All over the shop: Trips to Kensington and Cambridge

View From Hoxton Station in the morning

A Church by Regents Park

I have been spending time in many areas of London this week; from a hotel in Whitehall where a young, ball room dressed woman played harp in the hallways, to a warehouse dinner party in Brick Lane which was cold in temperature but warm in spirit. Who would have known  Brick Lane still has empty large spaces at cheap rents?

I work in Shoreditch, and last weekend, after work I travelled to Fulham to look after my cousins for the night - I do not know West London well, and so this in itself was a small trip for me. West London and East London are the same in many ways, but for some reason there is a clear difference in attitude. Though the buildings can be similar, something is different. It is not until you reach Kensington, that buildings appear that would never be found in the East End. It is here that houses become 1930s mansions, acting as a sculpture museum through their windows. People have money here. Cars are also indifferent of who they hit, they have enough insurance and will  happily barge you out of the way.

A house in Kensington

A Street in Kensington

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire

Kings College Chapel

Cambridge - I also went on a day trip to Cambridge on a wet and windy day. We cycled from Hackney to Liverpool Street station and hopped on a train. We looked through drizzled windows to the flat countryside as we passed fields, wooden cottages, small estates, towns, until we arrived at Cambridge station. It felt a little like being abroad -another unfamiliar terminal station. And then we cycled from the station to the town centre, pass areas of Cambridge that are never advertised, our breaks unable to grip to the wheels from wetness.

A High Street in Cambridge

The town was clearly pretty - a town in the style of Aldwych or Whitehall, showing off old English Elizabethan style buildings, but the odd seventies district council building broke its fantasy along with the over abundance of high street chain shops. It seems to me that any pretty city in England will now be full of large coloured signs with the words "Fat Face", "WH Smiths", "River Island", and it makes it hard to want to travel with in your own country, it makes it all far too recognisable. It was hard to find shops that were unique apart from the odd bookshop.

Jesus College, Cambridge

One thing was clear in Cambridge however; Cambridge is a city of learning. Even the Oxfam Assistant wanted to teach us a thing or two as we handed over a book to buy. "Ah yes, he studied with Miles Davis in 1962, and lived in France in 1987". This was not a conversation, it was a lesson. And as this happened, a man in a Sherlock Holmes cape returned a book from a cabinet which he never intended to buy saying, "Yes it is a good book." Thank God Oxfam now has his expertise on the matter.

And so we went on a cafe crawl after taking a look at the beautiful but closed colleges and walking along the foggy 'Backs'. We sat in the tiny Indigo Cafe and ate two large Sandwiches. I overheard a woman talking to her five year old Grand Daughter. They sat by the window opposite each other. The woman quietly looked at the girl and said, "This is the sort of day when I miss your Great Grandmother, she would have come out to a cafe with us like this." Well, the daughter looked at the woman and said loudly, "But Grandma, she's dead!" How could the woman be so silly?! And I laughed loudly and so too did the Grandmother. Tears ran down my eyes.

It was time to leave the cafe after a group of young students started laughing at a book called, 'History According to Facebook'. They laughed and told each other, "This is so funny". It was both easy and hard to imagine that this was the city that bred Fry and Laurie and Monty Python.

We made it through the rain, back through the town and back to a train where we made our way to the comforts of raggedy East London.