, a bit about what I really didn’t: London is a vibrant, multi-faceted, beautiful, gritty and endlessly entertaining city, but also downright creepy. The fact that it’s the most heavily surveilled city in the world, that cameras can follow you where-ever you go, that placards are up everywhere like Big Brother saying ‘We are watching out for you’ (easy to accidently read as ‘We are watching you’), that my friends get nervous walking past the young boys hanging around their apartment complex because of knife crime, that rampant media sensationalism is the norm and all newspapers look like tabloids really isn’t cute. I’ll admit that whenever I visit big cities, I usually leave wishing that I could spend an extended period of time there, maybe three or four months at least, just to really get in a little deeper to some of the most vibrant places in the world – Berlin, Tokyo, New York, Tel Aviv – but I didn’t feel that way about London. To be frank, there were just too many things about it that were off-putting.

Has anyone else ever felt this way, about any city? Or would anyone like to convince me otherwise about London? Tell me what you really think about the city, and maybe someone can change my mind!