A trip to London

Last Saturday Anne & I made a trip to London to visit the SWPP Trade Show. For the previous two years I've been a speaker at their National Convention and Trade Show. This year was a year of rest so we took the opportunity to visit the show without the pressure of making sure I arrived to give my seminar on time.

Dawn outside Nottingham Station

Our journey started before dawn with a bus trip into Nottingham to catch the East Midlands train into London. As we arrived as the station the cold, crisp dawn looked stunning , foretelling a great day ahead.

I've regularly travelled into London from Grantham with GNER so was looking forward to the comfort of a relaxing journey with a nice breakfast. In the event all the tea trolly could provide was a stale "Danish" pastry and instant coffee:-( 

St Pancras to Hammersmith via the Piccadilly line was OK. At Hammersmith we dived into McDonalds for a breakfast bagel and decent coffee before plunging into the Novotel and the Trade Show. 

The Trade Show was the expected collection of useful and useless exhibitors. We saw current and future suppliers and some great products we will be including into our range this year.

After the trade show we went to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Taylor Wessing exhibition.

Nelson's monument from the National Portrait Gallery

We stopped for a late "al fresco" lunch at Pret a Manger  opposite the National Portrait Gallery.

This gave us a great view of Nelson's column framed by nearby street lights.

The National Portrait Gallery has many interesting exhibitions and I particularly liked;

Private Eye: Photographs by Lewis Morley.

Queens in Waiting: Charlotte & Victoria.

Contemporary portraits.

We arrived back at St Pancras to find that many East Midland trains had been cancelled - due to signal failure in the Leicester area.  

Waiting for the train was extremely cold and frustrating. More and more people arrived expecting to catch a train. Even the Penguin theory (huddle, huddle, huddle) didn't improve the temperature. The situation was resolved and we gladly took our (pre-booked) seats for the stopping at all stations trip back to Nottingham. 

All in all a successful and eventful trip with a couple of nice pictures in the process:-)