The Dorchester The site of the Dorchester hotel was purchased by Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons and Gordon Hotels Ltd. in 1926. The two companies commissioned Sir Owen Williams and then William Curtis Green to design a new hotel on…
Tag: london
Inspired by my recent obsession with watching old episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, set in the 1930s, I decided to take a self-guided tour of some of the best examples of Art Deco architecture in central London. The first thing…
Posters provide striking and familiar visuals that illustrate, decorate and inform the public about the Second World War. The Imperial War Museum displays these posters in some of its exhibits as you might expect, but they also appear as reproductions…
The reason I love the Tower of London so much is that there’s always something new to see and learn. Last time I went I made the most of the free audio guide, but this time I opted to just…
The complex of buildings found at Westminster is a little architecturally confusing. We have Westminster Abbey, clearly old from what you see inside it, Westminster Hall and the Palace of Westminster, which look similar, and Big Ben, which screams Victoriana. These buildings can easily blend together if you don’t look carefully and that blending was indeed the intention of the designers.
I noticed a picture of a baby cage made it into the Metro the other day. It seems that this historical oddity is one that constantly comes in and out of the media and causes incredible public shock and outrage every time. It is amazing how attitudes change, so that something invented in the 1920s to do nothing but good now leaves us struggling to believe it ever happened.
I went to the V&A’s Museum of Childhood for the first time on Friday. I had always thought it would be interesting to see all the childhood-related objects collected by the Victoria and Albert Museum in one place, but I…
I have often walked past Lincoln’s Inn on my way to Chancery Lane and the Maughan Library. Lincoln’s Inn Fields is a beautiful little park to stroll through to avoid the busy roads and it’s amazing how quiet it is…
I must have walked down Whitehall a hundred times, past one stone façade after another, and not realised that such an important building lay just beside me. I knew about the old Palace of Whitehall, which was a key royal…
I visited the Churchill War Rooms many years ago and since my memories of it were hazy, I thought I’d check it out and see how it had changed. I remembered looking in on the old rooms and had a…