A Trip Down the Thames . . . in Shanghai

A couple of days after the American Dream fiasco, I set off in the direction of yet another strange part of Shanghai that I had read about online. Only technically located within the administrative district of Shanghai, there was a housing development project in whats honestly another town, called SongJiang New City, where the community is designed to look as though it were old traditional England.

Yeah, you read that right. London in the suburbs of Shanghai. I can feel the eyes rolling now, and trust me, I did the same.

There was a picture or two online, but I don't want to give away the game before I get there, so I won't tell you what tantalized me into coming. So I headed out with another friend of mine, named Frances, from Sweden, and my camera, to bring you this Sinofied Penny Lane.

We had to go to the end of Line 9, which as far as I can tell is the furthest south terminal point of all the different metro lines in Shanghai.

I hadn't really considered how long this trip might take, so it didn't occur to me that perhaps the metro line as represented on the metro map was not drawn to proportion, let alone scale. By the end of this trip, there were 10+ minute waits between metro stops, with the longest being around 20 minutes. This came totally unexpected, and meant that we had about a one and a half hour trip just to arrive to this darn place.  Good thing we had the day off from school.

Finally we did arrive at the terminal station, and as we emerged from our induced slumber, the next step was to hop into a taxi and tell them where we wanted to go, which was supposedly an approximately 3 USD taxi ride away.

That wasn't meant to build suspense, it really was a 3 USD taxi ride, but we didn't know for sure at the time.

The taxi driver brought us to a place, which was clearly marked with an entrance sign declaring "Thames Town". At first, it just looked like boring apartment buildings, so boring that I didn't bother photographing the first few minutes of it. We found a posted map, and started wandering in the direction that the map seemed to suggest we might be able to find something worth seeing.

We walked through a simple public square, which had a couple of closed museums, and walked towards a waterfront area. There, we were treated to our first bit of a Chinese attempt to recreate British culture.

Maybe you can't quite figure it out from this picture, so....

That's right, a Harry Potter statue.

Or at least, more or less. He's missing his trademark lightning scar, and he doesn't particularly look like Daniel Radcliffe (which, personally, I would argue must be the public perception of the character by now), but who knows? Maybe its all done out of a canny attempt to avoid claims about intellectual property violations. I somehow doubt it.

What follows next is a couple of pictures of the water front area. It was boring, but pleasant. It doesn't really deserve much chronicling; a few people were in the area relaxing and picnicking, but that's about it. I'll throw a few pictures at you, though:

Somewhere along the way in this area, we spotted our first Anglo-houses. They were behind trees and fences, but they were there nonetheless, and we were bound and determined to get to them. It just turned out we'd have to go back the way we came from and go down a different street instead!

So, we retraced our steps and went down the proper street, this time.

What street, you say? (Just say it.)

This street:

I was really loving the faux-Brit bits already, and it only got better from here.

Next was the requisite red box telephone booth, as seen here:

After this, it was clear in the distance that we were coming to the part that was really thematic.

Faux cottages and brick buildings abounded, and though there was really only a couple of streets of it, it was still pretty packed; also, given the setting, meaning, China, it certainly stood out.

This place was also a huge haven for poseurs, and people posing. I've previously posted a short article on people using whatever they can as a more beautiful backdrop than normal Chinese streets, whether for wedding photography or just for fun, and some of those pictures came from here.

I've got a couple other pictures of the same kind of activity, but that I didn't put up in that other post, so I give those to you here:

Aside from the Harry Potter statue, the area was littered statues of other people that are presumably pretty famous. I couldn't say who any of them are, other than Churchill, but maybe some of my British friends can lend a hand here:

I feel particularly bad for this last guy. He's perpetually in the middle of waiting for someone to talk to, right outside of a coffee store that looks like its been totally set up but not actually used. I was here at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and it was closed.

This was a common theme of the area, though; the project has been going on for several years, and most of it is still not actually functional. I can't tell if its just to give the appearance of function, or whether these sites will actually be intended to be in business now or in the near future.

A lot of the buildings were actually totally vacant, as you can see in some of these pictures:

All in all, the place is obviously still in need of some work. It was pretty interesting to walk around, but mostly for how contrary it is, on the surface, to the rest of China. However, in true Chinese fashion, it seems they were just good at copying the facade of something and leaving something left to desire within the core.

As a final note, the police in the area are dressed in a fashion deemed suitable for the recreation of England in Shanghai, which is to say, red coats (red shirts in the summer, as you'll see, but full on coats in the winter). This policeman here looks like he's just as puzzled as I was about the justification for the place.