TH.2058 at Tate Modern, October 2008

Well not my birthday but Jayne’s.  Instead of material goods I treated Jayne to some memories this year.  For a long time she has really wanted to go to the London Dungeon.  We did try to go once before but the queues were two hours long so we gave up: this time I booked tickets in advance to make sure.

It was a full day.  We went up to London early, getting there well before the Dungeons opened, and parked on Tooley Street just a few metres from the front door.  We went off and had some truly excellent bacon sandwiches at More London, did the Dungeons tour, then took a stroll along the river.  We stopped at Tate Modern so I could see the new exhibit in the Turbine Hall, then went on to Gabriel’s Wharf for a drink, before continuing to the South Bank.

We spent some time enjoying the street entertainers and then went round the London Aquarium – another thing Jayne particularly wanted to do.  After that we strolled back down to Gabriel’s Wharf for a late lunch, and took the backstreets to London Bridge.  J really wanted to round off the day by looking around Borough Market but everything was closed up by the time we got there: Sunday is not really the day for going there anyway.  We finished off with a coffee in Hay’s Galleria and then came home via Lewisham, Catford and Bromley – just so I could see if I still remembered all the routes through there.

It was a thoroughly good day out, spoiled for me only by my camera battery dying after two shots.  Maybe I need some new rechargeables, but that camera does seem to just kill them really quickly.  Jayne did not let it spoil her enjoyment though…. As Charlie was not working this weekend he was able to come along too which made it a special day.  It is so rare that we are all able to go anywhere together these days, and each time we are aware that it could be the last time.

Living so close to London, and having lived there for about 20 years, it is easy to forget just how much fun it can be to go up there and just be a tourist, even if one part of the brain is continuously keeping a mental note of all the changes from when I lived there, and looking out for which pieces of my youth have been torn down and replaced.

The dungeons were good fun, if a little pricey.  The last time I went there was not so much there: you just wandered around looking at a few waxworks: now it is a guided tour with some effective set-pieces and a couple of rides.  Cramming all that stuff into a confined set of arches must have been a real feat.  My favourite had to be the labyrinth where a quite small area is made to look like an extensive maze through the clever use of mirrors, and Sweeny Todd’s barber shop which had some special effects that really made Jayne jump.

It really is worth getting fast track tickets in advance though, to avoid the queue for entry.  Not that there was much of a queue at 9:30am on a Sunday, but the pricing works out differently for different time slots: in that time slot it works out abit cheaper to get advance tickets like that, whereas at busier times there is a bit of a premium for queue-jumping.   The pricing is bizarre though.  At the door there is a discount for students (anyone between 15 and 18 counts as a student) but with the advance tickets it actually worked out more to have two adults and two students than to have four adults, so I treated the kids as adults for the day.