Craig Cross's Blog, page 3

London blog: Downing Street

There are two kinds of people who stand outside Downing Street when the air is minus-5 (it's freezing cold this morning!): the curious and the furious. The curious are tourists. The furious are home grown. The cold must be keeping everyone away today because there's only one other person here (six if you include the coppers, seven if you include me) and I recognise him off the telly -- I'll tell you about him later. There's no sign of the Prime Minister anywhere. You'll know she's coming out...

London blog: Sky Garden

I used to think of this as the Palm House at Kew, 500 feet in the sky. But now I think of it as one of those giant sci-fi cities in the clouds. This is how we'll all be living soon, enclosed in a giant bio-dome. Skyscrapers are usually out of bounds to the public but all you have to do for the Sky Garden is book a time slot on their website. Once you've made it past the airport scanners and the cold hands of the security staff you're shuffled into a little lift with ten tourists all...

London blog: Carnaby Street

I've got that Kinks' song going round and round my head now: "One week he's in polka-dots, the next week he's in stripes, 'cause he's a dedicated follower of fashion." All the beautiful people used to flock down here in their Mary Quant miniskirts to buy their embroidered bell-bottoms, patterned kaftan scarves and velvet flares. They called them the "Carnabetian army" and they'd stand around the shopfronts showing off their new boots and hairdos. One shop even made their...

London blog: Nelson's Column

The air actually tastes like smoke -- not cigarette smoke, but that gunpowder smoke that drifts down from the fireworks. It's still hanging in the air from the party last night. I don't go to London on New Year's Eve anymore but back in the day (I'm talking about twenty years ago) we used to queue up for Trafalgar Square. It was a lot different in those days because they actively discouraged you from coming. They did just about everything possible to put people off. They used to search you...

London blog: Marble Arch

Christmas shopping down Oxford Street reminds me of walking down Wembley Way after you've escaped the stands, everyone streaming out the stadium to catch the last tube home. That is how busy it used to be 250 years ago when we spent our Saturday afternoons in the little town of Tyburn (modern-day Marble Arch). You've got to use your imagination a little bit, but try and disappear all the shops and drop in a crowd of thousands around a three-tiered gallows. Add in a grandstand as well (it...

London blog: London Stone

This thing is akin to the Arkenstone. It's the heart of the country, the dried-up centre of the city, the fossilised pip of whatever tree stood here first. Nobody knows for sure where it came from. Some people believe the London Stone is Roman, some people think it's medieval, whilst others insist it was the stone from which Arthur pulled Excalibur. Maybe it was the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs. All they really know for sure is that it is incredibly old, and it's this this age that...

London blog: Princess Diana Memorial Fountain

It was the kids I felt sorry for in Charles and Diana's titanic marriage battle -- and I'm not talking about Prince William and Harry. I'm talking about us, the poor old Brits who had fifteen years of their blue blood barneys and we still can't agree on who was right even now. The female half of the population tend to side with Di -- they see her as an innocent princess stuck in a loveless marriage, whereas the blokes just think she was a bit of a fruit loop. I will just say that she...

London blog: Green Park

Green Park is just green grass and trees. There are no flowers, no rivers, no ponds, no lakes, no buildings, no little kids playgrounds, just a couple of hot dog burger stands and military monuments. But if you travel back a few centuries then this place had it all: a swamp full of dead lepers, exploding firework disasters, temples turning into burning infernos, a gentleman's duel at twenty paces, and even a mad man's assassination attempt on Queen Victoria. I'm having to stand under a tree...

London blog: St. Dunstan-in-the-West

Hopefully you have twenty minutes to spare before visiting the church because I just want to show you where the old Roman wall once stood. Have a walk up Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill to St. Martin's church (it's just before St. Paul's Cathedral). If you stand on the doorstep then you're standing on the site of Lud Gate, one of the seven ancient gates into the city. Sadly there's no trace of it above ground anymore because it got torn down around 1760, but some of its statuary still survives...

London blog: National Army Museum

If there's one thing Britain is good at then it's fighting wars. Every country is good at something: for the Americans it's playing that girls game rounders (sorry, I mean baseball). For us it's winning wars. I think the reason we're so amazing at it is because we've been practising, practising, practising for a thousand years. That's why we have so many military museums in London: the Imperial War Museum, RAF Museum, Guards' Museum, Household Cavalry Museum, National Maritime Museum,...