New section. Start working!!!

OK students. Now you will see a new section. You will find London divided in sections, with a plan and the names of sites, museums and monuments that you can visit.

In pairs, and using your blog, you must upload a document (information- timetable and price, history, anecdotes, description, photos, etc) on one site you choose. You cannot repeat site. Try to make it simple and interesting (don't cut and paste) because you will have an exam on reading the blog!!!!

Enjoy

Ladybird and Ogroprofe

The Thames - part 1

From Westminster Bridge to Blackfriars Bridge

North side of the river:

• Westminster
• Banqueting house
• Charing Cross station -in a postmodern complex of shops and offices
  
• Embankment Gardens -there are many free music concerts (in the summer)
• Cleopatra's Needle - an Egyptian obelisc donated to England in 1819
  
• Shell Mex House - the oil company offices
• Savoy Hotel
• Somerset House -from 1786 with 3 art galleries
• Temple and Inns of Court - the lawyer buildings for 500 years.
  
• Saint Paul's Cathedral

South side of the river:

• County Hall - the London aquarium is inside
• British Airways London Eye - Impressive views of the city. You'll like it.
• The South Bank - A complex that includes The Royal Albert Hall, The National Theatre and the Hayward Gallery
• Gabriel's Warf - arts and crafts market
• Oxo Tower
  
• Doggett's Coat and Badge - A pub with the name of a famous regatta
• The Tate Modern
  

The Thames - part 2

North side of the river:

• Fishmongers' Hall - 1834 (la llotja)
  
• The Monument -remember the Great Fire?
• Billingsgate - old fish market
• The Customs - in a 1825 building
• Tower of London
• Tower Bridge - London Bridge
• Saint Katharine's Dock - nowadays a sporting yatch dock

South side of the river:

• Globe Theatre
• Southwark Cathedral - Some parts of the building date back to the 12th century. It has several monuments dedicated to Shakespeare
• Saint Olave's House - art déco building
• Hay's Galleria - old dock under roof with shops and restaurants
• HMS Belfast - World War II ship, currently a museum
  
• Tower Millenium Pier - impressive new townhall building with government and mayor offices
• Butlers Wharf - old Victorian warehouses, currently appartments
• Design museum
  

Whitehall and Westminster

These areas have been the centre of political and religious power in England for a thousand years.

Sites to visit:

• Houses of Parliament
• Big Ben (it is the bell, not the clock!)
  
• Jewel Tower (this and Westminster Hall are the only remains of the old Palace of Westminster)
  
• Westminster Abbey
• Dean's Yard (Dryden and Ben Johnson -the writer, not the athlete- used to walk around it)
  
• Saint Margaret's church (Margaret, not Margarit; we're ogres in my family, not saints)
• Parliament Square
• Cenotaph (monument to the dead of World War I)
• Downing Street (the Prime Minister's residence; you need important contacts to visit it)
• Cabinet War Rooms and Churchill Museum (World War II cabinet rooms)
• Banqueting House (First building to adopt the Paladian architectural style from Italy in London)
• House Guards Parade
• Trafalgar Studios
• Queen Ann's Gate (big elegant houses from 1704. The M15, the British Secret Service, is supposed to have organised its activities in here until recently)
• Guards Museum
• Saint James's Park Station (it holds the London Transport Company and has works of Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore)
• Blewcoat School
• Westminster Cathedral
• Saint John en Smith Square (English baroque masterpiece, today an auditorium)
• Tate Britain
  

Picadilly and Saint James's

Picadilly is the main artery of the West End. The name comes from the 17th fashionable pickadillstan (remember the white piece of clothing round their necks??). Saint James's still preserves buildings from the 18th century, when it was full of Royal palaces and the court gathered and shopped in the area. Two shops in Saint James's Street remind us of this time: the hat shop Lock and the wine shop Berry Bros. & Rudd. Fortnum and Mason, in Picadilly, has served quality food for almost 300 years. In the north, Mayfair, is still the most elegant suburb in London.

Sites to visit:

• Picadilly Circus (Eros, the Greek God of Love, has become a symbol of London)
• Saint James's Church (a favourite of Wren's)
• Albany (Lord Byron, Graham Green, two Prime Ministers , William Gladstone and Edward Heath, and the actor Terence Stamp lived in this appartment building)
• Royal Academy of Arts
• Burlington Arcade (it still has caretakers that throw out the people who don't keep the site clean)
• Ritz Hotel
• Spencer House
• Saint James's Palace
• Saint James's Square
• Royal Opera Arcade
• Pall Mall (150-year-old elegant clubs only for men where they fleed from their wives)
• Institute of Contemporary Arts
• Saint James's Park
• The Mall
• Marlborough House
• Queen's Chapel
• Clarence House
• Lancaster House
• Buckingham Palace
• Queen's Gallery
• Royal Mews
• Wellington Arch
• Apsley House
• Shepherd Market
• Green Park
• Faraday Museum (reconstruction of Faraday's, the pioneer of the 19th century in the use of electricity, scientific items and personal objects)
  

Soho and Trafalgar Square

Famous as the entertainment area of town since its creation in the 12th century. Throughout its first hundred years, it was a very elegant area and its inhabitants held eccentric parties. It has become a multicultural suburb, famous for its Chinatown.

Sites to see:

• Trafalgar Square
• Admiralty Arch
• National Gallery
• Saint Martin-in-the-Fields (model of a church for United States; famous people are buried there -eg Charles's II lover Nell Gynne, the painters William Hogarth andJoshua Reynolds)
• National Portrait Gallery (it shows British history through the portraits of poets, kings and Queens, musicians, philosophers, heroes and villains)
• Leiscester Square (with Charles Chaplin's statue and Shakespeare's fountain)
• Theatre Royal Haymarket
• Shaftesbury Avenue (the theatre and cinema street; Count Shaftesbury opened this avenue between 1877 and 1886 to improve communications to the West End through a very poor suburb; he improved the lives of the poor of the area)
• Chinatown
• Charing Cross (bookshop street)
• Palace Theatre (the only architectural interesting theatre; it belongs to Andrew Lloyd Webber)
• Soho Square
• Berwick Street Market (veg & fuit street market since 1840)
• Carnaby Street (the Oxford dictionary accepts Carnaby as a synonym of "fashionable clothes for young people")
  

Covent Garden and the Strand

Sites to see:

• The Piazza and Central Market
• Saint Paul's Church
• London's Transport Museum
• Theatre Museum
• Theatre Royal Drury Lane
• Royal Opera House
• Neal Street and Neal's Yard (19th century shops)
• Thomas Neal's (commercial centre)
• Seven Dials (column with 6 clocks in the crossing of 7 streets)
• Lamb and Flag (pub from the 16th century)
• Photographers' Gallery
• Adelphy Theatre
• Savoy Hotel
• Savoy Chapel (the Queen's private chapel; it was the hospital's chapel in Henry VII's era; part of its walls date back to 1512)
• Somerset House
• Saint-Mary-le-Strand
• Roman Baths (which are not Roman)
• Bush House (BBC World Service premises; nothing to do with George Bush or his dad)
• Victoria Embankment Gardens
• Adelphi
• Charing Cross (the name comes from the last of the 12 crosses raised by Edward I to mark his wife's, Leonor from Castille, funeral route)
• London Coliseum (the biggest theatre in London and the first to have lifts in Europe)

Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia

Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia have been synonims of literature, art and erudition. The Bloomsbury artists and writers were active till 1930's. The name Fitzrovia was invented by Dylan Thomas, who was a client in the Fitzroy Tavern.

Sites to visit:

• British Museum
• Bloomsbury Square (Virginia Woolf and friends lived there)
• Saint George Church
• Russell Square (one of the biggest squares in London; you can find the best Victorian hotel, the Russel Hotel; the poet T.S. Elliot worked in the western corner of the square)
• Queen Square (George III stayed in a doctor's house who tried to cure him from a hereditary illness which drove him to madness and death)
• Charles Dickens Museum (he lived in here for 3 very productive years)
• Foundling Museum ( Captain Thomas Coram tried to give abandoned children housing and schooling. His friend William Hogarth gave him many pictures and he created the first art gallery in Britain, to invite rich people to his hospital and hope they left donations for the children)
• British Library
• Saint Pancras International
• Saint Pancras Parish Church (the outside looks very much like the Acropolis in Athens)
  
• Woburn Walk
• Pecival David Foundation for Chinese Art
• Fitzroy Square
• Fitzroy Tavern (famous clients: Dylan Thomas, George Orwell and Augustus John)
  
• Charlotte Street
• Pollock's Toy Museum
  

Holborn and Inns of Court

Traditionally the area of journalists and lawyers. There are several buildings prior to the Great Fire (Staple Inn, Prince Henry's Room and indoor Middle Temple Hall)

Sites to visit:

• Sir John Soane's Museum (son of a bricklayer, he became one of the main British architects of the 19th century
  
• Lincoln's Inn
• Lincoln's Inn Fields
• Old Curiosity Shop (it might have given its name to Dicken's novel; 17th century building and the oldest shop in central London. It survived the Great Fire)
  
• Law Society (architectural interesting building)
  
• Saint Clement Danes Church (there is a big chain hanging from the wall to stop people opening the tombs and stealing dead bodies to be sold in hospitals and be used in medicine lessons in old times)
• Royal Courts of Justice
• Temple Bar Memorial (It marks the entrance to The City; in ceremonies the King stops in front of it and asks the Town Hall Mayor for permission to go into the City.
  
• Fleet Street (here one found the first printer in England; Shakespeare and Ben Johnson -again the writer, not the athlete- were customers in Old Mitre Tavern)
  
• Prince Henry's Room
• Temple
• Saint Bride's (One of Wren's; many journalists and printers buried in it; the cript contains remains of previous temples and a fragment of a Roman road)
  
• Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (clients of this tavern: Samuel Pepys -the journalist of the Great Fire-, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens)
  
• Dr. Johnson's House
• Saint Andrew Church
  
• Holborn Viaduct
• Saint Etheldreda's Chapel
• Hatton Garden (street of diamonds and jewelry)
  
• Staple Inn
• London Silver Vaults
• Gray's Inn (Shakespeare and Charles Dickens)
  

The City

The financial district of London. It is built on top of the Roman settlement of Londinium. The complete name is City of London, but it is best-known as The City. Most of the area disappeared in both the Great Fire in 1666 and World War II.

Sites to see and visit in Cockneyland:

• Mansion House (official residence of the Town Hall Mayor)
• Saint Stephen Walbrook church
• Royal Exchange
• Bank of England Museum
• Saint Mary-le-Bow church
• Saint Paul's Cathedral
• Old Bailey (long relationship with crime; opposite, the pub "Magpie and Stump" used to serve the execution breakfasts until 1868 until the hanging outside the prison was forbidden)
• Apothecaries' Hall (most members are doctors and surgeons; some strange old students: Oliver Cromwell and John Keats)
• Fishmonger's Hall
• Saint Magnus the Martyr church (shouldn't it be Olga instead of Magnus?)
• Monument
• Old Billingsgate
• Saint Mary-at-Hill church
• Saint Margarit -oops, Saint Margaret Pattens church
• Tower Bridge
• All Hallows by the Tower
• Tower of London
• Saint Katharines's Dock
  
• Stock Exchange
• Saint Helen's Bishopgate church
• Saint Katharine Cree church
• Leadenhall Market (started as the Roman Forum and has had a market since the Middle Ages)
• Lloyd's of London (modern building that remind us of the Pompidou in Paris)
• Guildhall Art Gallery
  

Smithfields and Spitafields

North of the The City walls, the areas always offered protection to people who did not wnat to belong to The City or that were not welcome, like the Hugonots in the 17th century o immigrants from Europe or Bengala.

Sites to visit:

• Smithfield market
• Saint Botolph church
• Museum of London
• Charterhouse
• Cloth Fair street (where there was the most important clothes market in Tudor times)
• Saint Bartholomew the Great church
• Barbican (it holds 2 theatres, a concert hall, 2 cinemas, an important art gallery, a library with important sections on children and on music, a greenhouse, and the Guildhall school of Music and Drama)
• Saint Giles church
• Whitebread's Brewery (old beer factory, of course)
• Bunhill Fields (it became a cemetery after the Black Death; important writers are buried there: Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan and William Blake)
• Wesley's Chapel-Leysian Mission
• Broadgate Centre
• Whitechapel Art Gallery
• Old Spitalfields Market
• Christ Church
• Fournier Street
• London Jamme Masjid
• Spitalfields Centre Museum of Immigration and Diversity
• Brick Lane (Bengal London)
• Dennis Severs House
• Columbia Road Market
  

Southwark and Bankside

Southwark was the "escape" from The City, where people could find entertainment and forbidden pleasures. Borough High Street was full of taverns, some of their Medieval yards have been preserved. At the end of the 16th century, the area was full of theatres and premises for bear and cock fights. One can still see a reproduction of The Globe Theatre in its original setting. Also, we can see the Design Museum, historical pubs, Borough Market and Southwark Cathedral.

Sites to visit:

• Southwark Cathedral
• Hop Exchange (used to be a brewery)
• Borough Market
• George Inn
• The Old Operating Theatre
• The Globe Theatre
• Cardinal's Wharf
• Bankside Gallery
• Tate Modern
• The Anchor (pub from the 16th century, although there are older remains)
• Vinopolis
• Clink Prison Museum
• Bermondsey
• London Dungeon (museum to cause horror inspired by Madame Tussaud's horror room; it shows the most frightening part of British history, with actors and special effects. There are rooms dedicated to the Black Death, torture methods and Jack the Ripper)
• Design Museum
• HMS Belfast

South Bank

The architecture of many of its buildings, especially the Hayward Gallery, has been widely criticised. Today it is admired by people interested in culture. Also, one can find one of the new symbols of the new millenium London, the London Eye; from its top there are great views of the town.

Sites to see:

• Royal National Theatre
• Hayward Gallery
• Royal Festival Hall
• County Hall
• British Airways London Eye
• Florence Nightingale Museum (the first "proper" nurse)
• Museum of Garden History
• Lambeth Palace
• Imperial War Museum
• The Old Vic (Vic from Victoria, not Vic from the Catalan town!)
• Gabriel's Wharf
• Waterloo Station

Chelsea

It became a fashionable area in Tudor times. It was the place for artists, like Turner, Whistler and Rossetti, and intelectuals. From the 1960's to the 80's young extravagant bohemian people used to live around the area. Nowadays it is too expensive for them.

Sotes to see:

• King's Road (here started the fashions of the mini-skirt and the punk)
• Carlyle's House. (historian and founder of the London Library; he had gatherings in this house with famous people like Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Charles Darwin)
• Chelsea Old Church
• Roper's Garden
• Cheyne Walk (the plaques on the houses' walls of this street show the names of their old inhabitants: J M W Turner at 119, George Eliot at 4, Henry James, T S Eliot and Ian Fleming...)
• Chelsey Physic Garden
• National Army Museum
• Royal Hospital
• Saatchi Gallery
• Sloane Square
  

South Kensington and Knightsbridge

Area of consulates and embassies.

Sites to see:

• Natural History Museum
• Victoria and Albert Museum
• Brompton Oratory
• Royal College of Music
• Royal Albert Hall
• Royal College of Art
• Albert Memorial
• Serpentine Gallery
• Kensington Palace
• Kensington Gardens
• Hyde Park
• Speaker's Corner (in 1872 the law allowed public speeches on any subject. Since then, on this corner of Hyde Park there's a meeting point of orators and eccentric speakers)
• Marble Arch
• Harrods
  

Kensington and Holland Park

Around Holland Park, you can see unbelievable Victorian Houses in a luxurious residential area. Two of them are open to the public. Bayswater and Noting Hill are more cosmopolitan and lively. Portobello Road has beome a popular market, where you can find anything from food to antiques.

Sites to see:

• Holland Park (with more trees than Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. It contains some original gardens from the beginning of the 19th century, a Japanese garden and fauna)
  
• Leighton House
• Linley Sambourne House
• Kensington Roof Gardens (6000 square metres of a 1930 garden on a roof; the gardens include a wood, a Spanish garden with palm trees, an English garden with pond, ducks and a couple of flamingoes. Free entry)
• Kensington Square
• Kensington Palace Gardens
• The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Playground
• Queensway
• Portobello Road (a lively market since 1837)
• Notting Hill
  

Regent's Park and Mary-le-bone

South of Regent's Park, you can find the Medieval village of Marylebone, with the highest number of Georgian houses in London.

Sites to visit:

• Mme Tussaud and Planetarium
• Regent's Park
• Saint Marylebone Parish Church
• Harley Street
• Portland Place
• Broadcasting House
• All Souls church
• Langham Hotel
• Wigmore Hall
• Wallace Collection
• Sherlock Holmes Museum (The building has been altered and furnished exactly like 221b, Baker Street. You are shown the different rooms and you can buy Sherlock's books and hunter's hats on the ground floor)
  
• London Central Mosque
• Regent's Canal
• London Zoo
• Cumberland Terrace