Last year my mum said that one thing she wanted to do in London was to visit Westminster Abbey. After looking at the various ticket options, I decided that for the small additional cost, it made more sense to buy a membership for me and a guest than it did to buy two tickets. That way I could revisit and my husband would be able to come with me as he had never been to Westminster Abbey. A few days ago I received an email telling me that my membership was coming up for renewal. I knew I wasn’t going to renew, so it prompted me to suggest to my husband that we visit before we lost the chance to (at least without paying again).
So, on a beautiful blue sky Saturday, we headed West to play at being tourists. We arrived, walked straight in and picked up our headsets for the audio guide.
Being January, it was much quieter than when I visited with my mum (albeit still busy) and the light was absolutely gorgeous as it streamed through the stained glass.
As I only visited last year, this time I was much less focused on the big historic things and much more on the smaller, weirder details, like this enslaved blue hedgehog creature. So much weirdness. If I didn’t want to become a tree when I die, I would definitely be requesting a weird creature to sit on my final resting place.
By the time we finished, it was late morning and, having got into the brunch groove at Forno Ragged Café the week before, decided to find a nearby brunch place.
Westminster has a dearth of good non-touristy brunch places, so we walked over to Victoria and headed to Aussie food spot Timmy Green.
It was busy when we arrived but they were able to get us two seats at the bar where we could order from the food menu.
I could have easily chosen half of the menu to accompany my standard cup of tea order, and really dithered other the Dirty Daisy, which sounded great, but in the end I went for the shakshouka which is baked eggs with spiced tomatoes, peppers, whipped Greek yogurt, served with charcoal sourdough on the side. As always, I could have happily had more bread for dipping and scooping, there should always be more bread in life.
My husband went for a banana smoothie and the smoked salmon royale which was served with avocado, lemon hollandaise and house chilli pesto. I’m not sure if there is some sort of national hollandaise shortage I’m unaware of but I will never understand getting a tiny dollop of hollandaise – give me a real smothering of hollandaise, but not my breakfast, not my problem.
It was a good solid brunch though and exactly what we needed after a morning of playing tourist in our own city.
