The London Traveler

Graverobbing is often thought to have been something that only happened in Edinburgh, where Burke and Hare carried out their depradations. (Not content with robbing graves, they also bumped off a few people who hadn’t died quickly enough.) But it was a problem in Victorian London, too.
Charles Dickens features a graverobber, the nastily named Jeremy Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities. We actually see him digging up the coffin – so does his young son, who admits to his father that he wants to be a bodysnatcher when he grows up. Obviously readers of Dickens’s novels wouldn’t have thought …read more

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Some things make me very cross. Here’s one of them. It may not mean much to you.
The British Museum puts the Etruscans under ‘Roman’.
Okay, let’s explain. The Etruscans were the original inhabitants of much of Italy – before the Romans. They had a culture which was much more friendly to women (Rome was notoriously misogynistic), which produced brilliant art, which welcomed immigrants from Greece and Phoenicia, and which was highly literate (though we have only a few words of their language).
The Romans destroyed the Etruscans. They stole bits of Etruscan culture but they destroyed Etruscan society.
So it strikes me that …read more

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Pete Marsh is someone I do try to visit every so often, just to see how he’s getting on.
He’s about two thousand years old, so I like to make sure he’s okay.
But on a recent visit I found he’d upped sticks!
Pete Marsh is a well preserved male body (well, the upper half, anyway) found in a bog in Cheshire in 1984. The bog gave him his name – Peat Marsh, geddit?
He must have been some kind of sacrifice, having been killed in three ways – strangled, his throat cut, and knocked on the head as well. (Either that or he …read more

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The Sherlock Holmes pub is conveniently located not far from the National Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square. It’s in Northumberland Street, just off the main drag.  If you’re looking for a cooling pint after your touristic endeavours, it’s an atmospheric place to relax. It’s recreated Sherlock Holmes’s digs in 221B Baker Street – though I do wonder why this was done here, and not anywhere nearer to Baker Street itself!
It serves real ale – Greene King Abbot Ale for instance, or Speckled Hen. (Don’t be fooled by the Sherlock Holmes ale – a bit of detective work …read more

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Charing Cross is named for the ‘Eleanor cross’ that stood here from 1290, in what was then the hamlet of Charing. A Gothic style ‘cross’ – really more of a pinnacle -  still stands in front of the Charing Cross Hotel, on the Strand, though it’s a Victorian replacement designed by E M Barry, who also designed the hotel and assisted his father on the Houses of Parliament. The original was demolished by Purtians in the 1640s as a symbol of both royalty and ‘popery’.
The story of the Eleanor crosses is rather touching. Edward I’s marriage to Eleanor of Castile …read more

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Westminster Cathedral is one of the great sights of London – in my book, anyway.
First of all, I’d better make sure no one confuses it with Westminster Abbey. The Abbey is where Kings, Queens, poets and the Establishment are buried; it’s a medieval building in the Gothic style, and an Anglican church. The Cathedral, on the other hand, is a Victorian building in neo-Byzantine style, and it’s a Roman Catholic church.
The foundation stone was laid in 1895. Architect JF Bentley didn’t choose the Gothic or classical styles that competed elsewhere in London for space – he looked to Byzantium and …read more

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I’ve always loved looking out of the plane as we come down into London, trying to find landmarks I can recognise. The trademark squiggle of the Thames around the Isle of Dogs; the green spaces of Kew. But it’s all crammed into a packed five minutes as you come in to land at Heathrow.
Now you can take a more leisurely look. An airship will carry you silently and slowly through the air above London. I’ve been told it’s the same as being on a sailing boat – you feel the eddies and currents of the air, more than you do …read more

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Half way along Whitehall stands the Banqueting House – the last remnant of Whitehall Palace.
The palace of Whitehall had grown up during the Middle Ages as a straggling, rather random collection of buildings. Into this Gothic and Tudor muddle, Inigo Jones placed a monument of classical reason – it must have come as a shock,  a building more Italian than English, clashing with everything around it.
Of course  later on, classical style became pretty common in London – Nash’s terraces, Lutyens’s neo-imperial, every other bank and insurance company using pediments and colonnades. But this was pretty much the first classical building …read more

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Londoners’ seaside comes in many forms. The meretricious charms of Southend, the style and panache of Brighton, the slightly down at heel atmosphere of Margate . And then again, there’s Whitstable -  an old fishing town, rather than a seaside resort, and a really delightful place to spend a summer weekend.
Whitstable is famous for its oysters.Head straight down to the harbour, with its Victorian clapperboarded buildings and fish market, to taste them. (But only if there’s an R in the month, otherwise you’ll have to make do with crab or fish, or cockles or winkles.)
Or wander the little alleyways of …read more

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Some of the most famous inhabitants of St James’s park are its five pelicans.
They’ve been here  a long time. Since the 1660s to be exact. (Not the same pelicans, obviously. Though the great white pelican can live for fifty years, so these are venerable birds.)
The first pelicans were presented to Charles II by the Russian ambassador. At the time, diarist John Evelyn was not impressed – he described them at the time as “between a stork and a swan”.    Which isn’t particularly accurate, and fails to describe their most unusual and noticeable attribute – the huge pouches under their …read more

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