London Place 30: South Bank

Right, let's cheer it up a bit. Obviously, there are a lots of places on the South Bank and there are a few different definitions of the South Bank - I guess I mean the right angle between Westminster Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge - all that bit. So the Anchor and Hope, the Cut, the Young Vic, The Old Vic and the pubs near it, the Eye, Waterloo, but most of all, the actual bits on the river - The Hayward, Queen Elizabeth Hall, BFI, Royal Festival Hall and National Theatre.

Foot for foot, maybe the best bit of London? Maybe? If you like all that stuff? The plays and the films? The heritage gigs and the art? The dirty old river, the dirty old trains ... the skateboarders. Of course.

I was taken to the South Bank for plays like Waiting for Godot and One-Way Pendulum when I was little. For weird art and ballets, too. I did think it was a bit grimy. It was a bit grimy back them. They have tidied it up a lot, without disguising the brutalism.

After I went back to London after university in the summer of 2001, I was there all the time. I remember, a couple of days after 9/11, going to, of all things, a slightly stilted tribute show to Tim Buckley there, walking back across the Jubilee Bridge, there was a security alert near Leicester Square, a city on standby.

Brian Wilson, Dexys, Super Furry Animals, smaller stuff at QEH, so many plays at the National and the Old Vic. I remember walking up to the Old Vic from Clapham South at Christmas 2007 for a pantomime. Then there was the reassuringly average upstairs backstage bar in the National, like a school canteen. 

Every year around Christmas, I meet a couple of old school friends and we go to one of the pubs behind the Old Vic and then the Thames Tandoori underneath Waterloo East. It's nice to have rituals. I have a yearly appointment at St Thomas's, too. Good vibes, man.

None of it is wildly beautiful, it's not that, is it? It's just what you hope a city will be like. Pleasant and bustling, full of incidents and memories.

Sorry, I've got a cold. There isn't going to be a point to this. I had a cold when Juliette and I first went to the Hayward. It was some kind of interactive exhibition, there was swinging on ropes. I was struggling. Then the Anchor and Hope, a pretty good pub.

Two different Hamlets. Who would I put myself through that? But, yes, basically, The South Bank, the most reliably enjoyable part of London. That's what it is.