The City of London

For the first time visitor to London it may all be about the big attractions.  The Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and the London Eye.  But London today has so much to offer the visitor and its own different areas to explore.  One of those areas is the original City of London founded by the Romans on the banks of the River Thames when they came to these islands nearly 2000 years ago.  

In some areas The City or the Square Mile as it is sometimes known is very different from Westminster further upstream.  The City of Westminster is very different in that its attractions such as Buckingham Palace or Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square are very in your face.  Whilst in The City of London you really have to go looking for some of the sites and history that are down little side streets and alleyways.  So if you go to The City what do you go and visit?

The Tower of London

This is an experience about the City of London.  The area of London formed by the Romans.  Although not technically in The City, but in the Greater London borough of Tower Hamlets.  It is impossible to step out of Tower Hill tube station and ignore this near 1,000 year old chunk of history.  The City and The Tower are inextricably linked by one defending the other.  

By looking onto or later going to visit The Tower of London you are entering a time machine that takes you through 1,000 years of the history of the British Isles.  Built to protect the city and act as a royal residence, but as the centuries pass it turns into something to keep the monarch free from harm and somewhere you most definitely don’t want to end up.  

There’s the notorious Traitors Gate where those accused of treason would come in alive and leave dead after their executions.  Executions go back to at least the 1300’s and they were even known to exist during World War Two.  

Although by this time not with a medieval axe.  This is not a place where the normal people of the country suffered.  Archbishops, Lords, Queens and noblemen have entered this tower and never walked out alive.  The London gangsters, The Kray Twins even spent some time in prison here after World War Two.  They would prove to be a different sort of royalty - criminal royalty.  In addition, you’ll find the Crown Jewels from the 1660s to bring a wonder to your eyes.  

So this venue has plenty to offer and your host on this experience has a millenium of stories to pick from at this stop.  

St. Dunstans in the East Church

In a world city like Greater London which for many of us on this little planet of ours is a mass urban metropolis, St. Dunstan’s in the East Church is a beautiful piece of greenery amongst all of this metal.

St. Dunstan’s goes back, originally to 1100 but has been destroyed twice.  Once by flames, in London’s great fire in 1666 and secondly by German bombers in World War Two.  It has been left to nature to work its magic and grow over its ruins, leaving today’s Londoners and visitors to the city to enjoy its peaceful overgrowth amongst all London’s busyness.  

London’s Oldest Coffee Shops

The Coffee shops of London in centuries past were not the big chains that you see today in London and around the world.  They were also not just about meeting your friends and seeing how they were.  Often they were used for what London, even today, does best.  DO BUSINESS.  MAKE MONEY.  These coffee shops, often in thin, little, narrow lanes were where the now world famous London Stock Exchange is and started in the 17th and 18th centuries.  

Use your imagination and you can take your mind back to crowded coffee shops where sailors, merchants and investors would buy and sell shares in trading companies going around the world to do business in places like modern day India, the far east or maybe further west trading in furs in the Americas.  One could almost call it a stock exchange.

The George and Vulture and Charles Dickens

If you were going to visit the artistic and literary delights of London Town then you would probably visit Bloomsbury.  An area further west in London than The City.  Whilst The City is just next to London’s East End.  

But in the depths of The City of London, down a little inconspicuous lane called St Michaels Alley is one of the bars the famous English writer, Charles Dickens used to drink in.  This delightful pub joins a number of other bars in London like The George off Borough High Street that Dickens drank in.  Even better is that The George and Vulture is used as a setting in one of Dickens books.  

Although closed through the weekend like much of The City, if you do go in you will feel the history and romance of the past that this little bar and restaurant has to offer and I thoroughly recommend a visit during your stay in London as well as learning about this bar on the tour.