China, Korea, Japan… In London

With the rise of K-Pop and anime, interest in East Asian culture has blossomed. 

As fans of East Asian culture and food, we hit on Chinatown and the surrounding area of Soho.

We pulled into Waterloo station with our day travelcards, allowing us to move freely throughout London on tubes, buses, and trams at no extra cost, before jumping onto the Underground system to Tottenham Court Road, on the northern side of Chinatown.

 Our first stop was Sokollab, a small K-Pop album and Korean skincare store in north Soho. There were so many albums to look through and plenty of smaller merch items including stickers, plush toys, and posters. I may have ended up spending a little too long looking through albums and possibly even longer picking out a poster to buy! Sokollab often organise fan meets and cup sleeve events in local cafes and parks, these can be found on their website and social media pages.

 The second location on our agenda ended up coming as a surprise to us. We had decided to head over to Japan Centre, on the opposite side of Soho, a store filled with Japanese imports of sake, wines, beers, and whole foods, as well as its affiliated 70’s retro Japan themed ramen house, Yokocho.

 However, we passed a store that we had remembered visiting some years ago, Forbidden Planet. Filled to the brim with manga books, comics, fantasy novels, merchandise, and apparel, this was a gold mine. We looked through plenty of books and merch before taking a short walk to Yokocho, (I even picked up a signed edition of Six Crimson Cranes by Japanese American author Elizabeth Lim!) 

Yokocho has plenty of food and drink options, including authentic ramen dishes, sake cocktails and imported beers. We ordered three sides to share and a main dish each. With a relaxed and fun environment, we took our time eating and conversing, before moving on to our last stop of the day.

On our way back to Tottenham Court Station, we popped into Bubbleology, a local bubble tea shop, to grab a drink to take with us. There are so many options to choose from and you can even add alcohol to your drink (drink-in only)! This time we headed out of Soho and into Kensington and Chelsea to Holland Park.

Holland Park contains the beautiful Kyoto Gardens, a stunning set-up of a traditional Japanese garden and scenic waterfall. We spent some time walking around the gardens, with lots of amazing flowers in bloom, and even a peacock showing off his feathers! There’s lots of facilities at the park including a small café, Georgian architecture, and stunning tulip gardens. 

These locations are just a small taste of the many restaurants, cafes and attractions in the area that were available to us, with many putting on special events for the summer. Hyper Japan Festival will be back this summer over at Battersea Park in July, with lots of input and products from Japan Centre and lots of Japanese themed entertainment. One to look out for.
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