This weekend, Christine and I went to London to visit friends, and tick off a few places off our London to-do list. It’s quite a long list, as there’s lots to do in London and we only get to visit once or twice a year. Indeed, this was my first visit since February last year, although Christine managed a brief overnight trip last month for work.
I took quite a few photos, but as my computer at home is still boxed up (and likely to be until the weekend at the earliest) I’m only uploading a select few at this stage, and editing them using Aviary, the photo editor built-in to Flickr. It’s not as good as the tools I have on my Mac, but it’ll do for now. I will be posting about the things that we did over the next week or so.
It will probably be the last major trip we do this year. Christine is now entering her last trimester of pregnancy and so she is becoming less mobile as time goes on. Whilst she managed okay in London, I don’t think she will be able to do many big days out in future, so this was something of a ‘last hurrah’ for us before the baby is due early next year.
All in all, we had a good weekend, and it was nice to see our friends again.
Leading on from yesterday’s post about our trip to London, here’s a little more about the Megabusplus service that we used. I’ve taken it before, when I needed to get down to London to fly to France for a holiday in 2009, but this was Christine’s first time, and also my first return trip.
Like the regular Megabus, it is run by the Stagecoach Group, and takes advantage of the fact that Stagecoach is also the current East Midlands Trains franchisee. So rather than getting a coach all of the way, time-wise roughly half of the journey is by coach and the reminder by train, with the switchover talking place at East Midlands Parkway railway station.
This is significantly quicker than taking a coach all of the way. Taking Halifax-London as the example, to do this by coach takes almost 6 hours in total. Megabusplus knocks this down to a little over four hours. You also arrive into London St Pancras railway station, which has much better onward transport links, than Victoria coach station. And I find that I can’t read on coaches (I get travel sick), so for me there’s less ‘downtime’ than a regular coach.
However, compared with a direct train Megabusplus is still slower – the 08:06 Grand Central train from Halifax left a few minutes after our coach and would have reached King’s Cross a full hour before we did.
The prices are about the same as regular Megabus, with fares starting at £1 one way, plus a 50p booking fee. I was too late to get it this cheap, but it was still much more affordable than the train at the last minute. Your ‘ticket’ is the reference number that you get by email when you pay – most people print this out but you can just show it on your phone to the driver, like I did.
The Halifax service actually starts from Bradford, then calls at Halifax and onto Huddersfield, before running direct to East Midlands Parkway. I say ‘direct’ – Huddersfield’s links with the southbound M1 are pretty poor and so we went on some very narrow and windy roads to get there. On the way down we briefly called at a service station, but this was only to change to a different driver and customers were not allowed to alight. East Midlands Parkway is effectively a service station though, with a café, toilets and a vending machine.
The Megabusplus coaches themselves are reasonably bog-standard – single-decker, space below for luggage, and a toilet. There’s no on-board catering, and seats aren’t allocated. Most of the people on the two journeys we made were travelling on their own, so if the coach is busy you’ll have to sit next to a stranger. Pre-booking is mandatory – there’s no facility to turn up and pay, although you can book up until the night before, as I did. On the other hand, this means that if everyone arrives early, then the coach can leave early – as happened on the return leg.
I would definitely recommend bringing a music player. Unlike trains, there’s no quiet coach, or any way of moving to another carriage if it’s too noisy. On the way back there was a very restless baby, so I was glad I had some music to listen to.
If you need to get to London cheaply, and don’t want it to take all day, then Megabusplus is worth it. But if you’re able to get a cheaper train ticket, then the train is a quicker and better experience.
As I alluded to on Friday, I took Christine away on a trip which I planned at the last minute on Thursday night. We’d both booked Friday off work, but had nothing planned for Friday or Saturday, and couldn’t think of anything particularly interesting to do. So, whilst Christine was out on Thursday night, I set about planning something.
Though London has a reputation for being expensive, getting there at the last minute seemed to be cheaper than many other places. A backup plan had been to go to Birmingham, to visit Cadbury World, but getting there by train would have cost a fortune as all of the cheap seats had gone.
We managed to get tickets on Megabusplus, leaving from Halifax, for a reasonable price. Unlike the regular Megabus, you only travel by coach half-way, and then pick up a train for the rest of the journey. I’ll write more about this later this week; whilst it’s slower than a direct train, it’s faster than going the whole way by coach. Leaving Halifax just before 8am, we arrived at St Pancras at around 12:30pm.
Lunch was at Carluccio’s in St Pancras – we decided to have a big meal at lunchtime, as trying to find anywhere for an affordable evening meal on Valentines Day is likely to be an exercise in futility. And then we headed on to the Museum of London, to see the Cheapside Horde. We went to the MoL in September but the Cheapside Horde exhibition hadn’t opened yet, so this was our opportunity to see it.
Afterwards we headed over to Chinatown for some dim sum – despite the large lunch we were peckish – and had a mosey around the shops. Visiting just after Chinese New Year meant the area was covered in Chinese lanterns – one of which made its presence known by landing on my head in the strong winds. We also nipped into one of the theatre ticket agents at Leicester Square, to get some of the last cheap tickets for that evening’s showing of We Will Rock You.
Our hotel was in Croydon, south London, which took about an hour to get to after the show finished, and involved a tube and two trains. We would have stayed more centrally but were limited by what was available on our budget. Still, the hotel was fine, and breakfast was included.
After breakfast we caught up with friends at the café at Tate Modern, then headed back to St Pancras for lunch. Then it was a train, a coach and then a bus back home – and we were back home for 8pm.
Considering it was planned at the last minute, and on a shoestring budget, we managed to do a lot in two days. And, most importantly, we had a good time. Whilst I can’t see us doing this every year for Valentines Day, it was good to get away, even if just for one night.
Normally we take a rolling case with us to London. This time we packed lightly and ensured that all of our clothes fitted into a rucksack (for me) and a shoulder bag (for Christine). This meant that we could use lockers and cloakrooms in the various museums that we visited, which were free or cost considerably less than the Left Luggage facilities at stations.
For a nice view of the River Thames, go to Blackfriars station. It has recently been rebuilt, and now spans the Thames with entrances on both the north and south banks, however more importantly big glass windows have been provided. The photo taken above was taken from Platform 1, looking east, and frames Tower Bridge really well.
We saw a pair of urban foxes. They didn’t make any of these noises. It’s not the first time I’ve seen an urban fox but I hadn’t been so close to one before.
On our second night in London we stayed at the Pullman Hotel on Euston Road – roughly halfway between St Pancras and Euston stations. It’s not a hotel we’d normally be able to afford but it was definitely worth staying at (certainly better than our Friday night hotel). You also get brilliant views of London from the upper floors, and you don’t need to have a room there to use the lifts.
We had a mosey out to the Thames Barrier, which as of 2005 is much easier to get to thanks to the Docklands Light Railway. Alight at Pontoon Dock, and then have a nice stroll through Thames Barrier Park which is in itself quite a nice place.
The Museum of London is well worth visiting. It’s free and offers an interesting history of the city, from early settlers to the present day. There’s even a small collection of items from last year’s Olympic Games. We didn’t have chance to visit the Museum of London Docklands this time though.
The Wellcome Collection looked interesting but most of it is closed until the spring, so we didn’t spend much time there. The bookshop is excellent though.
The British Library also has an exhibition of interesting texts in its archives, including two of the four surviving copies of Magna Carta, which will be 800 years old in a couple of years’ time. There’s enough there to kill time for an hour or so.
Christine and I are back from a lovely weekend in London. We decided to try out lastminute.com‘s ‘Top Secret Hotels’ for one of the nights. This is where the web site offers a deep discount at a (usually) four or five star hotel, but it doesn’t show you the name or any specific information about the hotel until you have booked. This means that premium hotels can fill spare rooms without damaging their reputation by lowering prices.
The hotel we booked was listed as having four stars, four out of five on TripAdvisor, and was located somewhere between Kensington and Fulham. Once the email came through, it was revealed to be the Millennium and Copthorne Hotels, located at Stamford Bridge, the ground for Chelsea Football Club. Apparently, we saved around £45 on the cost of the room.
Note that the hotel pictured above is The Midland Hotel in Morecambe, Lancashire. I didn’t take a picture of the hotel we stayed at this time.
Unfortunately the hotel was a bit disappointing. I’ve gone into more detail on a TripAdvisor review (awaiting moderation) but I would give the hotel three out of five, based on the price we paid; at full price, probably two out of five. There were a few things wrong with the room, but also, when booking a secret hotel, the bed layout cannot be guaranteed. So whilst we were hoping for a double room, we actually got a twin room. It does clearly state that this could happen when you book, but it’s worth knowing about.
Frankly, I’ve stayed at much nicer budget hotels, like Premier Inn and Holiday Inn Express, and paid less for the privilege. Whilst it was interesting to try somewhere a bit mysterious, I think we’ll stick with the hotel brands that we know and feel comfortable with next time.
I’m back home now, after my various travels. As well as going to London last week, I spent the weekend with Christine and some friends from university in a bunk barn in the western Yorkshire Dales, near the Howgill Fells (a range of hills on the western border of the Yorkshire Dales National Park).
Thanks to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, we got not one, but two public holidays in a row, so yesterday was spent in the lovely town of Keswick (pictured above) and on Latrigg, a hill overlooking it. As for today, I was in York for RailFest 2012 at the National Railway Museum – and I’ll be blogging about that visit tomorrow.
Photos will be forthcoming, but I have quite a backlog of pictures to upload from earlier on in May – I’ve just put up the latest set from the May Day bank holiday weekend in York, which are mostly pictures of owls, as it happens. Hopefully the rest will appear there shortly – as I’ve mentioned, I took over 200 in London alone, and nearly another 100 since.
Though Christine and I are not badly off financially, we’re still in a situation where we really want to save money where possible, and this includes holidays. Despite this, we went to London a few weeks ago for a long weekend, which is probably one of the most expensive cities in the world. But it doesn’t have to cost the earth and I’m going to go through some of the things we did, or could have done, to keep costs down.
1. Don’t stay in a hotel in Central London
As a general rule, the closer you are to central London, the more expensive your hotel will be. Go a little further afield and you will find some good value hotels, many of which are close to Tube stations. And you’ll probably find that the money saved by going for a cheaper hotel further out of London is more than the cost of travelling into central London on the Tube. The only disadvantage is the extra travelling time to get out there, so it’s harder to drop by your hotel room on an evening before going out, for example.
2. Consider a budget hotel
Whilst it’s nice to stay in hotel that offers everything, sometimes all you need is a bed for the night. I’ve stayed in a couple of good budget hotels – Holiday Inn Express at Royal Docks and Premier Inn at Collier’s Wood – both of which were very good value. if you don’t mind sharing a room, a hostel may be even cheaper.
3. Skip hotel meals
Budget hotels often unbundle meals from the price – this makes the headline price of the room cheaper, but means you may be paying as much as £8 per person, per day for breakfast. If you don’t need an all you can eat breakfast every day, skip it – you’ll be able to get something cheaper from a supermarket or a café. You can even save time by eating it on the Tube on your way in to London, if you’re staying in the suburbs.
4. Get an Oyster card
If you’re following my advice and staying outside central London, you’re likely to be using public transport a lot. An Oyster card will not only save you money, but will also mean you won’t need to have change for bus or Tube fares. Fares are as much as 50% cheaper with an Oyster card than without, and fares are capped at the price of a one-day travelcard, so if you do lots of journeys you won’t end up paying a fortune. Say you’re staying in a hotel near a Tube station in zone 3,and travel in and around central London a lot on one day during off-peak hours – you will not pay more than £7.30 that day, regardless of how may tube journeys you do in zones 1-3. Because it’s a top-up card, you just need to top it up at a machine each time the balance gets low (and they take cards). You can pick them up from major Tube stations for around £5, which includes £2 of credit, or order them online; unused credit doesn’t expire and you can register the card online to protect your balance in case the card is lost. It’s accepted on all Tube trains, plus all buses and mainline rail services within London zones 1-9.
5. Don’t go to restaurants on main streets
Restaurants in more prestigious locations will be more expensive. Go a little off the beaten track and you can find some nice places that don’t cost too much. TripAdvisor is your friend here, as are local guidebooks or recommendations. If necessary, stick with a chain restaurant that you know, like Pizza Hut or Nando’s – it’s your call whether you want something cheap and familiar or want to push the boat out a bit.
6. Look for special deals and vouchers
I often mention Money Saving Expert and there’s a good reason for it – the site is huge and is full of really good, impartial advice about saving money in all aspects of life, and this includes going out and holidays. You may find that some attractions will offer you two tickets for the price of one, simply by printing a voucher off their web site, or a restaurant will allow your kids to eat free, and Money Saving Expert gathers many of these in its Deals section. Also, have a look at sites like Groupon, Living Social and Keynoir for deals in London, which may include cheap accommodation, reduced price restaurant meals or cheaper entry into attractions, although be aware that they usually ask you to pay up front for a voucher so make sure you use it so you don’t waste money.
7. Visit free attractions
London is home to quite a few national collections like the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum, which are both free, enough to fill a full day and great for people of all ages, including kids. But there are also plenty of other free attractions and once again Money Saving Expert has a list of some of them. Of course, if you don’t want to spend any money you can just walk around and see the sights, eschewing the sometimes expensive open top sightseeing buses.
8. Consider buying a London Pass
If you’re spending a few days in London, and want to visit a number of attractions that charge for entry, you may wish to consider buying a London Pass. The price varies depending on how long you want it for, starting at £44 per person for a one day pass to £95 per person for a 6 day pass, which at £15.83 per day isn’t too expensive. Again, you’re paying up front, so unless you’re sure you’ll visit enough attractions for it to be worth it, don’t get it.
9. Book in advance
This applies not just to your travel and accommodation – some attractions offer a discount if you book ahead. Usually it’s only a modest 10%, but everything helps. If you’re going to London by train, remember that the cheapest tickets tend to be released around 3 months in advance, so order them at least 2 months in advance to get the best deal. Avoid sites like thetrainline, who charge a booking fee, and go directly to one of the train operators – it doesn’t necessarily have to be the one you are travelling with. See my Buying rail tickets guide for more details. Similarly some budget hotels have room sales with some very cheap rooms available if you’re quick enough to blag them.
10. Use the bus, or walk
The Tube is popular with visitors to London as it’s easy to follow, with each line having its own name and colour, and Tube stations are plentiful and located in useful places. But it’s not the only way to get around. London also has plenty of buses, and with an Oyster card, a single bus fare is only £1.30; and, like with Tube fares, they’re capped at £4 per day – this compares favourably with the Tube where a single fare in zone 1 is £1.90 with Oyster, rising to £2.90 if you’re travelling from zones 1-3. Also, because buses are above ground, they’re sometimes quicker than the Tube as you don’t need to spend as long as 5 minutes walking from the street to the platform, and they stop at more places. Use TfL’s Journey Planner to work out if there’s a bus you can catch. Alternatively, it may be quicker to walk, and there’s a handy map showing where walking between Tube stations would be quicker than actually taking the Tube (although the map is from five years ago so is a little out of date – it doesn’t include the Overground).
If you want more information, as well as the aforementioned web sites have a look at Money Saving London and London for Free for some ideas for free or cheap things to do.
As a non-Londoner who doesn’t drive, I am generally in awe of London’s public transport.
While any Londoner who’s had to make alternative arrangements during a tube strike will probably disagree, compared to the public transport available in most other British cities London is well ahead.
London Underground, or The Tube, is especially good. You get something like 20 trains every hour through central London, so you rarely have to wait more than 3 minutes for one. And it comes with at least 8 carriages, so you’re likely to be able to get on.
Its buses are cheap – £1.20 with an Oyster card for a single adult ticket (at the time of writing) – and pretty frequent too. And talking of Oyster, you have one card which lets you pay for basically any train, bus, tube or tram in greater London.
It’s not perfect; strikes, for one, happen more frequently than they probably should, and overcrowding is a problem. And the chaos which occurs when something breaks down during the peak periods.
Compare this to Bradford, where we have more expensive buses and no trams or tube to fall back on. The trains are thankfully cheaper but nowhere near as frequent, and not as pervasive – railway stations tend to be fewer and far between, so you’re left with the buses. Though we have some integrated ticketing, it’s only in the form of day rover tickets (which are only sold at travel interchanges) or weekly/monthly travel cards. There’s no pay-as-you-go scheme and it’s not a smartcard like Oyster.
London’s transport is on my mind as Christine and I are spending this weekend in London, and will hopefully be visiting London Zoo. It’s the first time I’ve been to London properly in almost three years, so naturally I’m a little excited.
So, London. We caught a late train out of Bradford (one of the direct Bradford-London trains) and got into the capital about 10pm on the Friday night. The great thing about London is that the public transport systems don’t stop at about 7pm, like they do in most other places. So, after meeting a friend in a pub near Euston, and leaving at closing time, we could still get to our hotel. The hotel was near Canning Town and is a good half hour away by tube/DLR.
We had intended to do some sightseeing over the weekend, but when we mentioned to various of our friends that we’d be in London, they were all keen to meet up with us. So, we ended up spending the afternoon socialising. We went to the Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes, again near Euston, which is an awesome place. It’s a pub which does nice food and decent beer, but also has a 10-pin bowling alley and karaoke booths, as well as retro arcade machines. Very easy to kill a lot of time there.
Saturday evening was the main reason for going to London – to see a musical in the West End, which is something neither of us have done before. We’ve seen musicals at theatres before – we both went to see Jerry Springer: The Opera when it came to Bradford in May last year – but there’s something special about seeing it in the West End (which for those unfamiliar with London is a bit like Broadway).
The musical we went to see was Avenue Q – I bought the soundtrack late in 2005 as the songs are hilarious, but it was only last year that it came to our shores. You may remember a song called “The Internet Is For Porn” being passed around the internet a lot some time ago – that’s taken from the musical and is quite a good example of what you can expect from it. If you’re easily offended then you’ll hate it; if you’re not then you’ll be rolling in the aisles laughing. Even though I knew most of the songs off by heart, to see it live was an awesome experience.
We went to the matinée performance, which had the benefit of being quite a bit cheaper than the later Saturday showing. We didn’t buy the cheapest seats since they were right on the balcony, and didn’t have a good view, but the ones we did buy were quite good for the price that we paid.
Afterwards, we went out for dinner – we had to walk around quite a bit before we found a restaurant which was in our price range, but we settled for a nice Italian restaurant just off one of the main streets which was actually very reasonable. We then had another late night tube journey – it’s surprising just how busy the Jubilee line is at 11:30pm on a Saturday night.
Sunday was also supposed to be a sightseeing day but we didn’t really do any – instead, we had lunch at Yo! Sushi (which I’d promised Hari as she has taken a real liking to sushi) and perusing the food court at Selfridges, which is the only bit of the shop we can actually afford. We came away with a big box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Oreo cookies – believe it or not, these are considered premium brands here and are hard to get hold of, with a standard packet of Oreos costing up to £3 (which is about US$5.50). They’re expensive, but sooooooo nice.
The journey back was okay, bar the fact that the train was 20 minutes late leaving London. All in all we had a really good weekend and although we did spend a lot of money it was worth it.
Unfortunately we’ve both been ill with colds since getting back 🙁 .
I’m sat on the train back to Bradford (another direct one with wifi, woohoo!), ready to leave King’s Cross. The verdict on Open Tech 2005? Possibly the best £5 I’ve spent in a very long time.
There was wifi at the event (and indeed lots of geeks with Powerbooks reading their Bloglines subscriptions) however for some reason I couldn’t get it to work with this PDA. Damn Windows Mobile…
Anyway, what follows is my take on the days events.
Despite it being only two days after some wannabe terrorists tried to blow up the tube, the underground seemed surprisingly normal and I had no problems getting to where I needed to be. The event was being held in the Reynolds Building, part of the Imperial College London’s medical school in Charing Cross Hospital, and the talks were in a couple of the teaching rooms there. The first talk I went to was by Danny O’Brien on the issues surrounding privacy amongst those in the public eye, especially bloggers. It was very interesting (even if it did take a while to start due to internet access problems, eventually sorted with an impromptu SSH tunnel); Danny is a good speaker and kept the audience interested.
At 12:30 I moved over to the seminar room where I saw a Linux-powered iPod for the first time (and even watched a video on it), learned about scripting in iTunes and about MythTV, along with the BBC’s open source project Kamaelia. I also bumped into Sven from Blogwise and Gia who vaguely remembered me from the London Geek Dinner last month.
During a much needed lunch break Phil Wilson came to chat to me (it’s great to be recognised ), and we then headed back to the lecture room for the official launch of BBC Backstage – effectively the Beeb’s developer network, with APIs and syndication feeds galore (see BBC News Online article). There’s already some people doing cool stuff with it, like taking the BBC’s travel news feed and plotting the problems on a Google map, or a ‘changelog’ of the BBC News Online home page – Ben Metcalfe, who was presenting, used the archives from July 7th as a good example of why this was so cool. Ben Hammersley was the ‘master of ceremonies’ – he’s even more mad than his blog depicts him as. He was wearing a skirt…
Ben H also MC’d the next session which was with Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo!. Jeremy’s talk focused on openness in technology – RSS, APIs etc. and how it benefits companies (and the problems it can create). Obviously being from Yahoo! the focus was on Yahoo! and Flickr but it did show how Yahoo! is ‘getting it’. While it didn’t make me as excited as the BBC talk it’s still good to see big companies opening themselves up, as it were.
It was at this point that I found out I’d won the third prize in the prize draw, so I picked up an O’Reilly USB flash drive (256MB!), along with a 1-year subscription to Make magazine. I also bought a copy of Ben’s ‘Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom‘ (sponsored link), which he signed.
The next session I went to was called Blogs and Social Software, and was chaired by Gia. Tom Reynolds, who works for the London Ambulance Service, did a talk about how to blog and not lose your job, which included lots of cat pictures, as any blogging talk should. He was followed by Paul Mutton, creator of the PieSpy IRC bot, about creating diagrams showing how individuals interact. He used data from Digital Spy’s Big Brother site to create an interaction map of the Big Brother housemates, which was pretty cool. Finally Paul Lenz talked about his Who Should You Vote For? site and his new project What Should I Read Next?, which lets you type in a book you have read and recieve suggestions for other titles to try. You can also add books that you like and help to extend the data set.
There was one final set of sessions after that but in tne interests of getting home at a reasonable time I left early so as to catch the 18:30 train from King’s Cross. All in all I had a great day and it was well worth the journey – I just wish I could have gone to all the sessions. That would have required some kind of cloning device though.
As well as those that I met (I also met Lloyd Davis in the last session), I saw but didn’t really have chance to meet Cory Doctorow, Tom Coates, Simon Willison and Matt Webb, amongst others.
Yikes, it’s taken me over an hour to write this. If I ever buy a PDA (this one is borrowed) I’ll be buying a keyboard for it. I’m in the Lincolnshire wilderness between Grantham and Newark now, by the way.
Update: Back home, so I’ve added links to some of the stuff I was talking about.
), and we then headed back to the lecture room for the official launch of