Travel Tips: London on the Cheap

When I tell people that I'm going to London, the response I often get is "I'd love to go, but it's such an expensive city." Sure, I say, if your travel expectations are for luxury accommodation, West End theatre and lots of tourist attractions, but that doesn't suit my style or my wallet. Over the past 15 years, I've developed a shedload of ways to have as good — or, I'd argue, better and more authentic — London travel experiences on a budget. Here are a few of my tips. 

• Before I even left, I saved myself a bundle through my credit cards. I booked my plane ticket and AirBnB with my travel rewards card (and made the down payment on the crown I need on a tooth I just broke) and got back about $150 in rewards to offset the cost of the travel and accommodation. I had let the reward points accumulate on my other credit card since my trip to Ireland last year and I'll be able to transfer about $200 to my bank account, which I'll use for walking around money in the UK. When I ordered a new raincoat and a few other things I needed for the trip from Amazon, at checkout I saw a banner advert saying I could open an Amazon credit card and immediately get $100 off my purchase. So I did. This is all free money!
• Accommodation: AirBnB or Vrbo have some good values for money, but it helps to start your search early. Forget about zone 1 — look at areas in zone 2 with excellent transport links, preferably a tube station and a couple of convenient bus routes. Two years ago, I stayed a five minute walk from Queen's Park station for $62/night. On my upcoming trip, I'll be spitting distance from the Tufnell Park station with easy access to Camden Town, King's Cross/St Pancras and beyond for $52/night. I look for a room with a private bathroom, wifi, cooking facilities and use of the washing machine. 
• Transport: Once you've settled in and walked to the tube station or bus stop, what's the best way to pay for transport? Whether you're in town for a few days or a few weeks, you need to get an Oyster card, but the type of card and what you load onto it will be different depending on the length of your visit. For less than a week, you're fine with a visitor's Oyster, which can be purchased online and mailed to you before your travel or purchased at Heathrow. If you're staying a week or longer, wait until you're in town and purchase a regular Oyster from any tube station or hundreds of news agents. What's the difference? Visitor cards function only as PAYG, so you need to pay attention to your balance and top it up when you get low. Regular Oysters have the added advantage of enabling you to load travel cards, sold in one week or one month duration, onto them. I load my Oyster with some cash and one-week zone 1-2 travel card(s). The cash will cover journeys into the farther out zones (Heathrow is in zone 6, so I always need some dosh on my card to get to/from the airport because I'm too cheap to take the Heathrow Connect or Express). 
• Food: Dining out in London can be expensive, but food is actually cheap. I rarely eat in restaurants other than to go for an Indian or a pub meal. I scope out the nearest farmers' market, street market, bakery and grocery store options. Tea and a roll or a chunk of tasty bread is all I need in the morning. For lunch, I prefer to bring something with me in my day bag or grab a Tesco Express and Sainsbury's Local meal deal — a sandwich, beverage and crisps for about £3 — and sit on a bench in a park or a churchyard to eat. Cafes are a good alternative — the ones in church crypts often serve healthy and hearty food. I often stop for an afternoon treat at a bakery or caff and then end the day with dinner on the cheap — a veggie pie, soup, salad or something else I can heat up easily at my gaff washed down with a glass or two of wine.
• Free outdoor spaces: London is full of places to walk and explore, including some of the best parks you could imagine, often with an historic home in the park or nearby. Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath is lovely, full of art and free. And the cemeteries are to die for! Highgate Cemetery is the only one of the Magnificent Seven that has an entry fee, but it's quite reasonable. It's often said that London is an amalgamation of many villages, each with its own character. I love spending time rambling around and taking it all in. And it doesn't cost a thing.
• Museums and other attractions: Most of the big-name museums, including the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert, the Museum of London and the Natural History Museum, have free entry. They do, however, charge for special exhibitions and those entry fees have gone up considerably over the past few years. Some of the other museums, including the Royal Academy and the Foundling Museum, do charge entry fees. If you know that you'll be museum hopping all over London (and beyond), while soaking up a lot of art and culture, an Art Pass is a great investment, particularly if they have a three-month "taster" Art Pass on offer for 15 quid. The card gets you in free to hundreds of venues that normally charge and also gives 50% off the cost of special exhibitions. Cards need to be ordered online and sent in the post to UK addresses. I asked my AirBnB host if I could use her postal address for my Art Pass and she was fine with it. NOTE: This is different to the London Pass, which in my estimation is a total ripoff. 
• Events and performances: I've never been to West End theatre, so I can't give advice on how to score cheap tickets to those plays.  Smaller theatres away from the West End, like the Almeida (Islington), Arcola (Dalston), Hampstead (Swiss Cottage) or Kiln (Kilburn), are reasonably priced. The Hampstead has reduced-price tickets on Mondays. There are also scads of cultural events, including performances, talks and walks, that are free. Some of the churches have free noontime music performances or you can sit in on a rehearsal. I'll be in London for two fantastic free events: Open House weekend (over 800 buildings of architectural interest all across the capital city open to the public) and Totally Thames Festival, a month-long celebration of the river with exhibitions, talks and walks. I also like to check out free or reasonably-priced talks at cultural institutions such as the British Library and the Bishopsgate Institute as well as the museums. 
• Promo codes and coupons: I get a bunch of weekly email newsletters from London websites and am always on the lookout for bargains. In the past, I've had coupons for pub meals and attractions. I recently downloaded the app for a new ride-hailing company called Kapten and used a promo code from SkintLondon to put £15 in credit on my account. 
• Views: Why pay £25 to look down on London from the dizzying heights of the Shard when you can get views just as good for free? There are viewing decks on the new extension to Tate Modern and on the One New Change shopping centre in back of St Paul's Cathedral. For something a bit higher up and enclosed, there's the Sky Garden on the Walkie Talkie building (timed entry, book online up to three weeks in advance) and the new garden at 120 Fenchurch Street (no need to book ahead). I've seen great views from Primrose Hill, Parliament Hill on Hampstead Heath, Greenwich Park, Richmond Park and several places in south London. On my upcoming trip, I'm looking forward to seeing the view from Dartmouth Park Hill, about a 10 minute walk from my AirBnB.

Two great sources of info about free and cheap things to see and do are the IanVisits website (sign up for his weekly newsletter of listings) and Londonist.

Watch this space for my chronicles of my journey, with scintillating details of where I went, what I saw and how much I spent. If you know of other tips, please pop them in the comments below. 

Heading home now

It was a bit lonely in the doss house last night, but I slept well thanks to the wine and Tylenol PM. Woke up around 1 am when the inmates in the next cell came in, but they weren't loud for long.

I got up early, showered, packed and was out the door at 9 for a walk around Griffith Park and up to the National Botanic Gardens. Both were lovely and quiet on this sunny Sunday.

We really lucked out with the weather this past week. Though it was grey and a bit chilly in Belfast, we only had rain one afternoon as we came back from our day's adventures. The past four days have been warm and bright ... and long, as we were here for the solstice and the sun has been setting around 10 pm.

I'm sitting at the gate at the airport now and we'll board soon.

Stats:
€2.50 banana bread at the Botanic Gardens caff

13,386 steps, 5.79 miles (so far)

A Flop House in Dublin

Friday (yesterday) we returned the rental car and got a morning bus from Belfast to Dublin, arriving at noon. It was an easy ten minute walk from the bus station to the hostel where we had reservations to stash our bags for the afternoon and then we were on our way to explore. The bag stash place is very close to the Dublin GPO, site of the rebel headquarters during the 1916 Easter Rising, so we stopped for a look around. Over 100 years on, the bullet holes are still evident on the portico and facade. Inside, it's a busy post office, nicely rebuilt after the interior burned during the fighting, with lots of wood and brass fittings. There's also a museum about the Easter Rising, but we skipped it as we needed to push on.

Next stop was the visitor info center where we bought our Leap visitor cards for the bus and tram and then made our way westward in search of food as we looked at this and that along the way -- a garden of remembrance for the dead of all Irish rebellions, the shiny brass plaque on the Sinn Fein national headquarters in Parnell Square, the bustling produce market, Jameson's Distillery, Victorian warehouses and worker housing, newly constructed office and housing blocks. We finally found sustenance in Smithfield Square at a trendy food market with lots of eat in/take out options including an excellent salad bar with Thai spice tuna salad, curry rice salad, and various combos of veg, feta, cous cous and quinoa.

On the itinerary for the afternoon was a guided walk about the Great Famine in Dublin, led by Fin Dwyer, the man behind the Irish History Podcast. Through sight and sound, he exposed us to the impact of the potato blight from 1846 to 1851 (which we usually think of as a rural calamity) on people living in urban Dublin. We learned that, throughout the years of the hunger, Ireland was exporting food to Britain and Europe. The blight may have sparked the famine, but it was the land tenancy system, along with British governmental policy and callous disregard for the suffering of the Irish people, that precipitated a food security catastrophe the likes of which has not been seen since. I'd highly recommend the walk to anyone coming to Dublin with an interest in Irish history.

After the walk, we popped into the Cobblestone to have a pint (Roger cider, me Guinness) and listen to some trad music, then reclaimed our bags and took the city bus north to the Drumcondra area to check in to our Airbnb. Drumcondra, like the Queen's Quarter where we stayed in Belfast, is an area of tree-lined streets of red brick Victorian terrace houses, populated by students, young families and senior citizens. Though we were feeling the good vibe of the neighborhood when we got off the bus, that disappeared when we opened the front door of the house where our Airbnb is. Turns out that the rather shabby house has been chopped up into ten tiny units. The dark hallway with worn carpet, steep stairway and hand-scrawled signs of instructions from our host awaited us inside. Our unit is small and dreary, but it's cheap, in a safe area and has good transport connections. We quickly dropped our stuff and headed out again.

In addition to booking these accommodations, Roger booked tickets for an a cappella showcase at a club near the Temple Bar area. We ate pizza, consumed wine and listened to music -- a nice way to wind down our day on the move. We wrapped it up with glasses of whiskey at Fagan's Pub (where Bertie Ahern took Bill Clinton for a drink in 1998) on our block in Drumcondra.

This morning we explored the Liberties, a very old part of Dublin between the massive Guinness factory on the west and Dublin Castle on the east. This doesn't seem to be an area that attracts tourists and I was happy to wander through a community garden with a pig located on wasteland, a tatty market and a Norman church without colliding with any teen tour groups. When we reached Dublin Castle, we spent a good amount of time seeing an exhibition called Coming Home: Art & the Great Hunger. It's a very powerful show, with a video intro, paintings and sculpture. Much of the works come from the collection of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut (who knew?) so local folks will get to see it when the art returns in 2019.

Roger then headed for the airport to go back to London, leaving me to travel solo until my flight on Sunday. I spent two hours at the Hugh Lane Gallery in Parnell Square. The permanent collection includes many impressionist and modern works by Irish artists. They also house the studio of Francis Bacon. It's his entire actual studio. After his death, the studio he had for over 30 years in a Kensington mews was dismantled and reconstructed, down to the piles of clutter and the smallest detail in this Dublin gallery. I'm not a fan of Bacon, but I thought the studio was so interesting -- it's rare to see the place where art is actually created.

I also walked along beautiful Georgian terrace streets, saw an iron bench being consumed by a tree at the King's Inn (a legal inn), visited Blessington Basin park (ducks, a swan, fairy houses and a sweet little lodge) and did my shopping for dinner. I'm back in the flop  house now. As soon as I finish writing this, I intend to sleep soundly and long.

Friday stats:
£3.50 final bus fare in Belfast
€19.50 for 72-hour bus pass in Dublin
€4.80 lunch
€17 famine walk
€3.40 pint of Guinness after the walk
€20 ticket to a cappella showcase
€12 pizza and wine

21,252 steps, 8.77 miles

Saturday stats:
€2.85 tuna & sweet corn sandwich from Tesco
€5.39 salad for dinner
€5.30 bread and wine

20,644 steps, 8.48 miles

The Coastal Route

We rented a car and drove north via an inland route and back to Belfast along the coast. Today is the longest day of the year and it was sun and blue skies the entire day, though temps never got out of the 50s and it was pretty breezy. I think this might be as good a day as we could possibly have had weather-wise in the north of Ireland in June.

We got turned around and lost numerous times, but Roger drove on the wrong side of the road only once and we didn't hit anything. There were a few times on the twisty narrow B roads that our hearts were in our throats, however.

I took a lot of photos on my camera, but only a couple of crap ones on the phone.

The Dark Hedges, a two hundred year old tunnel of beech trees seen in Game of Thrones:

Giant's Causeway, which is pretty spectacular:

When we got back into Belfast, we thought we'd drive over to the Shankill Road to look at the unionist murals. We made several attempts to get there via what looked on the map like through streets, only to encounter the barricades of the "peace wall." It might be that the gates had been closed at 6 or 7 pm, before we got there. It was a stark example of what local residents encounter as they try to get from one part of Belfast to another.

When we did reach the Shankill Road, we thought the area was creepy and the murals are very militaristic. During the Troubles, this was home turf for gangs who committed the most brutal sectarian violence, murdering scores of Catholics across Belfast. Now, the gangs have turned their enterprise to drug dealing. I didn't take any photos with my phone so you'll just have to wait for me to upload my proper photos to ipernity.

Stats:
£3.50 top up bus pass
£2.75 sandwich and crisps in Bushmills
£11.50 entry fee for Giant's Causeway
£3.40 pint of Guinness in Cushendun
£3.50 soup and bread for dinner

15,786 steps, 6.58 miles

More on the Troubles and a big ship goes down

Today we got a different perspective on the Troubles and how they impacted ordinary citizens of Belfast, both Protestant and Catholic, and do so to this day. We did the walking tour about the history of the terror with DC Tours. 

Our guide Paul ( Donzo) took us through several seminal incidents that took place in Belfast city centre, incidents that illustrated the "parallel universes" that have been inhabited by people on the two sides of the conflict over the past four decades. He carefully showed how people on either side can have their own truth and their own trauma. I was particularly struck to hear him describe the ways in which a person's own experience in the years of terror can to this day impact that person's viewpoint, body language and behavior. Paul has taken part in a number of educational and reconciliation projects related to bringing peace to Northern Ireland. I wish I had been able to ask how young people who were born after the Good Friday Agreement experience their city. I'm really curious how they view the Troubles and to what extent -- given that something like 90% of primary and secondary schools are segregated by religion -- they are able to have normalized experiences that mix Protestant and Catholic kids.

After the conclusion of the walk at the waterfront, we took a look at the Salmon of Knowledge and then crossed the pedestrian bridge over the river and made our way towards the old ship yards. Our lunch stop was the DOCK Cafe. I can't remember how I heard about this place, but whatever it was made me put it on my spreadsheet as one of my Belfast destinations. In a cavernous space at the base of a new development next to Abercorn Basin, the caff serves up wholesome food on an honour system -- each customer puts whatever amount they think is fair price for their order into an honesty box. The caff also serves as a meeting space for local groups, with comfy donated furniture all around, an art gallery, a prayer garden and place for community volunteerism. On the recommendation of one of the volunteers, we each had the chicken soup and bread and it hit the spot.

Our next destination was the Titanic Experience, where we learned about the late c19 and early c20 industries in Belfast, the dockyards, the building of the Titanic and its sinking. It's an interactive, highly immersive place -- as opposed to a museum proper. Lots of moving images, sounds, buttons to push. I enjoyed both the bits about the industrial history and seeing how the ship was outfitted with furnishings, woodworking, china, linen, etc., most of which was made in Ireland. 

It was wicked easy to catch a bus back to the city centre from Queen's Island. We stopped in a pub -- pint of cider for Roger and pint of Guinness for me -- before catching another bus back to the Queen's University quarter where we are staying. For dinner, we went back to Slim's Healthy Kitchen where we had eaten two nights before and it was just as good the second time around.

Stats:

£3 to top up bus pass

£1.90 for scone for breakfast eaten on the bus

£15 for History of the Terror walk with DC Tours

£3 lunch

£15 Titanic Experience

£4.40 pint of Guinness

£15 dinner and wine

14,392 steps, 6.08 miles