Sights in England
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Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey is such an important commemoration site for both the British royalty and the nation’s political and artistic idols, it’s difficult to overstress its symbolic value or imagine its equivalent anywhere else in the world. With the exception of Edward V and Edward VIII, every English sovereign has been crowned here since William the Conqueror in 1066, and most of the monarchs from Henry III (died 1272) to George II (died 1760) were also buried here.
There is an extraordinary amount to see here but, unless you enjoy feeling like part of a herd, come very early or very late.
The abbey is a magnificent sight. Though a mixture of architectural styles, it is c…
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Natural History Museum
This mammoth institution is dedicated to the Victorian pursuit of collecting and cataloguing. Walking into the Life galleries (Blue Zone) in the 1880 Gothic Revival building off Cromwell Rd evokes the musty moth-eaten era of the Victorian gentleman scientist. The main museum building, with its blue and sand-coloured brick and terracotta, was designed by Alfred Waterhouse and is as impressive as the towering diplodocus dinosaur skeleton in the Central Hall just ahead of the main entrance. It’s hard to match any of the exhibits with this initial sight, except perhaps the huge blue whale just beyond it. Children, who are the main fans of this museum, are primed for more pr…
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Tower Bridge
Perhaps second only to Big Ben as London’s most recognisable symbol, Tower Bridge doesn’t disappoint up close. There’s something about its neo-Gothic towers and blue suspension struts that that make it quite enthralling to look at. Built in 1894 as a much-needed crossing point in the east, it was equipped with a then revolutionary bascule (seesaw) mechanism that could clear the way for oncoming ships in three minutes. Although London’s days as a thriving port are long over, the bridge still does its stuff, lifting around 1000 times per year and as many as 10 times per day in summer. (For information on the next lifting ring 7940 3984 or check the bridge’s website.) The …
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St Paul’s Cathedral
Even the bombs of the Blitz couldn't erase the distinctive dome of London's most famous church. St Paul's was built by Sir Christopher Wren to replace the medieval cathedral destroyed in the Great Fire, but he had to sneak his plans for a dramatic dome past the City planners. Head to the crypt for memorials to famous Londoners and the Golden Gallery atop the dome for awesome City views.
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National Gallery
With more than 2000 Western European paintings on display, this is one of the largest galleries in the world. But it’s the quality of the works, and not the quantity, that impresses most. Almost five million people visit each year, keen to see seminal paintings from every important epoch in the history of art, including works by Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, Velázquez, Van Gogh and Renoir, just to name a few. Although it can get ridiculously busy in here, the galleries are spacious, sometimes even sedate, and it’s never so bad that you can’t appreciate the works. That said, weekday mornings and Wednesday evenings (after 6pm) are the best times to visit,…
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Tate Modern
The public’s love affair with this phenomenally successful modern art gallery shows no sign of waning a decade after it opened. Serious art critics have occasionally swiped at its populism, particularly the ‘participatory art’ exhibited in the Turbine Hall (Carl Höller’s funfair-like slides called Test Site; Olafur Eliasson’s arm-flapping The Weather Project; Doris Salcedo’s enormous crack in the floor called Shibboleth and Bodyspacemotionthing; and Robert Morris’ climbable geometric sculpture first exhibited in London in 1971 and recreated here in 2009). But an average five million visitors a year appear to disagree, making it the world’s most popular contem…
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Trafalgar Square
In many ways this is the centre of London, where rallies and marches take place, tens of thousands of revellers usher in the New Year and locals congregate for anything from communal open-air cinema to various political protests. The great square was neglected over many years, ringed with gnarling traffic and given over to flocks of pigeons that would dive-bomb anyone with a morsel of food on their person. But things changed in 2000 when Ken Livingstone became London Mayor and embarked on a bold and imaginative scheme to transform it into the kind of space John Nash had intended when he designed it in the early 19th century. Traffic was banished from the northern flank in…
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London Eye
It’s difficult to remember what London looked like before the landmark London Eye began twirling at the southwestern end of Jubilee Gardens in 2000. Not only has it fundamentally altered the skyline of the South Bank but, standing 135m tall in a fairly flat city, it is visible from many surprising parts of the city (eg Kennington and Mayfair). A ride – or ‘flight’, as it is called here – in one of the wheel’s 32 glass-enclosed gondolas holding up to 28 people is something you really can’t miss if you want to say you’ve ‘done’ London; 3.5 million people a year give it a go. It takes a gracefully slow 30 minutes and, weather permitting, you can see 25 miles in every directi…
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British Museum
One of London’s most visited attractions, this museum draws an average of five million punters each year through its marvellous porticoed main gate on Great Russell St (a few go through the quieter Montague Pl entrance). One of the world’s oldest and finest museums, the British Museum started in 1749 in the form of royal physician Hans Sloane’s ‘cabinet of curiosities’ – which he later bequeathed to the country – and carried on expanding its collection (which now numbers some seven million items) through judicious acquisition and the controversial plundering of empire. It’s an exhaustive and exhilarating stampede through world cultures, with galleries devoted to Egypt, We…
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York Minster
England's largest medieval cathedral and Yorkshire's most important historic building is the simply awesome York Minster that dominates the city.
The first church on the site was a wooden chapel built for the baptism of King Edwin on Easter Day 627; its site is marked in the crypt. This structure was sybolically built on the site of an earlier Roman Basilica, traces of which can be seen in the foundations. Fragments of a Norman church, built in 1080, can also be found below the Minster.
The present building, built mainly from 1220 to 1480, manages to represent all the major stages of Gothic architectural development. The transepts were built in Early English style between …
reviewed
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Science Museum
With seven floors of interactive and educational exhibits, the Science Museum is informative, entertaining and comprehensive. Be advised that it is slated to undergo a massive modernisation costing £150 million. Parts or all of the museum may be closed when you visit so call or check the website beforehand. The Energy Hall, on the ground floor as you enter, concentrates on full-sized machines of the Industrial Revolution, showing how the first steam engines such as Puffing Billy, a steam locomotive dating from 1813, helped Britain become ‘the workshop of the world’ in the early 19th century. Animations show how the machines worked and are accompanied by detailed overall …
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Buckingham Palace
Built in 1705 as Buckingham House for the duke of the same name, this palace has been the royal family’s London lodgings since 1837, when St James’s Palace was judged too old-fashioned and insufficiently impressive. It is dominated by the 25m-high Queen Victoria Memorial at the end of The Mall. Tickets for the palace are on sale from the Ticket Office at the Visitor Entrance, Buckingham Palace Rd. After a series of crises and embarrassing revelations in the early 1990s, the royal spin doctors cranked things up a gear to try to revive popular support, and it was decided to swing open the doors of Buck House to the public for the first time. Well, to 19 of the 661 rooms…
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Sir John Soane’s Museum
This little museum is one of the most atmospheric and fascinating sights in London. The building is the beautiful, bewitching home of architect Sir John Soane (1753–1837), which he left brimming with surprising personal effects and curiosities, and the museum represents his exquisite and eccentric taste. Soane was a country bricklayer’s son, most famous for designing the Bank of England. In his work and life, he drew on ideas picked up while on an 18th-century grand tour of Italy. He married a rich woman and used the wealth to build this house and the one next door, which was opened as an exhibition and education space in late 2007. The heritage-listed house is largely as…
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Shakespeare's Globe
If you love Shakespeare and the theatre, the Globe will knock you off your feet. This is authentic Shakespearean theatre, and a near-perfect replica of the building the Bard worked in from 1598 to 1611, that follows Elizabethan staging practices. The building is a wooden O without a roof over the central stage area, and although there are covered wooden bench seats in tiers around the stage, many people (there’s room for 700) like to do as the 17th-century ‘groundlings’ did, and stand in front of the stage, shouting and heckling. Because the building is quite open to the elements, you may have to wrap up. No umbrellas are allowed, but cheap rain coats are on sale. The the…
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Museum Gardens
A peaceful 4-hectare city-centre oasis which houses a wealth of medieval history, much of it in picturesque tatters. Assorted ruins and buildings include the Museum Gardens Lodge dating from 1874, and a 19th-century working observatory. The abbey ruins make a suitably evocative backdrop for the Mystery Plays held in the gardens every four years.
Take time out from York's summertime tourist hordes to wander past the abbey's Hospitium and Gatehall entrance, the Victorian Gothic Gardens Lodge and a VIP accommodation lodge dating from 1470. Then plunge into the Yorkshire Museum and its fine collection of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Viking and medieval remains. Pride of place goes to…
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St Margaret's Church
Oddities worth seeking out at grand St Margaret's Church include two extraordinarily elaborate Flemish brasses etched with vivid details of a peacock feast, strange dragon-like beasts and a mythical wild man. Outside by the west door there are also flood-level marks - 1976 was the highest, but the 1953 flood claimed more lives. Also remarkable is the 17th-century moon dial, which tells the tide, not the time and sports a cute dragon-head pointer and man-in-the-moon face.
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Borough Market
On this spot in some form or another since the 13th century, ‘London’s Larder’ has enjoyed an enormous renaissance in recent years, overflowing with food-lovers, both experienced and wannabes, and has become quite a tourist destination.
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Hampton Court Palace
Hampton Court Palace, the former palace of Henry VIII, is said to be stalked by the ghost of one of his six wives. Perhaps you’ll see her stalking through the regal state apartments or searching for her missing head in the famous palace maze.
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British Library
In 1998 the British Library moved to these spanking-new premises between King’s Cross and Euston stations. At a cost of £500 million, it was Britain’s most expensive building, and not one that is universally loved; Colin St John Wilson’s exterior of straight lines of red brick, which Prince Charles reckoned was akin to a ‘secret-police building’, is certainly not to all tastes. But even people who don’t like the building from the outside can’t fault the spectacularly cool and spacious interior. It is the nation’s principal copyright library and stocks one copy of every British publication as well as historic manuscripts, books and maps from the British Museum. The library…
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Churchill Museum & Cabinet War Rooms
Down in the bunker where Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his cabinet and generals met during WWII, £6 million has been spent on a huge exhibition devoted to ‘the greatest Briton’. This whizz-bang multimedia Churchill Museum joins the highly evocative Cabinet War Rooms, where chiefs of staff slept, ate and plotted Hitler’s downfall, blissfully believing they were protected from Luftwaffe bombs by the 3m slab of concrete overhead. (Turns out it would have crumpled like paper had the area taken a hit.) Together, these two sections make you forget the Churchill who was a maverick and lousy peacetime politician, and drive home how much the cigar-chewing, wartime PM was a cas…
reviewed
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Old Royal Naval College
When Christopher Wren was commissioned by William and Mary to build a naval hospital here in 1692, he designed it in two separate halves so as not to spoil the view of the river from the Queen’s House, Inigo Jones’ miniature masterpiece to the south. Today it also frames Canary Wharf and the skyscrapers of Docklands to the north. Built on the site of the Old Palace of Placentia, where Henry VIII was born in 1491, the hospital was initially intended for those wounded in the victory over the French at La Hogue. In 1869 the building was converted to a Naval College. Now even the navy has left and the premises are home to the University of Greenwich and Trinity College of M…
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Ely Cathedral
Not only dominating the town but visible across the flat fenland for vast distances, the ghostly silhouette of Ely Cathedral is locally dubbed the 'Ship of the Fens'.
Walking into the early 12th-century Romanesque nave, you're immediately struck by its clean, uncluttered lines and lofty sense of space. The cathedral is renowned for its entrancing ceilings and the masterly 14th-century octagon and lantern tower, which soar upwards in shimmering colours that are well worthy of a crick in your neck for gazing at them.
The vast 14th-century Lady Chapel is the biggest in England; it's filled with eerily empty niches that once held statues of saints and martyrs. They were hacked…
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Old Trafford (Manchester United Museum & Tour)
Home of the world’s most famous club, the Old Trafford stadium is both a theatre and a temple for its millions of fans worldwide, many of whom come in pilgrimage to the ground to pay tribute to the minor deities disguised as highly paid footballers that play there. Ironically, Manchester United are not as popular in Manchester as their cross-town rivals Manchester City, whose fans have traditionally regarded United’s enormous wealth and success in strictly Faustian terms. United fans snigger and dismiss this as small-minded jealousy, but they too have become disillusioned with the price of success and during the 2009–10 season protested vehemently against the club’s owner…
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Wallace Collection
Arguably London’s finest small gallery (relatively unknown even to Londoners), the Wallace Collection is an enthralling glimpse into 18th-century aristocratic life. The sumptuously restored Italianate mansion houses a treasure-trove of 17th- and 18th-century paintings, porcelain, artefacts and furniture collected by generations of the same family and bequeathed to the nation by the widow of Sir Richard Wallace (1818–90) on condition it should always be on display in the centre of London. Among the many highlights here – besides the warm and friendly staff – are paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Delacroix, Titian, Rubens, Poussin, Van Dyck, Velàzquez, Reynolds and Gainsborough…
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Museum Of Science & Industry
The city’s largest museum comprises 2.8 hectares in the heart of 19th-century industrial Manchester. It’s in the landscape of enormous, weather-stained brick buildings and rusting cast-iron relics of canals, viaducts, bridges, warehouses and market buildings that makes up Castlefield, now deemed an ‘urban heritage park’. If there’s anything you want to know about the Industrial (and post-Industrial) Revolution and Manchester’s key role in it, you’ll find the answers among the collection of steam engines and locomotives, factory machinery from the mills, and the excellent exhibition telling the story of Manchester from the sewers up. With more than a dozen permanent exhibi…
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