London

Going on a trip to the UK and Europe is always exciting, especially when visiting family and revisiting familiar sites. The photos I took were a mixture of iPhone snaps and a camera that I bought before the pandemic for another European vacation that never happened. I knew that photography wouldn’t be the main reason for this trip, so I decided to bring a much lighter camera, a Leica D-Lux 7, that didn’t disappoint! In fact, it was perfect as the weather in the UK and Italy was still very warm.

On the very first day of our trip, we met up with my brother and sister-in-law and walked 22,000 steps (who’s counting?)! This was great as it kept us awake and we slept well that night. During our trip, we managed to visit the newish Battersea Power Station upgrade, took a river trip on the Thames, got off at The Tate Modern, and later found a pub in the City of London.

The London Tube is a great way to travel around London. It’s easy to navigate, relatively inexpensive and you get to see interesting people!

Colourful and full of stuff that we couldn’t buy! We had one suitcase and one backpack each. As we would be doing a lot of train travel in Europe, we decided to keep everything to a minimum, and it worked!

Towards the end of the day, we were looking for a pub to have dinner when we stumbled across this rather remarkable ‘dance’. The dancers were attached to safety harnesses and leapt and danced their way down the outside for St Paul’s – quite a feat!

Whenever we travel overseas, we try to visit and explore as many art galleries and museums as possible. Churches also seem to be somewhere we gravitate towards.

We once again enjoyed the National Gallery and the Design Museum. Peter also visited the National Portrait Gallery; in his opinion, he said it was better than the National Gallery. These sorts of places also allow me to see more interesting people!

Whilst Peter was ‘doing’ the National Portrait Gallery, I spent some time in St Martin in the Fields waiting for a free concert. He joined me, and we thoroughly enjoyed a half hour listening to St Martin’s Voices – quite sublime!

We didn’t have much time to visit all of London this time, but here are a couple of familiar sites we managed.