Over 55,000 Bomber Command crew lost their lives during the second world war – a death rate of over 44% from those who served. Thousands of others were killed in training, wounded, or shot down and taken prisoner. A Bomber Command crew member had a worse chance of survival than a junior infantry officer in WW1 (usually the benchmark for combatants’ slaughter). A tour of operations was 30 missions and the chances of surviving those unscathed was less than 30% The risks and the casualties are almost beyond imagining. But there was no memorial to those that flew until Liam O’Connor and Philip Jac ..read more

On 12 October 2002, Islamist suicide bombers detonated a large car bomb and a device in a backpack in nightclubs in the popular tourist location of Kuta, in Bali, Indonesia. 202 people were killed, nearly all of whom were under 40. The country with the most fatalities was Australia; 88 of the victims came from there, and there are memorials to those killed in Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Canberra among other cities. 23 UK citizens died, and London has its own memorial in Horseguards Avenue, just at the foot of Clive Steps. This was unveiled by Charles and Camilla (as the Duke and Duchess of Co ..read more

Many of the stories of those who served in WW2 are capable of inducing in those of us who have never had to face such experiences a state of awe: the unimaginable horror, always the risk of death, the loss of friends and comrades. How did they endure? What reserves did they draw on to survive? And standing out among the brave are those who worked in enemy territory, who had to live with the constant threat of betrayal and arrest, who knew that capture almost certainly meant torture and death. Some of these exceptional individuals – men and women – are recognised with the memorial by the river ..read more

Sir John Soane (1753-1837), most famously the architect of the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery, was the son of a bricklayer who rose to be professor of architecture at the Royal Academy. He is buried in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, his self-designed mausoleum said to have been the inspiration for the domed roof of Giles Gilbert Scott’s famous K2 telephone kiosk.  When he died, he left his houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, his drawings and architectural models, his collections of paintings and sculpture, and – most significantly – his varied collection of architectura ..read more

Should you want to feel godlike, the entire capital spread out beneath your glorious presence, then the place to go is The London Centre, in Guildhall, because it is there that you can get to experience New London Architecture’s magnificent models of the city and its buildings. There are three such models on display at the moment; the Royal Docks development, the City Model (or which more shortly) and the New London Model, and each is a pretty impressive example of the modelmakers’ craft. The New London Model is huge – 12.5m long, representing a 25km slice of the capital. In front of you is ov ..read more

As usual, it started with a bit of googling to research something completely different, but when an interesting rabbit hole appears it seems remiss not to dive straight in. That different something was finding out about Treasury Passage, a passage (although not for the likes of you and me) that cuts through William Kent’s Treasury Building from Horseguards Parade to Downing Street. I will hopefully return to that in a subsequent post. But while looking into that I came upon the Library of Congress’s high-res scan of John Rocque’s “Plan Of The Cities Of London And Westminster, And Borough Of So ..read more

A visit to HMS Belfast on a chilly, late January Tuesday gave me the ship almost to myself, the first time I’d visited this floating museum opposite the Tower of London in almost 20 years. Now operated by the Imperial War Museum, this warship – not a battleship, but a cruiser: more lightly armed and armoured, but faster – was launched in 1938 at the Harland + Wolff yard in Belfast (this is the shipyard that built the Titanic). It saw action in WW2 protecting the Arctic convoys, taking part in the Battle of North Cape that saw the sinking of the German cruiser ‘Scharnhorst’, and was one of the ..read more

My solid, reliable, 20-year-old Toyota finally stopped being solid and reliable this month (on the M5 in Devon, which was fun). We’d been debating about not having a car once it expired (we just weren’t expecting that to happen now). Of all the places in the UK, London should be the easiest to survive without a motor – public transport is good, car clubs exist, the city is walkable and cyclable. So we’re going to give it a go, and I will track the progress (the good, the bad, the expensive) of being car free on this new blog. The new blog – click on the image above to see what’s been written s ..read more

On one’s way to the Parthenon Gallery one walks through Room 17 of the British Museum and there, on the right, is what appears to be a Greek temple. A pediment and entablature are supported by ionic columns, between which three female forms are ‘dancing’. Below this are two layers of frieze, with the thinner, top, layer showing forces capturing a city, and the bottom layer scenes of individual combat between warriors. It isn’t actually a temple, nor is it Greek; it is the monumental tomb of Arbinas (sometimes written as Erbinna), a 4thC BCE ruler of Xanthos, one of the city-states of an ancien ..read more

Pubs! Pubs are great (as I’ve mentioned before). If you truly want to experience London then you need to spend a few hours in a pub – watching, listening, talking and, of course, drinking beer. After a session in the pub you will have a much deeper sense of what makes Londoners tick, the character of the city and the conviviality of its inhabitants than you will get from reading any number of guide books or magazine articles. But despite my love, and frequent patronage of pubs, I’ve never written about specific boozers in the ten years or so that this blog has been going. So let’s correct that ..read more