Craig Cross's Blog, page 11

London blog: Piccadilly Circus

When I used to fly home from faraway places I'd jump on the tube from Heathrow airport and spill out here in the middle of the night. You come up the station stairs staring at the neon lights, everyone's milling around the West End after the pubs have shut, after their show has ended, it's freezing cold all of a sudden after sitting on that tube train for fifty minutes, and you've got all the bright lights and double decker buses with their icy white exhausts tearing round the fountain....

London blog: Ripley's Believe It Or Not!

This is a tourist trap. Don't get trapped. End of review. It exists for one purpose only: to suck the money out of your wallet. Your kids will see it, want to go, want to visit, yeah yeah yeah, take us mum! take us dad! They'll badger you until you relent... and two hours later they'll come out sighing 'that was rubbish' and you'll be ninety quid worse off and still have half a day of sightseeing ahead of you. And I'm not exaggerating about that price, either -- if you buy your tickets on...

London blog: Buckingham Palace -- Summer Opening

There's an excited line of tourists outside Buckingham Palace. Half of us are dressed for a society ball and the other half the shops. There are people here who seem to believe you need to dress up to get inside. (Trust me, you don't.) The Queen must dread the Summer Opening. It's a bit like having a million in-laws come round your house at Christmas. But she's got a big advantage over the hoi polloi because when we turn up she's already halfway up the M1 for two months in Balmoral. If...

London blog: Old Operating Theatre

You'll find the Old Operating Theatre and Herb Garret in an attic at the top of a tower, and you have to climb up a tight and winding wooden staircase to reach it. It's not your normal kind of museum. It's like a creaky-old cottage in the rafters -- a bit like a witch's cottage in the woods. You probably think that I'm exaggerating, but I promise you I'm not. I'm being totally serious! There are two sections to it: an old operating theatre that has survived from the 19th-century, plus a...

London blog: City Hall

City Hall is where the Mayor of London works. I'm always a bit wary about coming in here. If truth be told I'm more scared of coming in here than I am of Parliament, because there are always plenty of tourists walking around Parliament but in here, not so much. It's pretty much just you and a few security guards, plus the people who actually work here. If you want to blend in then you have to be carrying a folder full of papers or a briefcase or a laptop bag, because the kind of people who...

London blog: Golden Hinde

It's almost a shame that I have to tell you about this place because it's much better left as a surprise. People should definitely find this place by accident and not be led there by a guidebook. You can tell who's not expecting it when they're walking down the claustrophobic Clink Street, because they'll suddenly come to a stop and start fiddling in their handbag for a camera. This is the Golden Hinde II -- a near perfect replica of the ship that carried Francis Drake around the world. This...

London blog: Dr. Johnson's House

If you flick through a few London guidebooks then it won't be long before you find the phrase "If you're tired of London, you're tired of life". It's the go-to quote when you're writing about our city. Well, the guy who wrote that line used to live here -- at Dr. Johnson's House. Samuel Johnson was the famous writer and wit who wrote the first dictionary. If you want to be pedantic about it then I don't think it was actually the first, but we English like to call it the first. (The...

London blog: Temple Bar

Temple Bar is a Victorian monument in the middle of Fleet Street, topped off with a black dragon. It's quite a sight the first time you see it. I still remember sitting on the top deck of a bus and wondering what the hell it was. (This was twenty years ago.) It's something you look at, look at again, and then continue thinking about as you drive past. The next time you come down Fleet Street you'll already have your camera out, ready to take a photo. Can there be any higher praise than that?...

London blog: Kensington Palace

How many tourists put Kensington Palace on their 'must-do' list because of Princess Diana? If that's your only reason for going then trust me: don't bother. It's not much of a palace. It looks more like a Stately home to me -- the kind of country home you might visit on a Sunday afternoon to have a cup of tea. You can always rate a palace by the fame of the names who lived in it. William III was obviously a hugely important monarch, but let's be honest -- how many tourists know him? Unless...

London blog: Hampton Court Palace

If you grew up within ten miles of Hampton Court Palace then this place was your educational day out. This is how they'd teach you some British history. They'd cram fifty kids into a big bus and then make you troop around the grounds for two hours counting up the Tudor chimneys (because every single chimney is different, you see -- and if you came here ten thousand times as a kid then you would have remembered that!). At my next school it was even worse: because they made us do five-mile...