The London Traveler

Insider London is just launching a new tour – Innovative Interiors.
I blogged about Insider London’s green tours a while back. This new tour takes you from classic British design interiors to funky futurism – from clutter to minimalism and back again.
The tour takes in the high points of the West End, from Piccadilly, through Soho (home of the movie industry) to luxurious Mayfair.
Tourists are  promised, among other delights, an indoor thunderstorm and a golden cave.  With 15 sites visited, the three hour tour gives a fascinating view of the capital – and guide Cate Trotter can arrange cocktails or even …read more

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London has street cred. Some places have no street cred at all. In fact, London – the thriving, bustling metropolis – is ringed by towns with negative credibility.
Forty five minutes by train from any London station you find these places. Southend. Sidcup. Croydon. Harlow. Basildon.
What’s wrong with Basildon? 
It’s a ghastly place. A town in the middle of nowhere, among the muddy flat fields of Essex. Inhabited by no-hopers who can’t afford to move out. Where the shopping centre is the most interesting place you can go.
But one brave man is trying to  rehabiliate Basildon’s reputation. In fact, says Vin Harrop, …read more

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I’d heard quite a lot about Silvercane Tours – Simon Rodway’s special interest tours of London. He’s obviously quite busy at the moment, but he agreed to do an interview for The London Traveler about the mysteries of becoming a Blue Badge guide, his favourite sights in London, and his various tours.
LT: How did you first get interested in the history of London? (And are
you a Londoner – or did you grow up somewhere else?)
SR: I am a sufferer of ‘The Alexander The Great Syndrome’. Meaning, someone not born of the culture, but the biggest fan of it. I am …read more

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Images of London often feature red buses or black taxis. But a new colour is revolutionising the capital – green.
Ken Livingstone put London on the Green map with the amazingly energy-efficient ‘Testicle’  – City Hall. Now, Future London is launching a Green Tour of London. I spoke to Cate Trotter, who leads the tours.
LT – Where did the idea come from for your green tours?
Cate – I have a background in ethical marketing and ecological design, and since we do trend tours of London, I thought a green one would be exciting. We have plans for lots more.
LT – Who …read more

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I must admit I’ve never been that turned on by Harry Potter. I was brought up on Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, with a much smarter, much more interesting wizard, Ged, or ‘Sparrowhawk’. Yes, I did read the Harry Potter books- but I was soon back in Earthsea.
Still, there’s no denying that Harry Potter has a huge fan club. The other day I was going through King’s Cross Station and saw a load of people photographing a wall. Then I saw the sign they were photographing – platform 9 3/4, the platform from which Harry takes the Hogwarts …read more

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London has a rich history of espionage. From James Bond – currently being remembered by an Ian Fleming exhibition at the Imperial War Museum – to Burgess, Philby and Maclean (not to mention ’sleeper’ Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt), the city is full of spies and spymasters.
There’s now a spy trail of London which will help you view the sites of skulduggery.  In fact, two trails – one covering the Second World War, showing how the work of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) was crucial to beating Hitler, and one covering the Cold War.
On the Cold War …read more

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Sunrise and sunset on the Thames always make it special. Once or twice I’ve got up early so I can go and stand on Waterloo Bridge as the sun rises, tinting the grey river with pink and orange, softening the brutal lines of the South Bank and making the Shell Building look like a romantic fairy castle.
You can see Tower Bridge in a new light if you take one of Thames River Adventures’ canoe cruises.  Start off at five or six in the morning and canoe underneath the bridge as the sun rises.
At £70 per person, it’s not cheap – …read more

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Take a tour of Southwark today to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday.
Southwark was never part of the City of London. It was run by the Bishop of Winchester – and successive bishops seem to have decided to create an anarchic free-enterprise zone opposite the tightly regulated City. This paid them dividends – pleasure houses, theatres, bath houses (meaning roughly the same thing in Elizabethan London as in today’s San Francisco), bear baiting rings, and hundreds of taverns all paid rent to the enterprising bishops.
I must admit to a vested interest here – I’ve been researching Shakespeare’s Southwark for my own company, Podtours, …read more

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In a spare half hour recently I took out the ‘Blue Guide’ to London to flick through it. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but as I leafed through the book I began to feel that it was describing a different London from the one I knew.
It was a London that didn’t have Stoke Newington or the Edgware Road in it. A London without curry houses or balti places. A London without gurdwaras or mosques or black people or council estates. In short, it was London presented for the slightly literary traveller as a neat poached fillet – skinless, …read more

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The “24 Hour Museum” has a whole page full of themed walks and trails around London. One for the amateur of industrial and urban landscapes is the Brunel Docklands trail, with riverside vistas, a trip through the first ever underwater tunnel, and a few museums thrown in. More nature-loving minds will be attracted to the historic gardens and museums trail, or perhaps a visit to the hilltops of South London with views over the metropolis.
If you’re tired of sticking to the central areas of London and want to get out of the centre a bit, the twelve trails …read more

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