Back to Bermondsey

All the walking is wearing me out again, so I didn't leave Epsom for London until about noon. Arrived at Waterloo, then two changes of Tube, first via the Northern Line south, change at Kennington, then north to Borough. It's only after you've walked miles through the snaking white tiled underground tunnels that you realize things like: "oh, if I'd gotten off in Wimbledon I could have done such-and-such" or "from Vauxhall, I could have taken the Victoria line to Brixton." Duh. Riding the tube is basically a mesmerizing experience, and you get so used to life underground that you forget you can get from Waterloo to Borough faster via the surface streets, if you just put on your glasses and read the map.

Well, after my daily version of "Alice's Adventures Under the Ground" I headed toward Bermondsey Street, via Long Lane. Stopped for a mortadella and salad on ciabatta sandwich at pretty deli called FinefoodsEC1, run by two antic Italians, that had a queue of hungry-looking Europeans spilling into the street. Good sign: Spanish- and/or French-speaking young people + queue usually means good food at reasonable cost. Score!

Next stop: Punk fashion queen Zandra Rhodes' Fashion and Textile Museum, an orange- and pink building that just pops. This neighborhood used to be the heart of the tannery trade, and the streets have great names to prove it: Tanner, Morocco and Leathermarket. Now, it's all trendy shops and cafes. The current show is Very Sanderson 150 Years of English Decoration, and if you are interested in interior decoration and textiles, it's good. Sanderson established itself as a French wallpaper importer in 1860. Known for its chintz (remember the blowsy roses of the 1980s?), the show covers the rise, fall, and rise of Sanderson. In case you don't already know, it's been rediscovered by a new generation of fans. All you need to do is stay in a boutique hotel, like a W, for example, and you'll see who's discovered it.

Next stop, a walk through the Borough Market, which squeezes its Victorian iron and glasswork underneath the railway arches of London Bridge Station. By the time I got there, 4pm, things were starting to slow a bit, but the place was still jammed with stalls selling flowers, fruit, meat, fish, bread, dishes, cheeses and wine. Apparently the market has been here since medieval times, because until 1750, London only had one bridge, and all the farmers from Kent used to set up their stalls here.

Here's the real storefront of Neal's Yard Dairy. Their original shop, in, wait for it, Neal's Yard, near Covent Garden, is only a shadow of its former self. In 1979 I worked at Birkbeck College as a library assistant, and I could walk to Neal's Yard, and back, on my lunchbreak. Little did I know back then that I was entering the source of Britain's local food renaissance, their version of Alice Waters in San Francisco. I used to come here to buy "real" bread and "real" cheese because the stuff in Sainsbury's was crap. As an Australian, coming from a big agricultural nation that, circa 1975, somehow skipped the 1st world's descent into antiseptic, plasticated food, I was homesick for stuff with taste. Little did I know I was walking in the footsteps of the greats. I'm pleased to report that this location of Neal's Yard is wallpapered with pine cheese shelves, and carries blue veined and/or goaty beauties with names like these: Duckett's Caerphilly, Sparkenhoe Red Leicester, Ticklemore and Mini Milleens. Ohh, and the smell!!

The guy in white giving out samples was 10 years old when the original Neal's Yard was founded. He didn't seem surprised at all that a middle-aged baby boomer from the USA stopped by to wax lyrical about his cheeses.