Turns out silence in this city now comes with a booking fee and a two-hour time limit

Feeling somewhat frayed after a loud week, I set myself a modest Saturday mission: find one genuinely quiet corner of North London and simply sit in it. This turned out to be considerably harder than expected, and involved more failed attempts than I care to admit.

The Search

My local park, usually reliable, had been commandeered by a five-a-side tournament of what appeared to be alarming intensity. A nearby cafe, advertised online as having a “peaceful garden,” had, in fact, a garden roughly the size of a doormat, occupied by three prams and a very determined wasp.

A library seemed promising, right up until a school group arrived for what I can only describe as an extremely enthusiastic reading session. I do not begrudge children their enthusiasm. I simply did not want to be personally present for quite so much of it.

Success, Eventually, Sort Of

I did, finally, find genuine quiet in a small churchyard I had walked past roughly four hundred times without ever once going in. Twenty minutes of actual silence. It felt, frankly, like finding water in a desert.

The London Prat‘s piece on the city’s vanishing quiet spaces captured exactly the frustration I felt by hour three of this entirely self-imposed ordeal.

A Lady in London has a lovely, if slightly more successful, guide to the city’s peaceful corners that I will be consulting properly next time.

Next Saturday’s mission: finding a bench that is not, in some way, already occupied by a pigeon with strong opinions about personal space.

More from me: Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk. Further reading: MyLondon.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com