Today was not a tourist day. It was a London day. There is a difference.
We slept well, which continues to feel like one of the great victories of international travel. Michele was already off to the office, leaving us alone in the flat with a gentle breeze coming off the Thames. Fresh laundry, fresh shower, fresh coffee. There are moments in life where everything feels briefly in balance. From the balcony, London carried on as if England hadn't suffered football heartbreak less than twenty-four hours earlier — vans double-parked, cyclists threading impossible gaps, drivers regarding turn signals as merely a suggestion. One could spend an entire afternoon critiquing London driving. Some apparently do.
King's Road
We headed out, stopping at the neighborhood Italian shop for coffee — where my favorite Sardinian beer, Ichnusa, sat quietly in the cooler, patiently waiting for later. (It became a small ritual of the London leg: spot the Ichnusa, greet the Ichnusa, promise to return for the Ichnusa.) King's Road remains one of those streets that feels both historic and impossibly current — Chelsea pensioners in their scarlet coats one moment, a Lamborghini idling at the curb the next, and everywhere the low hum of a neighborhood that has always been slightly cooler than everywhere else and knows it.
King's Road was built in 1694 as a private road for King Charles II, and later became a launchpad for one cultural revolution after another. The Chelsea of the '60s and '70s ran on it: the Rolling Stones and the Beatles wandered through; Mary Quant sold the miniskirt from a shop here; and by 1976 Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were running SEX at 430 King's Road, effectively the birthplace of British punk and the Sex Pistols. Mod gave way to glam, glam to punk, punk to the New Romantics — a continuous lineage of British youth culture, all on one street. Today? Two Americans spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at pottery at the Chelsea Garden Centre. History marches on.
Lunch was at Alley Cats Pizza, reportedly hard to get into, and worth the reputation. The spicy vegan pizza was exceptional — thin and blistered, chewy crust, real heat, perfect leopard-spotted char, the kind of pie that makes you briefly forget it's vegan at all. It came with one of my favorite beer names of the trip: Blushing Bride IPA by Coalition Brewing, a proper West Coast–style hop hit dropped improbably into Chelsea. I don't know who she is, but she makes a fine beer. The best detail, though, was on the back wall: a giant screen playing old Looney Tunes cartoons — the good modern-era ones, all crisp color and elastic slapstick, not the ancient scratchy black-and-white stuff. Bugs and Daffy going at it over your shoulder while you eat spicy pizza and drink West Coast IPA in London is, it turns out, a genuinely perfect lunch. Meanwhile the city outside had decided to become Madrid, temperatures climbing into the 80s, and for a place built around overcast skies, everyone seemed slightly personally offended by the whole thing.
The Trembling Lady
We set out for Albert Bridge. If Tower Bridge is London's celebrity, Albert Bridge is London's eccentric aunt.
Completed in 1873, Albert Bridge quickly earned the nickname "The Trembling Lady." Victorian engineers discovered that large groups of soldiers marching in step set up uncomfortable resonant vibrations through the structure — the same physics that can, in principle, shake a bridge apart. Signs were installed requesting troops break step while crossing, and those signs remain today. There is something wonderfully British about preserving the instructions for a 150-year-old problem. (We crossed without incident — and, mercifully, without any giant swings involved this time.)
On the far side, Battersea Park welcomed us with shade, trees, and a much-needed breeze. The Victorians understood something important: cities need room to breathe. We wandered among the trees, found a few geocaches, explored the lake, and watched London simply exist — families, runners, dogs, people reading beneath enormous trees. It felt less like a capital city and more like a neighborhood.
A Pig Over London
Eventually we reached Battersea Power Station. The last time I saw it, it was largely abandoned. Today it's one of the most ambitious redevelopment projects in Europe — restaurants, shops, apartments, offices, and an enormous bar called The Control Room that perfectly embraces the building's industrial past. For decades this place supplied nearly 20% of London's electricity. And then, in 1976, it supplied something else entirely.
In 1976 Pink Floyd needed a cover for Animals, an album loosely inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm. Their solution: fly a giant inflatable pig between the power station's smokestacks. What nobody anticipated was the pig breaking free and drifting into Heathrow's airspace, briefly disrupting air traffic over London. Somewhere in an alternate timeline there's an RAF report concerning a giant pig over southwest London. This is where the trip's Animals thread begins — it'll follow us all the way home, "Pigs" here at the source, "Dogs" and "Sheep" completing the set somewhere over the Atlantic on Day 9.
From Battersea we wandered back toward Sloane Square, doing what we've become very good at: walking, shopping, asking questions, walking some more. Chelsea feels affluent in a way that's hard to fully explain — beautiful homes, tree-lined streets, people who somehow look put-together despite temperatures near 30°C. Back at the flat, I helped Michele set up her Meta VR headset (my first thought: "Can I use this to wander museums?" — because apparently physically crossing Europe isn't enough).
Up the Thames
Refreshed and hydrated, we headed back out — this time by river taxi, up the Thames with a Prime Time IPA in hand. This is, I'm now convinced, the correct way to move around London. You skip the whole snarling business of the streets and slide up the middle of the city on the water, wind in your face, the whole skyline swinging past on both banks. The boat runs quick and low, throwing a wake, and the city unspools in a single continuous shot: Chelsea's genteel embankment, houseboats and moorings, bridge after bridge each a slightly different Victorian personality, cormorants on the pilings, other boats saluting as they pass. The sun scattered across the water, Aimee and Michele caught up over the engine noise, and Chelsea rolled quietly by. We passed a building where Elton John once owned a penthouse, because London is like that — you'll casually hear "oh yes, that's where Elton lived," as though everyone has an Elton story ready to go.
Our destination was Putney, and I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did — active, energetic, properly alive in a way that felt different from Chelsea's polish. This is rowing country, the heart of it: Putney is the starting point of the famous Oxford–Cambridge Boat Race, and the riverbank is lined with boathouses, university and club colors, sculls sliding out onto the water, and a general population that appeared significantly fitter than I am. The whole neighborhood has that lean, sporty, riverside energy — pubs full after a row, people in kit, the Thames right there as the main character. We also learned that one of the local pubs is entered through a working pastry shop, which is the kind of detail that makes you want to move somewhere. Putney makes a genuinely compelling case for itself.
Dinner was at Chook Chook, an Indian restaurant themed like an old railway dining carriage — narrow, warm, wood-paneled, the tables laid out like you're about to pull away from a platform in 1930-something. The vegetarian dishes were excellent, spice dialed up, and washed down with cold Cobra (a lager literally engineered to go with Indian food, and it shows). It was the unhurried kind of dinner nobody wants to end — good food, great company, the clatter and warmth of a full room. Afterward we caught the bus back to Chelsea as the long evening finally settled, and shared a chilled red with Michele back at the flat, catching up on life and Cornwall and everything in between. David was still down in Cornwall at this point — we'd meet him in the days to come — so tonight it was the three of us, which was its own kind of perfect.
The Roundup · Day 06
🍺 Beer of the Day. Blushing Bride IPA takes the crown, with honorable mentions to the Prime Time IPA on the Thames and the Cobra at Chook Chook.
🔬 Historical Fact of the Day. Pink Floyd's inflatable pig escaped during the Animals shoot in 1976 and drifted into Heathrow airspace — proof that even giant flying pigs can delay London traffic.
🎵 Song of the Day. "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" — Pink Floyd, obviously, standing beneath the smokestacks.
📚 Quote of the Day. "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." — Samuel Johnson
❤️ Moment I'll Remember. Floating up the Thames at sunset with Aimee and Michele while London quietly drifted by on either side.