My name is Michael Mansell, and I am, technically speaking, from New Jersey. I realise that is not the most glamorous opening line for a London travel blog, but I have always believed in getting the uncomfortable truths out of the way early.
New Jersey, for those who have never visited – and statistically speaking, you have not missed a great deal – is the state that sits just across the river from New York City and spends most of its time being overshadowed by it. I grew up there, went to school there, and spent enough of my formative years staring across the Hudson at Manhattan to understand, fairly early on, that I was temperamentally suited to somewhere considerably older and considerably more chaotic than either of them.
After university, I did what seemed logical at the time and became a literature teacher in New York City. I spent twelve years doing that – teaching Dickens to teenagers who would have preferred to be doing almost anything else, and quietly becoming more obsessed with the world those novels described than with the city I was actually living in. There is probably a lesson in that. Several of my students spotted it before I did.
The thing about spending twelve years teaching English literature is that it does something irreversible to your relationship with Britain. Not Britain as it exists today, necessarily, but Britain as it exists in books – foggy, morally complicated, architecturally magnificent, and absolutely littered with characters who speak in complete sentences and have strong feelings about class. I taught Dickens and Hardy and Cronin and Orwell until London stopped feeling like somewhere I had never been and started feeling like somewhere I had simply not got around to visiting yet.
So I came. That was fourteen years ago. I came for six months – or so I told everyone, including myself – and I have not left since, which I think tells you everything you need to know about both London and my capacity for self-deception.
Why This Blog Exists
London, as any Londoner will tell you at considerable length, is not a city that reveals itself quickly or easily. It rewards patience, curiosity, and a willingness to wander down streets that do not appear to be going anywhere in particular. It also rewards a certain tolerance for grey skies, complicated plumbing, and the uniquely British tendency to apologise to inanimate objects after bumping into them.
What it does not particularly reward is arriving with a checklist assembled from a Hollywood film made in 1995. And yet this is, bafflingly, what a significant number of visitors attempt. I know this because I watch them. I watch them arrive at Paddington with the slightly dazed expression of someone who expected more fog. I watch them photograph Tower Bridge from the wrong side and call it London Bridge. I watch them tip twenty per cent in pubs and then look confused when nobody seems especially grateful.
I was, in the interests of full disclosure, not enormously different when I arrived. I merely had the advantage of having taught the literature thoroughly enough to know that the London of the novels was always a heightened version of the real thing – more dramatic, more symbolic, more atmospherically convenient. The actual city is better, in almost every respect. It is just not quite what you were expecting.
This blog exists to bridge that gap. To offer the kind of guidance that a well-read, moderately opinionated, fourteen-year expat from New Jersey might offer a friend visiting for the first time – honest, specific, occasionally self-deprecating, and entirely free of the compulsion to describe everything as “charming” or “quintessentially British,” two phrases that should be used sparingly and ideally not at all.
I write about places I have actually been and things I have actually eaten. I write about the history that makes London genuinely extraordinary rather than just old. I write about the moments that stop you in the street – the unexpected, the overlooked, the things that do not make the guidebooks but absolutely should. And yes, I write occasionally about the peculiarities of being an American in Britain, because fourteen years in, there are still days when this country surprises me completely, and I have learned that those surprises make for the best material.
The coffee recommendations, for what it is worth, are impeccable. The opinions are my own. The affection for this city is, at this point, entirely non-negotiable.
Welcome to The London Traveller. Mind the gap.
– Michael