A gateway on the past
This is an old familiar sight in the heart of London, just off Charing Cross and a stone’s throw (by catapult) from Trafalgar Square. It’s an imposing 17th century stone […]
Category Archives: London
Eros strikes again in London
Piccadilly Circus is at the throbbing heart of London and for years visitors have crowded under the statue of Eros, which was originally designed as an angel of mercy but […]
Fleeting time
I spent some of the best Friday evenings of my life walking home from London Bridge where I worked back to my flat in Pimlico in the 1980s. The route […]
Plague pits and theatrical ghosts in the West End
Most of the familiar but somewhat opaque names for different parts of London have real significance if you scratch the surface a bit. The Strand, for instance, is a name […]
Did Queen Boadicea catch the Hogwarts Express?
Some English monarchs have had a rotten deal in terms of their interment. Not all of them ended up in Westminster Abbey. The remains of Richard III were recently found […]
Tower of Lies
As I’m plodding through ‘Wolf Hall’ at the moment I thought I’d have a wander round the Tower of London again to absorb some Tudor atmosphere. It’s not difficult to […]
Humbug to commerce and ding dongs
I decided to try and get into something resembling a Christmas spirit by dropping in to a couple of local fetes at the weekend. The one at Bruce Castle was […]
Turn Again, Dick Head!
I was at the Whittington Hospital in Archway last week to discuss what to do about my five kidney stones. One of my neighbours, an elderly Irish lady called Madeleine, […]
Bridges and Bigots in London
I went for a meal at a Bengali restaurant on Butler’s Wharf alongside the Thames on Saturday night, for a friend’s wedding. His mum is Turkish, dad Bengali and wife […]
Egyptian revival in Hackney
Hackney’s not nearly as bad as it was when I lived round there in the early 1980s, and in fact has become quite the place to see and be seen […]
