London on a budget
A Family Vacation in London, Guided by Scrooge
A London icon, a double-decker bus, on its route.
COZY and warm under a thick duvet in the small duplex I had rented for a long weekend in central London, I suddenly awoke to a strange, high-pitched moan. It was my 10-year-old daughter flailing around on the air mattress she was sharing with her younger brother in the downstairs living room.
Her cry was followed by a call for help. "It's so c-c-c-cold," she wailed, a fact confirmed by my husband when he reached the bottom of the spiral staircase. Next to our younger children's blow-up bed, our 14-year-old daughter shivered on the couch.
"Honey," my husband yelled up to me sarcastically as he began frantically turning up space heaters. "I think it's time for you to consider that it is not possible for a family of five to visit London for three nights and four days on a budget of £1,000!"
In dollars, that comes to roughly $445 a day, including lodging, in the third-most expensive city in the world after Tokyo and Osaka (New York seems positively cheap at No. 13), and at that chilly 2 a.m. moment, I thought he might just have a point.
But I was determined to prove him wrong, along with the Transport for London clerk who laughed at me when, seeking advice about the cheapest way to get around the city, I told him my total family budget.
In most European capitals, a budget of a little more than $400 a day for a family of five would be a relative snap. In Paris, comfortable hotels for well under $100 a night can be found even near the Eiffel Tower. In Rome, delicious pasta or grilled pizza can be had for as little as $8 a person, and in Barcelona, a single subway journey is less than $2, all well within the means of even the most cash-starved traveler.
But London, where my family and I have lived for the last seven years, is an altogether different challenge. Hotel rooms for under $250 a night are almost impossible to come by, and a restaurant dinner can easily wipe out a full day's food budget in less than two hours. A recent night out with my husband (casual dinner, movie and a short cab ride home) set us back more than £75, not including the babysitter.
So could a family of five, limited to that four-day budget of £1,000 ($1,780 at $1.78 to the pound) spend a vacation in London without feeling as poor as Tiny Tim? Several weeks ago, starting on a Thursday afternoon, and ending on Sunday evening, our family — experiencing London as tourists — was determined to find out.
The first step, besides quickly weaning my children off the occasional cabs they like to take, was to find affordable lodging.
After spending an entire day on the Internet, I was beginning to think our only affordable option was going to be a youth hostel when I remembered a Web site I had heard about from a friend: Vacation Rental by Owner, or VRBO.com. The site had several decent-looking properties that fell within our price range, including the one I ended up renting: a clean, modern duplex apartment right near the Tower of London and just a block from the Thames. The price: £114 a night. Though no palace, it was incredibly tidy, minimally but beautifully decorated (including a few antiques) and for a couple or family with one child able to sleep alone on the large downstairs sofa, it would actually have been quite luxurious. Our larger family, however, found the space more limited (when the air mattress was set up, we could not physically move around the downstairs).
Although the broken television upset my 9-year-old son's cartoon viewing, everything else, from the wide selection of teas to the well-stocked bathroom (baskets of shampoos and soaps, including kids' shampoo) was more than acceptable (and, once we turned up the heat, comfortable).
The next morning, acceptance turned to smugness as we strolled by the hotel across the street, a place where the cheapest double room cost £280 a night, with breakfast an additional £19.50 per person. (We had stocked up on groceries for breakfast most mornings at a nearby store for a total of £11.80.)
SO far, so good.
With calculator in hand, we set out — me, eagerly; my family less so. The first challenge was transportation. In a city where a 10-minute cab ride can easily set you back £15 or more, we bought unlimited four-day off-peak Travelcards (£54.40 for our family of five) that would give us free run of the city's underground trains and buses.
Westminster Abbey was our first stop, and our first indication that the cheapest option is often the best one. After buying a family ticket (£22), we plunked down another £15 for the five sound audios. That was £1 per person less than we would have been charged for the guided tour, and it was a good deal. The group tour was crowded with adults who would have towered over our children as they tried to peek at the various sights, and whose questions about the people buried here — among them Charles Dickens and Queen Elizabeth I — would have sorely tested their patience.
Afterward, we headed to the West End for lunch. The last restaurant meal we had eaten as a family — an upscale pub lunch — had set us back £80. My worst fear was that too many expenses like that would send us for our final evening to the Hare Krishna center, where a friend said they give free vegetarian meals on Sunday nights if you dance with them for a half hour before dinner.
Luckily, a poor art student — is there any other kind? — had recommended the Stockpot on Old Compton Street. It was perfect: a classic British cafe featuring dishes like expertly prepared fish and chips and bangers and mash. With dessert, the entire meal for the five of us cost just £31.46, including the 10-percent service charge. Why had we not discovered this place seven years ago?
Sated, we headed to the Half Price Ticket Booth in Leicester Square, hoping to find some cheap theater tickets for that night. Sadly, the hit musical "Mary Poppins" was not on the board showing available shows, but Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," in a well-reviewed production playing at the famed National Theater, was. Ten minutes later, we had scored five tickets for seats in the upper circle. (Total cost: £90 pounds, about £20 off the full price.)
The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering through the British Museum, home of both the Elgin Marbles and the Rosetta Stone (free, though we again sprung for the audio tour, at a total cost of £13), and then on to nearby Covent Garden, where the kids were entertained by the street jugglers, opera singers and pantomimes.
Our pretheater dinner was at Chuen Cheng Ku in Chinatown, a stone's throw from Leicester Square, where we ordered plate after plate of steaming dim sum and half a crispy aromatic duck with a basket of extra pancakes for a total of £60.10, including two glasses of wine.
Then it was on to "Measure for Measure." Unfortunately, though extremely well-acted, this production turned out to be an untraditional production of Shakespeare's classic, one that opened with one of the play's characters performing a simulated sex act. I quickly moved to cover the eyes of my 10-year-old and 9-year-old and anxiously wondered what my 14-year-old was thinking. (Note to myself: read the reviews of a play before taking the kids.)
We decided the next morning to splurge on one breakfast out — after all, the full English breakfast is a famous meal — and so headed to the Star Café in Soho, where for £25.20 we feasted on eggs, bacon and sausages along with grilled tomatoes and baked beans. We spent the day checking out some of the more popular tourist attractions that were within our budget (the Tower of London, at £43 for a family ticket; the Globe Theater at £25), and skipping those that did not. (The London Eye would have cost us £40.95, even with the 10 percent online reservation discount, and Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and adjoining planetarium would have been £107.95 for the five of us!)
We wandered — free — along the scenic south bank of the Thames, stopping in at the sprawling Borough Market, a food lover's paradise, where we spent £12.60 on snacks like smoked prawns wrapped in tortillas, steak sandwiches smothered with mushrooms and huge double-fudge brownies, and then visiting the area's many galleries.
After an early dinner (£56.03) at Tas Pide, a popular Anatolian restaurant that serves meze of hot and cold starters (hummus, tabbouleh and falafel) with endless baskets of sliced bread, as well as pides (pizzalike main courses of dough baked in a wood fire and filled with everything from sun-dried apricots and hellim cheese to chicken with red pepper and spinach), we headed to the Tate Modern (free), which stays open until 10 p.m on Friday and Saturday.
While my husband and I wandered through the galleries upstairs, checking out works by Rothko, Dali and Warhol, the three children played hide-and-seek among the current interactive ground floor installation of 14,000 stacked white cardboard boxes.
It seemed only fair that our agenda should be less cultural and more child-friendly the next day. We headed, inevitably, I suppose, to Buckingham Palace. It is with some embarrassment that I admit that my children had never seen the Changing of the Guard. Finally, the moment had come to experience this free pageantry. The historic ceremony, performed every day in the spring and summer, and every other day in the autumn and winter at 11:30 a.m., was both frustrating (the crowds were 10 people deep around the gate) and fantastic (the kids loved the synchronized marching and poker-faced guards).
After a brisk walk through St. James's Park and the adjacent Green Park, we used our travelcards to pick up one of only two Routemaster Heritage buses still crisscrossing the streets of London. These original London double-deckers (the Routemasters date back to the 1960's) are worth catching — they pass by St. Paul's Cathedral, Royal Albert Hall, Fleet Street and Trafalgar Square. Take the No. 9 or 15, but make sure it is marked "Heritage." What's more, it is much cheaper than the commercial hop-on-hop-off Big Bus in London, which costs £20 per adult and £10 per child per day.
We got off in Knightsbridge and followed the crowds into Harrods. After a quick run-though of the famed department store (all looking; no buying), we purchased a picnic lunch (£14) in the Food Halls. We ate by the nearby Serpentine, the lake that runs through Hyde Park, before deciding to rent one of the rowboats available at the boathouse for a half hour of family fun (£9.99).
Afterward, while the girls in our family spent £26.50 at Kensington Palace, which houses among other treasures a royal ceremonial dress collection that includes many of Princess Diana's favorites, the boys headed instead to the nearby (free) Peter Pan Playground, complete with an Indian Village with tepees and totem poles.
That evening's activity consisted of window-shopping on Kensington High Street and a meal at Wagamama, a trendy spot that serves Japanese noodle and rice dishes at communal tables. For only £50, thanks to a well-priced kid's menu, we enjoyed miso soups, dumplings, and various rice and noodle dishes filled with chicken, seafood and an array of vegetables.
ON our last day as tourists, we headed downriver to Greenwich, to see the Royal Observatory and the National Maritime Museum (both free). It seemed the most fitting way to get there was by boat, and so we purchased, for £26, a family ticket that would allow us to take one of the river cruises from the Tower of London and return by the Docklands Light Railway, a fast automatic train introduced in London in 1987 that winds through the city's newest developments, including Canary Wharf.
After learning more than we could absorb about Royal Astronomers in the Observatory, we ate our best-value meal of the weekend at Goddard's Pie House. For £18.50 total, we each ordered a pie (steak and kidney, cheese and onion, chicken and mushroom, to name just a few) served with mashed potatoes and peas, and left stuffed.
Tired, we headed back on the Docklands Light Railway. As the children nodded off, I had tallied up our spending and was pleased to find we still had £53.42 left for our final meal. We chose Masala Zone, an inexpensive but well reviewed new Indian restaurant chain. Sharing large dishes of butter chicken, lamb korma, chickpea samosas, and prawn thali, we discussed the highlights of the long weekend with the children. My teenage daughter even apologized to me for a conversation I overheard her having on her cellphone in which she said, "You won't believe what my Mom is making me do this weekend!" Be grateful, I told them. At least we were not reduced to repeating in unison a Vaishnava mantra at the Hare Krishna Center.
When the bill came, it totaled £45.40. Without hesitation, I quickly ordered my husband and myself a second celebratory beer and pocketed my calculator. "Cheers," he said, holding up his glass. "You win."
Pinching Pounds
WHERE TO STAY
VRBO.com (Vacation Rental by Owner) provides numerous listings of vacation properties around the world for rent by their owners. In London, nearly a hundred different rental properties, including many family houses, are listed.
WHERE TO EAT
The Stockpot, 18 Old Compton Street W1, 44-20-7287-1066, serves British specialties as well as burgers, pastas and omelets. Open seven days a week, and there are several other locations.
Chuen Cheng Ku, 17 Wardour Street W1 44-20-7437-1398, in the heart of Chinatown, specializes in dim sum, which is served every day of the week.
Tas Pide, 20-22 New Globe Walk SE1, 44-20-7928-3300, an Anatolian restaurant on the South Bank, is so good it makes you want to visit Anatolia (the Asian part of Turkey) for more of the food. Open seven days a week for lunch and dinner.
Goddard's Pie House, 45 Greenwich Church Street SE10, 44-20-8293-9313, serves pies (both veggie and meat) as well as stewed or jellied eels, a Cockney specialty. Open seven days a week.
Star Cafe, 22 Great Chapel Street W1, 44-20-7437-8778, serves a traditional English breakfast from 7 a.m Monday to Friday, including a national favorite, black pudding, for those who like pig's blood with their eggs.
Wagamama, with 24 locations around the city, including 26A Kensington High Street W8, 44-20-7376-1717, has a kid's menu unlike any other — featuring mini-ramen, minichicken Katsu and deep-fried prawns.
Masala Zone, 9 Marshall Street W1F, 44-20-7287-9966, and other locations, serves excellent curries, thalis and lamb roghan josh.
Check Out My Other Blogs (click on blog name to go there) = / 1.3rd Eye Blog / 2. Favorites Blog/ 3. Vita Excolatur (Living Well ...) Blog/ 4. Humor Me Blog/ 5. News and Current Events Blog/ 6. Consider This ... Blog/ 7. Consumer Warnings Blog/ 8. New Orleans Pentimento Blog/ 9. We Constant Gardeners Blog/ 10. Chaillot Family Blog/
posted by Joe Paris at Saturday, December 30, 2006
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