Nightlife in London

London’s nightlife is currently buzzing with everything, from some of Europe’s liveliest nightclubs right through to stylish design bars and traditional old London pubs. Night-time hotspots can be found across the capital, although there is a particular concentration in the West End, where Soho is still the coolest place to drink, although it remains seedy along the edges. Soho is also the best place for gay bars and clubs. Two particularly hip areas in which to drink are the perennially cool Notting Hill/Ladbroke Grove area in the west and the now very up-and-come Old Street/Shoreditch area in the east (where the fashionable art and media crowd has popularised ‘Hoxton cool’). Many local areas, such as Camden and Angel in the north, Brixton and Clapham in the south, have great local pubs and bars and remain the areas where the best of the well-established gastropubs can be found.

The legal drinking age is 18 years and almost all of the clubs exact an admission price (often increasing after 2300 or 2400), which can be pricey, particularly in the West End. Dress codes vary depending on the calibre of the club but it may be wise to leave the trainers at home. Although there have been plans for change for a while now, England’s licensing laws still mean that pubs and bars traditionally close at 2300 Monday to Saturday and at 2230 on Sunday. However, some places have special licences that allow them to stay open later. Clubs usually open at 2200, fill up by 2400, and stay open until 0200/0300 during the week and usually around 0500 at weekends, although often later. Drink prices are exorbitant in London and can vary from pub to pub and club to club. A pint will cost anything from £2.50 upwards and will be much more like £3 in the West End. Few venues can be defined by their music, featuring different styles on different nights, with regular sets by guest DJs. The best way to keep abreast of goings-on is to check out the listings in the weekly Time Out magazine (website: www.timeout.com).
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Trafalgar Square : Attraction of London

Trafalgar Square is a square in central London that commemorates the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), a British naval victory of the Napoleonic Wars. The original name was to have been “King William the Fourth’s Square”, but George Ledwell Taylor suggested the name “Trafalgar Square”.

The area had been the site of the King’s Mews since the time of Edward I. In the 1820s the Prince Regent engaged the landscape architect John Nash to redevelop the area. Nash cleared the square as part of his Charing Cross Improvement Scheme. The present architecture of the square is due to Sir Charles Barry and was completed in 1845.

The square is a popular site for political demonstrations, is the site of Nelson’s Column, and related sculptures of note.

Overview

The square consists of a large central area surrounded by roadways on three sides, and stairs leading to the National Gallery on the other. The roads which cross the square form part of the busy A4 road, and prior to 2003, the square was surrounded by a one-way traffic system on all sides. Underpasses attached to Charing Cross tube station still allow pedestrians to avoid traffic. Recent works have reduced the width of the roads and closed the northern side of the square to traffic.

Nelson’s Column is in the centre of the square, surrounded by fountains and four huge bronze lions sculpted by Sir Edwin Landseer; the metal used is said to have been recycled from the cannon of the French fleet. The column is topped by a statue of Lord Nelson, the admiral who commanded the British Fleet at Trafalgar.
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Tower of London : Attraction of London

The Tower of London is a landmark in central London, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, just outside the City of London.

The White Tower, the square building with turrets on each corner that gave it its name, is actually in the middle of a complex of several buildings along the River Thames in London, which have served as fortress, armoury, treasury, zoo/menagerie, mint, palace, place of execution, public records office, observatory, refuge, and prison, particularly for upper class prisoners. This last use has led to the phrase “sent to the Tower” meaning “imprisoned”. Elizabeth I was imprisoned for a time in the Tower during her sister Mary’s reign; the last use of the Tower as a prison was in 1952, serving to restrict the movement of the Kray Twins who had deserted from the army.

History of Tower of London

The first known fortification on the site was a Roman fortress that Claudius built to protect the city of Londinium.

In 1078, William the Conqueror ordered the White Tower to be built, as much to protect the Normans from the people of the City of London as to protect London from anyone else. Earlier forts there, including the Roman one, had primarily wooden buildings, but William ordered his tower to be of stone that he had specially imported from France. It was King Richard the Lionheart who had the moat dug around the surrounding wall and filled with water from the Thames. The moat was not very successful until Henry III employed a Dutch moat building technique. It was drained in 1830, and human bones were in the refuse found at its bottom.
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Tower Bridge : Attraction of London

Tower Bridge is a bascule bridge in London, over the River Thames. It is close to the Tower of London, which gives it its name. It is occasionally incorrectly referred to as London Bridge, which is the next bridge upstream. The bridge is owned and maintained by Bridge House Estates, a charitable trust overseen by the Corporation of London.

Design

In the second half of the nineteenth century increased commercial development in the East End of London led to a requirement for a new river crossing downstream of London Bridge. A traditional fixed bridge could not be built because it would cut off access to the port facilities situated at that time in the Pool of London, between London Bridge and the Tower of London. A tunnel beneath the Thames, the Tower Subway, was opened in 1870, but it could only accommodate pedestrian traffic.

A Special Bridge or Subway Committee was formed in 1876 to find a solution to the river crossing problem. It opened the design of the crossing to public competition. Over 50 designs were submitted, including one from civil engineer Sir Joseph Bazalgette. The evaluation of the designs was surrounded by controversy, and it was not until 1884 that a design submitted by Horace Jones, the City Architect, was approved.

Jones’ design was for a bascule bridge 800 feet (244 m) in length with two towers each 213 feet (65 m) high, built on piers. The central span of 200 feet (61 m) between the towers is split into two equal bascules or leaves, which can be raised to an angle of 83 degrees to allow river traffic to pass. Although each bascule weighs over 1,000 tons, they are counterbalanced to minimise the force required and allow raising in one minute. The original hydraulic raising mechanism was powered by pressurised water stored in six accumulators. Water was pumped into the accumulators by steam engines. Today the original hydraulic machinery still opens the bridge, however it has been converted to use oil instead of water and electric motors have taken the place of the steam engines and accumulators. The old mechanism is open to the public.
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South Bank : Attraction of London

The South Bank is the area in London on the southern bank of the River Thames near Waterloo station that houses a number of important cultural buildings/institutions. It was the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain, for which the Royal Festival Hall, now part of the South Bank Centre arts complex, was built. The area is split between the boroughs of Lambeth and Southwark.

Since then, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room were opened in 1967, the Hayward Gallery in 1968, and the National Theatre in 1976. Nearby are the National Film Theatre (NFT), and the British Film Institute which also has opened an IMAX cinema.

Adjacent to the NT is the distinctive white tower of the London Weekend Television (LWT) building, where (among other things) the long-running television Arts programme The South Bank Show is produced. Carlton Television and GMTV have also broadcast from the building since 1993, and it is now called The London Television Centre.
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Piccadilly Circus : Attraction of London

Piccadilly Circus is a famous traffic intersection and public space of London’s West End in the City of Westminster. Built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with the major shopping street of Piccadilly (the “circus” refers to “circular open space at a street junction”), it now links directly to the theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue as well as the Haymarket, Coventry Street (onwards to Leicester Square) and Glasshouse Street. Its proximity to major shopping and entertainment areas, its central location at the heart of the West End, and its status as a major traffic intersection have made Piccadilly Circus a busy meeting point and a tourist attraction in its own right.

It is renowned for its video display and neon signs mounted on the corner building on the northern side, as well as the Shaftesbury memorial fountain and statue known as ‘Eros’ (sometimes called ‘The Angel of Christian Charity’, which would be better translated as ‘Agape’, but formally ‘Anteros’ - see below). It is surrounded by several noted buildings, including the London Pavilion and Criterion Theatre. Directly underneath the plaza is the London Underground station Piccadilly Circus.

History of Piccadilly Circus

Piccadilly Circus connects to Piccadilly, a thoroughfare whose name first appeared in 1626 as Pickadilly Hall, named after a house belonging to one Robert Baker, a tailor famous for selling piccadills or piccadillies, a term used for various kinds of collars. The street was known as Portugal Street in 1692 in honour of Catherine of Braganza, the queen consort of King Charles II of England, but was known as Piccadilly by 1743. Piccadilly Circus was created in 1819, at the junction with Regent Street, which was then being built under the planning of John Nash on the site of a house and garden belonging to a Lady Hutton. The circus lost its circular form in 1886 with the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue.
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Madame Tussauds : Attraction of London

Madame Tussauds is a wax museum in London, with branches in Amsterdam, Hong Kong (Victoria Peak), Las Vegas and New York City. It was set up by Marie Tussaud who was a wax sculptor.

Madame Tussaud (1761-1850), born Marie Grosholtz in Strasbourg, worked as a housekeeper for Dr. Philippe Curtius, a physician skilled in wax modelling. Curtius taught Tussaud the art of wax modelling. In 1765, Curtius made a waxwork of Marie Jean du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress. A cast of that mould is the oldest work currently on display. The first exhibition of Curtius’ waxworks was shown in 1770, and attracted a large audience. The exhibition moved to the Palais Royal in Paris in 1776. He opened a second location on Boulevard du Temple in 1782, the “Caverne des Grands Voleurs”, a precursor to the later Chamber of Horrors.

Tussaud created her first wax figure, of Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, in 1777. Other famous persons she modelled at that time include Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin. During the French Revolution she made wax death masks of prominent victims. She would search through corpses to find the decapitated heads of the citizens which the death masks were to depict. When Curtius died in 1794, he left his collection of waxworks to Marie. In 1802, she went to London. As a result of the Franco-English war, she was unable to return to France, so with her collection she travelled throughout Great Britain and Ireland. She established her first permanent exhibition on Baker Street in London in 1835 (on the “Baker Street Bazaar”).
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London Zoo : Attraction of London

London Zoo was the world’s first scientific zoo. It was opened in 1828, and was originally intended to be used as a collection for scientific study, it was eventually made open to the public in 1847. Today it houses a collection of more than 650 different species of animals.

It is managed under the auspices of the Zoological Society of London, and is situated at the northern end of Regent’s Park, London (the Regent’s Canal runs through it). The Society also has a more spacious site at Whipsnade Wild Animal Park in Bedfordshire and the larger animals such as elephants and rhinos have been moved there.

As well as being the first scientific zoo, London Zoo also opened the first Reptile House (1849), first public Aquarium (1853), first insect house (1881) and the first children’s zoo in 1938.

The zoo is currently undergoing a massive renovation project aimed at replacing cages with enclosures which recreate the animals’ natural environments, giving a better lifestyle to the animals, and a more realistic experience to visitors.

Architecture

Since its earliest days, the zoo has prided itself on appointing leading architects to design its buildings. These include:
the Clock Tower (1828, originally built to house llamas) and the Giraffe House (1836-1837) by Decimus Burton (both Grade II listed buildings)
the Mappin Terraces (1913-1914) by Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell and John James Joass (listed Grade II).
the Penguin Pool (1934).
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London Planetarium : Attraction of London

The London Planetarium is in Marylebone Road on the northern side of the city centre. It is adjacent to Madame Tussauds and is owned by the same company.

Originally built during the 1950s, the planetarium seats an audience of around 330 beneath a horizontal dome approximately 18m in diameter. For its first five decades of operation, an opto-mechanical star projector offered the audience a show based on a view of the night sky as seen from earth. During the 1990s, one of the world’s first digital planetarium systems, Digistar (created by Evans & Sutherland) was installed, allowing monochromatic 3D journeys through space and many other kinds of show to be presented.

In 2004 the Planetarium was upgraded to a full-colour Digistar 3 system that allows both pre-rendered and real-time shows to transport the audience in a realistic immersive environment to distant realms of time and space.

In January 2006 it was announced by Madame Tussauds that in July 2006 the London Planetarium, already renamed the Auditorium, would re-open with a show by Aardman Animations about celebrities.

London Eye : Attraction of London

The British Airways London Eye, sometimes called the Millennium Wheel (Coordinates: 51°30′12?N, 00°07′11?W), is the first-built and largest observation wheel in the world (a type of or evolution on the Ferris wheel), and has been since its opening at the end of 1999. It stands 135 metres (443 feet) high on the western end of Jubilee Gardens, on the South Bank of the River Thames in Lambeth, London, England, between Westminster and Hungerford Bridges. It is adjacent to London’s County Hall, and stands opposite the offices of the Ministry of Defence situated in Westminster which it overlooks to the west.

History of London Eye

Designed by architects David Marks, Julia Barfield, Malcolm Cook, Mark Sparrowhawk, Steven Chilton, and Nic Bailey, the wheel carries 32 sealed and air conditioned passenger capsules attached to its external circumference. It rotates at a rate of 0.26 metres per second (about 0.9 km/h or 0.6 mph) so that one revolution takes about 30 minutes to complete. The wheel does not usually stop to take on passengers; the rotation rate is so slow that passengers can easily walk on and off the moving capsules at ground level. It is, however, stopped on occasion to allow disabled or elderly passengers time to disembark safely. Structurally, the Eye resembles a huge spoked bicycle wheel, and was depicted as such in a poster advertising a charity cycle race. The wheel is not the first of its kind; one much smaller used to stand opposite Earls Court station during the later part of the 19th century and which just like the Eye was for Londoners’ and visitors’ enjoyment.

The wheel was constructed in sections which were floated up the river Thames on barges and assembled lying flat on pontoons. Once the wheel was complete it was raised into its upright position by cranes. The wheel was initially lifted at a rate of about 2 degrees per hour until it reached 65 degrees, where it stayed for a week while engineers prepared for the second phase of the lift. The total weight of steel in the Eye is 1,700 tonnes.
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London Aquarium : Attraction of London

The London Aquarium is located on the South Bank of the River Thames in central London, near the London Eye.

It is a collection of water tanks showing around thousand of species of fish, which is sponsored by National Geographic Channel. The aquarium includes three floors and 14 different zones (Freshwater stream, atlantic upper, rivers and ponds, pacific upper, indian ocean, atlantic lower, touch pool, temperate waters, pacific lower, coral reef, invertebrates, tropical freshwater, mangrove, rainforest).

The aquarium displayed robotic fish in 2005.

London Dungeon : Attraction of London

The London Dungeon is a tourist attraction based in Tooley Street, London, near London Bridge rail station. It recreates various gory historical events in a style which attempts to make them appealing to the younger generation. Some of the more than 40 exhibits include ‘The Great Fire of London’, ‘Jack the Ripper’, ‘Judgement Day’, ‘The Torture Chamber’, ‘Henry VIII’, ‘The Tower of London’ and ‘The French Revolution’. In 2003 a special exhibition opened on the Great Plague of 1665.

In 2004 the London Dungeon unveiled their new Traitor: Boat Ride to Hell and Labyrinth Maze of Mirrors, which is the largest Labyrinth made of mirrors in the world.

In 2005 the Dungeon replaced its ‘Henry VIII’, ‘The Tower of London’ and ‘The French Revolution’ exhibits with a new feature called The Labyrinth of the Lost, a winding maze of mirrors based on the crypt of the Church of All Hallows near Tower Bridge.

Many feel that the fact that the tragedies the attraction attempts to recreate happened a long time ago does not justify their being made light of or, less tasteful still, made fun of. Another common complaint is that, because of this emphasis on fun and thrills, the London Dungeon does not have the educational value expected of an attraction that purports to be historically themed. Fans and those in charge of the Dungeon however, claim that the attraction is designed to stimulate the imagination of vistors, improve the learning of students visting and to generally improve on the stale format that most traditional museums adhere to.

The Hamburg Dungeon, The York Dungeon and The Edinburgh Dungeon are all affiliated with The London Dungeon. In 2005 a new location opened in Amsterdam, called The Amsterdam Dungeon.

Leicester Square : Attraction of London

Leicester Square is a pedestrianised square in the West End of London, United Kingdom. It is located west of Charing Cross Road, east of Piccadilly Circus, 0.23 miles (0.37 km) north west of Charing Cross and within the City of Westminster.

History of Leicester Square

The square takes its name from the title of Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester. In 1630 he purchased four acres of land in St. Martin’s Field and by 1635 he had built himself a large house, known as Leicester House, at the northern end of it. The enclosure of part of the site for building deprived the inhabitants of St. Martin’s Parish of their rights to use the common land. The King appointed three members of the Privy Council to arbitrate and Lord Leicester was ordered to keep part of his land (which thereafter was known as Leicester Field and later as Leicester Square) open for use by the parishioners.

The area was developed in the 1670s. It was initially a fashionable area, and Leicester House was even the residence of Frederick, Prince of Wales at one time, but by the later part of the 18th century the square was no longer a smart address. Leicester House was demolished circa 1791-2.
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Horse Guards Parade : Attraction of London

Horse Guards Parade is a large parade ground off Whitehall in central London, at grid reference TQ299800. It was formerly the site of the Palace of Whitehall’s tilt-yard, where tournaments were held in the time of Henry VIII. It was also the scene of the annual celebrations of the birthday of Queen Elizabeth I.

The area has been used for a variety of reviews, parades and other ceremonies since the 17th century. It is the site of the annual ceremonies of Trooping the Colour, which commemorates the monarch’s official birthday, and Beating Retreat. For much of the late 20th century it was put to a rather less dignified purpose - as a car park for senior civil servants - but this use was ended in the 1990s.

The catalyst for the clearing of the parade ground was the Provisional IRA’s mortar attack on 10 Downing Street on 7 February 1991, which was carried out from a vehicle parked on the edge of Horse Guards Parade. Not surprisingly, vehicles are now not allowed to park anywhere in the area.
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Downing Street : Attraction of London

Downing Street is the famous street in central London which contains the buildings that have been, for over two hundred years, the official residences of two of the most senior British Cabinet Ministers, the First Lord of the Treasury, an office held by the Prime Minister, and the Second Lord of the Treasury, an office held by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The most famous address in Downing Street is 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury - and thus, in modern times, the residence of the Prime Minister, since the two roles have been filled by the same person. As a result of this “Downing Street” or “Number 10″ is often used as short-hand for the Prime Minister or their office, whilst “Number 11″ is likewise a term for the Chancellor of the Exchequer or their office.

Downing Street is located in Whitehall in central London, a few minutes’ walk from the Houses of Parliament and on the edge of the grounds of Buckingham Palace. The street was built by and named after Sir George Downing, 1st Baronet (1632-1689). Downing was a soldier and diplomat who served under Oliver Cromwell and King Charles II. In the service of the King he was rewarded with the plot of land adjoining St. James’s Park upon which Downing Street now stands. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Chief Whip all officially live in houses on one side of the street. The houses on the other side were all replaced by the massive Foreign Office in the nineteenth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, plans were considered to demolish both the Foreign Office and the rest of Downing Street and build “something more modern”. However the plans were never implemented and have long since been abandoned.

Who lives where

9 Downing Street was named in 2001 and is the Downing Street entrance to the Privy Council Office and currently houses the Chief Whip’s office.

10 Downing Street is the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, and thus the residence of the British Prime Minister, as in modern times, the two roles have been filled by the same person.

11 Downing Street us the official residence of the Second Lord of the Treasury, an thus the is the home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer,

12 Downing Street, formerly the Chief Whip’s Office, currently houses the Prime Minister’s Press Office, Strategic Communications Unit and Information and Research Unit.
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