Boulder to London

Melisse and I are done with Clapham.  The place is nice, the train access is good, the parks are beautiful, but the fact that we don’t have a kid hanging off each arm prevents us from really fitting into the neighborhood scene.  Unfortunately we still have about 4 or 5 months left on the lease before we can move to a more suitable location.  We should have pushed back harder when the landlord wanted to pull out the 6 month break clause…live and learn.  In any case, we’ve started looking for a new neighborhood and decided to check out Islington and Clerkenwell yesterday.

Both neighborhoods are in N. London and centrally located.  Both of us would have easy commutes to work/school and we would be closer to the city.  We started in Clerkenwell based on an article that I had read on Friday.  Unfortunately, the part of Clerkenwell we were in had little going on.  We walked around a bit and stopped into an excellent Italian restaurant for lunch, but there really wasn’t much happening.  We talked to the waitress and she said the area we were in is usually pretty dead on the weekends and recommended we come back during the week or check out another street that was near.

Since we weren’t really sold on it, we headed up the road to Islington.  It was only a short bus ride up to the main drag and we hopped off near Angel Station.  The road was full of people, although there was a little bit of a mall feeling to the place with a number of big box stores and chains.  We quickly ducked down a back road that Melisse new based on a tour she took with a friend that lived there and we found a cool little street market.  It was a bit chilly, so we stepped inside a pub for a beer where we decided to sit for a few hours since it was a very happening place with a good vibe.  Melisse conned me into going to an art store on the way home that was just around the corner and we loaded up on supplies for the coming term.  Overall, we really liked Islington…or at least what we could see from the inside of the pub on a Saturday afternoon.  We’ll have to make a few trips back before packing the suitcases, but it’s definitely on the list.

Sign outside a Clerkenwell pub…who can argue with this?