The London Traveler

The Cafe Royal has closed – a sad end to a great London institution.
Founded in 1865, the Cafe Royal was one of Oscar Wilde’s favourite hangouts. It hosted kings and princes, novelist Graham Greene, and Elizabeth Taylor and Mick Jagger – as well as boxing matches. (That’s where the Marquis of Queensberry comes into the story – not only Oscar Wilde’s great antagonist, but the man who created the rules of modern boxing, the Queensberry Rules.)
But now this end of Regent Street is going to be redeveloped, and the Cafe Royal has got to go. It’s been sold to a …read more

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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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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’m a big Ian McKellen fan. And his Richard III is, to my mind, one of the great Shakespearian performances.
But it’s also a wonderful guide to early 20th century building in London – the great days of Art Deco.
And what I think McKellen got absolutely right was the political ambivalence of this architecture. Take a good look at Shell  Mex House in the picture above – doesn’t it look just a bit like something by Albert Speer? The assertiveness of this architecture, its super-human scale, make it just that little bit totalitarian.
And certainly, when these buildings were put up, they …read more

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Many aspects of English culture are planned to confuse the visitor. One of the most confusing is a game, played on the BBC radio show ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a Clue’, called ‘Mornington Crescent’.
You might know where Mornington Crescent is. It’s a tube station on the Northern Line, north of Euston.
The game involves each player naming a tube station, in turn. So it might go like this:
“Euston.”
“Morden.”
“Baron’s Court.”
“Cockfosters.”
“Mornington Crescent.”
And the first player to arrive at Mornington Crescent wins.
Now the confusing thing is the rules. There are all kinds of variants of the game. Trumpington Variations, for example. Or the Tudor …read more

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Most London ghosts are fairly normal.   (Well, normal for ghosts.) Ghostly actors in the back of a theatre. Ghostly ladies in the Tower of London. The pub regular who loved his local so much he never left.
But here’s a great one. A ghost chicken.
Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, was an early scientist -  back in Shakespeare’s day. He was a real live wire, always experimenting with new things.  Coming back through Highgate in the snow, he had a bright idea; frozen chicken.  So he got his manservant to go and get a chicken; gutted it, plucked it, and shoved its …read more

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Most of us know the words to nursery rhymes – but few people track down what they originally meant.
It’s not always innocent. “Pop goes the weasel” is a song about poverty – and it can be very precisely located in North London.

Up and down the city road,

In and out the Eagle,
That’s the way the money goes,
Pop! goes the weasel.

Well the City Road is in Islington. And the Eagle is a well known pub on City Road. So ‘That’s the way the money goes’ – spending it on beer and, probably, gambling. Or, possibly, women.
As for the weasel going ‘pop’ – …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 City of London hides its medieval past quite well, partly due to the effect of the Great Fire of London which destroyed almost the entire city in 1666.
But if you look at a map, you can detect the medieval past in the twistiness of the streets, the absence of straight lines (and many that do exist, like Queen Victoria Street, are post-medieval), and above all, the street names.
Cheapside comes from the old English word ‘to cheapen’, meaning to bargain or to buy. It was the main market street, therefore – the place where things could be bought.
And you’ll see …read more

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If you thought it was safe to come out of your air raid shelter, you’re in for a big surprise!
Unexploded bombs have disrupted London’s transport today. London City Airport has been closed to traffic, since an unexploded bomb has been found on the Olympics site.
Meanwhile, another UXB at Bromley-by-Bow stopped the Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines last night.
We seem to be having a spate of UXBs at the moment – a mine was found near Felixstowe recently, and towed out to sea by the Navy before being destroyed. Here’s the official report, with some good pictures.
I wonder how …read more

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