london

I saw popular beat combo Slayer at that very venue a month ago.

Me too. I used to live right by there. Got too expensive though.

I used to live on the other side - Turnpike Lane/Wood Green - and walk quite a lot up by Ally Pally. There's a curious feel of the esplanade at the top. Something to do with the blue railings and types of lamp posts if I'm remembering rightly. Also perhaps the pitch n putt. I guess that might have been intentional. The lower parts remind me of the half utilised rather scrubby edge-of-town, council-run greensward-plus-football-pitch (no net, leaning posts, sagging crossbar) you get in a lot of smaller English towns.

You can walk very pleasantly from there to Hampstead Heath, pretty much without going near a road, and get a very decent sense of Tottenham to Hampstead north London, and even from there walk fairly pleasantly down into Regent's Park. Then you can go and stand on the Marylebone Road and suck in the fumes of one of the most polluted roads in London as recompense.

Is it worth a trip up Ally Pally to just go for a wander and a walk? I do like a good park, and spent a very pleasant couple of hours in Crystal Palace park last month when I was down, and that doesn't even have its palace any more (though dinosaurs!).

the Strata building, the one with those fans at the top

I was wondering what that was (but not enough to look it up, obv). It's horrible.

definitely, the walk up there is very pleasant + views when you get there

never done it from the hampstead direction though, only from finsbury park

Right, that's our Sunday morning hangover-buster sorted next time we're down. The Crystal Palace thing was a diversion just to kill a couple of hours as we were visiting friends in the area and got on the wrong bus to the wrong part of CP, and it turned out to be a lovely afternoon stroll. I love going past Ally Pally on the train and always mean to head up for a wander.

if you start at finsbury park, i recommend the parkland walk for the first stretch - http://www.haringey.gov.uk/index/community_and_leisure/greenspaces/parks_and_open_spaces_parks_facilities/parklandwalk.htm

Ally Pally, I saw my first gig there (Queen, December 1979) then watched the place burn down 6 months later in a conflagration visible all the way across London. The place was an empty burnt-out shell for years afterwards, then they rebuilt it for Antiques Roadshow suitability. Do they still have a deer pen in the park?

That walk along the abandoned train line really is fantastic. We did it a few years ago with the Psychogeographic Rolling Society and someone at the Tube Station let us into the overgrown station above.

Love the Parkland Walk and the views from Ally Pally are definitely worth the trip. You should try and fit in Queens Wood & Highgate Wood while you're over that way.

There's also a great vintage hi-fi & record shop called Audio Gold at the junction of Park Road and Muswell Hill, on the Crouch End side of Ally Pally.

I still think of that area as the spiritual home/heart/centre of ILX, even if the physical distribution of posters has long moved on.

There's a disused Victorian theatre inside as well, I was there for a halloween comedy gig a few years ago, it looks lovely in general and then you look up and there's big holes in the ceiling...

Parkland Walk is a good walk and a great (if rattly) cycle - it's very emphatic about the non-flatness of London around there - one minute there are streets below you to your left, another there's bridges overhead.

Keep meaning to do the Alexandra Palace walk. I'm a little prejudiced against it after going up there for a gig a few years ago in a horrendous pissy windy November thunderstorm.

so much money in this scene. wtf @ some of these:

http://edmsnob.com/leaked-contracts-performance-perks-favorite-edm-artists/

what are some hackney / lower clapton cafes that are open late and don't do anything notable in terms of food? the big neurotic in me finds it a bit off when i'm getting through one coffee an hour as i work alone while others are eating proper meals.

Can't believe I'm leaving tomorrow morning. I've been listening to End of the Road by Boyz II Men all day, things are very emotional.

how would u rate london out of ten

I dunno, but today, in roughly the same moment, I saw some "random," and maybe slightly "off"-looking dude standing outside (as in, outside but facing into the roped off outdoor section for smokers) a Soho gay bar AMAZINGLY singing parts of soul songs with perfect delivery and another guy walking down the street in a shoulder to foot length yellow and white striped robe-dress with matching yellow flip-flops and Geordi LaForge / Cyclops style sunglasses. Money can't buy that kind of stuff.

had to show a friend visiting from Moscow around yesterday; quite proud of the plan I decided on

- meet at Russell Square
- lunch at Fleet River Bakery
- Sir John Soane's Museum - been meaning to go here for years and it's already one of my favourite places in London - absolutely crammed full of hoarded antiquities, Hogarth paintings, rooms belonging to imaginary monks, an Egyptian sarcophagus, mirrors everywhere, dedications to the family lapdog...you can really feel his hoarder spirit strongly
- bus over to the Barbican, stroll through the estate (ideally would've checked out the rain room but fuck a two-hour wait) (the photography exhibition on at the moment is really good but I'd seen it already)
- stroll through the City and past St Paul's in a token nod to normal tourist sightseeing
- bus over to the Whitechapel Gallery, was interested in the exhibitions on at the moment - liked the Cattelan room and the awesome Penone sculpture, thought the Bochner stuff was a bit obvious in places though
- walk up Brick Lane and through Shoreditch to wind up at Song Que for dinner - weirdly this was the most disappointing bit of the day, Song Que's always been my default Vietnamese choice on that Kingsland Rd strip but both our meals were kinda over-greasy
- bus up to Hackney to finish up in a pub with friends. Didn't quite mean to drag a visitor all the way to my own hood but I cannot control the laziness or flakiness of 99% of my acquaintances

Whitechapel and Brick Lane tends to bring me down (I quite like Fournier St though) and the Kingsland Rd does so as well.

These days I'd be inclined to take visitors west to Kensington/Knightsbridge and do the drinking in some of the mews pubs there like the Grenadier in Belgravia or the Scarsdale Tavern in Edwards Square off Kensington High St. But it'd be a different experience of course.

I hate Brick Lane at night but I have started to quite enjoy rambling around Whitechapel and Brick Lane in the day. There's a great second hand books guy on Sundays, and Spitalfields can be good. Lots of the little streets like Fournier Street are nice too.

Kingsland Road is very dull.

(Not that I meant to diss your agenda Lex...One of the things I love about London is that you can put together infinite collections of differing vibes to give visitors an impression of London on a single visit: such as the elegant formalness of Regents Park, the middle eastern influence on Bayswater, the huge mansions of Holland Park, the incredible grimness of that stretch around New Oxford St/CentrePoint, British Museum and Bloomsbury...]

That bloody rain room has a 2-hr wait every time I go near it

Must check out the John Soames museum, sounds awesome.

John Soane's is a great museum - if you go, I'd visit the Hunterian museum in the Royal College of Surgeons on the other side of the square as well. Astonishing anatomical museum - bits of animals and humans in jars wall to ceiling. Maybe isn't to everyone's taste, image search will give you an idea of some of it.

shit, should warn - that image search will bring up images that some viewers may find disturbing.

Hunterian is the absolute bomb. When I worked at GAFTA (which is right next to the John Soane museum) I used to nip through Lincoln's Inn Fields and spend my lunchhour looking at endless jars of rotting, pickled fetuses and syphilis-rotted penises. Heaven.

Co-sign. Been there with my drawing group two or three times.

keep meaning to see soane's museum by candlelight will get around to it one day

rain room disappointing tho the queue moved quicker than they were saying

Hunterian museum

^ is this the place that does stuff like arsehole cupcakes and std-riddled buns in the tearoom?

I don't know - but not if this is the cupcake thing - the pathology museum is different, never been there.

oh, St Bart's seem quite nervous about it. Not surprised.

John Soane Museum is AMAZING. My general apathy towards pre-modern art/artifact museums was totally blown away by how cool this place is.

If you're willing to put in 2 hours in line, I'd recommend going to one of the free evenings where it's all candle-lit.

oh yes woof, that was what i was thinking of

Went to the Hunterian today. Strikes a decidedly more scholarly note than Peter The Great's equivalent collection (which is more omg look at this three-headed baby!) and seems less grotesque as a result. It was worth seeing.

Loved the Soane museum too.

Soane and the Hunterian are both fantastic...what are other notable small museums in London?

The Petrie Museum, maybe? I have been meaning to go for a while.

The Horniman - not as quirky but it does have a giant overstuffed walrus. Dennis Severs' house - not yet got around to it meself.

William Morris' House in Walthamstow is worth a look, depending on how you feel about the Arts & Crafts movement. Not exactly small, but often overlooked and amazing is the Wallace Collection- Poussin, Canaletto, Gainsborough and the Laughing Cavalier plus loads of armour, porcelain etc. One of my favourite galleries anywhere.

Wallace Collection is great - and well located as part of an overall Marylebone walk from Edgware Road tube that takes in leafy Montagu and Bryanston Squares, through Manchester Square and up Marylebone High St.

Dulwich Picture Gallery's another, strong trad painting collection, often very strong temporary exhibitions, beautiful John Soane building.

I really like the Geffrye Museum, maybe that's a bit big to qualify...?

Leighton House, off Kensington High St., near Holland Park (and Jimmy Page and Michael Winner) is worth a visit as a slightly unusual small museum.

(I read that as "usually unsightly", maybe it was the mention of Michael and Jimmy.)

Was going to chime in with Prince Henry's Room on Fleet St, but apparently it's closed.

Horniman is great and the surrounding grounds have recently been redone (I think they should be finished now) and have a nice view over London.

Went to the Petrie today. It's really interesting. Small but packed with artifacts. Quiet, too.

The William Klein / Daido Moriyama show at the Tate Modern is worth seeing. A Bigger Splash: Painting After Performance is as underwhelming as the reviews suggest, though. The Tanks are great.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/64340000/jpg/_64340140_naked.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-20466764

i just think it's brilliant that someone is standing up for what they believe in.

Police - "There's no obvious motive that we can see"