TRAVEL | LONDON | WESTMINSTER | POETs

Poets Corner Escape

Taking the bus to Westminster

5 min readSep 12, 2023

It has been a length of time since I last talked about my shameful, youthful years, wandering through London’s streets on foot, but less so as a successful man.

London is well known to me: Drury Lane, Whitechapel, Pimlico, Victoria, the City, Hyde Park, all no longer have any mystery for me.

This trip I’m not wandering streets but staying in Victoria, at a superb hotel with fancy rooms and all the amenities one could imagine. If I had brought my dogs, they would be walked twice a day for ten minutes without charge and a £100 tip for each dog!

It’s hard to dream inside such places, it’s buttoned down clean, has two high end restaurants, a pink bar, and the staff move along secret corridors and via unseen elevators.

A person like me, money or not, doesn’t fit in. I’m not going to bump into a member of staff in the elevator with whom I can discuss another staff member’s multicolored head gear, or ask where the hotel keeps it’s garbage crates.

It’s hard to dream among high end restaurants, fashion houses, offices, and penthouses. The place has no soul anymore. What teenager anymore runs away to the docks with any sense of longing, listening to sailors talk of far-flung wanderings, having their first real experience of the great ships.

Steve, who has ruined many an experience for me, has no time for my grumbling. It makes me smile, I do not even know I’m doing it, grumbling, I mean.

“Hurry up, we can take a cab to Mayfair, the meeting is in an hour,” he says, while sitting on the pot in my hotel room.

A London cab is a popular black box on wheels that allows its passengers to cross London without any interaction with Londoners’ while traveling from one place to the other.

Image:Author — meet locals on double deckers

I left the hotel via the fire-escape, down a staircase at the back of the hotel, shown to me by a thirty-two-year-old hotel room attendant called Wiktor, which in Poland is Victoria.

I hopped down the road pretty smartly toward Victoria Station. Over the years since last here, the most notable objects missing from the great station hall is the seating. If you want to rest, you’ll have to visit an establishment with a service: cafe, coffee shop, etc.

I asked Abegunde, a young Nigerian platform sweeper about this problem and he told me that it invites too many of London’s homeless to sleep and occupy seats with no intention to travel.

Abegunde told me he finds an average £20 a week in dropped coins, but averages a hundred pounds a week in rewards for handing in rings, chains, broaches, wallets, and phones. Abegunde earns £18 an hour and lives with his parents who emigrated to UK before he was born.

I skipped through the station and jumped a bus heading to Westminster Abbey to sit awhile in Poets Corner.

Before I go into the Abbey I need a coffee. I silence my cell phone. Hmm, that’s weird, ten messages. None from Jenny.

Having coffee I met up with Benjamin, born in London to a family from North Africa. He had the appearance of a King’s Guardsman wearing his chin strap on his forehead!

Handsome, witty, charming, and stylish, Benjamin has a haircut more commonly seen in the 1980s. He’s just started at an Architect Firm and loves working in London with a couple of workmates, rent sharing.

I boarded a Thames Ferry to Westminster and take in London’s changed and changing landscape. The river Thames doesn’t care, it’s seen millions of years of change.

Poet’s Corner inside Westminster Abbey is a place I like to wander, take a breath, be close to the gods of literature. A place to calm down after being given a senior ticket without asking for it. You think in a place where God exists that he would show mercy and have the ticket lady argue my age!

Steve meets me at Trafalgar Square. I’m not sure why I keep him as a friend, he can get quite ugly.

Back when I could only afford broken-down hotels, and where people swarmed the streets below me, I could drop love bombs. Today I cannot open the windows of this high rise hotel, no one looks up.