The London Traveler

 
I was near Victoria the other day and had a spare few minutes – so I went into a shop that wild horses usually couldn’t drag me into. The Royal Mews Shop, at the back of Buckingham Palace.
Some of the merchandise confirmed my worst fears. Horrible royal tat. There might not have been any corgi covers – but there were tapestry bell pulls (you need one, obviously, to summon your servants) and a book of royal family photos from the 1920s I can’t imagine anyone except my flag-waving grandma being interested in.
But there were also some rather nice souvenirs. China …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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Greenwich seems to be where it’s happening right now, with a whole load of summer activities. Among these is the Greenwich Wheel – a competitor to the London Eye.
It’s  taken a little while to get it going, but the Greenwich Wheel is finally up and working.  It will stay in place till September 28th, so you have the whole summer to get over to Greenwich and enjoy it.
The views are very different from what you’ll see from the Eye. For a start there’s the green expanse of Greenwich Park, and the Isle of Dogs with its docklands developments spread out …read more

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You might think a museum of waterworks sounds rather dull. But Victorian London excelled in the creation of excellent waterworks – Bazalgette’s huge sewers, fine pumping stations and public fountains – and it’s a heritage that deserves celebration, and gets it at the Kew Bridge Steam Museum.
The museum is set in a superb Victorian pumping station, which blends functionality with elegance. The fine Italian renaissance style standpipe tower is a local landmark, its restraining arches and cornices clearly asserting its architectural pretensions.
Still, although I’m a bit of a nerd, I’ve never been a model railway fan, and I find the …read more

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City Hall is one of London’s ‘new’ landmarks, a curvy blob on the South Bank that houses the London Assembly.
Designed by Foster & Partners, the building is a tilted glass globe, which purposely has no ‘front’ or ‘back’ – it’s a democratic shape, which can be seen from any perspective. Equally, it’s an energy efficient shape which minimises the surface area, thus reducing the building’s heating needs as there’s less opportunity for heat to leak out of the building.
The dominant feature in the interior is the spiral ramp that works its way up to the top floor. As with the …read more

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A piece in the Guardian today shows ways you can have fun in London for free, with activities as diverse as gigs, knitting, free movies, and watching a trial at the Old Bailey.
Many of the best museums – including the biggest ones – are free, and so is one of my favourites, the Sir John Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.
If you want to go to Evensong or one of the Sunday services in Westminster Abbey, it’s free – and that’s a big saving as otherwise it’s £12 to get in, which even for such a historic building seems a …read more

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The Tower of London is one of the compulsory stops on a tour of London. It’s the oldest complete building in London – parts of it going back to the Normans – with a long and frequently bloody history.
There’s a lot to see, and a lot to learn about it. So make sure you take advantage of the guided tours, led by the ‘Beefeaters’ (Yeoman Warders). These guys really know their stuff.
The tours last about an hour, and leave every half hour up to 330 in the afternoon from the main entrance at Middle Tower.
Even better, once you’ve paid for …read more

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Don’t get too excited. This is nothing at all to do with James Bond.
The Goldfinger in question was leading modernist architect Arno Goldfinger, who built this as his own house in 1939. Look at the horrid half-timber semis being built at the same date all over North London, and you can see just how revolutionary this was.
Look at the wonderful use of light – one huge window on the first floor, creating a well lit, open plan space, with small windows on the floor above for bedrooms.  (In fact if you look carefully you can see this is a terrace …read more

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When I lived in Stoke Newington I got to know the North Circular pretty well. One of the great sights just off that road was the Walthamstow Greyhound Stadium, with its illuminated facade redolent of the fairground.
A night at the greyhounds isn’t my preferred entertainment, to be honest. I’d rather see a play or an opera, or spend the evening in the pub. But I have been to the dogs one or two times, and it’s an enjoyable way of passing time with your mates – better than ten pin bowling, anyway (IMHO). And less dangerous than go-karting; but I’ll …read more

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One of my favourite museums in London is the one I consider the most truly macabre. It’s not the London Dungeon or a torture chamber in the Tower – it’s the museum at Westminster Abbey with its funeral effigies of English Kings.
There seems to have been a tradition of displaying the monarch’s body openly in public. It was one way of making sure the king had died ‘honestly’ – not been made away with – though apparently, the murderers of Edward II managed to avoid being traced by the use of a red hot poker and a piece of antler. …read more

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