Ambling Among London’s Odd and Empty Corners

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

David Milne, curator of the Dennis Severs' House Museum, lights candles at the museum, on Folgate Street.

"You know, guv, that really gets on my goat," Billy Allardyce said from the front of the taxi, his amplified voice a warble of Abbey Road reverb.

We were barreling toward Portobello Road in a cold winter downpour, headed for an arcade I'd been tipped about by my friend, the antiquarian Alexander di Carcaci. Mr. Allardyce was griping about change. The peculiarities and quirks of his 1960s childhood, he said, had given way to the blight of center city sameness.

"When I was a boy you could still see all them little shops, streets of specialty shops," Mr. Allardyce told me. Back then, Columbia Market — today a place of open-air flower stalls and hipster brunch spots — was where East End families shopped for pet guinea pigs.

"Kittens, dogs, snakes, rabbits," Mr. Allardyce said. "They even had goats."

The image delights me — a goat cropping grass in central London. It summons up both England's agrarian soul and also a capital city in which little-known spaces, odd corners and crooked byways have always had their place. It speaks to me of quiddity, that ineffable quality of what-ness. People have it — places, too. Manhattan certainly used to, though I'm not convinced of that anymore.

This is partly why I had booked a recent trip to London, because while the goats may be gone, the quiddity remains. It is woven into the city's texture, in its arcades, its shoulder-wide alleys, odd terraces, house museums and specialty shops; secreted between and beside and atop and sometimes even within the big marquee attractions, hidden right there in plain sight.

Jet-lagged and awake too early to visit the Tate Modern on an earlier visit in October, I had decided to kill time by walking there from my hotel near Buckingham Palace and along the sinuous South Bank. Passing Westminster Abbey on my way, I'd spontaneously dropped in on a 7:30 a.m. service held in a side chapel austere enough to pass for a rock church in Jerusalem. Away from the gilt and bombast of the abbey's lofty 14th-century nave, there were perhaps 30 others on hand that day, from among the millions of visitors to England last year, each of us partaking of an experience intimate, profoundly universal and available to anyone.

Moments like this abound in London. And it does no disservice to the Tower or Buckingham Palace or the London Eye to forgo the long lines and the touristic must-sees and practice instead some urban idling, the flânerie Balzac termed the "gastronomy of the eye." Walter Benjamin more famously characterized the flâneur as an essential urban figure, an amateur detective and investigator of urbanity. Predicting that rampant consumer capitalism would eventually spell doom for a flâneur's pleasures, Benjamin also neatly anticipated Billy Allardyce's gripe, and my own.

Yet wandering around London lately — alone or in the company of friends like Giles Waterfield, a novelist and lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, or the art historian Haydn Williams — I have bumbled upon wonders like the Dennis Severs' House Museum, 18 Folgate Street, a fanatically detailed "re-creation" by an expatriated American of house of a family of Huguenot silk weavers as it might have evolved over centuries. A place of guttering candles, of objects in mad profusion, of pomanders and "drying" laundry hung from rafters, the place could easily lapse into twee were it not for the force of Severs's artistic vision, which leaves a visitor feeling as if a door had opened into some mad aesthete's sensorium.

Exploring with Mr. Waterfield one afternoon, I discovered the York water gate, a Baroque stone pile attributed to Inigo Jones, and a centuries-old pub that retains its anachronistic charm despite being on every list of tourist attractions. On my own I visited a hushed room in the British Museum where Chinese ceramics amassed by a wealthy collector over a lifetime confirm that England is indeed Europe's attic.

Serenely displayed in Room 95 at the museum are some 1,700 objects from the collection of Sir Percival David, a 20th-century businessman who amassed the ceramics with a cultivated eye and singular determination. Established in 1952 at the University of London, the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art was until 2007 kept in a Georgian house on Gordon Square; it then moved on long-term loan to the British Museum, where it was reorganized and displayed in considerable splendor with a grant from a Hong Kong businessman.

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