Explore London
The City is where London began. Long established as the financial district, it stretches from Temple Bar in the west to the Tower of London in the east – administrative boundaries that are only slightly larger than those marked by the Roman walls and their medieval successors. However, in this Square Mile (as the City is sometimes referred to), you’ll find few leftovers of London’s early days, since four-fifths of the area burnt down in the Great Fire of 1666. Rebuilt in brick and stone, the City gradually lost its centrality as London swelled westwards, though it has maintained its position as Britain’s financial heartland. What you see now is mostly the product of three fairly recent building phases: the Victorian construction boom; the overzealous postwar reconstruction following the Blitz; and the building frenzy that began in the 1980s and has continued ever since.
When you consider what has happened here, it’s amazing that so much has survived to pay witness to the City’s 2000-year history. Wren’s spires still punctuate the skyline and his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, remains one of London’s geographical pivots. At the City’s eastern edge, the Tower of London still boasts some of the best-preserved medieval fortifications in Europe. Other relics, such as Wren’s Monument to the Great Fire and London’s oldest synagogue and church, are less conspicuous, and even locals have problems finding modern attractions like the Museum of London and the Barbican arts complex.
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St Paul’s Cathedral
St Paul’s Cathedral
Designed by Christopher Wren and completed in 1711, St Paul’s Cathedral remains a dominating presence in the City, despite the encroaching tower blocks. Topped by an enormous lead-covered dome, its showpiece west facade is particularly magnificent.
The best place from which to appreciate St Paul’s is beneath the dome, decorated (against Wren’s wishes) with Thornhill’s trompe l’oeil frescoes. The most richly decorated section of the cathedral, however, is the chancel, where the gilded mosaics of birds, fish, animals and greenery, dating from the 1890s, are spectacular. The intricately carved oak and limewood choir stalls, and the imposing organ case, are the work of Wren’s master carver, Grinling Gibbons.
The galleries
A series of stairs, beginning in the south aisle, lead to the dome’s three galleries, the first of which is the internal Whispering Gallery, so called because of its acoustic properties – words whispered to the wall on one side are distinctly audible over 100ft away on the other, though the place is often so busy you can’t hear much above the hubbub. The other two galleries are exterior: the wide Stone Gallery, around the balustrade at the base of the dome, and ultimately the tiny Golden Gallery, below the golden ball and cross which top the cathedral.
The crypt
Although the nave is crammed full of overblown monuments to military types, burials in St Paul’s are confined to the whitewashed crypt, reputedly the largest in Europe. Immediately to your right is Artists’ Corner, which boasts as many painters and architects as Westminster Abbey has poets, including Christopher Wren himself, who was commissioned to build the cathedral after its Gothic predecessor, Old St Paul’s, was destroyed in the Great Fire. The crypt’s two other star tombs are those of Nelson and Wellington, both occupying centre stage and both with more fanciful monuments upstairs.
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Tower of London
Tower of London
One of Britain’s main tourist attractions, the Tower of London overlooks the river at the eastern boundary of the old city walls. Despite all the hype, it remains one of London’s most remarkable buildings, site of some of the goriest events in the nation’s history, and somewhere all visitors and Londoners should explore at least once. Chiefly famous as a place of imprisonment and death, it has variously been used as a royal residence, armoury, mint, menagerie, observatory and – a function it still serves – a safe-deposit box for the Crown Jewels.
The lively free guided tours given by the Tower’s Beefeaters (officially known as Yeoman Warders) are useful for getting your bearings. Visitors today enter the Tower along Water Lane, but in times gone by most prisoners were delivered through Traitors’ Gate, on the waterfront. Immediately, they would have come to the Bloody Tower, which forms the main entrance to the Inner Ward, and which is where the 12-year-old Edward V and his 10-year-old brother were accommodated “for their own safety” in 1483 by their uncle, the future Richard III, and later murdered. It’s also where Walter Raleigh was imprisoned on three separate occasions, including a thirteen-year stretch.
Tower Green
At the centre of the Inner Ward is Tower Green, where ten highly placed but unlucky individuals were beheaded, among them Anne Boleyn and her cousin Catherine Howard (Henry VIII’s second and fifth wives). The White Tower, which overlooks the Green, is the original “Tower”, begun in 1076, and now home to displays from the Royal Armouries. Even if you’ve no interest in military paraphernalia, you should at least pay a visit to the Chapel of St John, a beautiful Norman structure on the second floor that was completed in 1080 – making it the oldest intact church building in London.
Crown Jewels
The Waterloo Barracks, to the north of the White Tower, hold the Crown Jewels; queues can be painfully long, however, and you only get to view the rocks from moving walkways. The vast majority of exhibits post-date the Commonwealth (1649–60), when many of the royal riches were melted down for coinage or sold off. Among the jewels are the three largest cut diamonds in the world, including the legendary Koh-i-Noor, which was set into the Queen Mother’s Crown in 1937.
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Clerkenwell, Hoxton and Shoreditch
Clerkenwell, Hoxton and Shoreditch
Since the 1990s, the northern fringe of the City has been colonized by artists, designers and architects and transformed itself into the city’s most vibrant artistic enclave, peppered with contemporary art galleries and a whole host of very cool bars, restaurants and clubs. Clerkenwell, to the west, is the most thoroughly gentrified, whereas Hoxton (to the north of Old Street), and to a lesser extent Shoreditch (to the south), have a grittier side to them. There are few conventional sights as such in all three areas, though Hoxton and Shoreditch are stuffed full of art galleries (most famously the White Cube on Hoxton Square), but their hip nightlife and shopping scenes keep them lively.
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Aiming high: city skyscrapers
Aiming high: city skyscrapers
Economic recession notwithstanding, the City skyline is sprouting a whole new generation of skyscrapers. From 1980, for thirty years, the City’s tallest building was the 600ft-high Tower 42, designed as the NatWest Tower by Richard Seifert (in the shape of the bank’s logo). Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building, on Leadenhall Street, completed in 1984, was more remarkable for its inside-out design than its modest height – even with Norman Foster’s 590ft-high Gherkin, it was the shape, not its height, that drew attention. In 2010, the NatWest Tower was finally topped by the Heron Tower, a fairly undistinguished 660-ft skyscraper, at 110 Bishopsgate, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox – on the plus side, public access means you can check out the shark aquarium in the atrium, and pop into the bar-restaurant on the 40th floor. More are planned: Rafael Viñoly’s 525-ft Walkie Talkie, 20 Fenchurch St, so-called because it will get wider as it gets bigger, will include a public “sky garden” on the roof; The Pinnacle, 22–24 Bishopsgate, also by Kohn Pedersen Fox, will be a swirling 945-ft helter-skelter of a tower (with a restaurant on the top floor); and The Cheesegrater, Richard Rogers’ 737-ft triangular-shaped office block at 122 Leadenhall St, is due for completion in 2013.
