themed London city walks
British life is full of riddles. So much so that sometimes it may seem as if it had been purposefully engineered to be misconstrued by naive visitors so that the British themselves can gently chuckle at these foreigners’ lack of sophistication and wit. The hidden rules of British life are as difficult to discern as…
When you are looking for a good restaurant in a strange and unfamiliar town, ask the locals: that is the Golden Rule Of How To Eat Well. It is an equally Golden Rule for picking the right hike. If you can, always ask your host: where do you go or take your family for a…
Some of the world’s great streets have made that leap from being famous for what they are to being famous for what they may never have been. Broadway houses many or perhaps even most of New York City’s playhouses, but its name has become synonymous for an entire type of theatre, and the Champs Elysees…
Street art works best as a visual counterpoint. It needs something it can aggressively challenge, an urban environment that provides some bite into which it can sink its sharp teeth. This is why street art looks best either in organically grown streets of historic buildings or in an architectural setting of geometrically austere glass-and-steel constructions….
William Shakespeare is arguably the world’s greatest writer, but he is also literature’s great man of mystery. We know almost all of his plays and poems, but little of the man himself. Unusually for a man of letters, we do not know his “philosophy” and where he stood on the great issues of the day…
A shrine for a world-famous pop star, the second largest private residence in London, the grave of London’s most iconic political émigré: you will come across all that and more in today’s walk – on top of some surprisingly wild scenery, so wild in fact that you would never expect to find anything like it…
One key difference between London and Paris is the pace at which these two largest cities in Europe change their face: in Paris, any such change is slow. Very slow. When I see photos of Parisian street scenes from the years before WWI, more often than not I can recognize the location. In London, conversely,…
Legendary towns have legendary streets and quarters. I have never lived in New York City, but I know what everybody knows: that Madison Avenue is a by-word for the country’s (and the world’s) advertising industry, that Broadway is the home of live entertainment and that Wall Street is the place from where the gangsters operate…
In our previous London spy walk on the trail of the Cambridge Five, we left off with Maclean and Burgess just about making it to Southampton for the day’s last ferry to France, never to return to the UK. The sudden disappearance of two middle-ranking foreign service officials, at least one of whom was under acute suspicion…
London may not be the world’s most beautiful city but it is probably its most storied. Almost every street corner has a story to tell: about rock music, Charles Dickens, Jack the Ripper and so on – the list of themes is virtually endless. London is also the capital of spy stories, and the most…