On one of the mornings that we were in London with Kirsten, we decided to cover the City of London, St Paul’s Cathedral and some of the sights around Bishopsgate and Shoreditch. This area is very different to Westminster, but it’s still an exciting part of London to visit, as there are lots of cool places to visit that are off the typical tourist tracks. With a mini itinerary in hand, we arrived at Liverpool Street station just after 10am and hopped straight onto the Central Line to St Paul’s. Normally I would have walked, but we had an 11am reservation at the Sky Garden and we only really had time for a flying visit to the Cathedral. We showed Kirsten the outside of the Cathedral and its grounds before heading on the tube to Bank for the Sky Garden.
The Walkie Talkie building, located on Fenchurch Street only a short walk from Bank, hosts the Sky Garden. The Sky Garden is one of the free attractions in London and it’s well worth a visit if you like flowers and seeing views of cities from above. We spent nearly the whole hour at the garden enjoying the atmosphere and taking lots of cityscape pictures from the balcony. It was definitely a unique place in London to take Kirsten.
From the Sky Garden, we walked back to Liverpool Street before taking a different direction towards Spitalfields Market. As we were visiting on a weekday, Spitalfields was very quiet, but there were still lots of art and craft stalls to browse, something the market is famous for. We were only there for a short while as we wanted to move onto Brick Lane for lunch, and in hindsight I should have penciled in more time for the market as Kirsten really enjoyed it, but that’s always the risk you take if you try to cover a lot of places in a city in one day. Sometimes it’s better to try and not cram so much in, so that you have time to spend longer at the places you enjoy.
Nonetheless we ended our morning in this part of London at the famous Cereal Killer Cafe. A nostalgic all day breakfast bar, it’s the one place in the city where you can eat the sugary cereals for lunch that you enjoyed as a child. It’s popular with locals and tourists and they offer special ‘cereal cocktails’ which feature a mix of popular cereals and sweet treats. We each ordered different cocktails and mine included chunks of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Cereal Killer Cafe really is a novelty, especially to new visitors to Brick Lane.
By about one thirty it was time for me to leave Stuart and Kirsten for a few hours and head over to Leicester Square for Aladdin The Musical. I met up with them in the evening at Notting Hill, where we showed Kirsten the colourful houses on Portobello Road. We had some really busy days in London whilst she was staying with us!
The City of London is definitely worth a visit, and as you can see from this post there really is quite a lot to see in the area. From Bishopsgate to Shoreditch, there are plenty of places to visit which are only a short walk or tube ride from Liverpool Street Station.
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