48 Hours from Earl’s Court: How to Do London Properly (Starting from The Knaresborough)

Two days, starting and ending at The Knaresborough on Knaresborough Place, built around the particular advantage of being in SW5 — three minutes from a Piccadilly line that will take you anywhere, and walking distance from more culture than most cities can manage at all. No tourist bus. No itinerary designed by committee. Just London, done with some intelligence.

DAY ONE

Morning: Old Brompton Road, Done Slowly

Begin the way that guests who live nearby begin it: at The Troubadour. Six minutes on foot down Old Brompton Road, open since 1954. Coffee, breakfast, a garden at the back, and walls lined with the accumulated evidence of what this place has been — the photographs, the instruments, the record sleeves, the newspaper clippings. Dylan, Hendrix, Adele, Led Zeppelin all played here, and the room has the unhurried quality of a place that stopped needing to prove anything some time ago. Walk back along Old Brompton Road and take note of what’s on it: Capote y Toros, Cambio de Tercio, Tendido Cero — three generations of one of London’s finest restaurant groups, all on the same street. You’ll be back this evening.

Late Morning: The V&A

Twelve minutes on foot from The Knaresborough, down Old Brompton Road and left onto Exhibition Road. The V&A is free, requires no booking, and contains two hundred and fifty rooms of the best decorative arts, design, fashion, and material culture in the world. The correct approach is to see two or three things properly rather than attempt the survey. The Islamic Middle East galleries are among the most important and least-visited in London. The Cast Courts — full-scale plaster casts of Trajan’s Column and Michelangelo’s David — create the strange sensation of standing inside a Victorian obsession with the ancient world. Lunch in the Refreshment Rooms café, opened in 1857 as the world’s first museum café, still operating inside its original Victorian tilework and painted ceilings.

Afternoon: South Kensington & the French Quarter

 Exit the V&A onto Exhibition Road and turn left towards South Kensington station. The streets immediately around the station — Thurloe Place, Onslow Square, the restaurants on Brompton Road — have a distinctly Parisian quality that is not accidental. South Kensington has the highest concentration of French residents of any neighbourhood in London, and the food culture reflects this: proper brasseries, French bakeries, the Institut Français. The Natural History Museum is two minutes from the V&A and also free. If the afternoon has time in it, Kensington Gardens is ten minutes north — the Serpentine Gallery is free and usually well programmed, and the Round Pond on a clear afternoon is the reason people pay Kensington prices to live here.

Evening: Dinner on Old Brompton Road

Return to The Knaresborough to change, then walk back to Old Brompton Road. Cambio de Tercio is the choice — Abel Lusa’s thirty-year-old Spanish flagship, with Jabugo ham on the counter, twenty tapas of serious intent, and a wine list that runs exclusively Spanish and has done so since 1995. Begin at Capote y Toros next door for a glass of fino before sitting down. The Jabugo ham at the bar and a manzanilla is, by any reasonable measure, one of the better aperitifs available within walking distance of SW5.

DAY TWO

Morning: Brompton Cemetery & Kensington

Begin with a walk through Brompton Cemetery — eight minutes from The Knaresborough, forty acres of Victorian garden cemetery established in 1840. The colonnaded chapel, the avenues of limes, the wildflowers in the older sections, the monuments to Emmeline Pankhurst and Richard Francis Burton: one of the more quietly beautiful spaces in SW5, and the fact that it is a functioning cemetery does not diminish this. Afterwards, coffee at The Troubadour if you didn’t exhaust the option yesterday, or walk north into Kensington for the morning.

Late Morning: Hyde Park & Kensington Gardens

North from Knaresborough Place — ten minutes on foot — puts you at the southern edge of Kensington Gardens. Walk north through the park along the Long Water towards the Round Pond, past Kensington Palace, and out onto Kensington Church Street if you want antiques dealers: Georgian furniture, silver, and ceramics running for half a mile towards Notting Hill. Or continue east through Hyde Park towards the Serpentine — the lake, the lido, the Gallery. The Italian Gardens at the north end of the Long Water, built for Prince Albert in 1860 and now restored, are a frequent oversight even among those who know the park well.

Afternoon: Chelsea

Walk south from Hyde Park or take the District line one stop from Gloucester Road to Sloane Square. The Saatchi Gallery on Duke of York Square is free and reliably well programmed. The National Army Museum on Royal Hospital Road is better than its name implies — free, and sharing a wall with the Royal Hospital Chelsea whose grounds are open to the public and occupied by Chelsea Pensioners in varying states of scarlet. King’s Road from Sloane Square west is your afternoon — independent shops on the side streets, a coffee at any of several decent cafés, and the kind of West London afternoon that makes the question of where else you might have stayed feel faintly irrelevant.

Evening: End Well

Return to The Knaresborough. The kitchenette is equipped; Waitrose on Cromwell Road is twelve minutes on foot. If the Finborough Theatre on Finborough Road has something on — and it usually does — that is five minutes from your front door and one of the more consistently surprising fifty-seat venues in the country. Or return to The Troubadour for a glass of wine and whatever the cellar is doing tonight. Either way: you have done London from one of its better-positioned addresses, without once queuing for anything that didn’t warrant it.

The Knaresborough is three minutes from the Piccadilly line and walking distance from most of what made this weekend worth it. You know where to start next time.