A Month in London.
September in London was the worse month we’ve had since returning to full-time travel in February.
I won’t sugarcoat it: we didn’t like London. We weren’t that impressed with the city’s highlights, didn’t much like the vibe of the city, there was very little value for money, we didn’t (generally) find the people friendly. Our Airbnb was terrible and I spent the month going to the dentist (2 crowns). It was a crap month in just about every respect.
So this month-end summary is going to be one long whine-fest and I’m sure any London lovers will be hating on me.
I sat down to write this and Googled “why do people love London?”. Then I realized that I had done the same last month when sitting down to write about York.
Actually Google did remind me of a couple of things we really did like about London. The Museums are absolutely fantastic: The British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, The Wallace Collection, Science Museum and Tate Britain were our favorites. But we also went to the Tate Modern, Natural History Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery and the Guildhall Art Gallery and Roman Amphitheatre. We spent hours in each and every hour was worth it. Just great. We’ve been to other cities over the last 6 months with great museums (Madrid and Paris at the top of the list) and London beats them because not only are the above museums fantastic, they’re also free. Google tells me that there are over 100 free museums in London. You could spent months visiting nothing but museums in London. So credit to London in that respect.
Another thing we did like about London were the pubs. We had a couple of pubs that we went to in the neighbourhood when we just couldn’t take our apartment. I’ll miss the cozy atmosphere and the pints of Guiness (although I can pretty much order that anywhere really). And for all that is said about how bad British food is, we actually had some really good meals in English pubs. The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms (where we enjoyed our last night) had an incredible slow-cooked Lamb and really good Fish and Chips.
There were some neighborhoods we liked, at the top of the list Hampstead. Upper St. in Islington is probably my favorite street in London and reminds me of Avenue Mont-Royal in Montreal in its heyday. If there’s a little sub-neighbourhood where I’d like to live in London it would be Upper St (we got to know it well, it’s where my dentist was located). Camden and Notting Hill? For tourists, posers and instagrammers.
I’m going to try to put into words why we didn’t like London. Off the top of my head: a city of different shades of grey, an architectural heaviness that often feels oppressive, dirty, with a hectic/manic/aggressive vibe in the street. “Distopian” is a word that comes to mind. When I google it to see it is jibes with anybody else’s description, AI tells me “London is a famous setting for dystopian stories, films, and cultural debates about surveillance, class division and urban decay”. Bang. A song that often popped into my mind when in London (and I don’t know why, I hadn’t heard it in years) was Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”. Beautiful song, but bleak. Look up the lyrics if you have a chance.
I can see why some people would maybe love London. If you’re young, you’d probably find it dynamic and exciting. Maybe we’re too old and that time has passed. On one hand, seeing the young professionals streaming from work and heading in groups to the nearest bar made me nostalgic for work and the past. On the other hand, it brought back the memories of the 9-5: rushing to work on cold winter mornings, long hours, stress, monotony, the shallow work relationships and the thoughts that you were stuck and that you’d be living this life for at least the next 20 years. Only that I was lucky in comparison to many of these people rushing to the pubs: I mostly liked my job, I mostly liked my co-workers…and I was lucky to work in Montreal during a great time. God, give me Montreal in the early 2000’s over London anytime. But I couldn’t help looking at these people chugging their beer and fake-laughing loudly and thinking that they were just spinning on a wheel like a hamster, going nowhere. Both Lissette and I were lucky in our careers and we often say we wouldn’t want to be young people today. The world in 2026 is really going to shit.
I don’t know why London brought up all these feelings in us. Maybe London is a decent place, maybe our feelings are biased. Maybe it’s the novocaine from the 4 dental appointments I had during the month infecting my brain. But I’m never going to tell you that we loved a place when we didn’t…and London just depressed us.
I’ll be writing more about London in upcoming posts. But one last thing: a couple of days ago we left London, taking the Eurostar to Paris and then on to Strasbourg. Arriving at Paris’s Gare du Nord and walking the 15 minutes to Gare de L’Est, you’re walking through the biggest shithole in Paris. This is the 10th arrondissement and you’d never think yourself in Paris (If you think we don’t know: well, in June we stayed a month on the 10th arrondissement steps away from La Porte St. Denis). The point is: even in this, the worst part of Paris, we breathed a sign of relief. I bought a baguette sandwich at the Gare de L’Est and the girl behind the counter was exceedingly friendly, I had a conversation with a French man in the bathroom (I won’t bother explaining that one). There’s a whole different vibe in Paris that’s just about the opposite of that in London.
If you’re wondering: no, I’m not finished with the bitching.
Next: The cost of a month in London.
The Cost of a Month in London
A summary of costs for the month:
Accommodation. We stayed in this apartment for the month. It was terrible.
One constant in the apartments we stayed in in England are musty, stale apartments with wall-to-wall carpeting and windows that don’t open. The front windows were actually painted shut, they hadn’t been open in over 10 years. The back window (off the bedroom) actually did open – but it faced a garden reeking of urine (more on that). It was a semi-basement and because of the wall-to-wall carpeting (put in after the photos on the Airbnb profile were taken), the air was humid and the carpeting felt like it had fleas. Note: it probably didn’t, but it had that particular humidity that makes the skin crawl and itch. But then I’m not sure of that either: Lissette was bitten on the arm by something during the month and had to get treatment for it. Maybe a spider? There were tons in the apartment. But the major complaint was not being able to open a window and get fresh air.
Which brings me to the host. John, an older man in his late 80’s did everything to be a good host. Exceedingly nice man. His “partner” on the other hand, had perfected the art of underhanded cuntiness.
“Open the windows? Why, I haven’t ever been asked that before!” she said when I asked them about trying to open the window.
Lissette had put a thin curtain over the side windows because we had no privacy: “You know, you can tell your wife that you don’t need to put curtains in the window, people can’t see in” (both I and John corrected her on that, with me emphatically telling her that not only can they see in, they do look in).
Another one: when we had checked in, the back door of the apartment was unlocked, John telling me they had lost the key. I insisted, saying that, for Lissette especially, it would make her feel secure knowing the door was locked and that nobody could break in. That’s when his partner showed up “well, you can tell your wife that it’s perfectly safe, this area is perfectly safe and she’s being paranoid”. Later that day, John did find the key to which I was grateful for. But you know what happened a few days later? We had left the apartment and noticed that our street was cordoned off. A police officer quickly came over to us, asked us if we were residents and then asked us for our details and phone numbers. “What happened” I asked the officer. Somebody had a break in a few doors down from ours he told us. Whatever it was, it was serious. How do we know? Because a couple of medical examiners came by, head to toe wearing medical gear including plastic booties over their shoes. Did someone get hurt? Get killed? I don’t know.
Then there was the fox who spent most of his time in the back yard. Why? Because John’s partner fed it. One day we saw it eating leftover spaghetti. So this big fox felt so at home that he would lie down on the picnic table. He would wander the back yard, go on the balcony, and pee outside our bedroom window. That’s why we had the strong smell of urine permeating into the bedroom.
Honestly, I think they were just as happy we left as we were happy to leave, I think there were bad feelings on both sides.
Anyway, enough ranting. The apartment cost £2,731 for the month.
Long Distance Travel. £122 total (ie £61 each) was spent for the 2 ¼ hour trip from York to London. LNER is the major train company and we had used them Edinburgh to York and then York to London. Quite good and honestly at par with SNCF in France and Renfe in Spain.
Short Distance Travel. £220 total (ie £110 each) for transportation around London for the month: underground, train and bus. That’s a lot. Getting around from where we were (Finsbury Park) usually meant 30-45 minutes of transportation depending on where we were going. Honestly, it doesn’t matter so much the neighbourhood: London is spread out so wherever you are you’ll be having to take public transport somewhere.
Tip: when we first arrived in London we had to take the underground two stops from Kings Cross St. Pancras to Finsbury park. If you go to the automatic machines, it will tell you the cost of a ticket is £7. That’s crazy. We went to an attendant and asked. He told us: the best way to take the underground (or bus or train) is to use your bank card. Just swipe it at the gate, you need it to get into the subway and also to get out. Doing it this way, our underground ticket would cost £3.10. It’s easy and it’s how we got around for the month.
Restaurants and Cafes: £266. We didn’t eat out much during the month and saved a lot of money on coffee because our Airbnb host had an excellent coffee machine. Our biggest outing was on our last night at the Pub, where we spent £38 on food (Fish & Chips for Lissette, a lamb dish for me) and £17 for 2 ½ beers (2 pints of Guiness, a small beer for Lissette) = total £55. Works out just a touch under $100 Canadian which makes it pretty good value for London.
Groceries. £923 which is almost the same as what we had paid the month previous in York. I had read somewhere that basic groceries would be cheaper in the UK than in France (where we had spent the previous 3 months) but instead found that we paid the same in Pounds in the UK as we paid in Euros in France…meaning that in the end we paid about 17% more in the UK (ie. the exchange rate difference).
Tourist Sites. £37 for me alone going to the Tower of London. I’m going to have a post telling you how expensive the main tourist sites in London are. Thankfully, they also have all those wonderful free museums and we spent a lot of time visiting them during the month. I’ll have a post on that as well.
I’ve skipped in detailing the “usual” line items I have in my cost grid. Nothing special, the usual cost of charging up our phones, going to the pharmacy, picking up the odd pair of socks or shirt…
But I do have one additional “extraordinary” cost on this month’s summary: £895 spent on going to the Dentist. It started when a crown fell out and I made an appointment to get it glued back in. When they did that, I asked them to look at my other crown which was put in a year ago in Spain. It had been feeling funny. Well, it turns out that it had fractured. So that meant a new crown. But it also meant excavating the old one. And then, the one which they re-glued popped out again and I had to get that fixed up again with some modifications. In the end, they were able to complete everything just a few days before we left London. I linked the dentist office, nice people and I think they did a good job. Time will tell…
Bottom Line on our monthly costs in London
This was easily the most expensive month we’ve had EVER travelling. London was somewhere Lissette had always wanted to go and the best I can say is that we can cross that off the List. Lissette has a bad track record of choosing destinations, Brazil and Costa Rica being her other past selections.
One of our readers on FB said it: “more expensive doesn’t mean better”. In London’s case it certainly doesn’t. In fact I feel like we didn’t get much for our money the 3 months we spent in the UK (although we liked Edinburgh…and the Scottish are among the nicest people you’ll ever meet).
Where we are now and upcoming plans
We arrived in beautiful Strasbourg a few days ago. What a lovely place. And we have a fantastic Airbnb apartment, the best since going back to full-time travel in February. It even has windows that open 😊.
October will be spent working our way through Eastern France and Switzerland towards Spain: Strasbourg, Colmar, Basel, Bern, Annecy, Grenoble, Valence with lots of day trips. So we can expect lots of pretty towns and some mountain scenery. I’ll be summing that up next month. We’re pretty excited to be back in France.
As I mentioned in last month’s summary, we have to be in Barcelona for mid-November for the repositioning cruise that will take us across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Something we’ve never done and we’re looking forward to that as well. It’s going to be an exciting next little while.
Related: August 2026: A Month in York
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