At midday on Monday Big Ben will sound its last bongs until 2021. It’s being silenced so that the clock and surrounding tower can be safely repaired. It will continue to show the correct time. But once the bell’s striking hammer is locked, the clock will lose its voice. Perhaps London, too, will lose its voice. Big […]
We tend to think of noisy places as ‘fast’ and quiet places as ‘slow’. There’s a rather obvious reason for this: motion – from cars, tube trains, hordes of commuters – usually generates noise. Other kinds of noise, though, have nothing to do with movement. A pub packed with people shouting to be heard above the music might still feel […]
Five years (yes, five!) since we launched, we are now FINALLY on TripAdvisor. We’re pleased as punch. So far we’ve had five wonderful reviews posted there. But we’ve got loads more on our website, amassed over the years. They give a really good flavour of what to expect. We’re always delighted to hear from people about their […]
There’s so much of wonder about Crossrail, the new railway under London that will link Reading and Heathrow with Shenfield and Abbey Wood when it opens in 2019. First off, there’s the staggeringly ambitious engineering work to construct 42km of tunnels through the centre of a city already riddled with holes from the tube network. The real joy […]
With huge political changes happening this year, we can expect London to play an important role as a place of protest. So, on Friday there will be Stand Up To Trump protests outside the US Embassy coinciding with Trump’s inauguration. On Saturday, thousands are expected to join the Women’s March from the US embassy to Trafalgar Square: a ‘sister’ […]
We’re delighted to be part of The Night Museum — a week of free events in and around the Museum of London from 29 October to 4 November exploring ‘the hidden, the illicit and the lost’. Rosie will be leading An Ear to the London Night on Wednesday 2 November. It’s a 45 minute adapted version of The London Ear […]
Judd Flogdell came on A Genius Tour last Saturday and devised an ‘unlearning’ experiment for herself to do afterwards (see post on The Benefits of Unlearning). She reports on the results: I’m calling this my Behind the Picture experiment. I chose the Thomas Lawrence print on my living room wall. After having reversed it and […]
Technologies like automatic doors, sensor-controlled escalators and even contactless payments all allow us to glide through London without touching it—with our hands, that is. We feel the city with our feet. Through the soles of our shoes we learn the texture of London’s uneven paving, lumpy tarmac and slippery cobbles. We also read the city […]
To navigate our way through life we most often apply a kind of internal filter that organises the world into priority, inessential and junk. It’s a useful tool. But how much of the richness of experience does it blank out? How far does it hamper our powers of perception and imagination? Sometimes what we think we already […]
Now that London’s trees have all outed themselves with their new foliage, it’s a great time to go tree spotting. The Natural History Museum’s Leafsnap UK app is a handy tool for identifying species from their leaves. Of all the city’s trees, the London plane (pictured left) gives the capital its arboreal character. But it hasn’t […]
