Things to do in England
-
A
Westminster Abbey
If you're one of those boring sods who boast about spending months in Europe without ever setting foot in a church, get over yourself and make this the exception. Not merely a beautiful place of worship, Westminster Abbey serves up the country's history cold on slabs of stone. For centuries the country's greatest have been interred here, including most of the monarchs from Henry III (died 1272) to George II (1760).
Westminster Abbey has never been a cathedral (the seat of a bishop). It's what is called a 'royal peculiar' and is administered directly by the Crown. Every monarch since William the Conqueror has been crowned here, with the exception of a couple of unlucky Eds …
reviewed
-
B
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…
reviewed
-
C
Tower Bridge
London was still a thriving port in 1894 when elegant Tower Bridge was built. Designed to be raised to allow ships to pass, electricity has now taken over from the original steam engines. A lift leads up from the northern tower to the overpriced Tower Bridge Exhibition, where the story of its building is recounted within the upper walkway. The same ticket gets you into the engine rooms below the southern tower. Below the bridge on the City side is Dead Man's Hole, where corpses that had made their way into the Thames (through suicide, murder or accident) were regularly retrieved.
reviewed
-
D
St Paul's Cathedral
Dominating the City with a dome second in size only to St Peter's in Rome, St Paul's Cathedral was designed by Wren after the Great Fire and built between 1675 and 1710. Four other cathedrals preceded it on this site, the first dating from 604.
The dome is renowned for somehow dodging the bombs during the Blitz and became an icon of the resilience shown in the capital during WWII. Outside the cathedral, to the north, is a monument to the people of London, a simple and elegant memorial to the 32,000 Londoners who weren't so lucky.
Inside, some 30m above the main paved area, is the first of three domes (actually a dome inside a cone inside a dome) supported by eight huge …
reviewed
-
E
National Gallery
Gazing grandly over Trafalgar Sq through its Corinthian columns, the National Gallery is the nation's most important repository of art. Four million visitors come annually to admire its 2300-plus Western European paintings, spanning the years 1250 to 1900. Highlights include Turner's The Fighting Temeraire (voted Britain's greatest painting), Botticelli's Venus and Mars and van Gogh's Sunflowers. The medieval religious paintings in the Sainsbury Wing are fascinating, but for a short, sharp blast of brilliance, you can't beat the truckloads of Monets, Cézannes and Renoirs.
reviewed
-
F
Tate Modern
It's hard to miss this surprisingly elegant former power station on the side of the river, which is fortunate as the tremendous Tate Modern really shouldn't be missed. Focussing on modern art in all its wacky and wonderful permutations, it's been extraordinarily successful in bringing challenging work to the masses, becoming one of London's most popular attractions.
Outstanding temporary exhibitions (on the 4th floor; prices vary) continue to spark excitement, as does the periodically changing large-scale installation in the vast Turbine Hall. The permanent collection is organised into four themed sections, which change periodically but include works by the likes of Mark R…
reviewed
-
G
Trafalgar Square
Trafalgar Sq is the public heart of London, hosting rallies, marches and feverish New Year's festivities. Londoners congregate here to celebrate anything from football victories to the ousting of political leaders. The square is one of the world's grandest public places. At the heart of it, Nelson surveys his fleet from the 43.5m-high Nelson's Column, erected in 1843 to commemorate his 1805 victory over Napoleon off Spain's Cape Trafalgar. The square is flanked by splendid buildings: Canada House to the west, the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery to the north, South Africa House and the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields to the east. Further south stands Admir…
reviewed
-
H
London Eye
It may seem a bit Mordor-ish to have a giant eye overlooking the city, but the London Eye doesn't actually resemble an eye at all, and, in a city where there's a CCTV camera on every other corner, it's probably only fitting. Originally designed as a temporary structure to celebrate the millennium, the Eye is now a permanent addition to the cityscape, joining Big Ben as one of London's most distinctive landmarks.
This 135m-tall, slow-moving Ferris-wheel-like attraction is the largest of its kind in the world. Passengers ride in an enclosed egg-shaped pod; the wheel takes 30 minutes to rotate completely and offers 25-mile views on a clear day. Visits are preceded by a short …
reviewed
-
I
Topshop & Topman
Topshop is the it-store when it comes to high-street shopping. Encapsulating London’s supreme skill at bringing catwalk fashion to the youth market affordably and quickly, it constantly innovates by working with young designers and celebrities. It’s the store that famously runs the popular Kate Moss collection. It also does manicure/pedicure and hair-styling sessions, and you can have a consultation with a personal stylist and get tips from a shopping guru.
reviewed
-
J
Tsunami
The food at this celebrated restaurant exhibits the style and taste you'd expect from an ex-Nobu chef. The sushi is exquisite, but it's the more unusual dishes, like ebi prawns wrapped in Greek pastry and butternut squash, and especially the mint-tea duck with pear and sweet honey miso, that will really bowl you over.
reviewed
Advertisement
-
K
British Museum
The country's largest museum and one of the oldest and finest in the world, this famous museum boasts vast Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, European and Middle Eastern galleries, among many others.
Begun in 1753 with a 'cabinet of curiosities' bequeathed by Sir Hans Sloane to the nation on his death, the collection mushroomed over the ensuing years partly through the plundering of the empire. The grand Enlightenment Gallery was the first section of the redesigned museum to be built (in 1823).
Among the must-sees are the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics, discovered in 1799; the controversial Parthenon Sculptures, stripped from the walls of the …
reviewed
-
L
York Minster
Not content with being Yorkshire's most important historic building, the awe-inspiring York Minster is also the largest medieval cath- edral in all of Northern Europe. Seat of the archbishop of York, primate of England, it is second in importance only to Canterbury, home of the primate of all England – the separate titles were created to settle a debate over whether York or Canterbury was the true centre of the English church. But that's where Canterbury's superiority ends, for this is without doubt one of the world's most beautiful Gothic buildings. If this is the only cathedral you visit in England, you'll still walk away satisfied – so long as you have the patience to …
reviewed
-
M
Science Museum
With seven floors of interactive and educational exhibits, the Science Museum covers everything from the Industrial Revolution to the exploration of space. There is something for all ages, from vintage cars, trains and aeroplanes to labour-saving devices for the home, a wind tunnel and flight simulator. Kids love the interactive sections. There's also a 450-seat Imax cinema.
reviewed
-
N
Buckingham Palace
With so many imposing buildings in the capital, the Queen's well-proportioned but relatively plain city pad is an anticlimax for some. Built in 1803 for the Duke of Buckingham, Buckingham Palace replaced St James's Palace as the monarch's London home in 1837. When she's not off giving her one-handed wave in far-flung parts of the Commonwealth, Queen Elizabeth II divides her time between here, Windsor and Balmoral. If you've got the urge to drop in for a cup of tea, a handy way of telling whether she's home is to check whether the yellow, red and blue royal standard is flying.
Nineteen lavishly furnished State Rooms – hung with artworks by the likes of Rembrandt, van Dyck, …
reviewed
-
O
Sir John Soane's Museum
Not all of this area's inhabitants were poor, as is aptly demonstrated by the remarkable home of celebrated architect and collector extraordinaire Sir John Soane (1753–1837). Now a fascinating museum, the house has been left largely as it was when Sir John was taken out in a box. Among his eclectic acquisitions are an Egyptian sarcophagus, dozens of Greek and Roman antiquities and the original Rake's Progress, William Hogarth's set of caricatures telling the story of a late 18th-century London cad. Soane was clearly a very clever chap – check out the ingenious folding walls in the picture gallery. Tours (£5) are given at 11am on Saturdays.
reviewed
-
P
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…
reviewed
-
Q
Shakespeare's Globe
Today's Londoners might grab a budget flight to Amsterdam to behave badly. Back in Shakespeare's time they'd cross London Bridge to Southwark. Free from the city's constraints, they could hook up with a prostitute, watch a bear being tortured for their amusement and then head to a theatre. The most famous of them was the Globe, where a clever fellow was producing box-office smashes like Macbeth and Hamlet.
Originally built in 1599, the Globe burnt down in 1613 and was immediately rebuilt. The Puritans, who regarded theatres as dreadful dens of iniquity, eventually closed it in 1642. Its present incarnation was the vision of American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, who sa…
reviewed
-
R
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…
reviewed
-
S
Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s
This match made in heaven – London’s most celebrated chef in arguably its grandest hotel – will make you weak at the knees. A meal in the gorgeous art deco dining room is a special occasion indeed; the Ramsay flavours will have you reeling, from the pressed foie gras marinated in white port and the cannon of salt marsh lamb with crystallised walnuts and cumin, all the way to the cheese trolley, whether you choose the one with French, British or Irish number plates. Consider the six-course tasting menu (£80).
reviewed
-
T
Alma de Cuba
This extraordinary venture has seen the transformation of a Polish church into a Miami-style Cuban extravaganza, a bar and restaurant where you can feast on a suckling pig (the menu heavily favours meat) or clink a perfectly made mojito at the long bar. ¡Salud!
reviewed
Advertisement
-
U
St Margaret's Church
A patchwork of architectural styles, this church is worth a look for its two extraordinarily elaborate Flemish brasses. You can also see a remarkable 17th-century moon dial, which tells the tide, not the time. You'll find historic flood-level markings by the west door.
reviewed
-
V
Afghan Kitchen
This minute two-floor gem serves up some of Islington’s best-value and most interesting cuisine. It features traditional Afghan dishes such as qurma suhzi gosht (lamb cooked with spinach) and qurma e mahi (fish stew) alongside a generous vegetarian selection, including borani kado (pumpkin with yoghurt) and moong dall (lentil dhal). It’s absolutely brilliant value, and rightly popular so book ahead for the evenings.
reviewed
-
W
Fishworks
This Bath-based chain was London’s first truly French poissonnerie (fishmonger) with a restaurant attached, its entranceway counters piled high with shaved ice, crustaceans and fish. We return regularly, especially for the sublime Dartmouth crab eaten cold and the incomparable zuppa del pescatore (fisherman’s soup; £19), a symphony of delights from the deep. There is also a Marylebone branch.
reviewed
-
X
Camden Market
Although this market remains a top attraction, its heyday is a distant memory. Commercial tat has long taken over from the truly inventive, although you might find some good retro pieces. The place is busiest at weekends, especially Sunday, when the crowds elbow each other all the way north from Camden Town tube station to Chalk Farm Rd. It’s composed of several separate markets, which tend to merge.
reviewed
-
Y
Mildred’s
Central London’s most inventive veggie restaurant, Mildred’s heaves at lunchtime so don’t be shy about sharing a table in the sky-lit dining room. Expect the likes of roasted fennel and chickpea terrine and puy lentil casserole as well as more standard (and hugely portioned) salads and stir-fries. Drinks include juices, coffee, beer and organic wine.
reviewed
