It was once a cacophonous pleasure zone with brothels, bear-baiting, gaming dens and four Tudor theatres: The Globe, The Rose, the Swan and the Hope. Shakespeare and Dickens lived here. Samuel Pepys watched the Great Fire light up the London sky from here in 1666. So, if you’re visiting London, make sure you visit Bankside…
Best Bookshop Cafes in London
Is there anything better than a good book and a slice of cake? I think not. London has some enchanting bookshops where you can practically curl up with your favourite tome and tuck into a delicious slice and a cuppa. Here are 12 of the best bookshop cafes in London. Bookshop with the best cake…
Strawberry Hill: Walpole’s Lost Treasures come home
How on earth do you track 150 paintings, sculptures, furniture and curiosities which were dispersed 176 years ago after the great “sale of the century?” You hire art super-sleuth Silvia Davoli, that’s how. And you know Horace Walpole would be tickled pink (or probably red, a colour he used lavishly and liberally) to see his…
Covent Garden in a day
Covent Garden is London’s living theatre, a canvas of the city’s enchanting past and its immersive present. It was once Nell Gwynn’s playground with her King, and home to the oldest theatre in London with its 500 ghosts of theatre past. Eliza Doolittle sold flowers to Mr Henry Higgins outside St Paul’s Church, the first…
10 children’s books set in London
As a young Parisienne, I would dream of floating across the Channel to London’s rooftops in the company of a sooty Bert and his Mary Poppins. Pan and Tinker Bell would whisk me over to Big Ben in the blink of a sleepy eye, and for breakfast, I would make marmalade sandwiches with Paddington Bear….
A London Literary tour for Kids
It’s time to hop into your winged slippers and take a trip round a magical London – one where childhood dreams never end. These London tales tell of a honey-loving bear from Harrods, an eccentric detective, boys with magic powers, giants and a Gothic vampire. So, without further ado, let’s take a swashbuckling, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious literary…
Dandy About Town
Bertie Wooster, Beau Brummel and Oscar Wilde are alive and well and living right here in the Big Smoke. My brother-in-law Daniel, who is a Major in a cavalry regiment in the British Army, took me on a Man about Town weekend together with some other Beaus and Berties who work for her Majesty’s pleasure….