City Guide London

Hi, I'm Craig and I love London’s history, its buildings, its traffic and noise, it’s buses and tubes, and even its dirty streets and wet weather.

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There are only 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 the tourists. The furious are home grown. Imagine being the PM and seeing a forest of angry banners at the end of your street every day. He must feel like one of those military generals staring out of his tent at an enemy army on a distant hill.

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It's easy to find Hyde Park Winter Wonderland because you just follow the sound of funfair screams all the way from Marble Arch. It's all blaring music and a background track of chatter and screams as the rollercoasters trip cameras that flash in your face. They've got waltzers, dodgems, carousels with silver lights and icicles, laser lights strafing the floor by your feet… one zone is dressed up like the North Pole with a huge Ice Mountain ride that has a live waterfall cascading down the front (real roaring water!)

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When you visit the Buckingham Palace State Rooms you can buy yourself a cup of Earl Grey tea in the restaurant that overlooks the lawn where they hold all the garden parties. Treat yourself to a cucumber sandwich as well. They cut the crusts off and slice them up into triangles here. All of the food seems to come with half a strawberry on top and a sprig of greenery that nobody knows if they can eat.

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Inside the Household Cavalry Museum is a big window into the stables. It’s a bit like peering into a football changing room at half-time. You can watch the soldiers hosing down the stalls, scraping out the grooves in the horse’s hooves, and scooping up big pitchforks of hay to fill up the feeders. They all act totally oblivious to the tourists taking photos of them, so I guess they must be used to it.

[ctyguidelondon]

This is the Sky Garden. When you step out onto the 35th floor you’re straight into a scatter of tables and chairs and people drinking Pimms and Pernod. They’ve got a posh bar up there selling cocktails and bottles of Dom Pérignon for 250 quid a pop, and the busy floor looks like a cross between a hotel lobby and an airport departure lounge.

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Back in the 1530s Henry VIII was putting up palaces like we put up sheds. Whilst he was living in Whitehall Palace he also had Richmond Palace and Greenwich Palace on the go, built Nonsuch and St. James's from scratch, and stole Hampton Court from Cardinal Wolsey. St. James's is the second-best preserved after Hampton Court with a four-story gatehouse and Chapel Royal.

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This is one of those shortcuts you don’t mind taking even if it makes the journey twice as long. If you were walking round here 2,000 years ago then you’d be in the middle of Roman Londinium because this is where they built the basilica (court) and forum (market). Unfortunately the only trace of them now is an old pillar in the cellar of the hairdressers by one of the entrances (90 Gracechurch Street) and they don’t let wanderers in off the street to see it... not even if you ask for a short back and sides first.

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It's hard to picture it now with all the traffic roaring round Hyde Park Corner but two hundred years ago Wellington Arch was on the very edge of London. You've got to imagine the grand houses of Piccadilly stretching all the way up to Apsley House and then just fields and trees to Kensington Palace. (That's why Apsley House was nicknamed No.1 London - because it was the first big house you saw by the Kensington Turnpike tollgate.)

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The Treasures of the British Library exhibition is all very dark and quiet inside (and even a little reverential), full of dimly lit display cases with handwritten manuscripts by some of the most famous names in history. And when I say the most famous names in history that's exactly what I mean - the first cabinet contains pages from Leonardo da Vinci's notebook. After that you've got Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's First Folio, and music manuscripts by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.

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This is from the Dismounting Ceremony at Horse Guards. 125 years ago Queen Victoria caught the entire Guard drinking on duty so she punished them with a daily inspection to make sure they were behaving themselves. This was back in 1894 when every dress she had was black, every hat she had was black, and all of her moods were black as well -- nobody messed with her in those days. The 100-year punishment was supposed to have expired in 1994 but our current queen kindly decided that they'd have to carry on with it for all eternity. So let that be a lesson to you: no drinking on duty!

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Because of its name lots of people think the Jewel Tower was home to the Crown Jewels but they’ve always been locked up safe and sound inside the Tower of London. This was where Edward III kept all of his other valuables – his beautifully decorated bowls, goblets, carved cups, silver plates, feathers and gems. By the time Henry VIII came to the throne it had been demoted to a cupboard for his furniture and clothes, and later on it became a storehouse for all the Acts of Parliament made over the road.

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This is the Richard of Lionheart statue outside the Houses of Parliament. If you Google an old black and white picture of him from during the war then you'll see that his blade was bent about a third of the way up. This was caused by a German bomb that dropped in the yard, blowing out the big window behind. They briefly thought about leaving it bent as a symbol to show that democracy would bend but not break under attack, but in the end they thought it looked a bit daft and straightened it up.

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The original Globe Theatre burned down in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII when someone thought it a good idea to simulate the sound of battle with a real live cannon. They loaded it with gunpowder and fired it into the sky, sending fiery sparks flying into the tinder dry thatched roof. The flames soon spread to the wooden walls and five minutes later the whole place was ablaze. Thatched roofs were eventually banned fifty years later following the Great Fire of London, and when they rebuilt the Globe 25 years ago they had to obtain special permission to install a new one.

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I don’t normally get bowled over when I see a piece of art, but this Rubens on the roof of Banqueting House is amazing. And I say that as a middle-aged bloke who has no particular interest in art. But staring up at it doesn’t half do your neck in. Happily they’ve scattered a few beanie bags around to lie on, but I’m too old to get on those things. If I sat on one of those things then I’d never get back up again.

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This is all that remains of the Roman Temple of Mithras underneath the Bloomberg building. It’s very dark when you first walk in, you can hardly see a thing. You can’t see the walls, the floor, your legs, nothing. Then ever so slowly a moon-coloured light illuminates the gloom and spotlights start hitting invisible bricks in midair to throw vertical shadows in the shape of columns. The temple then rises up to its full height using sheets of white light – it’s almost like looking at a hologram.

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If you board the Golden Hinde II by Southwark Cathedral you can pretend to be a pirate because this is a replica of the ship in which Sir Francis Drake sacked the Spanish treasure ships, sailed round the tip of Chile, up the west coast of America, and got back home in time to fight off the Armada.

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If you head down the creaky stairs to the basement then you can see the kitchen in Charles Dickens’ house, with a table piled high with pork pies and pastries and huge chunks of bread and cheese. They’ve got a little washroom down there as well with linen dripping from a string on the ceiling.