What do you miss about the UK?

LissaC said:
I miss visiting London so much. I can't explain how it feels to walk London streets. The Strand is my favorite and I have walked it countless times. The British Museum is one of my favorite places on earth and I go there every time I am in London. I miss Hotel Chocolat and Forbidden Planet and going to the theater. Hopefully next year I will return.
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I share your feeling about London, perfectly.
 
LissaC said:
I miss visiting London so much. I can't explain how it feels to walk London streets. The Strand is my favorite and I have walked it countless times. The British Museum is one of my favorite places on earth and I go there every time I am in London. I miss Hotel Chocolat and Forbidden Planet and going to the theater. Hopefully next year I will return.
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i used to go to Forbidden Planet every month with my school pals (this would have been in the mid Eighties) to buy comics. Back then it was in Denmark St where all the guitar shops are just off Tottenham Court Road before they got too big and moved to Shaftesbury Ave. Such a fascinating place. We had a sort of routine where we’d go there for comics, go to a games store to get D&D paraphernalia, get some KFC or McDs then ride the tube home before the rush hour.

I miss that. :)
 
May sound funny, but I always look forward to riding the Tube, and navigating the different stations & platforms. I even like the weird Underground smell, sort of a mix of hydraulics, cooking oil, and body odor. :)
 
LissaC said:
I miss visiting London so much. I can't explain how it feels to walk London streets. The Strand is my favorite and I have walked it countless times. The British Museum is one of my favorite places on earth and I go there every time I am in London. I miss Hotel Chocolat and Forbidden Planet and going to the theater. Hopefully next year I will return.
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My thoughts exactly. I love especially St Katharine Docks, the shabby streets of Hackney (where Burberry wholesale store is located), the Zoo, the quiet streets of Bayswater, the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) and Ronnie Scott's where I enjoyed a Stanley Clarke gig with my hubby. London is my favorite tourist destination too.
 
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TastyReuben said:
May sound funny, but I always look forward to riding the Tube, and navigating the different stations & platforms. I even like the weird Underground smell, sort of a mix of hydraulics, cooking oil, and body odor. :)
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Confuses the hell out of me since they installed the new ticket machines
 
TastyReuben said:
May sound funny, but I always look forward to riding the Tube, and navigating the different stations & platforms. I even like the weird Underground smell, sort of a mix of hydraulics, cooking oil, and body odor. :)
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That's the one thing I don't like about London, the Tube :D Too hot and crowded and too deep in the ground for me. I can't remember which station that was but I remember once having to walk a good 20 minutes just get from to get out of the station!
 
There's a lot that I don't like about London, but one thing I do enjoy is the number of parks and green spaces. One of the best is, strangely enough, quite new. It's the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes. It opened in 2000 and is on the site of some old, disused Victorian reservoirs. One thing that's great is that is so easily accessible from central London - you can walk there from Hammersmith tube station or get the "duck bus" (yes, really) along the road from there. Now, I will confess that I'm a birder, but you don't need to be to enjoy it. I've seen lots of things there that I would never have expected to see so close to the centre of London.
 
Duck59 said:
There's a lot that I don't like about London, but one thing I do enjoy is the number of parks and green spaces. One of the best is, strangely enough, quite new. It's the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes. It opened in 2000 and is on the site of some old, disused Victorian reservoirs. One thing that's great is that is so easily accessible from central London - you can walk there from Hammersmith tube station or get the "duck bus" (yes, really) along the road from there. Now, I will confess that I'm a birder, but you don't need to be to enjoy it. I've seen lots of things there that I would never have expected to see so close to the centre of London.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3eyqbH3aTA
 
Apart from London...I miss proper villages that look like the ones I see in television murder mysteries. Nothing looks exactly like an English village except an English village.

I miss pub culture, how time kind of stands still when you go inside. Here, having a meal, even just having a drink, is so task-oriented: sit down, order, eat/drink, leave. There, it's sit down, have a look round, get the drinks in, think about some stuff, peruse the menu, have a little chat, get the food order in, along with more drinks, enjoy the drinks, have the food, rest a little bit, maybe another drink, think about dessert & coffee, talk about that for a bit, get the dessert & coffee, have a final drink, say your farewells, and no one from the staff glaring at you to get up and go, so they can turn that table over to another paying customer.

I miss single-track roads, and the silent thrill of thinking, "What am I to do when I'm between pullover spots and a delivery van is barreling down at me?!" It's exciting. I miss hedges so close they scrape the sides of the car.

I miss a cup of tea from a lone kiosk sitting by the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. I miss being able to drive more than three miles without seeing a knot of fuel stops and convenience shops. I miss all the dogs in the pubs and people riding horses in the road. I miss the dry rock walls and all the sheep. Sheep everywhere.

I miss sailing through roundabouts, going miles and miles and miles without having to stop. I miss houses that seem to have their front doors open right into the road, no sidewalk/pavement in front as a buffer.

I used to go to a village shop that wrapped all my purchases in brown paper and tied them up with string. I don't know if anyone does that any longer, but it was positively charming. I miss early closing day when the shops would close on Wednesday afternoons. As inconvenient as it was sometimes, I was always warmed by the fact that the shopkeeper was probably home with his feet up, enjoying a well-earned little extra rest.

What a...civilized place!
 
I wonder what's killing off the Pubs?
One Publican (remember that term?) some time ago said he was being regulated and taxed out of business.

A stand alone bar in many towns in Calif has to have between 11 to 13 food items available to operate. Some bars are grandfathered in that don't have kitchens are exempt. But if the owner were to transfer/sell the likker license, the new owner would have to serve food.
 
I am counting the UK to mean not just England. I love London, and I've been there many times. But, I agree with the sentiment of locals when it comes to not missing the crush of tourists (pre-2020, of course). I imagine even the locals miss that these days. When I visit the UK, I don't want to go to London again....I'd rather visit somewhere I haven't seen before, much as I love the city.

My best times in the UK have been driving around the countryside, stopping in a little tavern, enjoying the scenery. One of my favorite memories is driving around about half of Loch Lomand, and stopping to just sit by the shore and breathe in the fresh air. I remember seeing a family with a little kid who was skipping stones along the water. We could have stayed all day doing that. This was before everyone had a phone, and I didn't think to take pictures (below is an image I downloaded that looks like areas we saw).

ben-lomond-and-loch-lomond-john-mckinlay.jpg
 
I miss having seen so little of the rest of the UK. I've been going to London more often in recent years (ok, Covid apart), each time a plunge in the heart. Every. Holy. Time.
I loved it even before I set foot there back in 1998. I wanted to chain myself to some gate and never leave. In fact, even now I still want to chain myself up or get lost.
The first time I took the Tube from Heathrow I understood why they call it the Tube. Here in Milan the tube vagons are like living rooms...and there are no seats covered with velvet. I liked this surprise. And I still like it now.
I fully agree with LissaC about the heat though.

Apart from London, the only places I visited were Edinburgh (remarkable), and Stone Henge (sorry, I wasn't impressed at all). And separate mention for Ireland (I had one of the best summer holidays of my life).

After 1998 I will have returned to London at least 10 more times, each time different.

I walk for hours in London when my schedule permits. The last time I was there was at the beginning of October 2020, after my business meetings I walked from Grosvenor Sq. to St. James Park and there for the first time I saw the green parrots. I mean, actually I saw parrots live for the first time. Green.
Thank you.

And yes, the food. I love English food. I really do. How much I would love a Full English Breakfast right now. With black pudding, of course.
 
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