United Kingdom
- seanick9
- Aug 6
- 18 min read
This chapter of the blog is about our visit to the United Kingdom! We hit three areas: London, Cotswolds and Edinburgh over the last 3 weeks. Of the three, the Cotswolds were new to me and the most interesting, but we had a great time in all three places, and we were also able to get Emily into some day camps for some of the time which she seemed to really enjoy!
London
Anna and I have both been to London a few times before, and had Emily signed up for kids camp, so we kind of skipped most of the normal touristy things like the British Museum, Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Westminster Palace, Great Wheel and the like, and focused on more neighborhood specific things! It doesn’t mean those things aren’t worth visiting, just that we didn’t prioritize them for this trip. We thought 10 days would be more than enough to see what we wanted to see, but London is such a massive, diverse city that it still seems like we hardly scratched the surface of sights, tastes and experiences. That said, here are most of our highlights for the time we were here.
Kids activities
London is a pretty kid-friendly place, for starters many of the restaurants and pubs have kids offerings, or go out of the way to make kids feel welcome. Kids are free on the train and bus, and there are many establishments and activities specifically designed for kids around the city. We visited a few and wanted to share our experiences.
Young V&A kids toy museum
On a rainy day, we had a backlog of places tagged to visit in Google Maps to draw from, and one such day we visited the Young V&A, a kids toy museum, part of the Victoria and Albert museums collection in London. It’s free to enter though there was a small cost to see the exhibition on the 3rd floor- I don’t recall what it was but we (Emily) weren’t interested. The building itself is quite large, with three floors of exhibits around a central atrium and cafe, with a mix between museum pieces behind glass and interactive toys.
The exhibits behind glass included some really old doll houses from hundreds of years ago and around the world, such as a 150 year old doll house from Japan. There was another wall that was devoted to all sorts of different play sets, legos, tinker toys and the like.
Emily was a bit frustrated about not being able to play with some of the toys behind the glass, but had a pretty good time with the interactive exhibits, such as the optical illusion space and the play theater, where she ran around with a single chicken foot for at least an hour.
Beauty and the Beast themed high tea
Anna booked us a high tea in London at the Waldorf, called Be Our Guest, to satisfy the desire to do a high tea, and to have something fun for Emily.
You start out by selecting a tea and a cakes package, which they bring out in courses with some savory options - a soup and some mini sandwiches, and sweet desserts, cakes and scones later. They had champagne and cocktails to add on as well. It was fun! Emily enjoyed it and the food was pretty tasty as well.
Greenwich market, the Cove play area
We went to Greenwich market as a day trip, though we skipped the royal observatory this time, we did go to the Cove play area near the national maritime museum. This was a giant three-level structure set up like a pirate ship, with slides, ladders, nets, ramps and interactive activities. Emily made a friend here and really wanted me to set up more play dates with her parents, and really didn’t want to leave at the end!
Princess Diana Memorial Playground
The Princess Diana Memorial Playground was a real hit with Emily. We went over there for an afternoon so she could burn off some steam. The playground has another giant wooden ship play structure that you could climb all around including a ladder up to the crows nest, there was a play river and sand beach area that Emily took her shoes off to play in, and it is all contained in this large garden set up like a zoo or a theme park. At the door they won’t let any unaccompanied adults in unless you have a kid with you. I went off to grab a pint but Emily and Anna stayed here for over an hour.
Little House of Science camp
While in London, we set Emily up with a full week of camp so she’d have an opportunity to play with other kids. This was one of the first camps we found so we booked it well ahead of time, not really knowing what to expect. It was at the University College School (UCS Hampstead), quite a ways from our Airbnb so each day included about an hour train each direction, twice a day, to get her to her camp. This was actually fine as we were quite enjoying getting the true local feel of commuting and getting to see a couple of different neighborhoods. Hampstead and Frognal Lane was pretty upscale, everything was very quiet, on large lots, gorgeous brick buildings and gated driveways.
Once we got to the school it was also a large campus, set back with private gated driveways and we had to check in at the front gate before getting to her building - and Anna and I looked at each other like what have we gotten her into. The whole process was a bit intimidating for us even, and we were worried that she would nope out of it pretty quickly. But, ever the trooper, Emily just walked right in with hardly a glance behind her, maybe a second of hesitation on the first day but that was it.
Each day, we picked her up and she had a new bag of goodies, science experiments with bags of goo, scale models of atoms and a vial of what looked like fake blood … full-on chemistry science experiments which was pretty impressive for a 4-7 year old class! She had a helium balloon on the atom day and started talking about how things were made of atoms! I don’t think a lot of it stuck but at any rate I felt pretty good about things when she clearly took part in their lessons, made a friend and had a good time every day. We’d highly recommend this class for her though might make sure to book the closest one to our lodging next time!
Food
There are obviously thousands of places to eat in London given its size, and much of it is quite delicious, but these are just a few of the ones we managed to visit with our limited time here that I wanted to share.
Borough market - we came at lunchtime and it was absolutely packed. The line for the Paella from Furness Food hut was 100 meters long, and there were many other food establishments as well but we were hungry and on a bit of a time limit, so we chose NOT to wait in the line and go across the street to the George instead.
If we’d planned ahead, coming here first and somewhat early would be a good idea - everything looked and smelled amazing! The reviews of Furness make it seem like we made a mistake, but I had no regrets as going to the George was fun as well!
Arvo cafe Primrose hill - Turkish brunch was so savory and delicious. Anna had the Turkish eggs and I had “the east”. Both had Turkish beef Sujuk sausage (similar to Chorizo but with beef for religious reasons) and delicious seasonings.
I Due Amici - this was the closest restaurant to our AirBnB so we came here multiple mornings for brunch, and each time the proprietor came out to give us some tasty treat after the meal, we think it was because of Emily! Solid full English breakfast and good coffee. We would definitely come back if we were in the area.
The Hunan man - I came here after my first choice didn’t look like it would live up to my expectations, and this was across the street. Hunan food is similar to Sichuan but even a bit spicier, and something that Seattle doesn’t really have (according to this article there are a few, but half are in Bellevue or the ID, and there are a couple small shops in the U district, and I’m not even sure they survived the pandemic.) At any rate, I haven’t found it much before and so sat down excited for a meal! Unfortunately a lot of the dishes are meant to be eaten family style and it was just me, so I ordered something I thought would be on the smaller side so as not to waste the food. It was still massive but I put in a good effort and almost finished it anyway - some noodles and chicken dish which I then loaded up with chili crisp.
Savoy Grill -> River Restaurant
For date night, I booked the Savoy grill so we could experience fine dining in London! Oops. haha, nope- I messed up on the reservation due to time zones, and ended up with a 4:30 PM booking instead of 6:30! So, we called them and ended up getting moved to the backup restaurant, also a Gordon Ramsey restaurant at the Savoy Hotel, the River Restaurant. I was still able to order the beef wellington, but the food, service and atmosphere were all a bit less impressive than we were hoping. I’ll try to remember to check time zones better next time!
Dishoom (menu)- an upscale Indian chain restaurant. We came here for lunch one day and it was packed! We had the black lentils and the special chicken, along with paratha bread instead of naan. The chicken dish I am not sure what it was as it’s not on their regular menu unfortunately and didn’t take a picture of the name! The chai was bottomless and all the courses were delicious. The flavors really packed a punch and I would happily go here every time we go to London!
Many pubs. So many pubs.
Sunday roast at pubs - Pubs in the UK seem to do Sunday Roast specials, which are amazing, served with vegetables, potatoes, and a Yorkshire pudding. I could do without the Yorkshire pudding, but have made it to a pub for the last three Sundays to enjoy this tradition. Why is it only a British thing? Italians have Sunday sauce. Maybe this is a tradition we should start in the US though I’m not sure what exactly would get folk in the door regularly!
I love the names of pubs, often lions and cocks and royalty in the name somehow, the British pub is iconic in name and character. I took a ton of photos of the various pubs I saw, and wondered if there was a canonical list of British pub names! It turns out there are just too many, and even the famous ones make a really long list.
Update! I heard about this site: https://pubnames.co.uk (and top 100 names) thanks to a post on reddit, apparently there are 454 pubs called the red lion! That answers my question if the Red Lion inn really has that many locations in the UK or if they are unaffiliated!
Some of the famous pubs:
Lore of the land - Guy Ritchie's pub - I came for a drink one afternoon while Anna shopped! Nothing super interesting about it, just a solid pub.
The George galleried inn from 1676, it’s really 5 different establishments around a courtyard, and real close to the Borough market
The Grapes - Sir Ian McKellan's pub, didn’t make it here unfortunately. It was just a bit farther out of the way from where we were staying and traveling to, so it didn’t happen.
Art Museum
The Wallace Collection (https://www.wallacecollection.org/explore/collection/history-collection/)
I hadn’t heard of this but Anna wanted to go see it. The collection is named after Richard Wallace who was originally an illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, but who inherited his father’s art collection since there was no legitimate heir. He then greatly expanded it, at one point becoming the 24th richest man in the UK from his land holdings. When he died, his widow donated his art collection to the UK government and public, and some of it is on display in London at the Hertford house where he had lived.
This museum / gallery was somewhat insane. I’d never seen so many suits of armor of different styles before - there were multiple large rooms just to hold the armory! I noticed a book sitting on a podium in one of the rooms, and it said “armory - volume 11”. Fine print, thousand pages with details about each piece. I imagine just the listings themselves would fill a bookshelf!
Definitely worth a visit if you happen to be in the area with a few hours to kill.
Cotswolds
After London, we spent a week in the Cotswolds in Stretton-on-Fosse, where we stayed at “Tea Cosy Cottage” (a thatch-roofed cabin constructed in late 17th century, which used to be a post office and a bakers and grocers cottage in the 19th century). While there, we had a rental car since it would have been very tough to get around otherwise, and since we had a car, we did bomb all around the area and visited many of the nearby little towns.
The names of the towns in the Cotswolds seem nonsensical, but that’s partly because they were not fully translated from old English (West Saxon dialect) - Cotswolds seems to refer to the sheep enclosure in rolling hillsides, due to the site being used for sheep farms and markets in the middle ages. Wold meant hilly land, Chipping meant market, Slaughter meant muddy, and Fosse meant Roman! So many of these towns are combinations of region name and signifier as to its neighborhood.
Moreton-in-marsh
This town was the nearest one to where we were staying, so we drove through it on the way to literally everything else. It has a nice downtown area that's a few blocks long with a lot of great restaurants and cafe’s, and the first day we went there it had a street market. Not really a farmers market, though there were some stalls with fruit, veg, meat and fish, but there were many stalls that had handmade goods, sheep and cow pelts, and even a stall that was basically a mobile hardware store! We enjoyed the coffee and snacks on our few visits to the local cafe’s, but the star was probably the Sri Lanka restaurant, Tikiri, that we liked so much we came back for another round. Highly recommended, it was a great blend of flavors and just a bit of spice.
Stow-on-the-wold
The next town south of Moreton-in-Marsh is Stow-on-the-wold, and it’s a bit larger still with even more cafes, pubs and restaurants. We visited a few cafes and a restaurant here as well, but the main attraction was the St Edwards church, which has a back door that has two yew trees growing beside it and which is rumored to be J.R.R. Tolkien’s inspiration for the door of Durin in the Lord of the Rings books. It definitely has that medieval look to it and photographs well!
Bourton on the water
Keep going south on the Fosseway and your next stop is Bourton-on-the-water. You’d think that a town that was on the water would be near a sea or a lake - but no, the water in this case is a stream that looks like someone built it in their back yard - about a foot deep, 15 or so feet wide and crystal clear with nice gravel covering the bottom. There were kids with their pants rolled up wading around in it like a play area one of the days we drove by. It even had a couple spots where the road came right into the waterway as a ford, so emergency vehicles could drive right through the stream if needed. Pretty underwhelming waterway to be something you named your town after if you ask me! Size of the waterway aside, it’s a gorgeous downtown area and has some amazing little alleyways to walk down.
This town was also right near the Cotswolds school which is where Emily had another one of her day camps, the “4-2-11 Camp” (so named because the range of kids that could attend is between 4 and 11 years of age, I’m guessing.)
Also near here is Hawkstone Brewery aka Cotswolds brewery, which is part owned by Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear and Clarkson Farm fame. We came here a couple times and Emily loved the strawberry milkshake from their cows!
Lavender Farm
While Lizzii and her boys were visiting, we went to the lavender farm in Snowshill. Tickets were reasonably priced and you can walk through the fields taking pictures and enjoying the scenery. There were many picnic tables around and we had brought some food to have for lunch! Great scenery and the smell was intoxicating, but unfortunately it was the time of year when yellowjackets start to come out so we did have to shoo them away a bit to enjoy our food. After walking through the farm you can see the still where they make the lavender oil - pretty interesting process, they just load a truck up and drive the whole truck / container full of lavender into the barn which they then fill with steam. Not what I would have expected! Then you can purchase some of their products on your way out.
Lower and Upper Slaughter
We also did the walk from Lower Slaughter to Upper Slaughter with Lizzii and her boys. This may have been my favorite walk - it’s hard to capture in pictures just how gorgeous the fields were, with a great tree off to the side and a nice wide pathway cut through the brush. We really enjoyed this walk.
Note these towns' names are another artifact of just how long this area has been occupied, since before modern English was invented. Slaughter does not refer to the act of butchering the livestock, but is instead from the old English ‘Slough’ meaning wet land.
England has a law called “right to roam” that protects access to walk through farmlands and yards like this, and there is a group called the Ramblers that meets regularly to ensure that the footpaths like this one remain unblocked for people to enjoy.
The route we took from Lower Slaughter to Upper Slaughter has a few really pretty spots past a water mill, some functional farms, a manor house and some really pretty old thatched cottages, typical of the area.
Chipping Campden
One day while Emily was in her 4-2-11 camp, Anna and I did the circular walk from Chipping Campden to Dovers Hill and Lynches wood, which was pretty interesting and had some more active farms (watch out for sheep poop on the trail!) before having some lunch in the town.
Stratford-upon-Avon
We wandered around the city, visiting the church, his birthplace and new place though we didn’t bother with the tours to view the insides.
We also went on an Avon river cruise which was pretty interesting. Avon was apparently used for many years to transport coal and goods, and had a human-driven boat locks in the city which we got to see in operation. Quite a difference from Seattle’s Hiram Chittenden locks which are quite massive and machine driven. There was also a farmers market down by the Avon while we were there which is where we had some lunch before it started to rain on us!
Sudeley Castle
Our last major stop in the Cotswolds was a visit to Sudeley Castle. This castle has a few major events in English history, especially in the Tudor family with Henry the 8th being the most famous visitor. The castle itself was constructed starting in 1443 by Ralph Boteler, Lord High Treasurer of England at the time. There were quite a few family dramas here, between King Edward IV’s “Secret queen”, King Richard III who stole the crown, King Henry VIII’s visit with Anne Boleyn, Thomas Seymour marrying King Henry VIII’s final wife Catherine Parr, and then William Parr who was accused of treason before the castle was seized by the crown. This was also the site of some major battles in the English civil war in 1643. In 1649 the crown ordered the castle to be “slighted” (according to wikipedia) and after that it was left in ruins for almost 200 years.
According to the signs at the castle, John and William Dent came by it basically by accident while riding their horses around, and decided to buy it. In 1837 they completed the purchase and began to restore it! The Dent family and in particular Emma Dent put in a lot of time, money and effort to restore this castle not quite to its original glory, but where much of the palace is usable.
The castle is now a museum, and we walked through it seeing the exhibits on the history of King Henry VIII’s 7 wives, Edward IV’s secret queen and Emma Dent’s room and garden.
After visiting the castle, we went out to see the grounds, and the playground!
The playground area was amazing, it was set up sort of as its own amusement park with a three level castle, zipline, small play areas and lots of grassy fields. Emily loved just running around the field. and found a friend to build a “Nature house” with, as well as riding the zipline probably 50 times.
I would definitely say this castle visit and playground area greatly exceeded my expectations and recommend it for anyone with a kid who has a day to kill!
Edinburgh
Unfortunately Emily and Nick both had a pretty nasty cold during our time in Edinburgh so we didn’t visit as many things as we would have liked.
Royal Mile
On our first day in Edinburgh we met up with Anna’s sister Lizzii and her family, and we walked around the Royal Mile on the hill, up to the Edinburgh castle. Anna and I had been here years before, so didn’t spend a ton of time here. Of note, the main castle entrance was closed off and covered by a grandstand, which apparently is set up every summer for the “Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo”, a festival held in Edinburgh every August. (This is unrelated to body art, apparently - I was wondering why there were so many no parking signs for a tattoo shop so I looked it up!) We were also here at the start of the Fringe festival, but did not attend any of that as the main festival largely starts this weekend and there were only a couple things that it looked like might be appropriate for Emily (but it did look like there were some fun shows!)
The Kings Seat
One afternoon while Emily was in camp, we went and did the Kings Seat hike, which ended up being more of a proper hike than we expected, even though it was only a couple miles, it was quite steep in spots and the way down was pretty technical.
Craigmillar castle
Craigmillar castle was a fun visit!
The ruins of the castle are still in pretty decent shape, and you can walk around most of them including climbing the main tower and viewing the various rooms, cellar, grounds and well. This castle is only 15 minutes from the downtown area of Edinburgh and from the top you can see the Edinburgh castle. In 1566, Mary, queen of the Scots stayed here to recover after a tough childbirth, and while she was here, the “Craigmillar Bond” (a plot to murder her husband Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley), was hatched. There are a few areas that are closed off due to concerns about cracks in the masonry, but still a worthwhile visit especially since it’s so close to the city.
Sporty Sprouts
Emily did 3 days at a local summer camp called Sporty Sprouts, as a way to continue her interaction with other kids. She’s definitely missing her friends and home at this point in the trip, not helped by the fact that she is recovering from a cold.
This camp is in the suburb of Colington at a Scouts hall, and they are definitely outdoor friendly -most days she came home completely covered in dirt, which she loved! They did lots of activities in the room itself, including baking (they made rocky road muffins/balls) as well as visited the local park.
Anna and I dropped her off and ran along the stream near there to get back to the AirBnB / city area, and stumbled upon this amazing trail through a tunnel that was covered in all kinds of art, called the Colinton tunnel, and after that ran alongside a canal that turned out to be the Slateford Aqueduct, which runs over roads, railways and more.
Clambers at Commonwealth Pool
On our last day, the weather was a bit sprinkly and we needed a place to kill a couple hours before heading to the airport. So we used the Bounce app to find a place near Haymarket to drop our bags, and took the bus to Commonwealth Pool where they had a kids play area called Clambers. This is a lot like the “PlayspaceSea” in Seattle SLU, where there’s a multi level climbing castle, ball pits, slides and the like. It cost about 10 pounds for an hour and Emily loved it! Unfortunately taking pictures was not allowed, so you'll have to look at their website to see what it looked like.
Hope you enjoyed reading about our UK trip! Now, we're off to France!
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