London’s Little Venice & Much More – Joel’s Journeys & Jaunts

London’s Little Venice? Really? Yes, really. Sort of. (Am I the only person in the world who, until recently, hadn’t known that London has a little Venice?)

After a train ride from Oxford, I arrived at my hotel in London, England, not long before the day silently slipped from morning to afternoon. I often make some sound when I slip, maybe just a whimper, or perhaps a yelp if the slip is more threatening, but days are inhibited when it comes to that sort of thing.

By the way, yes, I did feel the need to put “England” after “London” in the preceding paragraph. Canadians, and possibly only Canadians from the Province of Ontario, and maybe only southern Ontario, may be the only people who feel that need. I think everyone else in the world would make do with just “London,” rather than “London, England.” After all, who hasn’t heard of London?

It’s not that I thought you might not know where London is. It’s just that you might not know which London I was talking about. There’s one in Ontario, Canada, and maybe others, for all I know. I didn’t want anyone to be confused about which one I was talking about. Then again, my saying I took a train from Oxford to London should have tipped you off, even if you do know about the Canadian London.

To save time, yours and mine, from now on in these pages, if I say “London” without adding a country, it’s a fairly safe assumption that I’m talking about the one in England.

This is not my first time in London. It’s my third. I was here decades ago. I forget if it was in the late 1970s or the early 1980s. But that trip doesn’t count because 88.42% of the neurons and synapses that stored memories of that trip have long since died, withered, and gone to brain-cell heaven or hell, as the case may be.

The second time was in 2019. It was on a trip that started in London and went to York, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and back to London. That trip was recent enough to be included in this journal. You can see the posts from it by clicking here.

I decided that, on this trip, I’d like to see and do things that I didn’t see and do on the trip I still somewhat remember. Hence, Little Venice. However, I also visited the Sherlock Holmes Museum, Regent’s Park, and Primrose Hill this afternoon. Only one of those is a repeat from my last London visit. I’ll let you know when it comes by.

I haven’t made any plans yet for my remaining time in London (I’m here for four nights). I’m going to take it day by day. But there probably will be some repeats of the major sights I saw on previous trips.

I don’t know how much I’ll let my hotel location influence my sightseeing choices. My hotel is near Paddington Station. I chose it because my train from Oxford arrived at Paddington. And there’s a convenient Heathrow Express train that leaves from Paddington. I’ll take that to the airport when I head for home.

The problem is that Paddington is far from the centre of things in London. However, there is a tube station there. So I’ll probably take the tube a lot while I’m here. But for this afternoon, I stuck to sights within walking distance.

Little Venice

I chose Little Venice because my guidebooks recommended it. And it’s a short walk from my hotel.

London’s Little Venice is called Little Venice because it’s at the confluence of, I think, three canals. The real Venice in Italy has canals. Hence, Little Venice.

Aside: Confluence of canals. I don’t know what the collective noun for canals is, but if it’s not a confluence, it should be. It rolls off the tongue. If it isn’t already, I nominate confluence as the collective noun. All those in favour say, “confluence of canals.”

Um. I’ve been to Venice, Italy a few times. Sorry, Little Venice, you’re quite attractive and lively, but you’re no Venice. Not even a little Venice.

The canals that converge at Little Venice have a lot of greenery and few structures immediately beside them, let alone the beautiful old buildings of Venice, Italy. It’s very lovely. But it’s not Venice. The canals are wider than most of the “street” canals of Venice, but much narrower than its Grand Canal.

Rather simple, long houseboats dock beside the canals in Little Venice.

In Little Venice, someone approached me who claimed, I think honestly, that she was from Ohio, recently completed a master’s degree here, is staying on for a while, and is volunteering for the charitable trust that maintains the canals. She knew a lot about the canals and provided many facts and figures about them. (Although, how would I know if she was making it up?)

She said the canals weren’t always as nice. She showed me a picture she said was from 2008 of a large heap of used car tires dumped by the side of a canal. She said the trust cleaned it up and widened the old, narrow towpaths beside the canals into wider sidewalks. The trust, according to her, maintains the canals, the sidewalks, and the locks on the canals.

Of course, she could have been making it all up, despite the lanyard, official t-shirt, and photos she had. She was hoping for a donation. It was my smidgen of doubt that prevented me from giving her a one.

Just as I was leaving Little Venice, it started to rain. It continued for most, but not all, of my almost half-hour walk to the Sherlock Holmes Museum. That wasn’t a problem because I had my rain jacket and brolly. My brolly used to be an umbrella, but it divinely transubstantiated into a brolly when I entered England. Blessed be to the rain gods.

Sherlock Holmes Museum

The Sherlock Holmes Museum is located at 221B Baker Street, the fictional home of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.

But here’s the thing. The address of the museum wouldn’t be 221B Baker Street if the museum weren’t there.

It is, indeed, on Baker Street. But it’s located between numbers 237 and 241 Baker Street. The City of Westminster (as far as I’m concerned, it’s all London) granted the private museum’s request to be assigned the 221B address, despite it being out of sequence.

On the street level, there’s a gift shop, ticket office/gift shop cashier, and the door to the museum.

One floor up, as it was in the Sherlock Holmes books and stories, are two rooms set up like the Sherlock Holmes residence. Entry into these two small rooms is available only with a guide. The rooms are small, so they only let a few people in at a time. According to the guide, all of the furnishings are antiques, so we weren’t allowed to touch them.

The guide then described the rooms as if Sherlock Holmes were a real person. “If you were fortunate enough to be a real customer, Detective Holmes’s housekeeper would lead you up here and have you sit in this seat. The detective would always sit in that seat. And Doctor Watson would sit there. If Holmes got angry, he would sometimes shoot bullets into the wall, much to the consternation of his housekeeper.” The guide then pointed to alleged bullet holes forming the letters “VR,” for Victoria Regina, in the wall.

It went on like this for a few minutes, mostly continuing to talk as if Sherlock Holmes were a real person. Although at one point, she pointed to a deerstalker hat of the type that Sherlock Holmes had been famous for wearing. When she did, she said that a deerstalker hat never appeared in any of the books or stories. An illustrator portrayed Holmes in one. It was then adopted in films, plays, and TV series of the Holmes stories. But, according to her, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never included a deerstalker hat in his writing because he thought it was too cartoonish.

After the guide finished with those rooms, visitors were free to go on their own to the two rooms one floor up, which was a recreation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s actual office.

To be honest, I thought the Sherlock Holmes Museum was rather scant.

Regent’s Park

In the introduction to this post, I said there’s one sight I saw today that I’d seen on my last trip to London. Regent’s Park is it. I saw it then thanks only to Air Canada texting me before I checked out of my hotel to tell me that my flight was delayed by a few hours. I used the extra time to visit Regent’s Park.

I enjoyed it then, and it’s only a couple of blocks from the Sherlock Holmes Museum. The sun was out when I left the museum, so I decided to visit the park. While I was there, some heavy clouds rolled in for a while, but the rain stayed away.

Regent’s Park is a big, beautiful park with lots of grass, trees, fountains, statues, a couple of large water features, an excellent rose garden, and some other gardens. It also houses an outdoor theatre and a zoo. I didn’t go into either of those. The zoo looks relatively small on the map. The theatre advertised Brigadoon. I could hear music and singing coming from that area, but I don’t know if it was a performance or a rehearsal.

On my walk through the park, I came across a simple wooden gazebo. A jazz quartet was playing there and I stopped to listen to it. I took a video of a few minutes’ worth of it and uploaded it to YouTube. I posted it here for your viewing and listening pleasure.

I’ve included some pictures immediately below of Regent’s Park that I couldn’t fit in the text in this section.

Primrose Hill

Primrose Hill, and the small park it sits in (small relative to Regent’s Park, but not a particularly small park), is across a street from one end of Regent’s Park. My walking tour app recommended going there after Regent’s Park to see the views from atop Primrose Hill.

It’s not a terribly tall hill, but tall enough to provide sweeping views of the tall buildings of central London well off in the distance. It also provided a good view of the ominous clouds that had rolled in in that direction.

With the view taken in, I headed back to my hotel, a more than 40-minute walk away from that point.

The route back that Apple Maps sent me on took me along another canal, although the route came close to, but bypassed, Little Venice. Who knew London had so many canals? Not me. Until today.

For a chunk of the canal that I walked along on the way back, narrow piers jutted out perpendicular to one of the walls of the canal, the side I was on. They were spaced just far enough apart that a houseboat could park on either side of the pier, with little room between the boats parked at the next-door piers. They jammed a lot of boats into the space.

That’s it for today. Catch you tomorrow when I do, well, whatever.