CandyG

Hi guys,

I'll be in London for approximately 5 days (arriving on March 4th in the early am and departing on March 8th late at night) and was wondering if it was advisable that I buy the London Pass with transportation. I plan to visit a lot of tourist sights and figure the London Pass is a good buy.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm a big walker. I thought I would choose an area to walk around each day and take public transportation (or walk) back to where I'll be staying (haven't decided yet). Does this sound ok or are the sights in London (in each area) too far away from each other for me to spend the whole day walking? Will it be too cold at that time?

Thanks!

PalQ

I've walked around London for years - very walkable - most things of interest in fairly compact few-square mile area. Yes a great walking town. Don't miss the walk along the South Bank from London Bridge to the Eye Over London Ferris Wheel and beyond on riverside paths - a favorite promenade for locals.

TimS

Most of the major museums in London are free. The London Pass is only a good deal if enough places that do charge admission are on your "cannot miss" list and are covered by the pass. Otherwise, enjoy the free places and buy individual tickets as needed to the others.

enzian

On our last 3 trips to London, we walked everywhere---didn't use the Tube at all. We stay near Westminster Bridge. Here are our favorite walks:
1) The parks walk---starting at Birdcage Walk, through St. James Park, then Green Park, see Buckingham Palace, then continue on through Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Walk back through Belgravia.

2) Cross the Thames on Westminster Bridge, and walk the south bank walk to the Tate Modern. Cross back over the Millenium Bridge and back through Covent Garden and along the Strand to Trafalgar Square, and back along Birdcage Walk (not Whitehall, which is noisy and not pleasant for walking).

3) A loop up to the British Museum and back---lots of different routes for this one.

TimS

If you're flying in and out of Heathrow, I suggest you buy a pay-as-you-go Oyster card at the tube station at the airport and top it off with enough cash to cover the equivalent cost of two one-day zone 1-6 travelcards (for the 4th and the 8th) plus three one-day bus passes (for the 5th-7th). If you happen to take the tube on any of those middle days, you'll never be charged more than the equivalent of a one-day travelcard for whatever zones you pass through (probably only 1&2). Present your Oyster card at the airport and get back your deposit plus any money left on it. Visit www.tfl.gov.uk for more information.

sprin2

London is a great city for walking. Pick up a small map with all the streets, there are lots of fun passages and alleys to explore. I have a spiral bound Michelin map and love it. Some of the residential areas, Chelsea, along the canals, are great for walking too.

nytraveler

At that time of year London will probably be chilly - and possibly rainy - but not realaly cold.

London is a HUGE city and although it is walkable it requires alot of planning in grouping activities. We typically take the tube to our first sight of the day - then walk to all the other things of interest in the area that we have the strength for - than cab back to the hotel.

And that's just for the major tourist areas. Covering ALL of London by foot would take months.

TimS

I need to retract my recommendation of getting a pay-as-you-go Oyster card. I just read on another board that getting your deposit and any unused money back requires some paperwork and then you will be issued a check. (Not practical for visitors.) Instead, buy appropriate travelcards and/or bus passes.

Keith

The websites selling the London Pass are very misleading. They list attractions like The British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery. I bet that a lot of people buy the pass thinking they are purchasing admission to those museums, but the museums are already free.

At those attractions, what the pass is providing is admission to special temporary exhibits. There may be no special exhibits when you visit, or they may not even interest you.

Keith

PerfectJourneys

Hi Candy:
Here is a link to a great site with lots and lots of information on walks in and around London including nearest transportation, etc. I came across it some time ago and use it all the time for all types of information!

http://www.london-footprints.co.uk

Elainee

The LondonWalks organization with group walks, small fee takes you to places you would probably miss on your own and the guides as intelligent,knowlegeable. Also good for day trip out of town. They have website.

TimS

Okay. Now I may need to retract my retraction about the pay-as-you-go Oyster card. I read on still another board that you can get your deposit and any unused money back in cash. Who's right? I don't know. Simple solution: Ask at the first tube station you come to.

thursdaysd

You could also pick up one of Andrew Duncan's Walking London books & do your own guided walks.

CandyG

Thanks guys!

This is all great. I went to the bookstore and saw a couple of books re do-it-yourself walking tours so I'm going to go back and buy one. Also went tothe London Walks website and loved the idea!! I think I'll choose maybe 3 or four because there are so many interesting ones and they're really inexpensive (plus little chance I'll get lost...)

Thanks again!

ben_haines_london

Here are notes I wrote zsbout give years ago.

WALKS IN LONDON


TO SEE SOME ENGLISH HISTORY IN A WEEK IN LONDON

In January 1998 a couple wrote from the States. In a week in London the husband was keen to cover some English history, and his wife keen on the same, plus a chance to walk and to view handsome buildings and good townscapes. My comments may be of use to other enquirers. This website is for serious historians, who I am afraid will find little that is new. On the other hand, if they can improve and correct it I shall be glad.

[email protected]

I started by remembering that their joint interest was history, so I did not include beautiful views, fine buildings, famous tourist spots, and so on, unless they say something about our history. I drew up two lists. The first was places to reflect on major periods of the British past. The second was the same list, but turned into a programme from east to west, to stop them wasting time zig-zagging around London.
The order by period is this.
Museum of London: London's history from the old stone age to now
The Mithras temple: Roman
The Sutton Hoo ship burial, shown upstairs in the British Museum. Anglo Saxon
Tower of London: Norman
Westminster Abbey: medieval, various centuries
The Church of St Batholomew the Great: twelfth century
Temple Church: thirteenth century
Hampton Court: Tudor
The National Maritime Museum: seventeenth century
St Bartholomew's Hospital Great Hall: eighteenth century benevolence
Sir John Soane's Museum: eighteenth century taste
Dr Johnson's House: eighteenth century learning
Parliament: nineteenth century
Florence Nightingale Museum: nineteenth century
The National Portrait Gallery: mostly for the nineteenth century
The Cabinet War Rooms: mid twentieth century
Brick Lane: late twentieth century: a multi-cultural London

Now an order that cuts down travel time.

Day One. Start with a morning in the Museum of London, St Paul's tube, to get a picture of the last 2000 years. The museum is open weekdays ten to five fifty. After the museum take the Central line to Liverpool Street, and walk 300 yards east to Brick Lane, for a Bengali lunch. Or if you walk, leave the Museum of London. South on Aldersgate Street. First left at St Anne and St Agnes (Wren church: good music some lunchtimes) onto Gresham Street. See front of Guildhall, perhaps go in. Straight south down King Street and Queen Street to Victoria Street, turn left, and to the temple of Mithras. Up Victoria Street and Threadneedle Stytreet to the Bank of England (it has a small Bank museum, free). Turn south into Bartholomew Lane. Carry on south on the paved area east of the Royal Exchange. Turn east at Cornhill. Turn south at Gracechurch Street, then at once east through Leadenhall market (nineteenth century flamboyance: good lunches upstairs). At Lime Street turn north. Walk north east along Lime Street, St Mary Axe, Cutler Street, Harrow Place, Wentworth Street, and at Brick Lane turn towards the smell of curry.

If you want your curry very moderate you ask for Khorma, and a saucer of yoghurt. But the waiter will gladly advise you. Look at fellow lunchers: curry is now as British as fish and chips. Several kinds of curry that are favourites here are unknown in India. Go from Aldgate East tube to Tower Hill tube (only one stop, but it's a dull walk) and see the Tower, open Sunday and Monday ten to five, other days nine to five.

Day Two. Start at Farringdon or St Paul's tube, and see the Church of St Barthomolew the Great, and the Great Hall at St Barthomolew's Hospital. I think both are open about ten to four thirty. If you walk, go from St Barthomolews north through the Smithfield meat market, then west along Cowcross Street, on west along Greville Street, and see the jewellery quarter on Hatton Garden. Then one street eastwards to Leather Lane, turn south and walk through the market, cross the main road to no 24 High Holborn, and go into Barnard's Inn Hall, to see Gresham's College in the old Merchant Taylor's School. Carry south through the college yards, turn east, and you're in Fetter Lane. Walk south, and just after Bream's Buildings (on the right) turn east to Dr Johnson's House. After your visit there ask your way to the Old Cheshire Cheese, a pub he may have liked, but don't lunch there There's a better lunch upstairs in the Devereaux, just west of the Inns of Court. Carry on south to Fleet Street, turn west, and just after you pass Fetter Lane on your right you find Prince Henry's Room (which is Tudor) on the south side. At the next gateway turn south into Middle Temple Lane. Two courtyards down turn east to the court that has the Temple church, built by crusaders. After you see that leave westwards, walk through three courts, and ask any lawyer the way to the Devereaux pub for lunch upstairs. Then up the alley north to the Strand, see the front of the Law Courts, walk eastward by Bush House (with a BBC shop) and St Clement Danes (with a mounument to Polish airmen who fought beside our Few), past Somerset House (pop in to see the courtyard), straight through the Savoy Hotel to the Victoria Embankment Gardens (if you dare: if not drop down the Coal Hole), through those westwards to Villiers Street, and so to Embankment tube station.

Day Three. Start upstairs at the British Museum (tube Holborn) to see the Sutton Hoo ship burial, the funeral ship of an Anglo Saxon prince. If you've not read "Beowulf" you might try it now. You can spend days in the BM, but there's no point if you want a week of British history. The BM is open on weekdays ten to five. Go east along High Holborn (which is dull) to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and see Sir John Soane's museum. Now hop on a bus to Trafalgar Square: the best views from the bus are upstairs. If you bought it in England your tube and rail pass covers busses too. If you walk, go west along Remnant Street, Great Queen Street, and Long Acre to Covent Garden tube station, drop south into Covent Garden, and then walk west along Maiden Lane, Chandos Place, and William IV Street, to come out opposite the National Portrait Gallery.

With only a week, every minute will count. It might be that from some places your wife should leave two hours before you do, carrying the street atlas, and walk to the next historical building, whereas you take a tube or bus there, and meet her there. You'd have to agree a place and time of meeting. An example is British Museum to National Portrait Gallery: your wife could see Convent Garden at length, skip Sir John Soane's Museum, and meet you in the National Portrait Gallery.

Day Four. Westminster Abbey, which I think is open from nine to four thirty. The Cabinet War Rooms, west of Whitehall along King Charles Street, open weekdays 9.30 to 6. Parliament. There's a good weekday lunch upstairs in the Two Chairmen pub on Queen Anne's Gate, a block from St James' Park tube station. The landlord tells me that he gets Members of Parliament in, a fact which may add atmosphere. If you walk, then between the Cabinet War Rooms and the Two Chairmen you can visit the lake in St James' Park. If you take a couple of slices of hotel bread Her Majesty's ducks will be glad.

Walk over Westminster Bridge (Do you know Wordsworth's Ode from there ?), and on the south bank, in the end of St Thomas' Hospital nearest the bridge, is the Florence Nightingale Museum. After you finish there you can reach the Albert Embankment riverside walk, and walk south to Lambeth Bridge: by Lambeth Palace you have the classic tourist view of the Palace of Westminster.

Day Five. The Science Museum, open weekdays ten to six. Also your choice of a nearby spot: Kensington Palace, the Victoria and Albert Museum, or the Natural History Museum. A good lunch six doors from South Kensington tube station is Polish, the Daquise Restaurant. Those streets also have ethnic cooking from about five countries.

Your wife might leave you to the entrance hall of the Science Museum, miss it and walk to the Round Pond. There she would see boys of all ages sail toy boats, and the Arab and Philipino mothers and nannies of London airing their charges, and their opinions. There are few languages we don't speak in London. She'd then see Kensington Palace (open nine to five, Sundays eleven to five), and four hours later she'd meet you on one of the benches back in the same entrance hall

Day Six. A train from Waterloo Station to Hampton Court Palace, open Tuesdays to Sundays 9.15 to 4.30. I think they sell a combined train and entry ticket at Waterloo.

Day Seven. A boat from Embankment along the river to Greenwich, to see the National Maritime Museum and perhaps the Royal Observatory. They are open daily ten to five. All three pubs in the old market at Greenwich do lunches, but the best is in the Mitre pub, next to the splendid St Alphege Church. Come back by train to Charing Cross. Or if you want to think a little about Amrican history, take a late afternoon bus two miles upstream to Rotherhithe, and see the outside of the Church of St Mary Rotherhithe and the inside of the Mayflower pub (the quality of their supper is variable). It was here that the Pilgrim Fathers took ship for Holland and so for New England.

I'll add one half day for a walk with no museum visits -- perhaps the afternoon and early evening of your Greenwich day or your South Kensington day. It is simple. You start at Charing Cross Main Line station, go to the gate of platform one, turn left and then right and walk along a high-level pedestrian path above Villiers Street, beside the railway line. Cross the Thames, and as soon as you can take the steps to your left. Walk downstream, in front of the Royal Festival Hall and Queen Elizabeth Hall. Drop to the Albert Embankment, and carry on walking downstream, with stops for coffee in pubs, or something stronger. At Southwark Cathedral (which you might well visit: fine, and little known) turn left into Montague Close, walk under London Bridge, and carry on downstream. At Tower Bridge (if you go so far) climb up to the bridge, walk over the Thames, and take the tube. This walk takes you by some of our finest buildings, and there are no motor cars.

To enjoy walks you need the most detailed map you can find of central London. I have beside me the A-Z Visitors' London Atlas and Guide, 2 pounds 95, spiral bound, and very small (no weight to carry around). Or for the embankment walk you could be guided, for four pounds each: details are in the events magazines "Time Out" or "What's On in London" which you can buy at the news desk in the concourse of the airport you arrive at. They make good reading on the dull train into the West End. But I'd vote for taking the little atlas and guiding yourselves.

The one week two zone pass for tube, bus, and local trains including that to or from Greenwich costs 17 pounds a person, plus a passport photo each. You can buy it at the tube station in Heathrow, the rail station in Gatwick, or at any rail or tube station.

You'll see that this is by no means a standard tour of famous sights. Rather, it is a meditation on how we came to be the people we now are. I expect questions will arise: please feel very welcome to write to me.

In summer 2001 I wrote these notes:

FROM NEAR VICTORIA STATION

Across the road the Royal Mews, with the royal coaches.
Next, Buckingham Palace, thoroughly boring, with the hanging of the guard, which you wait for for ages and then cannot see
Along Birdcage Walk the Guards Museum and their chapel
Ten minutes further along Birdcage Walk, up Cockpit Steps, the Two Chairmen pub, eighteenth century, with decent lunch (all ages) and supper (adults only)
Just south of there, St James Park tube station, with an interesting shopful of tube and bus souvenirs
Back in the park, the lake, to admire the Queen's ducks. If the hotel gave you some bread you can feed them, too: the Queen doesn't mind
At the eastern end, the Cabinet War Rooms, redolent of Winston Churchill

Now we'll diverge in front of the Palace, walk a little way along the tedious Mall, turn left, and pass St James Palace. If you turn left again here you can inspect the boots of the Guardsman on duty. They should shine like glass. Now a shopping walk. Up St James past Lobb's hatters and Berry's wine merchants (both By Appointment). A view of The Economist's new building and some eighteenth century gentlemen's clubs. Round here are Spinks, for medals, and Sotheby's, for profits. A right turn along Jermyn Street takes you to the people who sell me club ties, in silk, and Paxman's delicious cheese shop. Across from them is St James Church, eighteenth century, good for lunchtime recitals. If you walk straight through that you're in Piccadilly, now overfull of airline offices. No matter, turn back, left from St James churchyard, and you can look into the Princess Arcade, and on the other, north, side of Piccadilly at The Royal Academy and then the Burlington Arcade, where you may not whistle. From the far or northern end of that you can zigzag to the Royal Arcade, with the silver shop that sold me my cutlery -- right out of my class, of course, but I see it as an investment. You must ring the bell to go in.

This time, we'll diverge south from the palace, along Buckingham Gate, cross the boring postwar Victoria Street (but pause to admire the Albert pub: good meals upstairs and down), and walk among the rich politicians' houses of Great Peter Street with a diversion into the street market on Strutton Ground to Tufton Street. Turn left, or north, here, pass a small gateway, and you're in Dean's Yard. Turn right, or westwards, into a medieval passageway and you're in the Abbey cloisters. If you walk quietly, disturb nobody, and observe any "private" signs you're among clergy houses and School buildings. Then, I imagine, you might go to the House of Commons to ask the policeman on the door whether you may see Westminster Hall. If not, cross the river as a consolation prize, and see the Florence Nightingale Museum at the eastern end of St Thomas Hospital (where my father taught anatomy before Hitler's war).



THE STRAND a three hour walk

You remember from the first chapter of your guide book to London that like Zagreb and Berlin London grew around two medieval centres, in London the City for living, making, and trading, and Westminster for praying and ruling. Each was on the Thames, and the rich, like the kings and Thomas More when Lord Chancellor, moved between them by boat. But the ordinary people walked between them along the northern shore (strand) of the river. You know the word strand from Lewis Carol: "and hand in hand on the edge of the strand they danced by the light of the moon". You know too that we Londoners get bored if a street runs more than a mile without changing its name, so from Westminster we walk along Whitehall (once the king's white hall, as bit like the White House, but a few centuries older), the Strand, and Fleet Street (the street that ran from the Vikings' Old Wyke (Aldwych) to the stinking Fleet ditch, now a clean-smelling railway line with a fine modern art deco station at City Thameslink, a kind of New York Central in miniature.

The mid stretch, the Strand, is as people have said. Space was tight inside the walls of the City, so great and powerful men built their own enclosures or mini-palaces between the Strand and the river. Care for a walk ?

As good democrats we want to walk downstream, from royal power to bourgeois democracy. On the left is St Martin in the Fields. I told you the two settlements had space between them, and St Martin's was in the fields. It is good for lunch in the crypt, but the evening concetrts are poor. A little along is the new monument to Oscar Wilde, quite disintegrating, and I think well done. In part it is a bench to sit on. Over the road is the Victorian grandeur of Charing Cross station (trains for Dover and the Continent) and the station frontage, which is the Charing Cross Hotel. If you ask politely you can walk up the grand staircase to see the still grander Betjeman restaurant, with a good carevery. You can see the rooms only if you book there, but the chain, Thistle Hotels, may have current special offers, and it is a good choice. If one shoe of yours is stolen there you need to worry: that is how all that trouble started in first chapter of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in the same hotel. Left of the hotel is a pedestrian street, Villiers Street, down to the river and boats to Greenwich, passing (but I seldom pass) Gordon's wine bar, and in summer to the bandstand for lunchtime music. I once saw a two-hour display of Egyptian belly dancing by London housewives, with their faces covered in beaded yashmaks, and their large and versatile tums all that Rubens could have wished. OK, eyes down, back to the Strand and downstream. Villiers is the family name of the Dukes of Buckingham, whose ornamental water gate is just by the wine bar. At Durham House Buildings you stand by the former London palace of the Bishops Palatine of Durham, whose courts and the king's courts were the only ones in medieval England with the right to condemn to death. Those bishops were not too strong on the sermon on the mount. Well, they could not be: there were rogue Scots cattle thieves just over the border, for whom hanging alone was good enough. You can see there the back door to the Royal Society of Arts, a set of fine town houses, dedicated for the last 2 ½ centuries to the promotion of arts, manufactures and commerce. Benjamin Franklin was a Fellow, and remained so throughout the incidents of 1789. Many fellows felt as he did that there should be no taxation without representation. Their free public lectures now are good, if you can get a ticket: please see http://www.indiana.edu/~victoria/lectures.html. To the left of the Strand are narrow seventeenth century lanes up to Maiden Lane, home of the expensive, unfashionable, eighteenth century, and good Rules restaurant. Please book ahead, and men please wear a tie. On the Strand itself, to the right, is a similar but Victorian restaurant, Simpsons in the Strand. Then almost at once you are at the entry to the Savoy Hotel, reached by the only twenty yards of road in London where you drive on the right. Here the great of Wall Street and Hollywood gathered between the wars to take the world's fastest and grandest ships to New York, starting with a Pullman boat train from Waterloo over the river. If you have the chutzpah you can walk into the Savoy from the Strand, and leave it two floors down by the riverside garden door. Just beyond it, buried in the buildings, is a medieval chapel, the Savoy Chapel. The hotel and the chapel are both named for Savoy, whose rulers had their London connection here. The chapel is a Royal Peculiar, like Westminster Abbey and the Chapel of Peter ad Vincula in the Tower, which means that the Queen appoints the clergy there. Of her courtesy she now asks the Bishop of London to help, but she does not have to. (Of course, she must ask Tony Blair). Carry on, and the road on the right to Waterloo Bridge is called Lancaster Place, because it was the London territory of the Dukes of Lancaster (York Buildings are a less distinguished street to the west, and as the play Richard III tells you the two Dukes gave up fighting at the Battle of Tewksbury in 1485). If you cross Lancaster Place and walk riverwards a little you can walk down a slope to the newly re-opened Somerset House, good for jewels, Russian treasures, French impressionists, in summer for ornamental fountains and in deep winter for open air ice skating. Next building along is Kings College, with a huge chapel on the first floor, designed to mark the Anglican (that is, Episcopalian) character of the college, in contrast to its contemporary rival, University College, which accepted Methodists, Presbyterians, and even Unitarians, had no chapel, and was called Godless Gower Street. Buried in the college is a grubby street with a grubby window behind which you can discern a grubby Roman bath, in situ 1800 years. Next comes modern Surrey Street (the land of the Earls of Surrey: an old Italian family serve proper tea, no teabags, in their café beside Temple underground station), Arundel Great Court (the land of the Earls of Arundel) and the old church of St Clement Danes. Danes because as I said the Vikings or Danes settled here in their Old Wyke in the ninth century. They did not want to settle in the ruins of Roman London: too untidy. The church features in the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons, and now marks the sacrifices of young World War Two pilots who defended us against Hitler. It has a fine interior, always staffed, and you can ask to see the floor monument to the free Poles who flew furiously to honour their oppressed country. West of the church is on your left stand the Royal Courts of Justice, a Victorian extravaganza featuring the lawgivers Moses, Jesus Christ and King Alfred on pedestals, on your right the entrance to Devereaux Court and the lawyers' space of the Temple (good lunch at the Devereaux Arms: medieval Templar church in a courtyard), and straight ahead a large statue of a griffin. The griffin is the heraldic supporter of the arms of the City of London, and here the Queen must stop for the Lord Mayor to admit her to his free city. It is not just Benjamin Franklin who wanted monarchs kept in their place.


FROM BLACKFRIARS TO BRICK LANE, another three hour walk

Start up at the station concourse of Blackfriars main line station, above the Circle Line. On the west wall of the concourse you see the destinations list from some 120 years ago, when the Company Directors saw this unlikely spot as departure point for Chatham and for St Petersburg. While there was a city of Leningrad the carved stone remained unchanged -- you could say a long-term approach to save money.

Stay at that level, walk eastwards, and you reach a modern wooden sculpture, a totem pole, of the seven ages of man. Drop to the street, admire the pub over the road, cross Victoria Street, go left of the Church of St Andrew by the Wardrobe. It's beside the place where in the middle ages the royal court kept linen and crockery that they didn't need just then. Up St Andrews Hill, turn right, Ireland Yard, Playhouse Yard (from before the Shakespeare time when a Puritan City closed playhouses and sent the actors to the stews of Southwark), and find the door of Apothecary's Hall. The Apothecary's are one of the Livery Companies, and still licence people to practise medicine (though if course not surgery: that belongs to the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons). Now up Black Friars Lane and turn right onto Carter Lane (so called because that's where carts full of goods for and from the City of London rolled to and from the riverside quays and inlets). There are a good grocer, little lanes, and pubs to your right, but it's a bit early yet for a pint, and a cup of coffee in the youth hostel on your left will be a better choice. The hostel is the former Cathedral choir school, converted.

Carry straight on eastwards on Carter Lane, and go into the City of London tourist information kiosk to see what lunchtime music there is at St Anne and St Agnes next day. Out again, and ever eastwards. Turn left at New Change, look behind you to enjoy the 20 year old ornamental clock, and almost at once turn right into Watling Street. You're now on a Roman road. We haven't too many of these. We think that, as in Chester, when Roman buildings collapsed to rubble about the fifth century they made great heaps in the roadway, so it was easier for Saxons to walk parallel to the Roman streets. You'll see that the City of London is still rectangular in layout, as a Roman city should be: the diagonals like Queen Victoria Street are all Victorian aberrations. I'd quite like to close them, and plant gardens there. But a few medieval lanes do coincide with Roman streets. At Bow Lane divert two minutes left, to Bow Church, which serves good vegetarian lunches, looks well, and features in the rhyme "Oranges and Lemons." Now go back down Bow Lane, 200 yards, round St Mary Aldermanbury Church (and pop in, perhaps), and walk up Queen Victoria Street to the Temple of Mithras. We found this only forty years ago. Mithras was a Persian god, brought west by Roman soldiers, and for about a century he ran neck and neck in popularity with Christianity.

A few yards further up Queen Victoria Street, turn right into Bucklersbury, along St Stephen's Row, Mansion House Place, St Swithun's Lane, admire the church with a tube station in the crypt, and as Elliot says in The Waste Land a dead sound at the stroke of nine. Circuit it, and you're on Lombard Street. Lombard, because in the fifteenth century Lombards, people from Milan, Verona, and Padua, came to trade and to found banks. You'll see the many hanging signs of the banks we have now on the street. You realise that the whole rich City around you depends on the need for bankers to meet and talk. If they ever took to video conferencing we'd be in trouble. Even as it is, retail banking is in decline, and you'll have noticed grand bars that are converted banks. Turn right into Pope's Head Alley, skirt the eastern end of the Royal Exchange (founded by Thomas Gresham in the seventeenth century to compete in commodities with Amsterdam, now good for specialist hops), and reach the Bartholomew Lane side of the Bank of England. The small museum there is worth a good look.

Back along the same side of the Royal Exchange, over Cornhill, Birchin Lane, Castle Court, Bell Inn Yard, cross Gracechurch Steet, into Bulls Head Passage, turn left on Lime Street, and into Leadenhall Market, a fine Victorian covered market, painted up like billyo. Those who know the first Harry Potter film will delight to see the corner through which he goes to the market street for his school neccessities – blazer, wand, and so on). In the market turn right, along Leadenhall Place, and at Lime Street (ah, but a different Lime Street) turn left around Lloyds Building, a post-modern thing, onto Billiter Street. Turn right on Leadenhall Street, and take the first right, St Mary Axe, around St Andrew Undershaft church. Look out for St Helen's Bishopsgate church on your left, one of the few gothic churches we still have: the Fire didn't reach it. Walk past it to Bishopsgate. Turn right up Bishopsgate, and drop into Liverpool Street station to admire the roof. After the disgrace of the destruction of classic Euston, this was the first triumph of preserving Victorian station Gothic on the grand scale.

Leave the station, carry on up Bishopsgate, and at the Bishopsgate Institute turn right into Brushfield Street. Admire the fine front doors of the little Hugenot houses of Spitalfields, now under renewal and repair. The Hugenots were Protestants who fled to us in 1689, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and brought with them the knowledge of fine spinning and weaving. They were thus the first big waves of immigrants in modern times. (If idiots say "The British race" I want to know "What British race ?&quot. Wander into and out of Spitalfields Market, cross Commercial Street, and you'll see Christ Church Spitalfields, one of the Waterloo churches built abut 1817 to celebratethe defeat of the French (who were, of course, foreigners and thus thought suitable to be defeated) and to help civilise the slum dwellers of the new Dickensian slums that were growing up all around the inner suburbs. Walk along Fournier Street to Brick Lane and turn left around the mosque. Smell something ? But first, look at the clothes, the gorgeous saris, and go into any supermarket to see mangoes of more kinds than you knew could grow. OK, now your reward. Find a restaurant you like the look of, take advice from the waiter, and have yourself a lager and a curry. Marks and Spencer sell more chicken tikka massala than any other ready-made meal. When Marks and Sparks announced closure in France, troubled British customers rushed along to stockpile ready-made curries. As you look around in the restaurant, you'll see London, my London, any colour, any language, any age.

So thanks for coming with me.

Ben Haines
[email protected]

noe847

I am going to be in London for 6 days in early March also. Thanks, Ben Haines, for the treasure trove of information. I will use it as I plan my routes.

I have the old Cadogan Guide by Andrew Gumbel, from around 1998. It is mostly a book of 10 walks, arranged by parts of the city. Very well done, with nice routes and tons of information and stories. I found my copy at www.abebooks.com, a great source for second hand books. The new Cadogan Guide is not organized the same way.

fromMA

Kristin,

What a great website! Thanks for the addy.

nospam

I just got back from London. With respect to the Oyster card:
1. It is a pre-paid type of card that you swipe each time you use the Tube or the bus system. One swipe automatically deducts the cost of a trip.
2. You can get an Oyster card as a tourist, but this means lining up for up to an hour, filling out a form, and paying a 3 pound deposit for the card, which is refundable on its return.
3. You can pay as you go -- charge up the card at any automatic ticket dispensor.
4. The costs are mainly with respect to single trips -- Oyster users pay 1.50 pound per trip vice 3 pounds. BUT a day pass for the tube IF you use it after peak hours is 4.90 pounds.
5. You can buy a day/week bus pass as an alternative.

Personally, I walked EVERYWHERES in London, but don't forget that you will also be spending hours on your feet in various Museums. This can add up. I found that buying a daily bus pass was worth it at 3.50 pounds, as when I got tired, I could jump on a double-decker, give my feet a rest, and still see the city.
Have fun!