Really liking Donncha’s shot of London taken whilst flying over head! Pity he just missed grabbing a shot of my apartment as well!
And whilst I’m sharing some photo love, OMG I think this is wonderful!
One of the things I love about London (and Paris, New York etc) is that people know how to stand out of your way on escalators etc. Here, you gotta stand to the right, so that people who want to pass, can do, on the left. God help you if you decide to straddle the escalators, or stop on the left hand side, it won’t be long until you are hurled abuse, and in my books rightly so!
It infuriates me as soon as I get off the plane in Dublin, people are straddling the escalator, sauntering down the platform, and generally do just about everything that they can to slow you up. Whilst I was living there, I guess I was just kind of used to it, and whilst it bothered me, it never really got me worked up. Now when I go back home, I’m ready to punch someone within about 30 seconds of getting off the plane, but know that there’s absolutely no point in saying anything because A) people aren’t going to give a shit, and B) I’d probably get a heap more abuse back from everyone around rather than people being in agreement with me!
Not a lot really! 
In fairness, that’s not exactly true. I will write a bit about the things about London that I won’t miss over the next few days, but, in the meantime, some of the things I will miss about living in London include:
Camden Town: Definitely one of the coolest and most offbeat places in the world that I have ever been. Yes, it can be very in your face at times, but the variety of different people, the grittiness, the food, the market and the ‘anything goes’ attitude are very cool. Add to this the fact that Camden is also town to the uber-cool Hawley Arms, which despite its locals reputation has become my favourite pub in London.
Canary Wharf: Home! I’ve loved living in and around Canary Wharf. The architecture, the space, the shops and restaurants, and my favourite building in Canary Wharf, the Bank of America. Canary Wharf reminds me very much of walking around Chicago, everything is so open and clean but I like it. That, and the fact that you constantly feel like you’re walking around the set of 28 Days / Weeks Later!
Borough Market: If you want to find really good, really diverse food in London, Borough Market is definitely where you need to go. The largest food market in the city, this should always be on your list of places to go, regardless of whether you are living in or just visiting London.
South Bank: Probably the best place for a lazy summers walk with your partner, from Westminster Bridge all the way along to Tower Bridge (assuming you have plenty of time to spare, and stop off for lunch along the way!). The view back along the river toward Westminster, the London Eye, and the street entertainment around this area, followed up by the lazy walk along the river, stopping off in OXO Gallery for a wander on the way, before walking along Queens Walk past HMS Belfast and onto City Hall and Tower Bridge is probably one of the most enjoyable ways to spend a long lazy afternoon.
Covent Garden: Always has a really good vibe about the place, loads of good shops and restaurants, and market for a wander.
Harrods Food Hall: Harrods will also feature on my list of things I don’t like about London, but, the Food Hall is a must stop for any foodie. Yes, it’s going to be crammed busy, as everywhere else in Harrods is, but, it’s well worth the effort!
Trafalgar Square, Whitehall and Westminster: The walk from Trafalgar Square down Whitehall to Westminster is amazing. Stopping off in Horseguards Parade, spotting all the various government departments and offices and then rounding the corner to see the spectacular Big Ben and Westminster is a walk I will never tire of, and will miss.
Spitafields Market: One of the nicest places in the city for a Sunday Brunch, really alternative vibe here as well.
Wandering around the City: I’ll miss walking around the City of London, past LLoyds, the Gherkin, Bank of England and the surrounding area. Ok, it’s a bit dead and boring at the weekend, but during the week when there’s a hussle and bustle its a very cool place to be.
OXO Tower Restaurant: Finally, without a doubt my favourite thing about living in London has been the spectacular OXO Tower Restaurant. Every time I’ve been, the food, service and ambience have been amazing. If you really fancy a treat in London, with spectacular views of the city, this is the place for you to go.
I always thought that moving countries would be a breeze, and especially moving from your second on to third, as you should have far less ‘baggage’ (literal and otherwise) in doing so. I can tell you know, even if you have a rather simple, carefree life, moving countries is far more difficult than you imagine! I would suggest to everyone planning on doing it that they start planning well in advance, making a list and starting to de-clutter long before they need to. I’m glad that I did, as it’s left me with less than a week to go feeling pretty happy that I’m on top of everything. I’ve monitored my mail coming into the apartment for the last 6 weeks or so, and ensured that I canceled or re-directed anything important that was coming through. I’ve been onto the bank / tv licence / phone / broadband / council etc settling up all my bills (given how slow some of these companies move, starting well in advance is vital if you want to get things done).
I had a heap of things that I shipped over from Ireland that are just not feasible to move to Australia, and whilst ebay has been a great help in offloading some stuff, it was nowhere near as good as I had been expecting, leaving me having to find other ways of selling / offloading things. I hate throwing out stuff that people could get good use out of, so, rather than doing that I’ve been working quite hard to find homes for things.
Despite my plans to literally bring my camera bag and some clean clothes for a few days, packing up a suitcase that already weighs 5kg and keeping it under the 20kg limit is a little more difficult than I had thought. I’ve already emptied and re-packed twice, and I think I’m still overweight. Alan’s going to bring a scales down this weekend to verify that.
And as for breaking a lease on an apartment, all I can say on this is, at any costs, stay well away from dealing with Foxtons if you are moving to London at any stage. I have every intention of opening up and explaining the full horrors of my experiences with Foxtons since I came here, but, I think I will leave that until I have moved along and don’t need to have any further dealings with them.
Aside from neglecting my blog as per usual!
I have had a hectic few weeks and months, deciding on, planning, and arranging a move out of cold, wet, grey London, to sunny Australia! In a weeks time from now, there will be no more London, no more tubes, no more crowds and no more getting wet all the time walking to and from work (even if it does rain here far far less than back in Ireland!). Kassie decided, for various reasons, to move back home to Brisbane a few months back, and I have finally seen sense and decided to do the same.
To say that I am excited about a move like this is a massive understatement. I’m sorry to say goodbye to an absolutely amazing company to work for, but as I’ve said to everyone since making my decision, sometimes certain things in life come along to take you off in a very different, and exciting direction, and those opportunities are too good to turn down!!
I am looking forward to taking a few weeks out without working, hooking up with Kassie and her family, Conor and Claire who have beaten me down to Brisbane, and all the other people I’ve got to know over the past year and a half down there. I can’t wait to explore the city and countryside with my camera on my back and take in something completely new to me. I can’t wait to feel heat on my bones all year round for a change!
I’m not sure how much the blog will be resuscitated over the coming weeks and months, I will try! Every time I go to make a concerted effort to update it, I just seem to loose interest again. I guess I do kind of have a good excuse now, to keep everyone back home updated on how I’m getting on. If you would like to see updates here, and they’re not forthcoming, please feel free to poke me until I get around to it. If you do want to see what I’m getting up to however, I can guarantee that my flickr stream will have pretty regular updates!
It’s a little strange to read about where you live like this. This is an article in today’s Irish Times about the apartment building that I live in:
Perching high above Canary Wharf beside the Thames
The last phase of Ballymore’s luxury apartments in London’s Docklands iare fro sale from €370,000. Edel Morgan reports
AT THE last phase of apartments at developer Ballymore’s 29-storey Ontario Tower in London Docklands, prospective purchasers won’t just be buying into a residential scheme but a development “that is more akin to life on an ocean liner or in a first class hotel”, according to the glossy brochure.
The raison-d’être of Ontario Tower - designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill architects - is to provide a sanctuary for stressed out executives from “urban pressures”, it says. It has the unusual bonus of “an invisible but ever present management infrastructure” which keeps distractions and trivia at bay and wraps the lifestyle the purchaser chooses around them “like an haute couture blanket”.
Of course invisible management infrastructures and haute couture blankets come at a price. The service charge is £5.05 a sq ft (€7.16) but allows the purchaser to avail of room service from the Radisson Edwardian hotel next door, access to a concierge service, two gyms and a spa.
Ontario Tower doesn’t just provide plain old luxury but “intelligent luxury”. The choice of two spas, says the brochure, is not “self indulgence or mere excess, simply a means of providing two differing types of experience and well being”.
Stripped bare of the bewildering brochure speak, Ontario Tower is an impressive development. At a practical level it’s a good idea to link the services of a plush contemporary hotel to a 260-unit residential development aimed at business people, particularly in an area of the Docklands where there are few restaurants or shops at the moment.
Ontario Tower has an iconic quality, particularly at night time, with its neon-lit elliptical top. Its waterside restaurant in the hotel is of a high standard and the East River Spa is an inviting facility with a relaxation room, herbal sauna, aromatic steam room, a swimming pool and treatment rooms.
Located on Ballymore’s New Providence Wharf, the development is close to two Docklands light railway stations and Canary Wharf is a 15-minute walk away.
The west and south-west facing apartments have views across the Thames to the striking 20,000-seater O2 Millennium Dome and on to the Canary Wharf skyline; these units come at a premium.
This phase has 29 apartments available for immediate occupation which includes eight two-bed homes, 13 studios and suites, four premier one-bedroom apartments and four smaller one-bed apartments.
The premier one-beds, also known as one-bed “mega-pads”, measure nearly 92sq m (1,000sq ft) and cost from £675,000 (€957,000).
Two-beds cost £580,000-£690,000 (€822,560-€979,319) and measure 89sq m (963sq ft). Ballymore says that so far there has been an even number of owner-occupiers and investors, with around 15 per cent bought by Irish investors.
The suites, which are described as a cross between a one-bed and a studio, with a pull-down bed, measure 35sq m (377sq ft) and start at £287,000 (€407,073) and studios cost from £264,000 (€370,778). Six penthouses will be released in the near future but prices have yet to be confirmed.
Ontario is minimalism and streamlining all the way with no bulky radiators - the apartments have heating along the windows and most have comfort cooling systems.
Kitchens off the livingroom are no nonsense glossy white with resin worktops and integrated appliances; bathrooms are in grey-streaked marble. Wardrobes have a white satinwood finish.
The majority of owner-occupiers at Ontario Tower are professionals working in Canary Wharf, some using it as their primary residence and others as a pièd-à-terre in the city.
According to the PR people for Ontario, the mega pad apartments to the rear of the building are popular, due to a series of economic and demographic factors including rising salaries and bonuses in the City and Canary Wharf, an increase in the number of single person households in the capital, and a requirement for larger areas for entertaining.
Ontario Tower held the accolade of the tallest residential tower in London’s Docklands for a brief period but has already been usurped by another Ballymore development, Pan Peninsula across the Thames at Millwall Dock.
It will have two towers of 40 and 50 storeys containing 762 apartments and will be even more of a pamper zone for business types with the inclusion of a private cinema, 24-hour concierge, a holistic fitness centre, a signature restaurant on the waterside and a cocktail bar on the 50th floor for residents and guests.
At the end of 2006 the official number of people employed at Canary Wharf was 90,302 of which around 25 per cent live in the surrounding five boroughs.
Increasingly Canary Wharf is becoming a shopping destination, particularly with the opening of Jubilee Place. About 500,000 people shop at Canary Wharf each week.
A large pool of residents and workers there have an enviable disposable income - it is no accident that Waitrose has opened a gigantic Food and Home store at Canada Place with its own steak and oyster bar.
Ontario Tower can command rents of £345-£475 (€489-€673) a week for one-beds, from £550 (€780) a week for two-beds, from £330-£375 (€468-€532) a week for suites and £230-£280 (€326-397) for studios. During the first six months of 2007, residential rents across the City and Docklands’ markets rose by 7 per cent making typical weekly rents of £490 (€695) for a two-bed apartment and £375 (€532)for a one-bed.
While the majority of tenants at Ontario Towers are young executives, there are some couples and singles between 40 and 50 who have relocated from overseas, and people from all over Britain who need a base in London.
Ballymore is involved in a number of projects in London’s Docklands including Leamouth Peninsula, Pan Peninsula, Baltimore Wharf and Wood Wharf.
Both Ontario Tower and Pan Peninsula were designed by the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill architects, who were behind Chicago’s Sears tower, the master plan for Hong Kong harbour and Canary Wharf.
Normally, I sleep with the blinds in the apartment up, I like waking up in the morning, rolling out of bed, and seeing my view of London out the window.
This morning I woke up rather bleary eyed and sleepy, and thought that I’d obviously closed the blinds last night, so headed over to open them up. Queue a dazed and confused Daragh as he tried to pull up the blinds that were already up, and figure out what exactly was going on. Turns out, there had been a severe weather warning issued for extremely dense fog, and this is what was confusing me. I could not see a thing. The building next door is about 20 feet away from mine, and even that was barely visible, never mind Canary Wharf or the city in the background. It was a very cool but eerie feeling. I couldn’t even see the ground below me which was very wierd!
Anyways, fog is now gone and it’s a beautiful sunny day in London now, and the forecast is good, with temperatures forecast to get up to 20 degrees over the weekend which is a bit mad for mid October!
Does anyone know of any decent (field) hockey clubs in East London, or of any sites out there on the wonderweb where I might go about finding hockey clubs in London? I’m looking at getting back into playing again, more just to have fun and get tucked into the social side of things than to take it too seriously (I always end up saying that, and then end up wanting to be back playing for the 1st’s!). Google hasn’t been too helpful to date, so, anyone familiar with hockey in London out there, now’s a good time to speak up (that includes you Anna!!).
UPDATE:
I’ve now found out about East London Hockey Club and Wapping Hockey Club via England Hockey so gonna check out a little more about them later! 
So, today I get to fly home (yay!) for the weekend. Great and all as that is, there is one part of it that’s a complete pain, the fact that I have to make my way over to Heathrow to get my plane. Flying to Ireland out of Heathrow doesn’t bother me, Terminal 1 is always nice and quiet, and it’s a 5 minute walk from the underground to the departure gate (gotta love online checkin!). But, getting to Heathrow itself is a pain. I live in East London, and I can see London City Airport out my window. It’s about 10 minutes there on the DLR, and it’s nice and quiet and easy to get to.
BUT…flights out of there are ridiclously expensive, especially if you want to fly at a resonable hour on a Friday / Sunday. Usually, every time that I go looking, my flights come in around £300, and whilst my time is precious, I just can’t make that a regular thing, especially when I can get a flight from Heathrow for around £60.
There is talk about expanding capacity at LCY, and in my mind it can’t come quick enough. It would also be nice to see another carrier taking on Cityjet (Air France) domination of the Dublin > London City route, Aer Arann where are you?!
There’s an interesting opinion piece in today’s Guardian penned by Simon Jenkins, discussing the ever increasing (and planned) number of high rise buildings in London. Since moving over, I’ve been in awe of the number of high rise buildings going up. I currently live in the highest residential property in the UK (though, that’s soon to change and I absolutely love high rise. Seeing some of the towers that are going up around the city, as well as some of those planned is really exiting. I personally think that high-rise is the way forward, having lived in Ireland, seeing the urban sprawl, as Dublin moves further and further out to the suburbs due to the lack of space to build housing / offices, due to planning restrictions on high rise buildings, I can certainly see the benefit.
Simon Jenkins is complaining about these, saying that they are betraying London’s heritage, and spoling the view. He is blaming Mayor Ken Livingston for circumventing planning laws in order to have these erected as a means of boosting his ego (with a slight suggestion at the fact that Ken’s pockets may be lined by the businesses involved in building these). I’m not for circumventing the correct planning process, but I do think that planning laws should certainly be favourable to high rise buildings.
Now, if only Ireland, and especially Dublin City Council could learn a little from this, perhaps we may eventually see something revolutionary and spectacular happen.
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