Sometimes it takes the enthusiasm of a visitor to make us look at where we live with fresh eyes - a lot of people are more likely to go to galleries and museums on a trip away from home, while their own area remains unexplored. Texan student and I Love London Facebook group creator Boze Herrington kindly answered our questions on what is so lovable about our capital.

Boze, you started a Facebook group called I Love London but you live in Austin, Texas - what’s that all about?

I’m a student and I studied abroad in London as part of my English program in the fall of 2006. However, I neglected to get a passport before my departure, so I arrived a week late. I was there for three months and ten days, so a hundred days really.

I grew up in Texas - it’s a flat and dreary place consumed with torrid sunshine and the constant sting of vexing nettle-grass. But nearly all of my favorite writers were British - Chesterton, Dickens, Tolkien, Lewis, Rowling, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, Lewis Carroll - as were most of my favorite bands - the Beatles, Oasis, Keane, Belle & Sebastian - and all of my favorite actors. There’s something magical that dwells within these northern rain-vexed isles. And so there came a time when I realized that I had to leave the land of my birth and find out what it was.

What makes someone a Londoner these days?

Anyone who’s ever borne the grand old City in their heart of hearts.

What response have you had to your Facebook group?

The response has been so far beyond what I ever imagined was possible… 11,000 people is three times larger than the town where I grew up! It’s bizarre to consider that in the age of social networking, even the smallest person can influence so many.

What are the top issues your group’s members bring to your attention?

With the sudden flowering of the group within the last few months, there’s been a lot of mass-market spamming, and we had to have a Scouring of the Shire, as it were. That’s mostly under control now, and I hope people aren’t intimidated any longer by the hordes of mountebanks.

What gets discussed on your discussion board?

Most of the respectable people who post on the Wall are wanting to know which places are the best in London, or seeking recommendations for the most inexpensive restaurants and bookstores and things. Or they want to sell their kittens, which is fine. Sometimes they discuss random topics like which is the best Tube station, or the best of the parks. Incidentally, I think my favorite Tube station is Waterloo (and the whole area thereabouts, from Lower Marsh Street up to Camberwell Green. And my favorite park is definitely St. James’s - perhaps because of all the stooping willow trees that dip their boughs like deer within the leaden-colored ponds.

What’s London’s best kept secret?

Hrmmm… London’s best-kept secret? There’s far more to Russell Square than the British Museum; it’s generally my least-favorite part of the lot. A good day trip is to just get off at Russell Square Tube station and start walking and see where the road brings you. Also, one of the best Waterstones is located right off British Museum Road. It has a second-hand bookshop and the prices are phenomenal.

I think Piccadilly Circus is really the heart of modern civilization. The world has a heart, and it beats at this meeting of these roads.

If someone’s never been to London before, what should they do during their stay?

Well, everything! But as we don’t have world enough and time for that, I would say: my favorite “classic London” trip is to start off at Buckingham Palace and journey through St. James’s till you get to Constitution Road and Parliament. Then take Westminster Bridge to Waterloo. The whole trip is about ten minutes long, and you see most of the town’s most famous sites. It’s also really fun to see “Olde London” - the part of the City up around Fleet Street with the pubs and little narrow streets - and no one should leave without at least once seeing the Embankment late at night.

Describe your perfect day off in London.

There was one Tuesday evening at dusk when I visited the Imperial War Museum. After I had left, I followed the street along for a while, as the daylight faded and the bell-shaped lamps began to glow in dim profusion on the road. There’s an indescribable sense of being in the city, of walking past buildings which are older than the country of my birth, through all the brick and dust and ale of long-departed years, which I can’t find in America (or not, at any rate, in any city where I’ve been).

As the city fell away before me, pubs and churches disappearing in the darkness of the dying day, the landscape around took on a sinister and lonely quality; trees rose up to my right with withered branches and with shrunken trunks, their lifeless boughs shorn of leaves… and utterly bereft of life. I passed a field of heather where, gazing across to the other side, I could see the last rays of the sun extinguished giving way to bitter winds and chill blue autumn skies. I came down a slope encompassed on both sides by high walls of the kind we saw in Edinburgh, with ivy trawling along down the side.
I walked into North Lambeth, without the faintest idea where I was going or where I was, inside the rounded tunnel of a bridge. The world before me seemed a haunted twilightscape of loneliness and fear. I’d had a terrible feeling I was wholly lost, but Waterloo Station stood around the nearest corner and I hastened towards it, passing a little enclosure at the back of a building on the way and stopping for a moment to admire it. There stood a gateway to the left and right, and a ladder leading nowhere in the dark.

I walked towards the station by the bank entrance and I made the dismally foolish mistake of going the wrong way as I sang “The Sounds of Silence” silently. That’s how I ended up on a narrow curve of road before a giant wall, with taxis whirring by in front of me like killer bees, and wondering at every moment whether I would die within the next. After about ten minutes of agony I made my way back out again, and towards the proper entrance, where I took a train to Blackfriars.

There I took the Southwark Walk: but what I saw of London Bridge, the Globe, accordions and zebras, railways, Marshalsea, Southwark Cathedral, and a street named David Copperfield, would take a much longer answer than I have the time to write, to tell in full.

What do you do when you’re not bigging up London?

“Bigging up?” I’ve never heard the term before! I write obsessively; I also memorize poetry, books, and plays.

When are you coming back to London?!!

As soon as I get the chance!

Over to you, Londoners - what do you love so much about where you live? And non-Londoners - what is your favourite day out in our city? If Boze is anything to go by you might be able to teach us a thing or two…

Photo credit: Memory Map Of London by Yersinia (CC License)