This home of purple is a terrific place to hang out ;-) great accessories including party balloons in abundance
One day this area so close to the sea will be well sort after, and is a long term investment, north of Christchurch Road less so
If you try to sit upstairs around 8.45pm you get told you're too late and have to sit downstairs.
I've eaten in a lot of Wetherspoons pubs and this one is consistently the best for food.
If you want to breathe fresh air, don't stand in or walk through here - almost everyone seems to smoke.
Westminster Abbey was built by Edward the Confessor and completed just before his death in 1065. Since William the Conqueror all the kings & queens of England have been crowned here.
Currently the third tallest Ferris wheel in the world (the tallest when built in 1999, but now behind Singapore and Nanchang), it moves at 0.6mph, and you can see 25 miles from the top.
Built in 1703 for the Duke of Buckingham, George III acquired it in 1762 as a private house. It became an official royal residence in the reign of Queen Victoria, when it was greatly enlarged.
The first national lottery was held in 1569, and the result was announced at the west door of (the old) St.Paul’s cathedral. It is unknown if the winner let it change him.
‘Soho’ is thought to come from the hunting and battle cry of the Duke of Monmouth, a local landlord. He used it at the Battle of Sedgemoor where he was defeated in 1685, and later executed.
No.10 was given to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first ‘prime minister’, by George II in thanks for his service. Walpole’s official title, First Lord of the Treasury, still remains on the letterbox.
Opened in 1881, the museum facade uses terracotta tiles which were resistant to the soot of Victorian London. The largest of the famous dinosaur skeletons in the central hall is a diplodocus.
The lion sculpture was once painted red and stood over the Red Lion Brewery on the South Bank in the 18th century. When the area was redeveloped in the 1950s the lion was saved and moved here.
The Mall took on its current form as a royal processional route around 1912. The palace approach was widened, and Admiralty Arch was built at one end and the Victoria Memorial at the other
London Bridge was once crowded with buildings and prone to fires. It survived the 1666 Great Fire because an earlier fire had destroyed houses at the north end, creating a fire break!
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Much of the collection was inherited from the Museum of Patents (est 1858) and includes early locomotives such as Stephenson’s Rocket and Puffing Billy, and the first jet engine.
This place is named after a cross put here by Edward I in 1290. He erected 12 crosses in all, each marking where his queen’s body rested overnight, en route from Lincoln to burial at Westminster.
Originally a deer park for Henry VIII, so he could hunt while staying at Whitehall Palace, the park was laid out in a formal style by Charles II, when Pepys came here to watch ice skating.
Yeah, it looks all shiny now, but go back 230 years and you'd be watching graverobbed corpses being dissected by the Hunter brothers. How quickly people forget.
Oxford Street’s biggest department store was opened by the American businessman Gordon J Selfridge in 1909, whose motto was ‘The customer is always right’.
To mark the 50th birthday of the Royal Air Force in 1968, Flight Lt. Allan Pollock flew his Hawker jet under the walkway of Tower Bridge. This unauthorised stunt won him a court martial.
In the 18th century the park was notorious for highwaymen and Horace Walpole was one of many robbed here. Handel’s ‘Music for the Royal Fireworks’ was composed for an event here in 1749.
The Bankside Power Station was built as a ‘cathedral of power’ in 1963, but closed in 1981. It reopened as one of Europe’s finest modern art galleries in 2000. The Turbine Hall is 35m high.
One of the gallery’s most famous pictures is the Chandos portrait, which is said to be of William Shakespeare by his friend Richard Burbage. But some dispute its provenance.
Take a few minutes, even in winter, to explore the central Rose Garden. Lots of flowers with silly names, and plenty of sculpture.
175-9 Oxford St, now a retail and office development, was in 1912 the site of the world’s first ever motor museum, and included Britain’s first ever petrol-engined car, the 1894 Bremer.
The second bridge here was completed in 1945. Because there was a war on, much of the work was carried out by women and so this used to be known as ‘the ladies’ bridge’.
This former power station was bought by the manufacturers of Oxo beef stock cubes in the 1920s. Can you spot how they managed to bypass advertising restrictions with their new tower?
In the area around here we saw 58% more threatened homelessness related problems than last year but enquiries about social housing rent arrears were down 18%.
