If I had to make a strict choice, I’d say I was a Northener. Lincoln isn’t quite half way up England and barely a third of the way up the UK mainland. However, I rhyme ‘bath’ with ‘trap’, my evening meal is my tea and I put my mushy peas directly onto my chips. Like many Northerners, I retain the tendency to treat London as if it were a separate country; I can’t just wander into London like I can with Horncastle, Stamford or even Nottingham. The only safe way way in is by train, with a well-stocked backpack of drinks and plasters, and with a spare hundred quid just in case.
However, I was lucky enough to have had Lincolnshire parents with a broader horizon than most of their kin. Mum spent a year studying at King’s College in the 1950s; dad worked in the home counties for two years as a young man, regularly visiting and passing through the capital. His brother, my uncle, found himself living in London after completing his National Service, married a local girl and stayed. My elder brother moved there at 18 and I often visited him until he finally moved back to Lincolnshire. Mum and Dad also took us on exciting days out to London, having collected coupons for cheap rail tickets from Kellogs Cornflakes packets. We visited the museums, cathedrals, Buckingham Palace, Horseguards’ Parade and many other thrilling places.
Only now do I appreciate how unusual this was in the 70s and 80s. Most of my friends did not go to London back then. Other family members seemed very reluctant to visit ever. I’m still amazed at how many people I know have rarely, if ever, been into the centre of London. Maybe to Heathrow, possibly on a theatre coach trip, but have never taken the Tube, are horrified at the cost of a London pint and aren’t really sure if they’d understand the locals anyway. There was an underlying assumption that all southerners were posh, maybe soft too, and therefore to be avoided.
Throughout my adult life I’ve had a number of reasons to visit Our Nation’s Capital, even if somewhat sporadically. Possibly to visit my brother, maybe to go to a test match and yes, I even saw a couple of West End shows. As my career developed, I had reason to be in London for meetings, events and for training. I started to find my way about a bit more, rather than just how to get to certain places via the Underground.
And then I discovered geocaching. As with other places I visited, trips to London now became an opportunity to find caches in a new setting. I’d deliberately get an earlier train in and a later train home to squeeze in a few quick finds. Sometimes I’d even nip out at lunch to grab a couple rather than network with other attendees. Most of my meetings were in Westminster and so I got to know that area very well indeed. More importantly, I started to learn how it connected to other parts of London and I started to walk around rather than take the safer option of the Underground. I’d get myself to Charing Cross and walk along Whitehall to my meeting. Another time I might go first to Victoria and then head past Westminster’s Cathedral and Abbey. Once the direct train lInk to Lincoln was restored, I’d stay longer after the meeting and have a couple of hours of exploration! My 100th find was at King’s Cross, marking the station’s new links with the Harry Potter series of books (All aboard the Hogwarts Express: GCNR55)
As my confidence grew, I started to tackle some puzzles and multis. An early favourite of mine was Sing as You Go: GC12F4C which took me several visits to complete, seeking a bit more information on each visit, learning more about the history of St James’ Park and Green Park, gathering clues to complete a crossword which led to the eventual cache. This was somewhat of a milestone cache for me. There were very few such involved multis back at home and completing it left me with a very satisfying feeling indeed.
Another favourite find from this time was an international Peter Pan themed series, including GC188J7 in Hyde Park. There were feeder caches all around the word, and by joining a team (Ours was The Shadow Thieves) with members who lived near each of the caches around the world, you could swap information found in ‘your’ cache to locate a second one nearby and even, if you wished’ claim finds on the other caches in the series. Again, this whole project took several months to complete and helped me find my way around that part of London in a way I would never otherwise have done.
Over the years, other London highlights followed. The Sherlock Holmes series of multis, first placed in 2001, was a squence of Holmes-related locations leading to a final bonus cache. This now historic series only came to my attention in 2019 and, over three years I picked them off until I finally grabbed the ‘Booty’ in 2022.
London also provided an opportunity to find more Virtuals than was possible back home. There were two ‘series’ of them, both still live. Firstly the London Rainbow Cache series, covering eight locations north of the river, and also the excellent themed series ‘Catastrophe, Calamity, Cataclysm‘
Another thrill when visiting London was the chance to try a Webcam cache. These are now very rare with only two surviving in the UK, but even back then there were none in Lincolnshire. Pre smart phone, pre paperles caching even, I well rememeber my first Webcam cache, calling a colleague on my old Nokia, asking him to take a very blurred screenshot of me in the middle of Oxford Street at London – West End Webcam (oxford Circus) (GCKVYF)
I also chose Euro Twit GC4ZR3T, a puzzle covering several parts of London, to complete my DT Grid, in the company of my good friend N0madGirl.
There’s an added caching bonus when visiting London in that it’s actually two ‘counties’- London itself and The City of London (Three if you include the City of Westminster, although that counts as one of the London Boroughs for these purposes). ‘The City’ is a unique area of the capital, partly for historic reasons (it is the location of the original Roman settlement of Londinium) and is also the country’s main business and finacial district. It was also home to many of the old London Guilds and livery companies (GCM2AT) and the part of the city devastated by the Great Fire of London in 1666. This last event led to an architectural distinctiveness largely spearheaded by Sir Christopher Wren and resulting in the magnificent Cathedral of St Paul (GCHX1W) as well as dozens of other of churches includng St Olaves (GC7B7J1) For an astounding view of this area, and indeed most of London, I ventured up to the Sky Garden (GC88YXD) on top of 20 Fenchurch Street.
I find The City endlessly fascinating and always try to include a visit there on any trip to London.
Over the last decade, my caching relationship with London has taken on a new aspect, that of an occasional member of its caching community. At one point it was, after Lincolnshire, my second most cached-in county. On one visit, I spotted an Event that I had time to attend, The Other Mile High Club (City of London) (GC44XD6) Spurred on by this, on my next visit I decided to hold an event of my own, at my brother’s old local in Kensington, the Churchill Arms. Suddenly my extroversion was challenged and there were several strangers there for me to befriend. One in particular, the aforementioned N0madgirl, became a firm friend over the following years, and at her wedding in 2018 I held an event for her outside the wedding venue.
Over the years I’ve held other events in London, including one to mark my departure for a month of volunteering in Malawi (see my other post Out of Africa) While in Malawi, I made a new friend, Sarah, who lived in London’s Blackheath. Sarah has also become a good friend and when visiting her I’ve also held an event in her local! Further to that, my ongoing series of ‘Tentmantent on Tour’ events has now included several at the Union Tavern near King’s Cross, which I’ve recently decided is my London ‘local’!
What this means is that on most of my trips into London, including to London Calling Mega Events, I always feel among friends, some of whom have even been known to travel to London specifically to attend!
A more recent development in my caching visits to the capital, has been my use of the e-scooter scheme. Like the ‘Boris Bikes’ these can be picked up and dropped off at hundreds of parking spots in most of the London Boroughs in the centre of ‘town’. You just need to upload your driving license and add payment details and then scan a scooter’s QR code to get going. At first I was quite anxious about diving ino the busy London traffic but after a while you discover that, as you can use cycle lanes, you are largely separated from the traffic. Scooting over Parliament Square and along the Victoria Embankment, or over Tower Bridge and into The City sounds terrifying, but I’ve found it to be both thrilling and liberating. It also means I can cover lots more ground on one of my epic puzzle-collecting trips and mostly get around the centre far quicker than if I’d taken the tube or a bus. I really hope that this scheme is continued after the last trial period due to end in 2026.
I’ll always feel Northern and will continue to chat to strangers on public transport, but my love affair with London will continue and I’ll always think of it not as a scary, sprawling metropolis but as a series of interlinked communities with endless caching opportunities, and a kind of second home.
Andy, 02/01/2025
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