London – Parking and Walking

I’ve written before about my discovery that London’s Barbican Centre is bloody great for visiting London on a weekend – and the weekend just gone reinforced that for me.

Again, I drove in early-ish on both days (I was at Barbican by 9.30 on both occasions) and the run in was easy.

Parking was worse on the Saturday than I’d seen it before – but I still found plenty of spaces, albeit on the next level up, rather than the one I usually use.  (It turned out that Barbican was hosting a graduation ceremony thing for the Open University, which explained why it was so busy) Still not a problem though.

In this case, I was walking down to Tobacco Dock – roughly 5km away – as the weather was great, and I had plenty of time to do it. (The venue doors didn’t open ’til 11.30 on both days – so I knew I was OK, regardless) So I got time to explore a bit, wander around, see stuff, and generally enjoy early-ish mornings in City of London.

The best (for me) was wandering down, turning a corner, and unexpectedly seeing the Tower of London, with the Shard behind it…

All told, it meant I got to explore some bits I didn’t know all that well, cover a decent amount of kilometres, and still do everything I wanted to at Meatopia – so just a win all round, really.

Even better, once I got home yesterday I filled up the car with what’d been used over the weekend. £30 of fuel, £18 for parking (Barbican put up their prices at the start of September by a whole pound – shocking!) – so it cost me less to do things that way than one day’s train and Underground fares would’ve been. Not bad, not bad at all.