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“Faces of London”

04.03.2009

In this edition

Understanding London	1
What to see	2

There is no London without the river Thames

What strikes visitors more than anything else about London is the sheer size of the place. Stretching for more than thirty miles on either side of the River Thames, and with an ethnically diverse population of just under eight million, it's Europe's largest city by far. Londoners tend to cope with all this by compartmentalizing the city, identifying with the neighbourhoods in which they work or live, and just making occasional forays "into town" or "up West", to the West End, London's shopping and entertainment heartland.
Despite Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish devolution, London still dominates the national horizon, too: this is where the country's news and money are made, it's where the central government resides and, as far as its inhabitants are concerned, provincial life begins beyond the circuit of the city's orbital motorway. Londoners' sense of superiority causes enormous resentment in the regions, yet it's undeniable that the capital has a unique aura of excitement and success - in most walks of British life, if you want to get on, you've got to do it in London.
For the visitor, too, London is a thrilling place - and after winning the right to stage the Olympics in 2012, the city is also in a relatively buoyant mood. The facelift that the capital has undergone over the last decade or so has seen virtually every one of London's world-class museums, galleries and institutions reinvented, from the Royal Opera House to the British Museum. The city now boasts the world's largest modern art gallery inTate Modern, the tallest observation wheel in the London Eye, and two fan-tastic new pedestrian bridges that have helped transform the south bank of the Thames into a magnet for visitors and Londoners alike. And after years of being the only major city in the world not to have a governing body, London now has its own elected assembly, housed in an eye-catching building within sight of Tower Bridge, and a mayor who's determined to try and solve one of London's biggest problems: transport.
In the meantime, London's traditional sights continue to draw in millions of tourists every year. Monuments from the capital's more glorious past are everywhere to be seen, from medieval banqueting halls and the great churches of Christopher Wren to the eclectic Victorian architecture of the triumphalist British Empire. There is also much enjoyment to be had from the city's quiet Georgian squares, the narrow alleyways of the City of London, the riverside walks, and the quirks of what is still identifiably a collection of villages. Even London's traffic problems ire offset by surprisingly large expanses of greenery: Hyde Park, Green Park and St James's Park are all within a few minutes' walk of the West End, while, further a field, you can enjoy the more expansive parklands of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.
You could spend days just shopping in London, mixing it with the upper classes in Harrods, or sampling the offbeat weekend markets of Portobello Road, Brick Lane, Greenwich and Camden. The music, clubbing are second to none, and mainstream arts are no less exciting regular opportunities to catch outstanding theatre companies, dance troupes, exhibitions and opera. Restaurants these days are an attraction, too. London has more Michelin-star establishments than Paris, as well as a vast range of low-cost, high-quality Chinese restaurants and Indian curry houses. Meannwhile, the city's pubs have heaps of atmosphere, especially away from the centre — and an exploration of the farther-flung communities is essenti to get' the complete picture of this dynamic metropolis.

What to see

“Faces of London”

London has grown not through centralized planning but by a process of agglomeration, meaning that though the majority of the city's sights are situated to the north of the River Thames, which loops through the centre of the city from west to east, there is no single focus of interest. Villages and urban developments that once surrounded the core are now lost within the amorphous mass of Greater London, leaving London's highlights widely spread, and meaning that visitors should make mastering the public transport system, particularly the Underground (tube), a top priority.
If London has a centre, it's Trafalgar Square, home to Nelsons Column and the National Gallery. It's also as good a place as any to start exploring the city, especially as the area to the south of here, Westminster and Whitehall, is one of the easiest bits to discover on foot. This was the city's royal, political and ecclesiastical power base for centuries, and you'll find some of London's most famous landmarks here: Downing Street, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey and, across St James's Park, Buckingham Palace. The grand streets and squares of St James's, Mayfair and Marylebone, to the north of Westminster, have been the playground of the rich since the Restoration, and now contain the city's busiest shopping zones: Piccadilly, Bond Street, Regent Street and, most frenetic of the lot, Oxford Street.
East of Piccadilly Circus, Soho, Chinatown and Covent Garden are also easy to walk around and form the heart of the West End entertainment district, where you'll find the largest concentration of theatres, cinemas, clubs, flashy shops, cafes and restaurants. Adjoining Covent Garden to the north, the university quarter of Bloomsbury is the traditional home of the publishing industry and location of the ever- popular British Museum, a stupendous treasure house that now boasts the

largest covered public space in Europe. Welding the West End to the financial district, Holborn is a little-visited area, but offers some of central London's most surprising treats, among them the eccentric Sir John Soane's Museum and the secluded quadrangles of the Inns of Court.
A couple of miles downstream from Westminster, The City - or the City of London, to give it its full title - is simultaneously the most ancient and the most modern part of London. Settled since Roman times, the area became the commercial and residential heart of medieval London, with its own Lord Mayor and its own peculiar form of local government, both of which survive (with considerable pageantry) to this day. The Great Fire of 1666 obliterated most of the City, and the resident population has dwindled to insignificance, yet this remains one of the great financial centres of the world, with the most prominent landmarks these days being the hi-tech offices of banks and insurance companies. However, the Square Mile boasts its share of historic sights too, notably the Tower of London and a fine cache of Wren churches that includes the mighty St Paul's Cathedral.
The East End and Docklands, to the east of the City, are equally notorious but in entirely different ways. Impoverished and working-class, the East End is not conventional tourist territory, yet to ignore it is to miss out a crucial element of the real, multi-ethnic London. With its abandoned warehouses converted into overpriced apartment blocks for the city's upwardly mobile, Docklands is the converse of the down-at-heel East End, with the Canary Wharf tower, the country's tallest building, epitomizing the pretensions of the 1980s'Thatcherite dream.
The South Bank, Bankside and Southwark together make up the small slice of Central London that lies south of

the Thames. The South Bank Centre itself, London's little-loved concrete culture bunker, is enjoying a new lease of life – thanks, in part, to the feel-good factor emanating from the graceful London Eye, which hangs over the Thames nearby. Bankside, the city's low-life t from Roman times to the eighteenth century, is also enjoying a millennial renaissance, with a new pedestrian bridge linking St Paul's with the former power Station that is now home to the Tate Modern, London's extraordinary museum of modern art.
In Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens you'll find the largest park in central London, a segment of greenery which separates wealthy west London from the city centre. The museums of South Kensington — the London from the city centre. The museums of South Kensington — the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum — are a must; and if you have shopping on your agenda you may well want to investigate the hive of plush stores in the vicinity of Harrods, superstore to the upper echelons.
Some of the most appealing parts of north London are clustered around Regent s Canal, which skirts Regent's Park and serves as the focus for the capital's trendiest weekend market, held around Camden Lock. Further out, in the chic literary suburbs of Hampstead and Highgate, there are unbeatable views across the city from half-wild Hampstead Heath, the favourite parkland of thousands of Londoners. The glory of southeast London is Greenwich, with its nautical associations, royal park and observatory (not to mention its Dome). Finally, there are plenty of rewarding day-trips Up the Thames from Chiswick to Hampton Court and, beyond, to Windsor, an area

that is liberally peppered with the stately homes and grounds of the country's royalty and former aristocracy.

A man who is tired of London is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.
Samuel Johnson