St James’s feels a little besieged, sandwiched between Piccadilly, The Mall and Trafalgar Square. Some of the backstreets around Piccadilly can be a bit, um, pungent. 🤢
Nevertheless the centre is nice, with a garden square that is open to the public on weekdays.
The area is insanely wealthy - all high end art galleries and tailors - so isn’t exactly buzzing at weekends. Pall Mall was the liveliest street when I was there - well, there was an ice cream van.
The ICA is a slightly subversive feeling space with an emphasis on showing non-mainstream films.
The galleries are only open for exhibitions, but there’s a (not amazing, sorry) café and a shop stocking books focused on progressive issues.
The door to the Mall Galleries is easily missed, its next to the Institute of Contemporary arts.
One of the galleries has a small café in the corner selling coffees and sandwiches, though I was there for Food Photographer of the Year so can’t be completely certain it wasn’t an exhibit.
The Royal Society is a serious, working academic institution and, as nice as everyone was, I did feel like I wasn’t really supposed to be visiting.
The only other person in the exhibition space was doing a TV interview on their laptop. 😬
During the summer they open up with family friendly science exhibitions which are really the events that most people visit for.
Spencer House is a relic of when St James’s was somehow even more upmarket than it is now.
Narrowly avoiding destruction during World War Two, the house was fully restored in the 1980s.
You can only visit for tours on Sundays, the one I was on took ~90 minutes. Lady Di got mentioned after about 30 seconds, later than I expected.
St James’s Park is the smallest of the parks in the area but I think the prettiest, featuring a large ornamental lake and lots of flower borders.
As well as the usual ducks and geese it is famously home to a small population of pelicans, a gift from the Russian Ambassador in 1664.
