london, again

I was in London recently for work and to spend time with family. It had been years since I’d been back, but the city still moved with that mix of old and new that I’ve always loved. I used to live in King’s Cross—a part of town that’s almost unrecognizable now. Glass towers and polished storefronts where corner shops and scaffolding once stood. Even the old shortcut I used to take to the station is gone. But something about the city still feels familiar.

This trip was its own kind of reunion. I spent time with a friend I went to college with, now a noted artist with gallery shows across the UK. We wandered through East London and talked about how far we’d both come from those nights standing outside pubs in Shoreditch. I sat in a private garden in Marylebone with a girlfriend I’ve known since childhood, the two of us trading stories about womanhood, ambition, and how our lives turned out nothing like the ones we imagined at sixteen—and yet somehow feel exactly right.

Walking through London’s historic neighborhoods, I found myself pausing in front of townhomes with brass knockers and box hedges, tall windows and bold paint. There’s a confidence to those facades—the sense that someone, at some point, claimed this space and made it theirs. And made it beautiful.

It’s a different kind of beauty than what I’m surrounded by at home. But that’s what I love about travel—it stretches your imagination. You see what’s possible. In neighborhoods like Notting Hill and Brixton, I noticed how people reimagined their space, how they turned row houses into galleries, studios, and salons. There were bits of inspiration tucked into every block. The colors. The quiet. The corners turned into something unexpected.

These streets remind me that a home is never just a house. It’s a quiet conversation between past and present, and those two things are always in conversation.

-L