The “Dolphin” lamp standards have been burning gas for over 125 years Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the great Victorian engineer, has a very modest memorial. It is embedded in a mausoleum-like…
London
Trafalgar Square today with King Charles l looking down Whitehall towards his place of execution Nothing is quite what it seems in Trafalgar Square. It is umbilically tied to Nelson’s…
If the Thames is the bit of London that most Londoners take for granted then the Thames foreshore is the bit they would also take for granted if only…
Me (left) sampling Forty Hall – Chateau Tooting (centre) – and Olding Manor, right A highlight of my sojourn among English and Welsh vineyards last…
Georgian London, as Dan Cruickshank tells us, was partly constructed from the ill-gotten gains of the sex industry. But a shameful amount of the rest was built from the profits…
The next couple of days – it closes Sunday – afford a rare opportunity to see the innards of Battersea Power Station before it is converted into an £8bn complex…
Tail end of the queue to present grapes The scene could be a British B movie. A warehouse in South London. A chill October morning. Cars arrive. Packages are taken…
All Hallows – looking less hallowed in the shadow of the upwardly mobile “Walkie Talkie” building Walking in the crypt of All Hallows, the oldest church in the City close…
We hear a lot about new tech companies in London but a lot less about vineyard start-ups. So, a warm welcome – and as a vineyard it sure needs a…
Then Now If you enter the Royal Exchange building today – between the Bank of England and the Mansion House – you could be forgiven for wondering why this…
Taking The Bard for Granted (reprinted, courtesy of @LondonHistorian) by Victor Keegan In Staunton, Virginia there is a loving re-construction of the Blackfriars Theatre which after 1608 was the main…
The two great survivors of modernity in the City of London are the churches and the opulent halls of the livery companies. Although many were rebuilt after the…
Westminster Abbey, is too glorious (and expensive at £16 per adult) to fit our usual criteria of unusual places. But not so its less visited but delightful cloisters and grounds…
My curiosity about what happened to the stones from old London Bridge (the one with houses on top which was demolished in the 1830s after lasting over 600 years)…