London on the Cheap, Part I International Living Postcards--your daily escape Wednesday, January 21, 2004
London, England If you are trying to live on a dollar-based income in London, you'll have to find a way to live with sterling at $1.82, the highest it has been for years. You have no choice but to learn where the cheap things are. Here are some ideas for furnishing your London pied-à-terre for less. Don't buy department store furniture when you cannot afford Georgian antiques from Camden Passage. Instead, head for Bacon Street in the East End. The weekend market there sells gently used furniture and carpets, much of it from corporate bankruptcies. You may wind up with two pretty leather and chrome chairs for your living room. The shop had 18 more when I bought mine very cheaply. They came from an Internet company boardroom. They have lots of framed prints and a few oil paintings, carpets, couches, dining chairs, lamps, you-name-it. The chaise longue I found here needed only minor repairs. They even delivered it since I also bought a pine "Welsh dresser". The classic chaise (with a few patches on the upholstery I hid using a pillow I covered in solid velvet) now graces my drawing room. For reproduction furniture of a most traditional cast (clubland leather sofas and deep armchairs, mahogany sideboards and dining sets, big chests of drawers) a good site is Tower Bridge Road south of the Tower of London in Bermondsey. There are many dealers with quite similar merchandise, so you should be able to bargain. Britain makes heaps of this stuff still and it has a poor resale value. But not to worry, you are not reselling. Another good street to work your way through is Peckham High Street, reachable by British Rail to Queens Road Peckham. As its name shows, this is second-hand fit for the Queen; furniture that doesn't quite make it in the London antique market, but will create heaps of ambiance if only other colonists are visiting you. We bought a mahogany what-not (a little bookcase), a large walnut desk of indeterminate ancestry, a non-functional grandfather clock (do you really think I want it to go bong-bong every 15 minutes?), a Vietnamese elephant table, and a big Chinese carpet. The bite was £450 ($820), which would have bought one of these items from a proper antique dealer. Vivian Lewis
for International Living | 
