June 9th 2012

Something we're discovering about London is that there's lots of free things to do if you look for them. Garry was looking around on the Internet and found this — The London Green Fair — at Regent's Park. We walked up and had a look round.

Chickens!

These guys were weaving sticks. Not entirely sure why.

Herbs to buy. If we had had space I would had bought them all.

Garry and his brolly

Big chicken. Not entirely sure why.

Regge band

Stalls selling lots of very pretty, very expensive things

SO many different types of food

Eco-friendly stalls with The City behind

Iron Man! *boo domp chish*

Garry and I

The main reason we'd come, however, was to see an 80 piece Dutch Wind Orchestra who were absolutely brilliant.

Regent's Park itself is lovely even without the festival. And there are lots of dogs, which is always a good thing in my book. Will be spending quite a lot of time here when it's sunny, I think. Especially since we only saw a small slice of it.

The park

June 8th 2012

I was reading a local paper when I saw that there was going to be a biscuit festival in the centre of town. A whole festival for biscuits. AMAZING.

It was held at the Brunswick Shopping Centre, which is almost directly opposite Russell Square station. When we got there, two very excited people called Gary Baldi and Connie Crumbs were dragging people up on stage for contests to win biscuits.

In the adverts I'd seen for the festival it promised...well, a lot more than it delivered. I imagine that because it was a Friday it wasn't as busy as it would be on the Saturday. However, there was a biscuit decorating stand...

Garry had a vanilla biscuit smeared with red wine buttercream and sprinkled with nuts, meringues and a dollop of caramel.

Mine was far simpler — a lemon biscuit with vanilla buttercream and caramel. It looks a bit like an egg here.

They were, admittedly, very nice biscuits but there wasn't a great deal to keep us occupied here so we went for a wander. And that's how we ended up at Camden Lock.

This is a 30 minute walk or a 10 minute bus ride from our house and it is, quite frankly, amazing.

It's a total labyrinth of stalls selling everything from food to clothes to toiletries to stationery to artwork to second hand books to vintage items, all in some really quite beautiful settings.

I couldn't take many photos inside here as many of the stalls have "No photograph" signs on them, but it used to be a stables and each stables is made into a little stall selling beautiful things. It's incredible.

The only problem is I am really, really not cool enough for Camden Lock. I'm going to have to come back with several more piercings before I feel like I fit in...

There will almost certainly be another post on Camden Lock at some point. I just didn't have enough time to see it all and I missed so much out — I think it needs a whole day devoted to it.

How to get there