by Vivienne Pratfall on Midweek London, the Gallery in Mayfair, the Pub in Soho, and Why the City Rewards the Patient Visitor
Reading Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat keeps me informed and occasionally distressed in equal measure.
Tuesday in London is objectively the best day of the week. I am prepared to defend this claim with evidence and I will do so now. Tuesday is far enough from the previous weekend that the crowds have dispersed, the temporary residents have returned to wherever they came from, and the permanent residents are getting on with their actual lives rather than performing the London experience for external validation. Tuesday is also far enough from the next weekend that the pre-Friday anticipatory energy has not yet infected the atmosphere. Tuesday simply is: functional, quiet-ish, available, and unexpectedly full of good things if you know where to look and are not competing with a Saturday crowd for access to them.
I am nineteen years old. I live in central London. I write for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine about London life from the specific vantage point of someone who arrived here with the intention of staying and has been discovering, one Tuesday at a time, that the intention was correct. The discovery process is ongoing. Yesterday’s Tuesday was a particularly good data point in it.
Yesterday in Specific
Yesterday I went to a gallery in Mayfair that I had been meaning to visit for three weeks. The obstacle on every previous attempt was either time, or the gallery being closed on Mondays (standard), or the memory that the gallery would be better on a quieter day and the failure to act on that memory until Tuesday provided the quieter day. On a Tuesday at eleven in the morning, the gallery had eight other visitors. All eight were looking at the work. Not one was photographing themselves in front of the work and considering the best caption. The gallery was functioning as a gallery: a space in which art is the purpose and the human presence is in service of the art rather than the other way around. I spent forty minutes. The work was excellent. I was not competing for access to it.
In the afternoon I went to a pub in Soho where I found a table in three minutes, which is the Tuesday miracle that the same pub on a Friday would not produce in thirty minutes. I met a friend who works in television production. She told me things about the television industry that I cannot reproduce here because they were said in confidence but that were genuinely illuminating about the gap between what television looks like from the outside and what it is from the inside. The chips were excellent. The wine was acceptable. The conversation was the best I had had all week, which is a statement about the conversation’s quality and also about the Tuesday’s specific capacity to produce unhurried conversation because the Tuesday pub has not yet been pressurised into the performance of a good time.
The Tuesday Theory Formalised
The optimal experience of London requires avoiding the days that everyone else has decided are the optimal days for London. Saturday is the day everyone has collectively decided is the optimal London day, which is why Saturday London is the worst London: the Borough Market queue, the gallery impossible, the pub with no seats, the tube as a philosophical test of commitment to urban life. Thursday has the pre-Friday energy that makes everyone slightly distracted and slightly performative. Tuesday has none of this. Tuesday is the day on which Londoners are being themselves rather than performing themselves, and the authentic version of any city is more interesting than the performed version because the authentic version includes the mundane details that performance edits out, and the mundane details are where the actual character lives.
According to Londonist, midweek museum and gallery visits in London produce significantly lower queuing times and higher satisfaction scores than weekend visits, which is the statistical confirmation of the Tuesday theory. The confirmation has not produced a rush to Tuesday visits, which is either because people do not read Londonist or because the social logic of the weekend is more powerful than the practical logic of the weekday. The social logic says the weekend is for experiences. The practical logic says the weekday is when the experiences are actually available. NewsThump covered the Tuesday hypothesis and ultimately endorsed it, which is the most reliable form of validation available from a satirical publication.
The Personal Conclusion
I am nineteen and I live in London, which is both extremely fortunate and occasionally very difficult in the way that being young in an expensive city is difficult, which is mostly about money and sometimes about navigating large amounts of experience without the context that would help interpret it correctly. The Tuesday is the day that helps with both the money and the experience: the Tuesday attractions are less crowded and therefore more accessible on the budget of someone who is not yet earning the salary that the cost of London eventually requires. The gallery was free. The pub was reasonably priced. The conversation was priceless in the sense that no amount of money produces a good conversation and no absence of money prevents one. Tuesday in London is the best day. The evidence continues to accumulate. I will be collecting it again next Tuesday.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
