Saturday, November 3:
Tokens and treasures, yesterday’s pleasures
Cheap imitations of heirlooms of old
Dented and tarnished, scarred and unvarnished
In old Portobello they’re bought and they’re sold

Portebollo Road, Portobello Road
Street where the riches of ages are stowed
Artifacts to glorify our regal abode
Are hidden in the flotsam in Portobello road.
You’ll find what you want in the Portobello Road

From Disney’s Bednobs & Broomstick, which was stuck in my head most of the week. Portobello Road Market is, indeed, just like the song. Knicknacks of all shapes and sizes spill out of stalls lining the street. It was great.

Rachael and I had high tea in a modern tea shop nearby and we visited the Victoria & Albert Museum, a museum of cultural history of sorts that was founded with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition of 1850 (which would be an interesting subject for an historic romance novel!). I was really hoping to see costume history at the V & A, but they only displayed a small portion of their costume collection. Online they have an extensive collection of fashion history photographs and some fascinating feature articles such as Corsets and Crinoline.

Incidentally, while at Rachael’s I read Twice the Temptation by Suzanne Enoch that has two stories, one historic and one contemporary, both centering around a cursed heirloom necklace. In the second story the heroine is responsible for a touring jewelry exhibition by the V & A, which made seeing the V & A all the cooler, but unfortunately the V & A jewelry exhibit was closed for renovation while we were there. I liked the historic story better than the contemporary one anyway.

Sunday, November 4:
We took the train to Cambridge, which is lovely, where I saw my friend Tracy. The college house system sounds just like Hogwarts and the town looks like Hogsmead. I even took my photo next to platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross Station on the way there! We had high tea again (yum) and advised Tracy on what romance novel she should read for her first foray into the genre. She wanted something light as a break from her Bioengineering PhD studies. oof!

Monday, November 5:
I walked through Hyde Park. Yay! Now I can imagine it in every Regency Romance where the hero and heroine ride down Rotten Row, or walk through the gardens, or fall into the Serpentine (Kate in the Viscount Who Loved Me!). I saw a rider in traditional riding costume (wearing Hessians?) and I remembered that the top thing I wanted to do in London was go for a horse ride in Hyde Park. Phooey to remember on my last day. I couldn’t find the stables, but I did find the phone numbers for two stables that hire horses for riding in the park. Next time for sure! I followed the rider down Rotten Row for a bit, simply because I was so excited to actually see someone riding in Hyde Park, until he started cantering, at which time I was left in the dust.

Later I took the Tube to Covent Garden, saw Covent Garden Market, walked to the British Museum, strolled down Drury Lane, and toured the Royal Theater Drury Lane – all popular Regency Romance locations.

I admit, sadly, that I didn’t write much on my trip, but I got a lot of research done for my book! I read a lot at Rachael’s, partly because I got sick and partly because I couldn’t resist digging into Rachael’s collection of romance novels. I discovered two new yummy authors I really like: Kasey Michaels and Eloisa James. And I had fun. I would love to go back someday. You could stay years in London and not see everything!

After Stockholm’s quaint 17th century buildings painted in rose, yellow, peach, and red, London is relatively grey and colorless. I admit, I am disappointed. Compared to Stockholm, London isn’t very picturesque. However, it has one or two other things to recommend it, namely tons of historic sites, cultural icons, and romance novel settings. It is warmer than Sweden too, and it hasn’t rained yet this week! Ickiness alert: the pollution here is bad, and although you can’t see it with the nekid eye, you find it clearly in the black gunk that accumulates in your nose every day. Ew.

As you may remember, this is my very first trip to London. Did I immediately head for the Tower? Buckingham Palace? Big Ben? No, no and no. It is highly doubtful that my characters stood in line for a Beefeater tour. The best way to understand a character is to see the city as they saw it; to walk the winding streets and darkened alleys; to sit in green parks and watch the people scurry past; to study the built environment as it would have appeared during the 19th century. What would they have seen? Heard? Smelled? Where would they have lived? Shopped? Played? Cities are living, breathing, adapting organisms that have a profound impact on our personality, actions, and lifestyle. Understand the city, and you understand the soul of its people, be they historical, fictional, or present day.

As Churchill so succinctly put it, “We shape our buildings; thereafter our buildings shape us.”

Tuesday, October 30

On Tuesday I took the London Walks tour of Historic Greenwich, mostly because it started out with a boat ride down the Themes, which was lovely. The boat guide pointed out famous pubs and locations used by Charles Dickens in his novel Oliver Twist, such as where the criminal mastermind Fagin lived and died. Greenwich itself was slightly dull, perhaps because the guide didn’t share much in the way of interesting history lessons, but I did set my watch by the official ball that falls at 1 pm. (Pictured left: the Queen’s house with its view to the Themes framed by buildings of the Navel hospital.)

I ran back to the City for a much more interesting afternoon walk of “Old London, the Medieval to Georgian City“, which could be renamed “Churches of Christopher Wren and the Great Fire of 1666″. Our tour guide Hilary was fabulous. Old London is pretty much the financial capital of the world, so don’t expect a lot of old architecture aside from the churches.

In the evening we took the “Hidden Pubs of Old London Town” tour in which we saw the home of Dr. Johnson (author of the first dictionary), the location of Sweeney Todd’s barbershop (He shaved the faces of gentlemen/Who never thereafter were heard of again./He trod a path that few have trod,/Did Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street -Sondheim), and Twinnings (tea merchants since 1706).

Wednesday, October 31

Halloween. In the morning I took a tour of “Shakespeare’s and Dicken’s London – The Old City” by the marvelous actor Shaughan who regaled us with monologues from both writers’ works and a song. In the afternoon I toured Old Hampstead Village where the middle class escaped the noxious fumes of the city and saw the Admiralty House that P. L. Travers wrote into Mary Poppins (pictured left). Who knew it was real? The Admiral apparently built his home the the exact dimensions of his ships’ deck and really did set off canons from the roof. Hampstead was an attractive brick village, but the guide was sparing on the historic details of the place. I really could care less where the Spice Girls or Riddley Pearson live.

Thursday, November 1

First day of NaNoWriMo and I write a grand total of zero words, because of course I came down with a cold. I managed to go out for the morning for a lovely and very informative tour of Mayfair, neighborhood of everyone who is anyone in a Regency romance novel (and Beau Brummell, Regency fashion leader). It was very different from what I’ve been imagining all this time! It is still a swanky place to live – the most expensive digs in the world, populated mostly by Americans and Middle Easterners. Many of the buildings are empty, bought only as property investments, adding a layer of blight and neglect. Apparently it is also a high class red light district – and always has been. In the late 1700′s the most infamous light-skirt, Kitty something, charged what would in today’s dollars be 300,000 pounds for her services. I think I need to right that into my book. Ha! Our guide, Richard, was awesome, very informative, and very open to questions.

I walked around Bond Street and saw Boodle’s, Brook’s, and the building where Almack’s used to be in Pall Mall in the afternoon, then came home and slept. Friday I slept. Being sick sucks.

With eager anticipation I have been researching places to go and things to do during my upcoming pilgrimage to the holy land of the Regency Romance genre.

The Travel Book Search

Frustratingly, there seem to be London guidebooks for most other literary genres, but not romance. There are numerous books on London through the eyes of Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wild, Sherlock Holmes, and Charles Dickens, and one genre travel guide to the Mystery Reader’s Walking Guide: London. There are half a dozen books on literary guides to London written during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – much good would they do guiding a reader through the much-changed 21st. At least a Dickens’ guide would help me identify locations in Lisa Kleypas’ Victorian-era novels, but where is London for Georgette Heyer Lovers? Stephanie Laurens’ London: Mayfair and Beyond? The Traveler’s Companion to the London of Julia Quinn? The closest I have come are travel guides to Jane Austin’s England and Bath, but not, specifically, London.

Which leads us back to writing our own.

Walking Tours of Regency-Related London

London Walks is a company that has approximately ten walking tours a day for only 6 pounds each that all look fabulous and have been enthusiastically recommended to me. A few of them relate to our topic:

- Old Mayfair – The Best Address in London!: During the 19th century, anyone who was anyone had a town home in Mayfair for the Season, including all our monied and titled heroes and heroines.

- The London Walk: Westminster and the West End: “Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, the Changing of the Guard, our loveliest Royal Park, 500-year-old St. James’s Palace, clubland, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Trafalgar Square, Admiralty Arch…” All the sights our characters witnessed.

- The Literary London Pub Walk: “Shades of Dickens and Thackeray; Oscar Wilde and G. B. Shaw; Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Circle (who lived in Squares and loved in triangles); George Orwell, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot – how they were flesh and blood men and women who lived, loved, laughed, caroused, quarrelled and spun ‘words so nimble, so full of subtle flame…’.”

I will be there over October 31st, most likely sampling the Apparitions, Alleyways & Ale: the Halloween Ghostwalk Tour!!!

Map Me Baby

A recent find: an online map of London from 1827.

After a month-long obsession with Regency Romance novels I have finally done it – I’ve bought tickets for a pilgrimage to the golden city. Caught up in a giddy wave of excitement, I immediately searched the internet for places to visit. I want to stroll in the footsteps of my heroines, to soak in the magic of the pleasure gardens, to drink a brandy in the dark paneled rooms where my heroes have sat, to people-watch in Hyde Park, and to dance the night away under the coal-obscured starlight of the London sky. Okay, not exactly, but you get my drift. What still exists in London that was there during the Regency period? White’s? Brooks’? Boodle’s? Almack’s? Mayfair mansions? The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens? Covent Gardens? Drury Lane? Hyde Park? Surely I’m not the first starry-eyed bookworm to want to see the Regency haunts in real life? Google, for once, has failed me – where is The Regency Romance-Lover’s Guide to Visiting London? Why hasn’t Avon Romance, the giant of Regency publishing, put out such a needed travelog? There are DaVinci Code tours of Paris, The Sound of Music tours in Austria, and Brothers Grimm tours in Germany, so where is the Regency Romance Novel tour of London? Unless, gentle reader, you can point me in the right direction, I shall have to write the book myself. It would be my honor to create such a tome to guide fellow Romance pilgrims.

Here are a few resources that I intend to look into to guide my trip research:

“A Visit to Regency London” by Victoria Hinshaw

The most promising find – a single webpage with a list and photographs of what one can see today from Regency London from a Regency romance novelist.

“Jane Austin in London” by The Jane Austin Society of Australia

Pages on Jane in London, especially the pages on pleasure gardens and
Gentlemen’s Clubs. The Society took a trip to London and visited gardens and several Gentlemen’s Clubs including Whites and Brooks, but hasn’t seen fit to put the maps, itinerary, and the like on the website. Great information on the cultural importance of the pleasure gardens, theater, art, and clubs.

The A to Z of Regency London by Richard Horwood.

Maps, maps, and more maps! Horwood’s plan of the Cities of London and Westminster (3rd Edition 1813) in book form on a scale of 14 inches per mile, with key and index. Extends Hyde Park-East India Docks; Pentonville-Walworth. Hardback, 116pp. Publication no 131 (1985). I can compare this to modern day maps to see how the city has changed.

London by Edward Rutherford

I read his Princes of Ireland about Dublin and was impressed with Rutherford’s storytelling technique. He weaves the history of a city through the lives of subsequent generations of common people.

London’s Pleasures from Restoration to Regency: Two Centuries of Elegance and Indulgence by David Kerr Cameron

This book sounds like a fabulous research book for rakish and genteel activities alike: from bear-bating to pleasure gardens to theaters to coffee houses. Unfortunately, the Seattle Public Library doesn’t seem to have it. I may have found a use for my Borders gift card, which I have been saving it for a rainy day!

An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray

Publishers Weekly mentions that “perhaps even fans of Regency romances” will like this book about the prolifigate vice and paradoxical idealized virtue of the Regency period. The author covers the period of history from 1790 to 1830.

The Traditional Shops & Restaurants of London: A Guide to Century-Old Establishments and New Classics by Eugenia Bell

Profiles the historic shops of London, some of which started in the early 1700s and are still around. Now I just have to go back through my novel and dig up the names of the shops and restaurants my heroes and heroines frequent!

Tea in the City: London by Jane Pettigrew

Like I could visit England without having a spot o’ tea. Crumpets anyone?

The Amateur Historian’s Guide to Medieval and Tudor London by Sarah Valente Kettler and Carole Trimble

This is the exact travel book I am looking for…except for the wrong time period. I want The Amateur Historian’s Guide to Regency London. My kingdom, My kingdom, My kingdom for a horse!