London travel diary / Camera roll (Saturday, June 11, 2022)

For family, friends, and the curious, I’m posting some selections from my camera roll from last month’s trip to London.

Day 1

Our flight left Tampa on Friday evening, and we landed in London on Saturday morning, a little before 9:00 a.m. local time.

Upon deplaning, we saw a couple of Queen tributes. Here’s the first one..

…and here’s the second:

We made the trip from Gatwick to London in pretty short order on the Gatwick Express, which ends at Victoria Station, and we took a cab to the hotel from there:

Auth0, my employer, put us up at the Sea Containers hotel, located right on the Thames’ south bank and just west of Blackfriars. Here’s the view from our hotel room.

After a nice post-flight shower and change of clothes, we stepped out the hotel’s riverside doorway and took our first proper trip selfie…

…and then we worked our way east along the river…

…then a tiny bit south…

…towards our goal, Flat Iron Square, for lunch.

It’s a fun, open-air beer garden with food stalls, tables aplenty, and a lively crowd. The South Bank seems to have no shortage of these places.

We got lunch from Lil’ Watan, who serve Lebanese food out of a shipping container…

…and drinks from the bar under one of the arches.

After lunch, we set off to explore the South Bank a little more. In my handful of trips to London, I’d stayed mostly on the north side of the Thames.

Southwark has a lot of railway bridges, and the locals have gotten pretty creative with the underpasses:

We passed by Crossbones Graveyard, and there were these great posters nearby:

And while we were in the area, I made sure to pass by this building on Redcross Street, which is known for its “Take Courage” ghost sign: