it being the last day i spend in london until december, i want to sum up my experience here. the first few days i had friends guiding me around, showing me stuff and it was awesome. i saw some pretty rad things!
but it was not until today that i did some real exploring. the tag excursion doesn’t count because i didn’t find anything. you’re supposed to find stuff when you explore, right? yeah. okay, well, i’ll use that definition for now. it’s what i mean.
i took the tubes to covent garden and went straight to plastic fantastic. i spent about 2 hours in there listening to records, probably at least 500 records. it was a lot. there were many records to listen to there and some very helpful staff. i bought 4 records for them, all superb elite buys. after leaving plastic fantastic, i decided to wander in the direction that i figured oxford st / oxford circus was. i had read on The InterWeb that there was this most kromulent strip of road where both Virgin and HMV situated their flagship stores. indeed, i did find this place. these were the biggest music stores i had ever been in. completely huge. not like costco or anything. i mean, that would be awesome, but it would be hard to fit that kind of space into the locations you want your music store to be (ie: already high traffic, which means high property cost). uh, so but anyway, maybe they were each half the size of a costco. which is still [censored] huge! i bought 3 double CD’s (Chilled Euphoria and Deep and Chilled Euphora, both mixed by Red Jerry, and Painted On Silence, mixed by the mighty Parks and Wilson) from Virgin, and one double 12″ (Garbage – Breaking Up The Girl – Timo Maas and Brothers in Rhythm remixes) from HMV.
after shopping for music, i decided i would walk to regent park. and so i did. it took about an hour or so because i stopped lots to take pictures. i got there and spent another hour and a half taking pictures and wandering around.. it was just gorgeous today. if there is one thing i have to say about london .. it is that their parks are just awesome. london is quite a nice city because of that. i walked into camden town from there and that was that, but all in all i did about 5-6 hours of walking and exploring today. i look forward to doing more the next time i come back!
Yay! Plastic rocks, definitely one of the finest record shops the UK has to offer. Have seen Digweed in there a couple of times and you don’t get the moody DJ thing behind the counter you get at some places. I seem to recall that the HMV in Oxford Street is the largest record store in the world, at least it was a while ago unless someone built a bigger one. Will take you to Tag when you’re back in December Dav
Hope the flight home is o.k.
Hey Davin. I’m jealous that you’re over in London… and I’m not! I’ve been to the flagship Virgin store (near Picadilly Circus?) as well — it’s HUGE! I walked out of there having purchased several CDs. I also picked up many copies of MixMag and Muzik… which came with free CDs.
Have a couple pints ‘o ale for me, before leaving London!