London 2018: Beatles Walking Tour, Little Venice, Paddington

On our first visit to London in 2000, we really enjoyed taking walking tours with the tour group London Walks, choosing the extremely popular “Jack the Ripper” Walk as well as a “Hidden London” walk .  The tours are 2 hours in length, at a cost of 10 pounds per person and are usually informative and entertaining.  If you plan to take more than two walks during your stay in London, it makes sense to purchase the discount pass where you pay 2 pounds extra for the first walk and then 2 pounds less for all subsequent walks.  The pass is good for 30 days for tourists.  We like the fact that you don’t need to pre-book for the walks and that they start and stop near tube stations.   On this trip, we have chosen three walks to take with this group—a Beatles tour and two tours around the Covent Garden area.  We originally planned a fourth walk that encompassed the areas of Hampstead and Highgate but realized that we would get a much more detailed tour of Highgate Cemetery from the cemetery itself and could only see the West part of the cemetery with that tour.

Our first walking tour was called the “Beatles Magical Mystery Tour”, visiting some of the important locations in London where the Beatles first made a name for themselves after arriving from their home town of Liverpool.  The tour would start at the Tottenham Court Road tube station and conclude at the Abbey Road recording studio where the Beatles recorded all their albums between 1962 and 1970, including the album named after the studio.  As the start and end points of the tour were nowhere near each other, we would need to take a tube ride in between to get to Abbey Road Studios.  Once there, it would be just a short walk away from an area known as “Little Venice”, so we thought that we would check it out after the tour.  Arriving at Tottenham Court Road Station, I was drawn to the colourful mosaic patterns that decorated the walls.

Our guide for the walk was Richard Porter, a life-long Beatles fan and expert on Beatlemania, who has met the group members on multiple occasions and has written a book about them.  The first stop was in Soho Square where Paul McCartney’s London Office “MPL” is found.  MPL stands for McCartney Productions Limited, not McCartney Paul & Linda as many have surmised.  McCartney’s company owns the rights to many songs and a few musicals including Annie and Grease, but ironically and despite repeated efforts, it does not own the publishing rights to the Beatles catalogue.  Next we visited Trident Records where “Hey Jude” was recorded.  Other artists who recorded here included David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Queen.  We stopped in front of the entry to a gentlemen’s toilet on Broadwick St. in Soho where John Lennon participated in a sketch from the BBC Comedy Series “Not Only .. But Also” starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.  John played Dan, the doorman of a trendy nightclub, who charged the exorbitant amount of 5 pounds to use the facilities in the underground men’s lavatory.  John wore his trademark “granny glasses” for the first time, sparking a fashion trend.  Then we went to Carnaby Street which used to be a favourite location for musicians including the Beatles, Stones and Kinks to go shop for clothing before it became too touristy.  A large mural called “The Spirit of Soho” (1991) celebrates the historic venues and people associated with Soho, including Karl Marx, Handel, Isaac Newton and Casanova, who is depicted wearing an outfit reminiscent of the ones worn by the Beatles on their Sergeant Pepper album.

We were taken to the steps of the Palladium Theatre where the Beatles’ October 1963 performance on the show “Late Night At the Palladium” was watched by 18 million viewers and marked the start of “Beatlemania”.  Fans screamed and mobbed the group when they exited the theatre and the next day, for the first time, the Beatles ended up on the front page of every major newspaper.  As noted by the blue heritage plaque, next to the Palladium were the offices of Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles.  It was here that John Lennon made the contentious and possibly taken out of context statement that “The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ”.  We stood outside 3 Saville Road, formerly the site of the Beatles’ Apple Corps headquarters, where the band held the infamous “rooftop concert”, which ended up being their final public performance.  We were also shown the former location of Indica Gallery, where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono when he was invited to attend an exhibition of her conceptual art.  The gallery was partly owned by Peter Asher, the brother of Paul McCartney’s then girlfriend Jane Asher, and was named after Peter’s favourite brand of marijuana.

The highlight of the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour was the final stop to visit Abbey Road Studios (originally named EMI Studios), the location where the Beatles recorded almost all of their albums between 1962-1970.  It has become a tradition for visitors to write tributes to the Beatles on the wall in front of the building, which gets painted over every 3 months.  A sign pointing to the wall originally seems to be a warning against this graffiti, but is actually a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Beatles songs “Help” and “Get Back” which are highlighted in the sentences.  The Beatles named their 1969 album Abbey Road after the street that the studio resides on, and took the famous photo of the Fab Four walking across the nearby Zebra crosswalk that is used on the cover of the album.  Originally the album was to be named Everest but it was deemed too expensive to travel to Mount Everest for a cover shoot, so a more local setting was chosen.  The Abbey Road album cover became part of a weird “Paul is Dead” conspiracy theory that theorized that the procession was part of a funeral march.  The “clues” indicating that Paul was dead included his bare feet and the cigarette in his right hand, since he was left-handed.

This iconic depiction of the four Beatles walking across the zebra crossing has become one of the most famous and most imitated/spoofed images in the history of popular music.  Homages of other foursomes include characters from the Simpsons, Marvel/DC superheroes, Star Trek, Pac Man, Star Wars, Tin Tin, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and more.  We were quite excited in anticipation of being able to walk across the zebra crossing ourselves at the end of our tour.  While we were at an art show in Toronto a few days prior to traveling to London, we spotted a graffiti rendering of beetles (the insects!) on the famous crossing and could not resist buying it as a “pre-trip souvenir”.  The tour guide warned us that it was actually dangerous to make this crossing since it was a busy intersection with lots of cars and buses coming from both directions.  You would think at least the locals would know to avoid this street by now.  This in no way deters any tourists, as we were told of people crossing naked or even lying down across the road.  Of course, Rich and I had to make this trek multiple times ourselves, and with the power of Photoshop, we were able to replicate our images from different photos to simulate a foursome on the crosswalk, both in regular and cartoon modes on our camera.

Little Venice is an area in just north of Central London where three branches of the Regent’s Canal traverse East, North-West and South-West, flowing from a small basin that is known as the “Little Venice Lagoon”.  While not on the scale of the actual canals of Venice, Italy (which we visited several years ago), parts of Regent’s Canal are lined with trees and houseboats and spanned by bridges, exuding a quaint charm similar to the Canal Saint-Martin in Paris.  It is thought that the poet Robert Browning coined the term “Little Venice”.  Boats that can be found on the canal include a puppet theatre boat,  floating shops and restaurants, a floating hotel and even a floating church called St. Peter’s Barge.

We thought it would be fun to have lunch on one of the floating restaurants and rest our feet before heading home.  Unfortunately we just missed the lunch period for the first boat that we tried, but we had success getting a table at the “Darcie Green”, a brightly coloured boat that is connected to a floating coffee and cocktail bar called the “May Green”.  Sharing a combined 50-meter upper deck overlooking the Grand Union Canal, the two boats were designed by British pop artist Sir Peter Blake.  With glass windows and round port holes on both sides of the boat, you could get a good view of either the canal or the other shops and restaurants along the boardwalk.

It was a bit breezy and chilly on the canal so we warmed up and perked up by sharing a “house-made” hot chocolate with our meal.  We each started with a spicy tuna tostada with avocado, yuzu cream made from the sour Japanese citrus yuzu fruit, and candied chili.  Then we shared a plate of crispy breaded calamari, courgettes and green beans with a sauce cheekily called the “Ribman’s Holy F*ck sauce) and a sashimi salad with pieces of sea bass, salmon and tuna sashimi combined with mixed greens, avocado, pickled ginger and a soy/sesame dressing.  This made for a nice lunch in a really cool setting.

At this point, we had followed along the south-west branch of the canal and ended up next to Paddington Tube Station which we would take to head home.  Of course, at a station called “Paddington” in London, we expected to see some sign of the fictional children’s book character Paddington Bear, and we were not disappointed.  A short distance away from the tube station entrance was a blue sculpture of Paddington holding his trademark briefcase and wearing the iconic hat and duffle coat.  This was one of four sculptures of Paddington that you can find on a scavenger hunt by following the “Pawprint Trail” around London. Also found in this area were sculptures (created 1998 and 2000) by Sean Henry of a pair of casually dressed men, one as if out for a stroll and the other just standing around enjoying the scenery.  A temporary exhibit from a series called “Collaborative Works” paired up painter Sinta Tantra, who paints on an architectural scale and sculptor Nick Hornby, who works in bronze and marble with the aid of 3-D modelling software.  The collaboration is a set of images representing schematic designs for new sculptures.  Had we arrived in this area at the beginning of the day, we would have explored more and found more sculptures and art to look at throughout Paddington Station and its surrounding streets.  But after a long day of walking, we had no more energy to wander and just headed home after our late lunch.