London has a habit of holding on to its past. Even now, as newer buildings rise into the skyline, the streets below remain largely unchanged. Sometimes three centuries sit quietly at eye level, in brick and stone, shaping the way the city feels long before it reveals what it is. I’ve often wondered what it might be like to ride through these streets before the city wakes, without the blur of tourists or the urgency of commuters.
So, I rolled the Royal Enfield Classic 650 out of the driveway in Ealing at 6:30 on a Sunday morning and thumbed the starter. Plus, I’d added a new tool to my travel writing kit and wanted to test it—a pair of Ray Ban Meta smart glasses. They would let me capture what I saw without stopping, and answer the questions that bubbled up as I rode as if the city were narrating its own story.
At this hour, with the city’s 20mph limit enforced by silent cameras, the bike’s exhaust note settled into a gentle, rhythmic purr. Loud enough to feel the heartbeat of the machine, but soft enough to respect the early morning quiet.
To give the ride a sense of purpose, I mapped a circuit that felt like a pilgrimage. I wanted to visit the former lodgings of Indians who had once walked these very streets and imagined a different future for their home country.
I first sought out the homes of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the father of Indian Renaissance, and Swami Vivekananda, whose lectures helped introduce Indian thought to the West, marked by blue plaques near the British Museum and in Pimlico. They had lived here in the 1800s, when the Empire was at its zenith. Even a young Mohandas Gandhi was here, at 20 Baron’s Court Road, as a law student between 1888 and 1891. The voice in my ear filled in these details, along with smaller ones—like his search for a decent vegetarian meal, which led him to the London Vegetarian Society.
For them, London was the centre of the world. Industrially confident, soot-stained, and seemingly eternal.
Purring past the former homes of Sardar Patel and Jawaharlal Nehru in Kensington, I found myself thinking about the London they would have known. They arrived at a moment when the Victorian age was ending, when the first cracks in imperial certainty were starting to show, and a new century was stretching into view. A time when ideas of self-governance, once deemed radical in the age of Victoria, were beginning to take shape. It was also when the first automobiles began to enter, their exhaust filling a city still shaped by horses.
The blue plaques simply mark the houses. The rest of the story must be imagined, or in my case, asked for and supplied. The most poignant stop was 10 King Henry’s Road in Chalk Farm. The blue plaque marks the home of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar as a student in the early 1920s. Riding past that residence, I felt a bridge between this quiet London street and my daily life in India. Back home in Mumbai, my morning runs through Hindu Colony in Dadar East take me past Rajgruha, Ambedkar’s residence, now a museum. Surrounded by newer high-rises, it still holds its ground with quiet authority.
To stand before his London address, especially in his birth month of April, felt like holding both ends of a historical thread. The ideas that would shape modern India were being sharpened here, in the heart of the Empire he would help dismantle.
It was a quiet moment of recognition that the history I pass each morning in Mumbai once lived and breathed here.
From there, I pointed the motorcycle toward The Mall. Usually, a procession of pedestrians and posing tourists, this morning it lay empty. Just a long stretch of red asphalt leading to the Victoria Memorial, shimmering in the early light.
As the morning light caught the gold on the monument, it felt difficult not to sense echoes of 1901, the year Queen Victoria died, in the present. Just as the horse was giving way to the piston 125 years ago, the piston now finds itself negotiating space with the battery.
Riding back through the city, I found myself thinking that every age believes it will last forever, right up until the next one arrives.
The Victorians had the hiss of steam, the 20th century found its rhythm in the exhaust note, and we are living through a quieter shift, marked by the near silence of electric power.
Having spent the morning in the streets once home to people who had gone on to transform their countries, I could not help but feel that some endings, when they do arrive, deserve to take their time. London, after all, has never been in a hurry to let go of anything.