Week 27 in London

Week 27: 5 – 11 October 2015

On Monday Roslyn started her new job at London & Partners, in one of the modern ‘More London Riverside' buildings, with a 6th floor view straight out to Tower Bridge.

Fast forward to Saturday and we went over to Borough Market, one of London’s largest food markets. Parts of the Bridget Jones’ Diary were filmed around the markets, in the movie Bridget can be seen strutting through these markets with the ingredients for what later becomes blue soup (http://bit.ly/1GODfCo). The building portrayed as the exterior of her flat (actually a pub) as well as the restaurant where the fight scene takes place (http://bit.ly/1M0QG9N) are both just outside the main market halls.

With plenty of delectable options for lunch, Roslyn went for a duck confit sandwich while Brendan was slightly more adventurous and discovered a venison burger – surprisingly good!

Once we’d made our way through the markets, eaten lunch and bought chorizo and cakes, we wandered up to the ‘More London’ precinct where Roslyn works because Brendan had never been there. We crossed Tower Bridge, moseyed around for a while and then decided that going to the cinema would be nice, something we haven’t done since departing Australia.

We jumped back onto the tube and went across to Hammersmith, grabbing dinner at The William Morris pub while the Australia vs Wales Rugby game was on. We finished dinner, Australia won and off we went to watch The Intern, at a cinema that had clearly not seen renovations since the mid 1990's.

Side note, oddly in London nearly all the cafes, restaurants and pubs seem to be chains. Nicholson’s and JD Wetherspoon are 2 of the biggest pub groups, The William Morris being a Wetherspoon pub. The strange thing is that while each individual Wetherspoon pub has its own unique name, architecture and internal fit out, they all run a near-identical menu. This results in some of the charm of being in an old English pub being lost, and they just feel a bit soulless. Regardless of whether these mass produced pubs are culturally beneficial or not, the other good thing about Wetherspoons is you can get a meal with a drink for under £10 (that’s very rare in London)! The other advantage is that once you’ve been into one Wetherspoon pub, you can go into any other pub in the group and know what you’re going to order and how much you’ll pay even if you’ve never been to that particular watering hole before.

Highlights for the week:

- Roslyn’s first week at London & Partners
- Borough Markets, sites of filming of Bridget Jones’ Diary
- Venison burger
- Checked out Roslyn’s new office in the ‘More London’ precinct
- Walked across Tower Bridge
- Dinner at The William Morris pub in Hammersmith during Australia vs Wales game
- Went to the cinema and watched The Intern