The flags were hanging everywhere and the bunting was covering everything so London was ready for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, a massive party to celebrate 60 years on the throne. Continue reading
Blooming London – Chelsea Flower Show 2012
Chelsea Flower Show is a famous part of the British summer and after several weeks of poor weather the sun came out and we were off to Chelsea! This year I opted to go on the last day, having been before on the opening day and braved the crowds in exchange for the chance to buy some plants when everything is dismantled at the end of the day. Continue reading
Olympics…. only 73 days to go!
The start of Olympic Games is only 73 days but many of us are focusing on the Diamond Jubilee at the moment. The build up the Jubilee is very exciting, especially as we look ahead to the River Pageant. This is going to be the biggest event on the River Thames for 350 years (since Charles 11 if you like to know) with over 1000 boats forming a procession that will be 7 miles in length taking 90 minutes to pass by. There will even be a boat as a belfry with newly cast bells on ringing all the way and being ‘answered’ by bells in church towers along the route. The Royal Family will be on a boat and your blog writer will be in the Tower of London on the day so expect lots of photos and excitement in future blogs!
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| Olympic clock 73 days to go! |
As well as the build up to the Jubilee, the Olympic preparations are all around us. I heard that the wonderful viewing platform and cafe by the Olympic Park was closing as the area will be an access route to the Park, so I headed down there to bring you the last photos of the venues. Stratford is the main gateway tube station for the Olympics and you can see their signage is up and ready!
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| Stratford station |
There are 2 key places to view the Olympic Park in Stratford, the first being an indoor viewing area in John Lewis which gives you the chance to see the stadium and the wonderfully curved aquatic centre, on the left of this photo.
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| View from John Lewis |
Across the other side of the park is the Greenway with its View Tube Cafe where you can see the stadium and Orbit right in front of you and they serve a great cup of coffee too!
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| View Tube Cafe |
The stadium looks wonderful and will be the centre piece of the games and the park, seating 80,000 spectators for the much anticipated opening ceremony which has Danny Boyle (director of Slumdog Millionaire) as its Artistic Director . The red Orbit tower is impressive, looking like a crazy helter skelter and was designed by Anish Kapoor.
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| Stadium and Orbit |
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| Olympic Stadium |
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| Orbit |
The Orbit tower has a viewing platform that will open during the games and will be accessible by a lift or by the 455 spiral staircase if you are feeling very energetic! At 376 feet/114 metres it is Britain’s tallest sculpture. It is made from 60% recycled steel to reflect one of the key themes of the London Olympics. It is a controversial structure but I love it, it is crazy and wild looking but has energy and distinctiveness.
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| Orbit viewing platform
The great views from the View Tube cafe will be closed from 18th May but will reopen later in the year so I will keep an eye open for this news. Soon, however, you’ll be able to see the park from the inside as, after all, it is only 73 days to go!
Bye for now,
Sue
itsyourlondon.co.uk
@itsyourlondon
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What to do when it rains in London!
Yes it does rain in London and, despite the drought warnings we have been bombarded with lately, it has been raining for the last couple of weeks. Gardeners and the people who run the water supply have been happy but the rest of us are looking forward to the sun shining again. Luckily there are loads of things to do in London when the rain comes down and here I’ve listed just a few as a full list would go on for pages!
In bad weather (and good days too!) I usually head for a museum or art gallery – they are free, warm and dry and house some of the greatest treasures in the world. You can see the amazing Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles or gaze at the paintings by everyone from Rembrandt through Van Gogh, Matisse and Monet, to Jake and Dinos Chapman by dropping into the British Museum, The National Gallery and the Tate Modern. If you are strong enough to face the queues, you can marvel at the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum.
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| British Museum |
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| National Gallery |
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| Tate Modern |
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| Natural History Museum |
Travel by the underground and you’ll be sheltered from the weather and you can get around London easily and quickly. For those of you who love shopping, either head for a large department store such as Selfridges or Harrods and you’ll be there for hours, or disappear in one of the huge Westfield shopping centres in Shepherds Bush and Stratford and you can easily lose a whole day.
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| Westfield Shepherds Bush |
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| Harrods |
On a wet evening, you can’t beat a good play or film. London’s ‘theatreland’ will delight you with the stars (at the moment we have Danny Devito and Cate Blanchett on the stage and recently had Keira Knightley and Kevin Spacey), with great musicals like Billy Elliot and Phantom and newer ones like Sweeney Todd. The National Theatre will give you meatier fare, the off West End theatres like the Donmar Warehouse give you a smaller more intimate experience and don’t forget to check out the ballet and opera too!
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| National Theatre |
Last but by no means least are the thousands of pubs and restaurants which provide shelter from the rain and some of the top cuisines in the world and certainly the most variety.You have everything from Heston Blumenthal’s amazing Michelin starred Dinner, Gordon Ramsay’s own top restaurant and Koffman and Ducasse through to cheap and cheerful pub food with lots of fish and chips on their menus. You can find just about any cuisine in the world and London’s food scene is immensely rich and varied so look beyond the chain restaurants and find something special and memorable.
Hopefully these ideas will keep you dry when you visit London and you could be surprised by beautiful sunshine instead, in which case you’ll be able to find open air versions of almost everything on this list!
Bye for now.
Sue Hillman
itsyourlondon.co.uk
Twitter: @itsyourlondon
Literary stars in London!
London is such a world hub that you have access to some amazing events and get to see your favourite stars whether they are musical, theatrical or literary!
Last week saw World Book Night roll into town. It’s a wonderful event which was held outdoors last year in Trafalgar Square but I think the literary folk got a bit too cold so this yea it moved into the Queen Elizabeth Hall, part of the South Bank complex. This was just as well, as it was a chilly wet evening again! The date was 23rd April, St George’s Day but more relevant for this night, is that it’s Shakespeare’s birthday and the day he died!
World Book Night is an evening of book readings by authors and famous book lovers and part of a major campaign to encourage reading. 25 titles are chosen each year, then 1 million special editions of these are printed and ‘givers’ pledge to hand out copies to those who don’t regularly read. That’s a lot of extra books going round to excite new readers!
Have a look through this photos gallery of some of the stars who read for us: Margaret Attwood (by video), David Nicholls (One Fine Day) Iain Banks (also known as Iain M Banks!), Mark Haddon (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night) Andrea Levy (Small Island) and Kathy Lette (loads of best sellers).
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| Margaret Attwood |
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| Iain M Banks |
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| Kathy Lette |
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| Andrea Levy |
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| David Nicholls |
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| Mark Haddon |
One other bookish event worth a mention was 5×15 held in Notting Hill. These evenings bring us 5 speakers who each have 15 minutes on a topic of their choice. The guests can be anything from famous singers to TV personalities to authors or campaigners.
The last event was a great mix including Paul Conroy who was the big draw for me. He’s just escaped from Syria where his colleague Mary Colvin sadly died and he arrived fresh from hospital with a drip! We had Andrew Davies who has written and adapted major TV successes including the famous Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and more recently Bleak House. He told us just how easy it is to adapt a famous novel for TV! We were entertained by Bettany Hughes, historian TV presenter and writer, a passionate speaker, Prue Leith, the cookery master and now writer and Richard Davenport-Hines who has just published a book on the Titanic. And here they are:
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| Paul Conroy |
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| Andrew Davies |
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| Bettany Hughes |
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| Richard Davenport-Hines |
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| Prue Leith |
That’s all from literary London for now!
Sue
itsyourlondon.co.uk
@itsyourlondon
Cutty Sark reopens and joins the London list of ‘must see’
Greenwich is a great place to visit and it has just got a whole lot better! The beautiful Cutty Sark sailing ship has been reopened and is a new landmark for the area. To offer even more, The National Maritime Museum has added to their already amazing collections with a fascinating new exhibition called Royal River: Power, Pageantry and the Thames.
The Cutty Sark was the fastest ship of her day and plied her trade around the world mostly as a tea clipper and is the last surviving of these ships. She has been restored using a great deal of original material which is a miracle given the fire that swept through her in 2007. Luck was on their side that day as a great deal of the original timbers had been removed from the site so survived to be reinstated to make the wonderful ship we can visit.
The restoration has at its heart a glass apron which means you can walk right underneath the golden hull and see the glorious shape of the ship as well as explore the decks and cabins.
There are evocative tea chests on the lower decks and fun interactive maps where you can try to beat the Cutty Sark’s best journey time but I was 10 days slower! Famous as a tea clipper that name deriving from these ships ‘clipping’ the time taken and you can learn how the trade winds and doldrums influenced their racing times.
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On the top deck you can admire the high rigging which once held 32 sails and reaches up 152 feet/47 metres, and see the tiny bunks the crew slept in, Cutty Sark was launched in 1869 when the men were clearly much shorter than we are now! The wheel, however, is really tall (as you can see in the photo with yours truly) and I’m sure the Captain would have to stand on a box to reach the top spokes.
The Queen opens the Cutty Sark for visitors on 24th April which must be strange for her as she performed the same act in 1957 as this photo shows. The photo is part of a really interesting slide show with commentary where we learn that a Cutty Sark is a ladies undergarment and it taken from a poem by Robert Burns!
On our preview day they were still adding the finishing touches but I’m sure by the time the Queen arrives it’ll be perfect. The Cutty Sark is now on my list of recommendations for visitors to London.
My laptop has let me down recently but hopefully I’ll be back posting many more London blogs.
Bye for now,
Sue
itsyourlondon.co.uk
@itsyourlondon
Madagascar, it’s not quite London!
I’ve been lucky enough to spend 2 months in Madagascar so here’s a post about the amazing time I had there, before the normal service is resumed about all things London.
The first 6 weeks were spent on a charity school building project in a remote area of south east Madagascar. We were camping with no running water and no electricity but it was all worth it to complete a secondary school for the area, their first but hopefully not their last.
We stayed in a beautiful area and took on the challenge of construction work by hand with good humour, even surviving a passing cyclone, luckily we were only the edge of it! We saw poverty and hard lives and really admired the approach of Malagasy people who always try to make the best of whatever is thrown at them. The charity who organise the volunteering projects is Azafady which is doing really good work in this under developed part of the world.
The first 6 weeks were spent on a charity school building project in a remote area of south east Madagascar. We were camping with no running water and no electricity but it was all worth it to complete a secondary school for the area, their first but hopefully not their last.
We stayed in a beautiful area and took on the challenge of construction work by hand with good humour, even surviving a passing cyclone, luckily we were only the edge of it! We saw poverty and hard lives and really admired the approach of Malagasy people who always try to make the best of whatever is thrown at them. The charity who organise the volunteering projects is Azafady which is doing really good work in this under developed part of the world.
Here are some photos of our work and the surrounding beauty:
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| Our challenge! |
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| Making the floor by hand |
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| The local market |
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| Beautiful countryside near our village |
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| Lake in Fort Dauphin |
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| A beach just for us! |
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| Fort Dauphin |
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| A beautiful country |
After 6 weeks hard work building the school, I was off on my travels to see some more of the island, particularly the unique wildlife – the fabulous lemurs and chameleons. I also got to see the golden web of the spiders whose silk is used to make the extraordinary golden cape currently in the Victoria and Albert Museum London.
How to chose a few photos to show you this wonderful island and its wildlife? Well, here goes, my favourite lemurs and chameleons:
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| Ring tail leumurs |
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| Sifaka lemur |
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| Indri lemur |
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| Baby brown lemur |
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| Curly tail chameleon |
It was a magical trip and I have so many great memories but it was still great to be back in London and to try and catch up with all the things that had happened in those 2 months.
Bye for now
Sue
@itsyourlondon
Leaving London!
I’m going to be away for several weeks now so just wanted to wish you all a very happy 2012.
This is shaping up to be a great year for London with the Royal Jubilee and then the Olympics and Paralympics so watch out for lots of blogs from March onwards.
Bye for now,
Sue
itsyourlondon.co.uk
@itsyourlondon
A Winter Wonderland in London this Christmas!
Christmas time in London is great fun with loads of thing to do and see. One of our favourites is Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park so we took some friends who had not been before to enjoy an evening of Christmas cheer. They couldn’t work out what Winter Wonderland was from our description – is it a theme park, is it a Christmas market, it is a food market, is for kids or adults? Well, it’s all of these and it takes up a huge space right in the middle of Hyde Park!
You enter through a massive arch through which you can just see the beginings of the fun fair in the distance. The first section is made up of several alleyways of Christmas market chalets but the best thing here is the talking and singing moose! I’ve attached a video but in case that doesn’t work for you, there’s a photo as well. I hope the video runs for you as he is wonderful and one of my highlights. (If it doesn’t download right away, come back to it)
You can linger for ages checking out all the gifts in the chalets of the market section as it is extensive and tempting. Once through with shopping you are surrounded by food stalls and into the fun fair. There’s everything from the old fashioned but beautiful helter skelter and big wheel, to incredibly fast whirling things, all looking very festive, to dreadfully scary rides that were too fast to take a photo of and I have know idea how people were not sick on them but it seemed fun was being had! The roller coaster was popular, looking a little slower than the super fast rides but still resulted in a good few screams.
There are some traditions about Christmas ghost stories so there was the obligatory haunted house with a huge violin playing skeleton outside. On the cuter side, I loved the snowman, the sweets and the massive balloon
We managed to eat and drink our way round the whole experience, tasting the warming mulled wine and by the time we got to the burgers one friend was so hungry he ordered two, making the stall holder so excited that he shouted for all to hear ‘he’s going for 2’! There were stalls full of churros and chocolate, candy floss, any type of grilled sausage and colourful sweets.
We almost went for the ice skating but after a wonderful dry evening, the rain started to come down so we escaped to a nearby pub to keep dry and warm.
We’re all going again next year and perhaps someone will be brave enough to try the scary rides but I don’t think it will be me!
Bye for now,
Sue
@itsyourlondon
More gorgeous London Chrismas lights!
There are so many fabulous Christmas lights in London this year I just had to put up another selection for you! I still have some lights left to visit, so there could even be part 3…
Not quite fitting the heading of lights, but very Christmassy none the less, were the sights on show this Saturday in Trafalgar Square where I stumbled upon a massive Santa gathering! Hundreds of Santa were streaming out of the tube stations and off the buses to hang out together, sing songs, do congas and (shock – horror!) drink beer! Everyone was having such fun it was infectious, although the tourists who had come to check out the Olympic clock were rather bemused. They kept asking ‘why’? It seems the only answer was to have fun…
Nearby Covent Garden always looks beautiful at Christmas and I was eager to see if the giant reindeer was there again. Yes, he was although he had set up camp round the other side of the piazza. I missed the real ones who had been there during the day but I love this chap with his proper red nose! There was also an intriguing and beautifully lit chalet which turned out to house a digital installation work by Martha Fiennes called Nativity. The market sections were decorated with enormous baubles and the whole area looked wonderfully festive, as I’d hoped.
Regent Street is a posh shopping street but they have a habit of putting up the most commercial lights with product placement to the fore. This year, however, they have been more restrained and have some lovely lights about sledges and elfs!
All the big shopping areas in London are great for lights, festive window dressing and decorated trees – even skating rinks! Here is the last set of photos showing: the window at Selfridges, the tree at Whiteleys; and the skating rink at Westfield Shepherds Bush.
I hope you’ve enjoyed more Christmas in London!
Bye for now,
Sue
itsyourlondon.co.uk
@itsyourlondon