Metropolitan

[gervase_fen]

I spent yesterday afternoon wandering around the West End and the South Bank on a humid afternoon, whilst waiting for Mrs Fen, who had an important appointment to keep. I was saddened to see that Rendezvous in Leicester Square had gone:

Time was when my London itinerary would be feature a visit here, between London Film Festival screenings in the Odeon West End ; intensive browsing at Tower Records, Piccadilly, Comics Showcase, the Vintage Magazine Shop, Borders and Murder One in Charing Cross Road ; and a look at the wares on the trestle tables of the book dealers outside the NFT cafeteria.  The trestle tables are still going, I'm pleased to say, and the Earlham Street Fopp and Forbidden Planet remain fixed points of call. (Forbidden Planet has two bays of  fiction adorned with the Murder One logo - one half of one bay is Hard Case Crime, and one whole bay is Sherlockian pastiche with a bit of Steampunk thrown in.)

I was pleased to see that my favourite book of 2012 was getting the full works on the Underground :  ... Foyles on the South Bank had three copies of the new edition, hidden on the bottom shelf of the Young Adult section. 

There was one new London landmark that I saw yesterday that I hadn't encountered before - the professional Mr Bean impersonator making a successful living outside the National Gallery.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

It's when you make a list such as that in your second paragraph that you realise that an era has passed on, isn't it...

[gervase-fen.livejournal.com]

Yes, absolutely. Forbidden Planet was packed, so I think they'll remain a reason to walk down Charing Cross Road; Fopp had some interesting promotions (backlist offers on Artificial Eye DVDs for instance) but the staff in the basement outnumbered the customers 3 to 1. The nature of Mrs Fen's appointment meant that I couldn't kill time in a cinema (there was no set end point) and I found myself in a particularly nostalgiac mood for bibliophiliac diversion as I slogged around in the heat.