London Jewelry Week...was a dud...

Holborn High Street

I stopped in the middle of the road to take this. Risky, I know....

Hatton garden turned out to be nothing but diamond and wedding ring shops!

Led under false pretenses by this ad in the tube station. There were 4 jewelery stalls!

Leather Lane turned out to just to be something like a flea market....

And there was a line for this "taco truck" aroudn the corner. They even sold t-shirts and stuff for it...

So Lost!!! Dont know where this is or how I got here! But I followed a sign for "Shoe Lane" to get out of it! (a street with "shoe" in the name can't be bad...)

I found Fleet Street!

And there's St. Paul's off in the distance!

Fleet Street looked cool, but had no printing shops.

Self Explanatory.

This was all I could find left of the old printing glory days for Fleet Street.

Love these lamps...means I'm near the Thames River!

And there is the Thames behind this telephone box with the Banksy-esque poster!

Bought the little "b" charm!
http://www.lesnereides.com/c-precieux-bijoux-de-sentiments.php


So I keep seeing this sign in the tube stations for London Jewellery Week (yes, like colour, they spell jewelry different) which happens to be this week. So after some research on the computer, I thought it sounded like something I should try out. I had quite a long and confusing route to get to Chancery Lane which is the closest tube stop to Hatton Garden, which is supposed to be London's premier jewlery district. On Leather Lane, they had advertised a market with jewelry designs from contemporary jewelry desingers.

They lied (mostly). When I got to Hatton Garden, it was all diamond and engagement ring stores (neither of which am I in the market for). So popping one street over to Leather Lane, I found the supposed market, where the marjority of items were what the Brits call "Brick-a-Brack". Basically bags, leather goods, and clothes that seemed to be from a flea market or of very low quality. I finally found the sign for jewelry week and next to it, only 4 stalls of local designers hand made jewelry! That was it! So I walked up and down the street a few times to see if that was indeed it, and it was. I walked around and found one promising store-Platform Jewelry-off on a side street, but they had nothing that I just had to have.

http://www.platformjewellery.com/

So after just walking around a bit, I found myself in the middle of the Square pictured above. I think it may have been Holborn Square, but not sure (again, I don't like to take my map out so I can seem more like a Londoner). I saw a sign for Fleet Street, which was home to the British Press until the 1980's and home to all the wooden printing blocks I got from Portebello Road last April when I visited London. I walked in their direction, but after I lost sight of the Fleet Street signs, I saw a sign for a street named "Shoe Lane" and followed that instead (I mean shoes? yes please!). There were no shoe stores on this street though. Just skyscraper towers that mark the City of London-or their working district (like our downtown Houston). Shoe Lane did unexpectedly dump me out onto Fleet Street though.

Fleet Street was a bit if a let-down as well. Although the architecture was pretty cool, there was really no sign of the old printing press industry. I did see a sign for St. Bride's Fleet St. Press Library, but when I followed the sign, it led me to a dead end-St. Bride's Church. The church's tiered tower is said to be the inspiration for wedding cakes.

I walked down Fleet Street towards the direction two guys in the sandwich shop I ate in had told me to go (I think-I asked them because they were young and looked pretty dapper in their suits, but when they spoke, I couldn't understand them. I saw one point this way). It landed me somewhere along the Thames, near Balckfriar's Station. I took the tube to Leicester Square, where I had seen a cool jewlery store a few days before. Since my jewelry week had been a bust, I treated msyelf to a small pendant with a "b" on it. As the sky was really starting to look threatening now, I headed back to Bob's and made it home just in time bfore the rain swept in!

Although things didn't turn out quite as planned, and I spent most of my time lost and ducking into church courtyards to check my map (who's going to mug a tourist in a churchyard???-knock on wood), a good day to get my bearings around the City!