Sights in London
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Royal Hospital Chelsea
Designed by Christopher Wren, this superb structure was built in 1692 to provide shelter for ex-servicemen. Since the reign of Charles II it has housed hundreds of war veterans, known as Chelsea Pensioners. They’re fondly regarded as national treasures, and cut striking figures in the dark-blue greatcoats (in winter) or scarlet frock coats (in summer) that they wear on ceremonial occasions.
The museum contains a huge collection of war medals bequeathed by former residents and you’ll get to peek at the hospital’s Great Hall refectory, Octagon Porch, chapel and courtyards. Opening times of the grounds vary wildly through the year, but they are usually open from 10am to…
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Clarence House
After his beloved granny the Queen Mum died in 2002, Prince Charles got the tradespeople into her former home and spent £4.6 million of taxpayers’ money reshaping Clarence House to his own design yet the public have to pay to have a look at five official rooms when royal residents are on holidays.
The highlight is the late Queen Mother’s small art collection, including one painting by playwright Noël Coward and others by WS Sickert and Sir James Gunn. The house was originally designed by John Nash in the early 19th century, but – as Prince Charles wasn’t the first royal to call in the decorators – has been modified much since. Admission is by timed tickets, which must…
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Queen’s House
The first Palladian building by architect Inigo Jones after he returned from Italy, what was at first called the ‘House of Delight’ is indeed far more enticing than the art collection it contains, even though it includes some Turners, Holbeins, Hogarths and Gainsboroughs. The house was begun in 1616 for Anne of Denmark, wife of James I, but was not completed until 1638, when it became the home of Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria. The Great Hall is the principal room – a lovely cube shape, with an elaborately tiled floor and the helix-shaped Tulip Staircase (named for the flowers on the wrought-iron balustrade) leading to a gallery on level 2, hung with…
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Serpentine Gallery
What resembles an unprepossessing 1930s tearoom in the midst of leafy Kensington Gardens is one of London’s most important contemporary art galleries. Artists including Damien Hirst, Andreas Gursky, Louise Bourgeois, Gabriel Orozco, Tomoko Takahashi and Jeff Koons have all exhibited here.
Every year a leading architect (who has never built in the UK) is commissioned to build a new ‘Summer Pavilion’ nearby, open from May to October. Reading, talks and open-air cinema screenings take place here as well. A new 880-sq-metre exhibition space, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, will open in 2012 in the Magazine, a former Palladian villa-style gunpowder depot on the far side…
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Ham House
Known as ‘Hampton Court in miniature’, Ham House was built in 1610 and became home to the first Earl of Dysart, unluckily employed as ‘whipping boy’ to Charles I. Inside it’s furnished with grandeur; the Great Staircase is a magnificent example of Stuart woodworking. Look out for ceiling paintings by Antonio Verrio, who also worked at Hampton Court Palace, and for a miniature of Elizabeth I by Nicholas Hilliard. Other notable paintings are by Constable and Reynolds. The grounds of Ham House slope down to the Thames, but there are also pleasant 17th-century formal gardens. Just opposite the Thames and accessible by small ferry is Marble Hill Park and its splendid…
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Isle of Dogs
Pundits can’t really agree on whether this is really an island; strictly speaking it’s a peninsula of land on the northern shore of the Thames, though without modern road and transport links it would almost be separated from the mainland at West India Docks. And etymologists are still out to lunch over the origin of the island’s name. Some believe it’s because the royal kennels were located here during the reign of Henry VIII. Others maintain it’s a corruption of the Flemish word dijk (dyke), recalling the Flemish engineers who shored up the area’s muddy banks.
The centrepiece of the Isle of Dogs is Cesar Pelli’s 244m-high Canary Wharf Tower, which was built…
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Museum of Garden History
In a city that offers the broad attractions of Kew Gardens, the modest Museum of Garden History housed in the church of St Mary-at-Lambeth is mainly for the seriously green-thumbed. Its trump card is the charming knot garden, a replica of a 17th-century formal garden, with topiary hedges clipped into an intricate, twirling design. Keen gardeners will enjoy the displays on the 17th-century Tradescant père and fils – a father-and-son team who were gardeners to Charles I and Charles II, globetrotters and enthusiastic collectors of exotic plants (they introduced the pineapple to London). Nongardeners might like to pay their respects to Captain William Bligh (of mutinous …
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St James’s Palace
The striking Tudor gatehouse of St James’s Palace, the only surviving part of a building initiated by the palace-mad Henry VIII in 1530, is best approached from St James’s St to the north of St James’s park. This was the official residence of kings and queens for more than three centuries.
Foreign ambassadors are still formally accredited to the Court of St James, although the tea and biscuits are actually served at Buckingham Palace. Princess Diana, who hated this place, lived here until her divorce from Charles in 1996, when she moved to Kensington Palace. Prince Charles and his sons stayed on at St James’s until 2004, before decamping next door to Clarence House,…
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St Bride’s, Fleet Street
Rupert Murdoch might have frogmarched the newspaper industry out to Wapping in the 1980s, but this small church off Fleet St remains ‘the journalists’ church’ – William Caxton’s first printing press was relocated to the churchyard after his death in 1500. Candles were kept burning here for reporters John McCarthy and Terry Anderson during their years as hostages in Lebanon in the 1990s, and a plaque commemorates journalists killed in the Iraq war alongside even more recent memorials. St Bride’s is also of architectural interest. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1671, its add-on spire (1703) reputedly inspired the first tiered wedding cake. In the crypt there’s a…
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Royal Academy of Arts
Britain’s first art school was founded in 1768 but the organisation moved here onlyin the fol-lowing century. The collection contains drawings, paintings, architectural designs, photographs and sculptures by past and present Academicians such as John Constable, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, JMW Turner, David Hockney and Norman Foster. Highlights are displayed in the John Madejski Fine Rooms, which are accessible by free guided tours (1 hr; h1pm & 3pm Wed-Fri, 1pm Tue, 11.30am Sat). The displays change regularly.
The rooms themselves are a treat; it was in the Reynolds Room for instance that Charles Darwin first presented his groundbreaking ideas on…
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Lord’s Cricket Ground
The ‘home of cricket’ is a must for any devotee of this peculiarly English game: book early for the test matches here, but it’s also worth taking the absorbing and anecdotal 90-minute tour of the ground and facilities. This interesting tour takes in the famous Long Room, where members watch the games surrounded by portraits of cricket’s great and good, and a museum featuring evocative memorabilia that will appeal to fans old and new. The famous little urn containing the Ashes, the prize of the most fiercely contested competition in cricket, resides here when in English hands. The ground itself is dominated by a striking media centre that looks like a clock radio, but you…
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Monument
Sir Christopher Wren and Dr Robert Hooke's huge 1677 column, known simply as the Monument, is a memorial to the Great Fire of London of 1666, whose impact on London's history cannot be overstated. Tens of thousands of Londoners were left homeless and much of the city was destroyed.
An immense Doric column made of Portland stone, it is 4.5m wide, and 60.6m tall – the exact distance it stands from the bakery in Pudding Lane where the fire reputedly started – and is topped with a gilded bronze urn of flames that some call a big gold pincushion. Although a midget by today's standards, the Monument would have been gigantic, and towered over London, when first built.
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Marble Arch
John Nash designed this huge arch in 1827. It was moved here, to the northeastern corner of Hyde Park, from its original spot in front of Buckingham Palace in 1851, when it was adjudged too small and unimposing to be the entrance to the royal manor. If you’re feeling anarchic, walk through the central portal, a privilege reserved by (unenforced) law for the royal family and the ceremonial King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery. A plaque on the traffic island at Marble Arch indicates the spot where the infamous Tyburn Tree, a three-legged gallows, once stood. An estimated 50, 000 people were executed here between 1571 and 1783, many having been dragged from the Tower of…
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Marble Hill House
An 18th-century Palladian gem, this majestic love nest was originally built for George II’s mistress Henrietta Howard and later occupied by Mrs Fitzherbert, the secret wife of George IV. The splendid Georgian interior contains some magnificent touches, including the hand-painted Chinese wallpaper in the dining parlour and some gorgeous furniture. The poet Alexander Pope had a hand in designing the park, which stretches leisurely down to the Thames.
To get there from St Margaret’s station, turn right along St Margaret’s Rd. Then take the right fork along Crown Rd and turn left along Richmond Rd. Turn right along Beaufort Rd and walk across Marble Hill Park to the house.…
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Golden Hinde
Okay, it looks like a dinky theme-park ride and kids love it, but stepping aboard this replica of Sir Francis Drake’s famous Tudor ship will inspire genuine admiration for the admiral and his rather short (average height: 1.6m) crew, which counted between 40 and 60. A tiny five-deck galleon just like this was home to Drake and his crew from 1577 to 1580 as they became the first sailors to circumnavigate the globe.
Tickets are available from the Golden Hinde Shop. On Sundays kids can party as pirates on deck; sleepovers on the gun deck (£39.95 per person) include grog, ship’s biscuits, a Tudor dinner and a breakfast of bread and cheese.
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Kensington Gardens
Immediately west of Hyde Park and across the Serpentine lake, these gardens are technically part of Kensington Palace. If you have kids, the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, in the northwest corner of the gardens, has some pretty ambitious attractions for children. Next to the playground is the delightful Elfin Oak, an ancient tree stump carved with elves, gnomes, witches and small animals.
George Frampton’s celebrated Peter Pan statue is close to the lake. On the opposite side is a statue of Edward Jenner, who developed a vaccine for smallpox.
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Florence Nightingale Museum
Attached to St Thomas’s Hospital, this small, recently refurbished museum tells the story of feisty war heroine Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), who led a team of nurses to Turkey in 1854 during the Crimean War. There she worked to improve conditions for the soldiers before returning to London to set up a training school for nurses at St Thomas’s in 1859. So popular did she become that baseball-card-style photos of the gentle ‘Lady of the Lamp’ were sold during her lifetime. There is no shortage of revisionist detractors who dismiss her as a ‘canny administrator’ and ‘publicity hound’; Nightingale was, in fact, one of the world’s first modern celebrities. But the fact…
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Pollock’s Toy Museum
Aimed at both kids and adults, this museum is simultaneously creepy and mesmerising. You walk in through its shop, laden with excellent wooden toys and various games, and start your exploration by climbing up a rickety narrow staircase, where displays begin with framed dolls from Latin America, Africa, India and Europe. Upstairs is the museum’s collection of toy theatres, many made by Benjamin Pollock himself, the leading Victorian manufacturer of the popular sets. Head up another set of stairs and you see tin toys and weird-looking dolls in cotton nighties. As you continue on the higgledy-piggledy trail of creaking stairs and floorboards, the dolls follow you with their…
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Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain
Opposite Kensington Gardens’ Serpentine Gallery and across West Carriage Dr is this memorial fountain dedicated to the late Princess of Wales. Envisaged by the designer Kathryn Gustafson as a ‘moat without a castle’ and draped ‘like a necklace’ around the southwestern edge of Hyde Park near the Serpentine Bridge, the circular double stream is composed of 545 pieces of Cornish granite, its waters drawn from a chalk aquifer more than 100m below ground.
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Wimbledon Common
Running on into Putney Heath, Wimbledon Common covers a staggering 460 hectares of southwest London. An astonishing expanse of open, wild and wooded space for walking, nature trailing and picnicking – the best mode of exploration – the common has its own Wimbledon Windmill, a fine smock mill (ie octagonal-shaped with sloping weatherboarded sides) dating from 1817, which now contains a museum with working models on the history of windmills and milling. It was during a stay in the mill in 1908 that Robert Baden-Powell was inspired to write parts of his Scouting for Boys. The adjacent Windmill Tearooms can supply tea, caffeine and sustenance.
On the southern side of the…
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Danson House
This Palladian villa was built by one John Boyd, an East India Company director, in 1766. A 10-year restoration to bring the house back to its original Georgian style was completed in 2005, aided by the discovery of a series of fine watercolours of the interiors by the second owner’s daughter, Sarah Johnston, in 1805. Highlights include the dining room’s numerous reliefs and frescoes celebrating love and romance; the library and music room, with its functioning organ; the dizzying spiral staircase accessing the upper floors; and the Victorian kitchens (open only occasionally). The English-style garden is a delight, and on the large lake in Danson Park, which is flanked by…
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O2 (Millennium Dome)
The 380m-wide circular Millennium Dome (renamed O2) cost £750 million to build and more than £5 million a year just to keep it erect. It closed at the end of 2000, having failed miserably in its bid to attract 12 million visitors, and was until 2007 for the most part unemployed. Since then it has hosted big acts like Madonna, Prince, Justin Timberlake and Barbara Streisand in its 23, 000-seat 02 Arena and soul, pop and jazz bands in the 2350-seat IndigO2. Massive exhibitions (Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, The Human Body) and sporting events have made their temporary homes here and there’s a slew of bars, clubs and restaurants sheltering under what was…
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Chelsea Old Church
This church stands behind a bronze monument to Thomas More (1477–1535). More’s body is thought to be buried somewhere within the church; his head, having been hung out on London Bridge, is now at rest far away in St Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury. Original features in the church include the Tudor More Chapel. At the western end of the south aisle don’t miss the only chained books in a London church (chained, of course, to stop anyone making off with them).
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Ragged School Museum
Both adults and children are inevitably charmed by this combination of mock Victorian schoolroom – with hard wooden benches and desks, slates, chalk, inkwells and abacuses – re-created East End kitchen and social history museum below. ‘Ragged’ was a Victorian term used to refer to pupils’ usually torn, dirty and dishevelled clothes, and the museum celebrates the legacy of Dr Thomas Barnardo, who founded this school for destitute East End children in the 1870s. The school closed in 1908 but you can experience what it would have been like on the first Sunday of the month, when a Victorian lesson in which ‘pupils’ (adults and children alike) are taught reading, writing and…
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Carlyle’s House
From 1834 until his death in 1881, the eminent Victorian essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle dwelled in this three-storey terrace house, bought by his parents when surrounded by open fields in what was then a deeply unfashionable part of town. The lovely Queen Ann house – built in 1708 – is magnificently preserved as it looked in 1895, when it became London’s first literary shrine. It’s not big but has been left much as it was when Carlyle was living here and Chopin, Tennyson and Dickens came to call.
Carlyle unsuccessfully soundproofed his attic room from the hullabaloo of street criers, organ grinders and Italian ice-cream sellers and against this acoustic…
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