Image via Wikipedia

Getting to know all the unique London neighborhoods is a challenge worthy of accepting after an international relocation places a family in London.  While many London neighborhoods may not be a great place to call home due to prices or impracticality visiting them on Saturday afternoons is always an option.  Of all the London neighborhoods in and around the central part of the city Hampstead is one of the best for families wanting to escape a cold, gray, London winter afternoon.

London Neighborhoods – Hampstead’s History

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Hampstead was popular with British aristocracy due to a natural well.  After competition from London spas caused the well to close in the late 1800s it became a center for art and politics.  Liberalism was king of Hampstead and Hampstead Liberalist was a (at times derogatory term) to describe the liberal humanists of the 1960s.

London Neighborhoods – Kenwood House

This majestic estate was built in the early seventeenth century, changed hands several times over the centuries and was finally left to the state in 1927 by Lord Iveagh of the Guinness family. It was opened to the public in 1928.  The home houses numerous pieces of art work and the gardens are spectacular.  Next to the home is the ancient Hampstead Heath, an area of pristine, undisturbed British forest and wild land attracting visitors from around the world.

London Neighborhoods – Hampstead Heath

Hampstead Heath is a 790 acre park north of London comprised of ancient forestland, ponds, swimming areas, hiking trails and playgrounds.  Londoners have visited the park and grounds for centuries benefitting from the clean air and water.  The swimming ponds at one time were drinking water reservoirs.  Today visitors include the park much as visitors did centuries and decades ago.  With one of the highest points in the London area located in the park visitors experience a breathtaking view of London.

Families having recently moved to London interested in visiting London neighborhoods should consider a Saturday trip to Hampstead.  If the weather is agreeable a day can be spent wandering the gardens of Kenwood House and enjoying Hampstead Heath.  If the weather is cold and dreary Kenwood House beckons with its charm and epitomized British appeal.  With so many London neighborhoods to visit while living in the city every weekend should be spent making the most of it!

Author:  Colleen

Where are your favorite places for walking your dog?

I LOVE Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park for our dog—there are always other dogs and people out and about and loads of squirrels to chase. AND the Honest Sausage snack bar is, of course, a personal favourite of our furry friend.

Battersea Park is another great place for dogs—ours heads out with his buddies to BP a few days a week. AND on the weekends, Richmond Park is doggie heaven with acres and acres of trails, open space and swimming opportunities for our four legged friends. All off leash—but you do have to be mindful of the deer and the horses in the park, so it’s wise to know that your dog is good with recall. Regent’s Park, Hampstead Heath, and Primrose Hill also all have large leash-free areas.

What if you aren’t home to walk the dog?

For those people who work at an office and don’t want their pet home alone all day, there are a number of dog walkers and doggy day care options in and around the city. A good place to start in finding a walker is through your vet—who may have an approved list of dog walkers in the area—or from other pet owners in your local park.

Speaking of vets, how can expats go about finding a good one for their pet?

A good vet is a MUST, and I highly recommend our vet, Dr. Peter Culpin at Pets Naturally in Notting Hill. Cannot say enough wonderful things about him—gentle, kind, sweet, and incredibly knowledgeable about pets large and small: www.petsnaturally.co.uk. He is one in a million.

I hear, though, there is also one near Marble Arch that is good as well, and another expat friend who recently got a dog just found the local vet in her neighborhood, which is a privately owned chain of three locations in north London: St. John’s Wood, Primrose Hill, and Finchley. They’re called Hamilton Veterinary Clinics: www.hamiltonvets.com. There is another bigger chain called Village Vet (www.villagevet.co.uk). University of Cambridge apparently also has a cutting edge animal hospital for serious pet illnesses.

Like healthcare for humans in the UK, your experience is largely dependent on whether or not you find a good doctor or not. So do the research, ask around, and take referrals seriously. I received referrals from two people who did not know each other for the same vet and took that very seriously. I would also suggest getting insurance, which is offered by many companies; I got mine through Tesco.

Well, this is all very valuable information to know if your London relocation involves a pet, and we’ll follow up tomorrow with more. Meanwhile, if you have questions about the logistics of actually moving a pet overseas, don’t hesitate to ask any of our London Relocation company staff—they’re highly knowledgeable on all aspects of an international relocation, for humans and animals alike!

Related articles

• Expat Pets – Moving to London with a Dog (Part 1) (londonrelocationservices.com)

Living In London – London Neighborhoods – North London- Image via Wikipedia

We’re up to  north again and this area is the choice of many Americans moving to London. North London is a massive area with dozens of postcodes and suburbs. Mostly residential, many people who work in the city have chosen to live in North London for schools, amenities and the feeling of being slightly out of the city, even if you’re right in the thick of things.

North London – Hampstead

Hampstead is one of the greenest suburbs in London. It is also a suburb that has a village atmosphere and quaint shops and streets surrounding the magnificent green area of Hampstead Heath. This atmosphere comes at a price though. A London flat in this neighborhood can cost you anywhere from £1000 -£ 4000 per week. Houses are even more expensive.

Council Information: Hampstead falls under the Council Borough of Camden with annual taxes ranging from £900 – £2700.

Transport: Hampstead Station falls under Transport Zone 2 and is located on the Northern Line of the London Underground. The Hampstead Heath Station serves the overland trains and there are several buses from Hampstead into London, including the N5 night bus right to Trafalgar Square.

Shopping: Hampstead offers a number of excellent grocery stores that offer home delivery like Tesco Express and Waitrose but the real treat of living in Hampstead are the smaller shops that line the streets of this residential neighborhood. Specialty grocery stores and health shops,​ as well as boutiques and excellent restaurants can be found in this area. Hampstead is one of the suburbs in London where being seen out and about is more about celeb spotting than anything else!

Doctors: there are a number of excellent local GP’s in the area as well as the Royal Free Hospital which has an A&E as well as being an excellent maternity hospital. If you’re looking for a pharmacy in the area then you can find Boots on Hampstead high Street which is one of the biggest chains of pharmacies in the country.

Other Amenities: There are a number of excellent schools in the area from kindergartens to post graduate colleges. The borough of Camden has a large number of independent schools and international schools.

Living in London – Historical Gem-Image via Wikipedia

If you want to know more about the history of London, then in moving to London you have come to the right place. Living in London is a cornucopia filled with historical and cultural gems, and just as soon as you are settled into your new London rental you’ll have to get out an explore this magnificent city. London is characterized by its churches, parks, London flats, and palaces and the many people who visit the city seek out those attractions. The city’s Roman legacy is reflected in the ground at the London Wall as well as the faces of every church which are imprinted.  With the aide memoire of the time during which London was attacked by the Germans during World War II, referred to as the London Blitz. London wears every period of its long history for the present to see; to walk from east to west is to watch the city unfold through time.

Christopher Wren’s work continues to marvel all around the City of London. Holborn’s Fleet St. was long associated with the London press and the Royal Courts. Down in Westminster, you will hold court with the regents, royals, and ruffians who run this fair capital, and up in Bloomsbury you’ll mingle with the students and youth who hold the future of London in their eager grasp.

Unlike London’s museums, sights tend to be expensive. There is no reason to spend £30 on tourist trips to the Tower of London, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the London Eye, only to be left wondering what to do for the rest of your day with just pocket change to spare. Be your own tour guide. From avant-garde architecture in Islington to the urban wilderness of Hampstead Heath, the best of London’s sights are often those seen via excursions on foot. No matter what path you choose, whether you’re strolling down small cobblestone streets or briskly marching down a modern thoroughfare, your exploration will be rewarded. There is no wrong turn.

London is a place to be experienced, not toured so while you are living in London, you need to be a part of the fabric of life in order to really experience this fascinating city.

Author:  Colleen

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Orange.

Orange who?

Orange you glad I’m not going to write about UK taxes this week?

(Whoa boy…UK taxation might be preferable to resurrecting hideous knock-knock jokes from childhood, huh…)

Sorry about that.  My brain is trying to get out of weekend-mode and not having a little difficulty doing so…not that telling bad jokes is how I spend my weekends….In truth, though, my weekends might not shape up to anything much cooler than curling up with a book on the sofa.  I know there’s a marvelous city out there with limitless options of things to do, but sometimes a gal needs a weekend when London can wait.  Yesterday in particular, however, for having not emerged from my cozy London flat all day, I sure felt like I had traversed the entire city, from the touristed parts to the off-the-beaten path.  It was an adventure of the mind and a very fun way of revisiting many places I’ve been.

Actually, for as fantastical as it is, parts of this novel almost read like a tutorial in relocating to London.  The book is Her Fearful Symmetry, written by Audrey Niffenegger and set in London’s Highgate Cemetery.  Not many average tourists are keen to make that trek up the Northern Line to the North London Highgate/Hampstead area, but I encourage you to do so, especially if you’re moving to London and will have the time.  It is so lovely up there, green and residential with a village feeling, yet with convenient access to central London.

In any case, Niffenegger herself (author of Time Traveler’s Wife, if the name isn’t ringing a bell) is an American expat living in London.  When she began this second novel, she at first intended to set it in one of Chicago’s most historic cemeteries, but the the cemetery became such a dominant aspect of the plot that she realized it needed to be the end-all-be-all of cemeteries in the world.  So she came to London and, more specifically, Highgate!  As part of her research, she became a volunteer for the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, and to this day if you take the tour of the West Cemetery, you may get a tour guide named Audrey .  Throughout the novel, she lends her American perspective to her two female protagonists, naive twins originating from Chicago, Illinois’s Lake Forest suburb.  It is comical to read how they acquaint themselves with the London flat they’ve inherited (demonstrating their surprise to find a washing machine behind a cabinet door in the kitchen, just as I’ve written about before in my “Crouching Tenant, Hidden Dishwasher” post) as well as try to learn the local lingo.  They familiarize themselves with London public transportation, suffering the crowds of the Tube at rush hour and learning what an *ouch* black taxi fare is from Heathrow to North London.  They find the great neighborhoods for shopping like Sloane Square and Knightsbridge, which stores to shop at for practical needs like groceries and toiletries, and how to register with NHS.  They also learn the histories of London’s Magnficent Seven cemeteries that were established in the mid-eighteenth century to accommodate the overcrowding of the dead in the city’s churchyards.

Oh, and did I mention their flat is haunted?  Ah yes, ’tis a bit of a ghoulish read that is perfect for this time of year as we approach Halloween.  Another modern-day book I’ve read that comes to mind about an American staying in a haunted London flat is Gregory Maguire’s Lost (again, if the name isn’t familiar, he’s the author of Wicked).  Now that I think of it, perhaps I should compile a haunted London literature list for you at some point this month to get you in the mood for the season and your new, utterly atmospheric city if you’re moving to London soon.  I’ll keep you posted!

Author:  Colleen

The weather is SO gorgeous outside, my recommended day-touring on a day like this would be to head north.  Catch the Northern Line to either Archway or Highgate tube stations and catch the afternoon tour at Highgate Cemetery.  You can tour the East cemetery on your own for £3, seeing notable graves such as that of Karl Marx, then partake in the guided tour of the cemetery’s atmospherically overgrown West cemetery, also the resting place of reputable people such as the Rossettis and several of Charles Dickens’s immediate family.  Under the shade of the immense trees (a few of which are Redwoods from America’s west coast), you’ll meander through the lush vegetation and look on the chipped and eroded outcroppings of Victorian-style gravestones; perhaps the most unexpected part of this tour is the “Egyptian Avenue,” crypts fashioned after ancient Egyptian burials, which was the vogue thing to do in 19th-century England, evidently.

From Highgate Cemetery, you are in walking distance of the nearly 800 green acres of Hampstead Heath.  Tour this immense park at your leisure, hiking the hills, sitting by the duck ponds, or even swimming in the designated human ponds.   A great pub located just outside the northwest edge of the heath is the Spaniards Inn, where you don’t yet have to forego the outdoors when you seat yourself in the sunshine of their beergarden.  Otherwise, make your way to the high street for any assortment of sidewalk cafes and boutiques in the old stomping grounds of Keats.  From here, you can hop the tube at either Hampstead or Belsize Park stations.

Depending on how your day is progressing, you can close it out here or perhaps take advantage of the extended summer daylight hours and make your way to the darling village of Primrose Hill (via tube to Chalk Farm or walking) for dinner and to watch the sunset from Primrose Hill itself, which, like Hampstead Heath, offers an outstanding city view.

This is a trek that not many tourists make, but when you actually move to London, make a point to explore these serene, residential northern villages.

Londoners revel in the rarity of sunshine at Kensington Gardens.

Anyone visiting or moving to London has been clued in on its weather stereotype:  cool, grey, wet.  Well, there’s a reason why stereotypes exist sometimes, and London is no exception.

Having faced the coldest winter it’s had in 30 years, London is only just now unfurling its buds and blooming into action.  We had a gloomy introduction to Spring that held us at bay, pressing our faces to the puddled pavement with its oppressive cloud-cover and cold temps, as we just gritted our teeth against it and compliantly grunted, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?!”

This past weekend, though…*sigh*  Now we’re talkin’.  With temperatures creeping closer to 20 degrees Celsius (that’s in the upper 60s, for us Fahrenheit folk) as the sun shined on and on through clear skies (yep, still clear of airplanes, too, because of the volcanic eruption in Iceland; SO strange to see during such otherwise clear weather), residents and visitors alike were reveling in the euphoric freedom of it all.

An obvious response to this shift is when, delighting in their liberation as they scamper through the city parks, people perhaps liberate a lot of their skin.  This same phenomenon made me laugh back in Chicago, when on a nice Spring day, people would be dressed in shorts and tank-tops, when in reality if it were that temperature during the Autumn, they’d be layering up in sweaters and jackets already.  People are always so eager that they jump the gun, and it is sometimes the innocent onlookers that become the victims of others’ strip-downs, when they really overdo it and practically need a censor to blur certain parts out for a PG-rated audience.

Now, I’m just teasing about how some people choose to dress in their excitement over nicer weather; others around the city are in uproar over an extreme of this—namely, the current controversy going down regarding Hampstead Heath and a petition circulating around in favor of allotting more space for nude sunbathers.  The Heath currently maintains a pond for male nude swimming, but naturists complain of the insufficient space for sunbathing, arguing that the area could be easily obscured from the rest of the public if the display would make others uncomfortable to view.  The UK is quite more stringent on public nudity than continental Europe in this respect; ironically, as I recall from past travels, the English Garden in Munich has an extensive meadow for naturists.  When you move to the UK, you’ll find there are quite a number of cultural differences between this island and mainland Europe; for as much as it’s different than the States, the British share many similarities with Americans that other Europeans don’t, so I suppose this relative prudishness is one.

In what ways might you enjoy the weather if you’re relocating to London in time for late Spring or Summer?  If you’re seeking to situate yourself near pleasant outdoor spaces, let us help you find a fine indoor space as well by contacting London Relocation Ltd. with any relocation questions you may have!

This semi-sunny, on the cusp of Spring day compels me to recommend a lovely spot in Northern London where you might fancy living if you’re moving to London, or to at least visit:  Hampstead.  Maintaining a village atmosphere, this area experienced population growth during the Victorian age, to which many of its quaint buildings date back.  It is known as an artistic and literary haven, and no doubt Hampstead Heath has provided much of such inspiration over the centuries.  Nearly 800 acres in size, the Heath is an immense bounty of green space to be had in London.  With its wooded trails, open, rolling meadows and ponds, it’s a tranquil retreat from urban life that is easily accessible from the city center.  Even just strolling through the pristine, postcard-perfect residential streets is a calming treat that takes you back to another era.  One particular home of interest in Hampstead is Keats House, where the poet lived from 1818 to 1820 and wrote some his most notable poems, including “Ode to a Nightingale.”  The Spaniards Inn, which Keats himself liked to frequent (as did Lord Byron) alleges that this poem was written in its gardens; whether true or not, I highly recommend this pub as a stop for food and libations.  It has a charming beer garden, and whilst sitting there you can revel in its history–it dates back to the 16th-century and is even mentioned in classic literature like Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

It’s true that this is a very expensive neighborhood to live in, so if it’s a bit outside of your budget, you can content yourself that London Relocation Ltd. will place you in a lovely locale that meets all your needs and will be close enough to public transport so you can catch the Tube to visit Hampstead whenever you want–take the Northern Line to either Belsize Park or Hampstead stations and step right onto the high street to delight in its cute boutiques and cafes.