A Provincial New Yorker Tours London for the First Time

I’m back from nine days in London with my family — wife, son (26), and two daughters (24 and 17). It’s the first time I’ve visited the U.K., a trip we had originally planned for the summer of 2020 for our 25th wedding anniversary, before history intervened. My only prior trips outside North America have been to Ireland (1995, for our honeymoon) and China (2011, for a business trip too brief to even see the Great Wall). While I’m sure this is old hat to quite a few of our readers, and probably comical to our readers in Britain, I thought I’d share my impressions, and maybe a few lessons learned for those considering the trip.

For the first-time American traveler, there are two Englands. One is modern England, subsumed wholly into Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia”: high finance, ethnic restaurants, dance clubs, and cutting-edge theater, as well as the more traditional English pubs, sports, parks, gardens, tea, scenery, and other entertainments accessible to tourists. There is even a Legoland wedged between Windsor Castle and the Ascot. If you can spare the time, there is also Scotland and Wales — but these are more than a day trip from London, six to seven hours each way. Forget what the map might tell you about distances as the crow flies: By modern transit, Paris is closer than Wales.

About the Author

Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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I’m back from nine days in London with my family — wife, son (26), and two daughters (24 and 17). It’s the first time I’ve visited the U.K., a trip we had originally planned for the summer of 2020 for our 25th wedding anniversary, before history intervened. My only prior trips outside North America have been to Ireland (1995, for our honeymoon) and China (2011, for a business trip too brief to even see the Great Wall). While I’m sure this is old hat to quite a few of our readers, and probably comical to our readers in Britain, I thought I’d share my impressions, and maybe a few lessons learned for those considering the trip.

For the first-time American traveler, there are two Englands. One is modern England, subsumed wholly into Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia”: high finance, ethnic restaurants, dance clubs, and cutting-edge theater, as well as the more traditional English pubs, sports, parks, gardens, tea, scenery, and other entertainments accessible to tourists. There is even a Legoland wedged between Windsor Castle and the Ascot. If you can spare the time, there is also Scotland and Wales — but these are more than a day trip from London, six to seven hours each way. Forget what the map might tell you about distances as the crow flies: By modern transit, Paris is closer than Wales.