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Our timing was good. London and Halloween are made for each other. The October 31 festival of the macabre was carried to the USA by the Irish, but there is no better place to get into the mood for Halloween than in deep-autumn London. First runner-up would have to be Puerto Rico, where Halloween is celebrated with an insane and tropical exuberance, and with no cold weather to impede costume designs (the no-clothing approach is an option in Puerto Rico!)...but those are different stories.

It is fun and fascinating to hang out this irrepressible city of so many lives. London was founded by the Romans within 50 years of the birth of Christ, and got it first torching just 17 years later when a very pissed-off Queen Boudicca led her Icenians on a rampage. London got going again by AD 100 and reached a population of about 60,000 before being abandoned in the 5th century when the Roman Empire declined. The Roman roads remain to this day, albeit with name changes, such as “A-10” instead of "Ermine".

Londoners started all over again in the 600s, and things slowly grew under the Anglo Saxons, pestered by Vikings. By the 1000s, London was again the largest and most prosperous city in England, and went on to crank through the Middle Ages. London reached a population of more than 100,000 by the 1300s before giving up a third of that to plague in the 1400s. More plague, and a big old fire, kept things in check through the 1600s, but the rebuilding was inevitable. London’s stint as the world’s largest city lasted about 100 years, from the early 1800s to the 1920s, when it was overtaken by New York City. Later, about 30,000 people died here in the bombings of World War Two.

The fast-flowing, brown-churning River Thames has had a few lives too. It has been swampy, five times wider than now at high tide, black, and stinky. Now you can drink the Thames, just let the mud in your glass settle. Once dead, the River Thames now has 115 species of fish, and flocks of birds to eat them. As-ever it is a tidal river, and more than ever London is vulnerable to flooding. The river level goes up and down by 7 to 8 meters during the course of a day, and keeps getting higher due to a slow geological tilting of the entire island which is part of a post-glacial rebound (up in the north, down in the south). The Thames Barrier, a movable flood barrier, was installed east of London the early 80s to mitigate this, and it has been used more than 100 times. It’s designed to last until the 2030s, but we’ll see if global warming trims any years off of that.

We got into London in the night, sat on the sidewalk in Oxford Circus, and waited for our contact to arrive and take us to a flat in the East End.

Here on the sidewalk, London’s ethnicity is abundantly apparent. About 40% of London’s population belongs to a minority group, with more than half of this number being born outside the UK. The strength and diversity of the groups is striking…there are more than 50 different communities each with numbers exceeding 10,000 people. There are about as many foreign-born Ghanaians living in London as there are Americans; Black and Asian children outnumber white children 3 to 2. Baraka and I figured he’d be getting a break from head rubs here…and we were almost right.

It felt great to be back. I always laugh my way through a visit to London and the UK. There is something subtle but side-splitting in the humor here...cynical, deviant, and devastatingly cheerful.



My friend Saul has moved to the States again, but he keeps a flat in Stoke Newington, in London’s north-East End. You know you are getting close when, from the bus, you spy the spire of St. Mary’s New Church rising over the rooftops. “New” means “built in the 1850s”. Across the street from the New Church is the Old Church, which occupies a site that has likely had a church since the 900s. The south aisle was built in 1563, and it is the only church of the Elizabethan period left in London. Severe bomb damage was incurred in the 1940s, but the Old Church was restored by 1953. It continues to hold services, and is a popular spot for concerts.

About 100 people took communion in Stoke Newington in 1548, when this parish was still an agricultural hamlet off Ermine Road, the Roman road between London and Lincoln (now called the A-10). “Stoke” signifies “the clearing of woodland”. Of the few other roads at the time was Church Street. There has long been this powerful Church of England presence here, but there is also a long and rich tradition of non-conformism and bohemia. In the 1800s, for example, the neighborhood was a hotbed of the slavery-abolition movement.

Once a haven for merchants with gardened mansions, Church Street was also a home for writers. We lived close to where Defoe Road intersects Church Street. This was of particular interest to us because Baraka had just finished reading an abridged Robinson Crusoe as a school assignment. Daniel Defoe began renting on the north side of Church Street in about 1709, and later built up his estate on the south side of the street. He bought the estate from John Drury, whose son Robert had been shipwrecked off Madagascar in 1703 and not rescued until 1717. Defoe published Crusoe in 1719.

Along Old Church Street are public houses, lovingly furnished, where you can bring your dog. I took a pint in the Rose and Crown, without knowing it has been in existence since 1612 as one of the main inns off Ermine Road. The current version of the Rose and Crown has been on this corner since 1927, right across Albion Street from its original spot.

Also present on Church Street are the green grocers, the Indian restaurants, the doner-kebab house, and the fish and chips shop. The bus rolls in on Albion past a fast food joint called “Chick-Pizz”, which always gave us a good laugh.





Down the street we have Abney Park, not to be confused with the Seattle steam-punk band of the same name (and I suspect you didn’t). Abney Park is where Amy Winehouse filmed part of her video for "Back To Black" last year. It also was the first arboretum in Europe to be combined with a cemetery, in the 1840s.

The Abney parkland was laid out in the early 1700s by Lady Mary Abney and her friend, the poet and non-conformist hymnist Dr. Isaac Watts. But in the first half of the 1800s, London’s population increased from about 1 to 2.3 million people. It just wasn’t working anymore to bury people in small parish churchyards. Graves got dug which already contained bodies, decaying matter was leaking into the drinking water supply, and bodies were routinely flushed into London’s newly-built sewer system. In 1832, Parliament passed an act to encourage development of private cemeteries outside of London. Abney Park became one of the “Magnificent Seven” resulting public cemeteries. It opened in 1840, as a non-denominational cemetery, open to the burial of people regardless of their religious leanings. Resting here are William and Catherine Booth, founders of the Salvation Army, as well as many prominent figures of the slavery abolition movement, including the African Thomas Caulkner.

Abney Park was intended to be a park as well as a cemetery. A huge amount of work went into the landscaping, where 2,500 trees and shrubs were arranged and labeled alphabetically, from Acer to Zanthoxylum. Abney today is a dense forest preserve where, through the eons, these trees and their descendants have slowly claimed the land and the graves. The soft defined paths meander through the forest, where light trickles in to reveal many graves only as ivy-covered mounds. Talk about a place where you can get your Halloween groove going!

All but the occasional courtesy-burial at Abney ceased by 1978. But there are some memorial benches in the forest, where you can go and scatter someone’s ashes if you want. Today, Abney’s life as a park remains vibrant, and it is used for a range of educational and cultural activities. The park is also heavily used by walkers-with-conviction, who will practically mow you over as they stomp though the gate next to our bus stop.

There are lots of great things to do in London that don’t cost any money. Here are a few:

If you are 11 or under, ride the buses and the London Underground for free. The world’s first subway opened in 1863, and it has stayed up-to-date and works great (especially in conjunction with buses) to get you everywhere. If you are over 11, you can buy an Oyster Card and do the same. It will max out each day, charging you about five pounds, and that’s not so bad. Go up or get down just about anywhere, and you will find yourself in an interesting neighborhood full of stories. As an added bonus, you can conduct science lessons on air displacement when walking towards a tube while a train was either coming in or pulling away.

By the way, why is it perfectly OK to run down the stairs of a London double-decker bus whilst it careens around a corner, but for "safety" you must remain seated with your seatbelt securely fastened while your airplane taxis to the gate?

Why not go to Hyde Park Speakers’ Corner on Sunday Morning, a traditional site for exercise of free speech since the 1870s, and get in on the discussion. You can turn up, unannounced, and give a speech on whatever you want. Before you open your mouth, be aware of the hallowed ground you are standing on. You may be punishingly heckled by the regulars. This is where the likes of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell, and William Morris honed their chops. You might want to just listen, and then go give your particular speech somewhere else.

Go and have a look at the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum…or perhaps, a print of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa”. You could easily get lost in here for the rest of the day. Or go to another of the many STUPENDOUS museums that have free admission. Topping the list for children would have to be the Science Museum, it is just a total blast, and the Natural History Museum, located next door, with its dinosaur skeletons and life-size blue whale. But you can also choose from the Tate(s), the National Gallery, the National Army, the Museum in Docklands, the Victoria and Albert, and the Geffrye, to name just a few.

Free admission helps you get the most out of these mammoth museums. There is no problem in coming back, over and over again! Come for an hour, come for five hours. You could literally spend months making your way through the museums. We slotted two afternoons in the Science Museum, but still only got through a fraction of it.

It is interesting to go to the National Army Museum and get a British perspective on the "American War", a perspective that was absent from my USA history classes in school when I was growing up. For example, George Washington was a passable general, but all he needed to do was hold his army together long enough to get Britain to abandon the war. In school, I never learned about the tens of thousands of African slaves and Native Americans who fought on the side of the British. I was also not quite aware of the magnitude of French involvement on behalf of the Americans (especially in the key Battle of York), nor the extent of the German involvement on behalf of the Brits. Or of the side-battles that occured in the Caribbean, Gibraltar, and India. The subject probably does get a more balanced treatment nowadays in the USA, though. Baraka informs me, “Oh yeah Baba, the Revolutionary War was actually World War Zero”.

Attend church at Westminster Abbey. We went on Sunday afternoon for Evensong, but you can go there for this or another service any day of the week. Evensong is mostly singing, some in which you participate, with three lessons plus a sermon. It is a lovely service steeped in tradition and responsibility to the community. Of course, you may leave an offering.

After Evensong, get on the Northern Line and get off at Hampstead. It is late on Sunday afternoon. Walk down Flask Walk and continue through the neighborhood and up onto Hampstead Heath. This massive lea is 790 acres, roughly in the shape of a triangle with a 3-kilometer hypotenuse. Its name shows up in the literature in the year 986, when Ethelred the Unready grants one of his servants “land at Hamstede”. Legend has it that Queen Boudicca is buried in a mound here.

The top of the Heath is one of the highest points in London and has a view protected by law. The grass here is long and soft. It’s good place to lie down awhile and look at the sky.

Here are a few that we managed to get to:

Go to a West End stage show. Just go on over to Leicester Square, where “half-price” ticket booths abound for the evening’s shows. We are both long-time Monty Python aficionados, so we could not resist the musical “Spamalot”, a show based on the movie “Monty Python and the Holy Grail”. We took our seats beneath a set topped with cartoon clouds straight from the 70s TV show, eyeing them carefully to understand if a giant foot was going to come down and squash everything at some point. During the overture, a trumpeter starts to toot the Monty Python theme song. But the conductor rhythmically exchanges his baton for a pistol, levels it at the trumpeter and fires, thus saving everyone from the foot.

The legendary Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum on Marylebone Road near Baker (its location since 1884) is good fun. Make sure and bring your digital camera! After awhile, walking around the rooms with the crowd and posing with the figures, you start to lose track of who’s wax and who’s not. I particularly enjoyed hanging out with the ensemble of India’s Bollywood actors.

Tussaud’s these days is largely about pop-culture commentary, and perhaps flattery (the Queen and Amitabh Bachchan, for example, are looking pretty darn young, trim, and fit in Tussaud’s!)

But I hadn’t considered how Marie Tussaud’s work carried such a different significance when she began touring during the first part of the 1800s. Back then, no one knew what anybody looked like! In a time before photographs, Tussaud provided a rare physical reference point that was otherwise unavailable to the public. Her exhibition was a direct source of news. I mean, if you walked down the street in those days and bumped into Queen Victoria, you might not notice her, or you might think she was just some grumpy rich lady…unless you’d been to Tussaud’s.

The Chamber of Horrors, a fixture in Tussaud’s since inception, is intact. It’s staffed with scary actors these days, and under-12’s are not recommended (Baraka and I scooted through kind of quick-like). This part of the show has its roots in the French Revolution, when Marie was getting her start under the tutelage of waxwork modeling pioneer Dr. Phillipe Curtius. She’d already done Voltaire, Rousseau, and Ben Franklin, and suddenly she had all of these very cooperative models in the form of the heads of decapitated aristocrats. This gave her a chance to prove her allegiance to the emerging new French order, before moving to England where her business really took off. (For a few more of our Tussaud's snaps, click here.)

Riverboat cruises are a good go, and the captain's commentary along the way is fascinating. Here is where we learned you can drink the Thames. We also got glimpses of things like Execution Hall (now an apartment house…how lovely) and Execution Dock, where they used to hang pirates over the low-tide mark and leave them hanging until three tides washed over their heads. Directly across the river is the Angel Pub, still very much in operation, where Judge Jeffreys would recline with his pint as he watched his dead pirates bathe across the way.

We recommend taking these riverboats east for about 40 minutes to Greenwich, where amidst parkland sits the for-free Royal Observatory. The Prime Meridian longitudinal line runs through the courtyard...you can put a foot in each hemisphere.

We didn’t get on the London Eye, the gigantic ferris wheel that has 20+ person cabs and takes 40 minutes to complete a circuit. We did watch it from our Thames riverboat cruise, however. The captain explained to us that you can have birthday parties on the London Eye, and you can also get married. You get on at the bottom, are man-and-wife by the time you reach the top, and then it's all downhill from there.

The London Dungeon (not to be confused with the Tower of London) is good fun too, especially when in the mood during Halloween-time. This deluxe commercial haunted house is now part of a chain, and London is where it all began thanks to a very accommodating history. Plenty of real live rats crawl around in the displays to bring plague home especially just for you. During the course of your 1 ½ hour actor-guided visit, you get condemned to death by Judge Jeffreys, head in a boat to Execution Dock, rub shoulders with Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper, and learn the tale of an unfortunate bakery coal left alit on Pudding Street one evening in 1666. “AHHHHH!!! London’s on fire!!!” yells the performer, running into our crowd. Then she straightens up and says, “Well, let’s go have a look then.”

A visit to the Tower of London really is indispensable, and a darn good value for your sixteen pounds (nine for a child). If you love pomp, gold, and jewelry, go to The Tower and see the Crown Jewels. If you love guns, armor, and head-chopping-off equipment, go to The Tower. If you love history, and stories...and more stories...go to The Tower. After four hours we were exhausted and trying to get to the Science Museum for our second stint, but just kept getting lured into another palace, another tower...twelve more intriguing stories.

And then there is Hamley’s Toy Store on Regent Street, the 7-level flagship store of the 247-year-old retailer. A long and wonderful evening can be had here in the “for-free” category for you and your child…but I just said "child" now didn’t I. We made it that way for our first visit, but we did find a Build-A-Bear Workshop on the second level...

Baraka said, "I've never done Build-A-Bear...". I sensed a soon-to-vanish opportunity, and did not hesitate to go back there with him a few nights later to plunk down 24 pounds for his creation (a dog, actually, with a karate outfit and Skecher’s tennis shoes). Then I realized I needn’t have worried…there is something so appealing about these things and this idea. You won’t necessarily ever grow out of it.

After an evening in Hamley’s, or your West End show, you can walk through the drizzle in Soho for dinner in Chinatown. It is here where the head-rubs abounded for Baraka.






It's dusk, of our last day, as I jog through the gate to Abney Park Cemetery.

A few people are out in the twilight forest, walking, communing. Deep in the woods, an odd solitary plucked wildflower graces the top of a grave.

At the east gate, about 20 people dressed in blue uniforms enter. I find them again, later on in my circuit, assembled in prayer at the Booth grave. "Ah, the Salvation Army Band," I think to myself. Down the path, two guys are black spray-painting what look like engine parts. Don't know what that's about...

People leave, and the forest gets darker. I keep running. Darkening mounds of ivy make interesting shapes in the woods, through the corners of my eyes as I round the bends.

I finish, in the failing light, and walk slowly through the park towards the gate, through the middle of the woods...I find myself continuously looking around...looking behind. I reach the gate at Church Street. It's locked, so I climb over the wall.


Later, as Baraka sleeps, I go out to see what's up.

Down at the front doors to our building, our jack-o-lanterns are still burning well. I head down to Church Street, as fireworks go off in the distance. Ryan's Bar has a lively fancy-dress party, and it spills out onto the chilly sidewalk. "Brrr!" I think, at the sight of some skimpy costumes.

In the Rose and Crown, a coal fire is burning, and most of the tables are taken and in heavy conversation. I feel a little warmer, and step up to the bar.

"Yes?" says the barman.

"Marston's Pedigree," I say, still shivering.

"Pardon me?"

"Marston's Pedigree."

"Well, it's just that I thought you would say 'please', or something."

I blush and smile.

"Hyde's Oldbill please!" says the lady behind me.