Spring Tips from Matthew
Explore London with One Aldwych Curator, Dr Matthew Green
1 - GORDON'S WINE BAR
Perhaps my favourite place to while away a summer evening is Gordon’s Wine Bar in Embankment. You may sit at the tables outside, the Thames glistening in the distance and London’s stell mountains soaring into a turquoise sky, or, better still, venture into the 17th-century interior, shadows spilling out, clinking and chattering coming from within, and embrace the wall of heat that engulfs you as you make your way to candlelit table in London’s oldest wine bar with an appropriately exquisite, but affordable, wine list. It is as though nothing has changed for 400 years.
2 - PARLIAMENT HILL
If you are after a panorama of the city, eschew the touristy London Eye for nothing compares with the view from Parliament Hill, atop which you can stand, in the summer breeze, and gaze down at the metropolis splayed out beneath your feet, with Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s, symbol of London’s resurgence from the ashes of fire, and another plague, clearly visible in the centre.
3 - HIGHGATE PONDS
For the brave, take a dip in one of the Highgate Ponds – there is a men’s pond and a mixed pond, then saunter past Keat’s House and dine in the Hollybush Pub in Hampstead Village amongst media tycoons and faded politicians.
4 - ST JAMES'S SQUARE & BEYOND
Medieval London was originally swaddled in its tall Roman walls but, from the 17th century, it burst out, sprawling westwards, with the building of utterly gorgeous terrace squares of fine brick townhouses fronting onto swirling sedan chairs and perfumed pigs and sheep from the Home Counties. To take in this new metropolis, why not load up Google Maps and take yourself on a tour of the great squares of the West End, beginning with St James’s and proceeding to Hanover, Grosvenor, Soho, Bloomsbury and Manchester Square, admiring the historic perfume shops, chocolate houses, art galleries and tobacconists that still linger.
5 - THE TATES
London contains some of the best art galleries in the world and if you take in Tate Britain, in Pimlico, then catch a riverboat to its sister gallery, the Tate Modern, and you’ll come away marvelling at the great wonders of craftmanship within, but also the masterpiece that is London as seen from its original highway of commerce, its ‘liquid history’: the Thames.
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