Even on the fringes of a posh neighbourhood like this one, it can be some time before you hear English, let alone meet a bona fide Londoner. And Ben, the first one I do meet, is pretty positive about the 30th Olympiad.
"I'm well up for it, myself. The Jubilee right now helps - looking at the shops, all the flags. It's like a patriotic leg up." The 36-year-old stay-at-home dad has heard all the media doom-merchants, yet believes the secret ingredient for success is right in front of
everyone's eyes.
"Some of my mates managed to get tickets and they're over the moon. It's not going to be like Beijing, where Chinese people were being paid to go, getting bused in to fill up stadiums ... then clapping at all the wrong times. Brits love our sports, just like you Kiwis do." Breakfast is a different affair inside Piccolino, on Exchange Square. Here, viewed from plush leather seats, the peas look corn-fed. Free-range. Mushed one at a time, by hand.
Clayton Adams, who left New Zealand for work in the nearby heart of the financial district, admits there have already been comical repercussions from the Games, though mostly confined to the office.
"One analyst took six months off because he managed to get into the British Olympic hockey team. Which is only strange because he's South African. Then another of our IT guys made the archery squad, so he's reduced his hours to go off shooting arrows."
Kiwis Clayton and wife Lynda, both a decade in London, live 10 minutes from the Olympic Park in Stratford.
Yet Lynda says the temptation to carve slice of Olympic"rental" gold was quickly nipped in the bud.
"I got put off straight away when the 'specialist' Olympic letting agency I approached wanted £1000 ($2056) up front, just for managing the whole thing. Then you had to be out at least 4-6 days beforehand. It just wasn't going to work. And that was before my brother brought up the subject of complete strangers shagging in your bed."
Instead, the couple are taking their two young children to Spain, flying out four hours before the opening ceremony and not returning until the day it all ends.
"The Tubes are a nightmare anyway," Clayton says, "particularly in summer. So I guess the clincher was the idea of having an extra 100,000 people on our train every day. Maybe because it's not our country, Kiwis don't buy into the hype so much, but a lot of English people seem really proud, nervous but proud. I've never seen people so excited to win balloted tickets to an afternoon of weightlifting or freestyle gymnastics."
Outside, Clayton has to go to work, under the shadow of the Gherkin, as do millions of other people. A never-ending suit cut from human cloth pours out of Liverpool St Station, earbud headphones in, savouring a final page on its collective Kindle.
"Londoners are like New Yorkers," Sue, my second local of the day, tells me as I join the throng marching yowards the corner of London Wall and Bishopsgate. "They work long hours and only care about what affects them in an everyday sense, right now."
Twelve million journeys are estimated to be made in London on a typical working day (a figure expected to rise by three million during the Games fortnight) and the 44-year-old PA says Brits fear workday disruption more than Olympic disaster.
"I live in Enfield and what they've done out there with the White Water Centre is spectacular, but in the City, no one's paying any attention to that. It's the 'body on the tracks' syndrome: when there is one, people only think 'how's this affect me. I'm going to be late'."
The five Olympic rings hover over London like those spaceships from Independence Day. But it seems no one really minds a sporting apocalypse on a par with the Black Plague or the Great Fire of 1666, as long as the trains continue to run on time.
Something deep-seated in the English character, perhaps? A hankering for the kind of empirical precision that built, well, the British Empire. Old Chap.
"I doubt it," ex-Wellingtonian David Cleary says. "They're a hardy bunch, the English. That's something we don't hear enough of back home." The 40-year-old has spent a third of his life in the capital, building a thriving business here.
"They're used to the delays. No one's quick to complain in a city that already has a 10-quid congestion charge just for driving through the centre of town. They blocked off roads here the other weekend for a test drive of the cycling road race. People weren't able to cross the road for five minutes. Londoners wouldn't even blink at that."
Cleary applied online for Olympic tickets, but missed out. "Like anyone here, Kiwis also tend to end up living in their address code. I'm in Fulham, SW6, and the farthest I would go isW1 - Chelsea, Mayfair. And even that's occasionally. Out east, it might be affecting people, but for someone in SW6, East London is another world."
Heading east from Cleary's shop on New King's Rd requires a consultation with the Tube map, which is perhaps the most stared-at technicolour plate of pasta on the planet. Thankfully, normal service is operating on all lines.
Self-confessed "lost soul" and former Invercargill girl Ciara Mulholland is in the same District Line carriage. It's almost 11am and she is late for work.
"We had emails circulating last week about whether people will be able to make it into work or not. And, of course, given the option, people always say no."
Her own pre-Olympics warm-up has been kept to a minimum. "The countdown clock in Trafalgar Square is pretty hideous. All the Kiwis I know are more interested in why the coffee is so s*** over here, or what Kiwi bands are coming or are they ever gonna go to a party where there's no other New Zealanders."
Mulholland, who lived through the Sydney Games in 2000, believes Kiwis in London - "Kwondoners" - have more colonial fish to fry.
"The Olympics isn't quintessentially English, the Diamond Jubilee is. It's accessible. It's affordable. They'll have all their waka out there on the river for it and that speaks to us more, I reckon. Maybe if we'd had five rings instead of a Union Jack on our flag for the last 150 years I'd be excited. One of my mates has knitted a Corgi and I've changed myscreensaver to a picture of Her Majesty. It's my Queensaver."
Leaving her at South Ken Station, I stroll past the Royal Albert Hall to Hyde Park. The big screens are not up yet, but railings are freshly painted and new gravel is being laid. Under the shadow of the Ritz, drop-top doubledeckers drop off tourists as squirrels prep for another photo session.
Still heading east, Stratford isn't a world away after all: just a mere 11 stops from Marble Arch on the Central line. It could be another planet. Here, London truly is"Minding the Gap". Not the one between the train and platform but the unknown space separating national glory and logistical nightmare.
Pavers lay pavements. Builders build. Walking around the brand new Olympic Park is something akin to walking into God's Legoland. The only thing marking it out as a human endeavour is the number of people carrying ID cards. And iPads. As if the 2012 Games were an app you could just download.
"It's mad," an anonymous labourer pushing a trolley of pre-fab slabs tells me. "How big it is. We're getting asked questions all the time. One little old lady asked me if she was still in London and I don't blame her, really."
A frantic, steely English determination hangs in the air. On a fold-out chair, a man in a fluoro vest sits reading the paper-but he gets up as soon as I pull out my camera. People in ties and hard hats walk around saying things like "We need to meet Sir Jeffrey outside theWater Polo Arena in 20 minutes"In .
One almost forgets this is London's third Olympics, and they seem determined for it to be third time lucky. In 1948, everyone was still a little grumpy after the war. Biffed shotputs at each other. 1908 was surrounded in controversy: poor Dorando Pietri of Italy being helped over the Marathon finish line and disqualified; New Zealand attending for the first time (the tyres on King Edward's Subaru went missing).
Tellingly, the first thing one sees exiting the station is not floodlights or even torch-borne flames but the official mall of the 2012 Games. The largest in Europe, bristling with muzak. A kind of beached Titanic that probably seats more people than the Olympic stadia. Signs aroundthe worksites even instruct visitors the best views can be found on platforms inside the mall, at retailer John Lewis.
The message is clear: Celebrate humanity, but don't forget to pick up that Mango Wood Vase with white trim on the way.
