London Pride – WholeArsed

Our trip to London to take in the Fulham match (and hopefully the Atletico Madrid Champions League semifinal match), was oddly dominated by David Bowie and water. That, and clicking in the Arsenal exchange every spare moment for a ticket to the Atletico match. My husband’s childhood friend was in London at the same time we were, so we also had fun catching up with him.

David Bowie had been a minor character in my teen world. I knew some of his music, most notably Space Oddity, a rock ballad about an astronaut who goes to the moon, but something goes wrong and he floats away, never to return to Earth. That particular song, a line from which I’ve borrowed as the title of this post, was initially released in 1969 but was re-released in the United States in 1972. Other versions have been released since then, but it’s the 1972 version I’m familiar with. Something about that song really captured my imagination. In my interpretation of the song, Major Tom decides not to go back to earth and enacts his ship’s malfunction. Apparently that is not how David Bowie saw it. Major Tom floated hopelessly away in his broken spaceship.

My interpretation is better.

I remember one of my high school classmates declaring “David Bowie is so gross.” I didn’t know enough about him to have an opinion but I had seen pictures of him and knew he did something very few men did at that time: he sometimes wore makeup and clothing more commonly associated with women. I was living in a conservative area of the country, but there is probably no place in the world that despises individuality and demands conformity more than high schools of the 1970s.

I had really loved Queen in high school. Funny now that I think of it that David Bowie would possibly be “gross” but Queen was A-ok. Bowie’s music took a turn that intersected more with my mainstream sensibilities in the early 1980s. I loved the collaboration he did in 1981 with Queen’s Freddie Mercury, Under Pressure. It’s still one of my favorite songs. And later it rubbed me the wrong way that Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby started with the same musical hook. (I feel more inclined to forgive Vanilla Ice now that Arsenal fans use Ice Ice Baby as the base of a chant to honor Declan Rice. Rice Rice, baby.)

David Bowie exploded into the mainstream with Let’s Dance in the early 1980s. I had moved to Denver after college and was working, but didn’t yet have enough money or income to buy a car. I was carpooling with one of my colleagues every day. He was the first openly gay person I’d ever known and often he would cajole me into accompanying him to one of the gay bars in our neighborhood before he dropped me off at my apartment. So many handsome men. None of them interested in me, other than as a human. It was pretty sweet. Let’s Dance and Modern Love were big hits on the dance floor. I think that’s where I decided it’s always ok to dance alone. And was the start of me thinking everybody just wear what you want. Be who you are. Try out stuff until you’re clear. Even you, David Bowie. (And I think he would say “No shit. That’s what I did.”)

Anyway, that is a long preamble to our visit to the new David Bowie exhibit in London called You’re Not Alone at Lightroom, a “multimedia spectacle” that will “transport visitors into the iconic performances and creative mind and spirit of one of the world’s most visionary and influential artists.” It reminded me of Frameless, the interactive art exhibit we visited when we were last in London.

After a brief introduction to a life timeline for Bowie, you enter a large auditorium-like room, the walls, ceiling, and floor being used to project images, video, artifacts supporting narrative about how and why Bowie created as he did. I guess it’s technically a documentary but creatively delivered and very well done. There’s very little I enjoy more than being immersed in creative process, and David Bowie left behind exceptional records about his work that were the basis of the presentation. And it did include Space Oddity in full, which allowed for some interesting visual effects.

We found that so interesting that we made a point on a different day to head over to V&A East and V&A East Storehouse, new extensions of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

At V&A East we visited fascinating exhibits on “Why we make,” focused on the impulse to create and the process of creation. Not merely creation of art, but furniture, clothing, housing. I have found the Victoria & Albert museum in Kensington to be overwhelming, but the V&A East is very, very manageable and no less interesting. Bonus: it has a patio with a great view of the area where the Olympic stadium is. Which, by the way, is currently the home of West Ham. Arsenal were to be playing West Ham at London Stadium the weekend after we visited. We made sure to walk over and spread our Arsenal cooties all around the ground after visiting the exhibits.

The V&A East Storehouse is a short walk from V&A East. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s literally a storehouse for objects owned by the Victoria & Albert, but not currently on display in the museum. Except it’s the fanciest Storehouse you’ll ever lay eyes on. It’s a museum-like storehouse. You can walk around and look at the objects, which we did.

You can also visit a special area devoted to David Bowie. The David Bowie Centre is a permanent archive for David Bowie’s possessions that was given to the V&A. It contains a small exhibit that includes some iconic costumes worn by Bowie, objects he owned, and a narrative and artifacts about how some of his music was written (including hand-written starts at several songs, including Space Oddity, which was written almost like a play). It also includes archives of interviews, articles, reviews that are not on display but can be accessed upon request. He must have understood his own importance or he would never have retained all that stuff. And I guess he was right about his importance or the V&A would not now have it. Great exhibit.

Space Oddity tells us “planet earth is blue,” and we understand it’s blue because of the water on its surface. Our visit to London, coincidentally, included several water-related activities. The River Lea lies between the V&A East and London Stadium and there’s a place on the edge where you can rent a swan boat. Along with a bevy of school-aged kids, we decided we needed to do that. We discovered that swan boats are just the right size for me to peddle at 5′ 2″ and completely wrong for my husband at 6′ 2″. After a very short trip down river, we crossed this activity off our list.

On one of the days we were in town there was a boat festival, the IWA Canalway Cavalcade, near something called “Little Venice.” Having seen Bangkok’s version of “Little Venice” in January, I wasn’t expecting much that resembled Venice. Although the one in London did not, in the end, look at all like Venice, it was very charming and fun to see all the houseboats gathered together. There were many vendors and activities for the kids and we enjoyed walking along the canal on a nice day. My husband noticed that you can take a boat from Little Venice over to Camden so we hopped aboard and enjoyed the scenery for the 45-minute ride.

We also did a walking tour of the hidden River Fleet. This is a river that once visibly flowed through early London but became nasty, dirty, stinky and was covered with roads in the 1700s. It’s now, more or less, a sewage canal. Once before we had tried to find the headway for the river, but with construction near it along the Thames it’s impossible to see. But you can “see” and hear it underneath streets in parts of London.

Tourist taking photo of picturesque River Fleet.

We did a few things that have nothing to do with David Bowie or water, but do take place on Planet Earth. We visited the Somerset House for the 2026 SONY World Photography Awards exhibit. The exhibit included entries by amateurs and professionals in various categories, including portraits, landscapes, still life. I have no idea how they picked winners. It was all so good.

We also went over to an event called Sicily Fest. This was in a big hall in Islington, and held a bunch of vendors selling Sicilian food and drinks as well as a very popular Sicilian band. We attended a church service at Southwark Cathedral, home of Hodge the cat, who indeed was wandering around during the service and stopped by to sniff my husband.

And, as always, we found ourselves in a number of Fuller’s pubs. In my favorite experience, on the first day we were there, we really loved the glasses the Sutton Arms served our London Pride in. They had a depiction of the Thames that was very cool. We asked the bartender if it were possible to buy one. He said “Just take one. We have so many. And they always just walk away, especially with people drinking outside.” We were not quite in the sticky fingers frame of mind. While we sipped, ate a very delicious pizza, and watched the world go by through a large, open door, I googled how easy it would be to buy a glass. We found that Amazon could deliver such an item to us in the UK but not in Chicago. We enjoyed our beer in those beautiful glasses and left them behind. Here’s hoping enough will be retained by the London pubs for us to enjoy one again on a future trip.

After so many recent stays in Tower Hill, we were ready for a fresh, new place we’d never been. So for this trip, my husband selected a boutique hotel called Ruby Lucy in Lambeth. Lambeth is a neighborhood south of the Thames. It’s situated close to the Waterloo train and underground station, kind of a cool, old station. The station was exceedingly busy at all times, droves of people standing in front of the entrance to the tracks, staring at the board on which their track was to be assigned.

Ruby Lucy was a quirky little hotel with a great lobby and fairly spacious rooms. Each floor has an open tea station just outside the elevators and a communal iron board. Our room had a comfy queen bed and one of those crazy showers that is open-glassed on two sides to the room. It had a curtain on the outside of the shower; i.e., if you’ve failed to plan before you start your shower, the person in the room gets the choice of whether to draw the curtains or not. Good to be well enough acquainted before the trip so the choice made by the person not in the shower creates no drama.

The hotel is located on Lower Marsh Street, which was a real find. Although we were quite close to the London Eye, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, the neighborhood had the feel of being very far from all of those things. Funky and a bit gritty, the street was closed to all but bike and foot traffic and, during the day, had a great little market with mostly street food. There were so many other food options available that we never partook of the street food, but it was extremely tempting. We went to a nice Thai restaurant, Sino Thai, for dinner on the day we arrived and enjoyed Cuban tapas at Cubano the next night. We had a yummy breakfast at Balance one morning.

One of the cooler things about the neighborhood was an attraction I’d never heard of before, Leake Street Arches. We had been walking down Lower Marsh Street waiting for our hotel room to be made up when I noticed a garden path leading to what looked like an underground tunnel. Inside was a broad arch covered with some of the coolest graffiti I’ve ever seen. According to the web site, “London’s largest legal graffiti wall.” An artist was working on some fresh art with a can of spray paint.

My husband, who you may recall was recovering from a concussion on our last visit and not drinking, was looking forward to visiting all the Fuller’s pubs we could. With three in the immediate neighborhood, we were able to make a good dent in his goal. His favorite beer is a Fuller’s product called London Pride. I bought some for him for Christmas at Binny’s but it’s just not the same as knowing that it is being drawn from a cask in the basement of the pub. Or so I’ve heard. The Fuller’s pubs in our neighborhood were nice but not quite the pub experience we wanted. One day we left our neighborhood for the highly rated The Harp in Covent garden. Great pub with a fun crowd AND the requisite London Pride. But no food, so after one round and a great conversation with some interesting folks, we crossed the street to visit The Admiralty, a place we’d eaten on one of our visits in December. Also a Fuller’s pub. 5 Fuller’s pubs in all; not bad for a trip with boots on the ground for three nights.