One Day in London: Day Trip from Paris

At the beginning of November, after finding a 44€ round trip ticket to London on the Eurostar, Didier and I set out for a quick day trip to one of my favorite cities.

For a day trip London is a difficult city- it’s just so darn BIG. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ve probably seen a lot of the places that we went, but I have a confession to make: we tried to fit too much in. I had planned the trip out for the whole day (mainly to find super Instagrammable spots), but of course there were delays and a 5pm sunset which meant that we didn’t get to see as much as we would have liked to. If we could do it all over again, I would pick just a couple neighborhoods to wander through and make it a much more chill day.

However, I’m of course very happy that we got to go- it was our first trip together out of France, if you don’t count Monaco!

After arriving at St Pancras about 20 minutes behind schedule, we headed for one of the places that has been on my photo list for AGES: the mosaic wall at Sugarhouse Studios.

This was one of the more difficult places to find- the normal road that would have taken us there was closed for construction so we had to take a massive detour and wander through a construction site to find it. But worth it? I think so!

From there we headed to Shoreditch to find another colorful wall before our lunch reservation. How pretty is this one at Chance Street Studios?

We headed from there to Corner Room at the Town Hall Hotel, which has some of the most charming decor I’ve ever seen in a restaurant. It didn’t hurt that the food was phenomenal as well, albeit with rather small portions.

From there we hopped back on the tube to head to the Tower of London– we’ve both been to London before and done most of the touristy sites, but as he wanted to go over there and I felt bad dragging him to all these places I wanted to photograph, we went to wander around there for awhile. It wasn’t my favorite stop- a seagull pooped right on my new sweater, right on the boob! Fortunately, I had a scarf to cover it up.

How handsome is this guy?!

From there we went up to Notting Hill. If I could pick any neighborhood in London to spend a day just wandering around, it would be this one. It was getting dark by the time we made it up here (darn you winter in the Northern Hemisphere) but I still managed to find a good shot of this adorable biscuit shop!

I wanted to capture sunset from behind Westminster, so we booked it down there and watched as the lights slowly came on along the Thames, our fingers slowly icing over.

We only had about an hour and a half before we had to make it back to St Pancras for our train, so from Waterloo we took the tube up to Camden Town for fish and chips (because if you go to the UK and don’t have fish and chips at some point, did you really go?). After hearing great things about Poppies, we decided to check it out and it did not disappoint! The staff were really accommodating about our rushed schedule and we got out of there just in time to make it to St Pancras to catch our train- which was then over an hour late. We made it back to Paris just before 1am, exhausted but happy to have gotten to spend the day together.

Have you ever done a day trip London-Paris? What did you do?