My niece works for a railway company and as part of her staff benefit, friends and family can travel with her at a heavily discounted price. Bearing in mind transport prices are quite expensive in UK, and I'm not one to pass on good offers, I tagged along with her when she went to London recently. Her manager even allowed us to travel first class!!
Lunch
We got into London around lunch time and headed over to an area called Elephant and Castle to a community market for lunch. This area isn't one of the best in London and used to have quite high crime rates. Like many inner cities, there's been a lot of urban regeneration, and due to its proximity to the City of London, things are happening here, but I think it's still got some way to go. Lunch was located in an old paper factory warehouse and claims to be " London’s First Sustainable Community Market". It has about 40 food stalls with cuisines from all corners of the world. Being a week day, it wasn't too busy, I think during weekend and the evenings the atmosphere would be much livelier.
Walk around central London
After lunch I wanted to go to a museum at Bloomberg's European headquarters in the city of London . It was about 2 km away so I decided to walk because I love walking around London. There's always something interesting to see on the way, be it plants growing out of graffiti walls under a railway bridge, or a mish mash of modern skyscrapers alongside one of the many centuries old London bridges. Or even better still, black cabs and red buses, both iconic of London.
London Mithraeum
If you're interested in Roman archeology and history, the London Mithraeum is definitely worth a visit. At around AD50, the Romans built the capital of Roman Britain, Londinium and they were here for over four centuries till the fall of the Roman empire. Londinium, as you may have guessed, is the present day London. When London was rebuilt after the second world war, archaeologists discovered some ruins and artefacts underground. It turned out this was a mithraeum, an underground temple dedicated to the god of Mithra, and where the secret Mithras Cult would meet. This was an all male cult and they would meet in these
underground temples performing their secret rituals and doing whatever weird things cults would do behind closed doors.
The temple ruins were bang in the city of London and they were moved away and rebuilt on ground level so the site could be redeveloped. When Bloomberg decided to build their European headquarters on the site in 2012, they moved the Mithraeum ruins back to its original location, 7 meters below ground and turned it into a museum.
The most amazing thing for me, is that during 2005 to 2016 I was actually working in the city of London. My office was 5 minutes away from the site, but I never knew about all this history!! That just shows how ignorant I am of London's history how rich London's history is.
The London Mithraeum does what they call an immersive exhibition. Visitors enter a dark room and can just about see the ruins in the center. We all waited patiently not knowing what to expect. Suddenly a very faint light is lit up and there is some smoke (dry ice probably). We hear a lot of chatter but it wasn't English, I think it maybe Latin, and they're trying to recreate a cult meeting happening back in the Roman days. It was all very mysterious. I was half expecting to see holograms of cult members but I imagine they wanted visitors to feel the atmosphere
and imagine it, instead of forcing an image in them and spoil the experience.
I'm not sure how long the chatter went on for. Maybe 5 minutes I think because the whole session only lasted 15 minutes. Afterwards they lit up the room and we could walk around and see the ruins properly. It's really fascinating to think that all this in front of my eyes existed nearly two thousand years ago.
Tube to Battersea
My next stop was to the other side of London to the Battersea Power Station which I blogged about here. It was a bit too far to walk, plus I enjoy our tube, even though it's old, has no air conditioning and not very reliable sometimes. It's just very London, and that's what I love about it.
Dinner at Chinatown
And finally, my last stop in London before catching the train home, dinner. Chinatown in London does some of the best Chinese food, but there's also a lot of tourist traps. This time I went to a place called The Eight, it had some very good reviews from my local Chinese groups. The reviews were spot on rounding off my half day in London on a high.
