Free The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

deal of the artwork was entirely to my taste, but I did enjoy the experience very much and when I stepped outside the rain had stopped, the sun was shining, and London looked awfully fine, its streets glistening and cleansed (sort of).
    —
    And so passed a couple of happy weeks. Each day, without a great deal of thought beforehand, I did things that I had never done at all or hadn’t done in years. I strolled through Battersea Park and then along the river to the Tate Modern, one of London’s best new museums. I went to the top of Primrose Hill to take in the view across the city. I explored the quiet streets of Pimlico and the lost world of Westminster around Vincent Square. I went to the National Portrait Gallery and had tea in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square. I walked through all the Inns of Court and visited the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons just because I happened to pass it. These are all wonderful things. You should do them, too.
    I went to Southall one day to go to lunch with my friend Aosaf Afzal, who grew up near there and offered to show me around. Southall is the most overwhelmingly Asian place in Britain. For a long time, it even had a Punjabi pub, the Glass Junction, where you could pay for drinks in pounds or rupees, but that closed in 2012.
    “A lot of Asians don’t have a great pub-going culture,” Aosaf explained.

    It was certainly the liveliest and most colorful place I had ever seen in Britain, with shops stacked to the ceilings and spilling out onto the pavements with the most extraordinary range of wares—buckets, mops, saris, tiffin containers, brooms, sweets, you name it. Every shop seemed to sell exactly the same crazy range of items. Each appeared to be doing good business, but all that activity masks considerable deprivation. Hounslow, the borough in which Southall resides, is the second most rapidly degentrifying community in Britain, however exactly that is measured, Aosaf told me. “Hounslow has a population of two hundred fifty thousand but no bookshop and no cinema,” he added cheerfully.
    “Then why do you live here?” I asked.
    “Because it is my home,” he said simply. “It’s where I am from, where my family is. And I like it.”
    It struck me that when I think of London and Aosaf thinks of London we think of two quite different cities, but this comes back to my earlier point. London isn’t a place at all. It’s a million little places.
    —
    Sometimes during this happy fortnight I just went about my business. I was walking down Kensington High Street one day when I remembered that my wife had instructed me to get some grocery items, so I popped into a Marks and Spencer store. It had evidently undergone a refurbishment since I was last there. In the middle of the main floor, where there used to be an escalator, there was now a staircase, which I thought slightly odd, but the really big surprise was when I went down to the basement and discovered that the food hall—the grocery department—was gone. Marks and Spencer stores always have a grocery section; I had been in this one a hundred times at least. I walked all over, but now there was nothing for sale in the basement but clothes.
    I went up to a young sales assistant who was folding T-shirts and asked him where the food hall was, thinking they must have moved it to another floor.

    “Don’t have a food hall,” he said without looking up.
    “You got rid of the food hall?” I said in astonishment.
    “Never had one.”
    Now I have to say right here that I didn’t like this young man already because he had a vaguely insolent air. Also, he had a lot of gel in his hair. My family tell me that you can’t dislike people just because they have gel in their hair, but I think it is as good a reason as any.
    “That’s nonsense,” I said. “There’s always been a food hall here.”
    “Never been one here,” he responded blandly. “There’s no food halls in any of our