Practical guides, city routes and the author’s London research. Choose a subject, then open the complete article.
Begin with the empty space, not the dagger. In the morning West Smithfield feels like a pause in London’s dense fabric. Victorian market buildings stand on one side, a hospital and medieval…
Smithfield has a passage that edits time. From the square you see a timber-framed Tudor building above a stone arch. Walk beneath it and the market noise contracts. Ahead is the dark…
Stand between Westminster Abbey and the Supreme Court. This is now one of London’s most controlled landscapes: cameras, security arches, police officers, barriers and the timetables of…
St John’s Gate looks like an entrance to a city that has disappeared. Two heavy, battlemented towers compress an arch through which an ordinary street passes. Bicycles, vans and people…
Tower Green offers very little that can be seen from 19 May 1536. There is a clipped lawn, a row of Yeoman Warders’ houses, a chapel with Tudor windows and a circular glass memorial shaped…
Inside the White Tower, a plaque offers what appears to be a nearly perfect solution. It recalls that workmen in 1674 found the bones of two children near an old staircase. Their estimated…
The most famous image of Jane Grey’s death is wrong in almost every physical detail. Paul Delaroche places her in a dark stone chamber. A shaft of light strikes a white satin dress.…
At high tide in the late thirteenth century, the Thames came much closer to the stone arch. A royal barge could leave the river, pass beneath a pointed opening and enter a protected basin…
A fourteenth- or seventeenth-century visitor approaches the Tower’s western gate without yet seeing a cage. First comes a short, heavy roar, claws striking timber, a chain, a human shout.…
A black bird walks across the grass as if it owns the fortress. It does not hop anxiously like a pigeon. It takes several deliberate steps, lowers a formidable bill and studies the visitor…
Whitehall is rarely quiet. Buses pass between government buildings, security barriers redraw the pavement, and visitors move toward Parliament Square. Above the entrance to Banqueting House…
Do not picture the Gothic towers of the present Houses of Parliament. Picture a cramped early-seventeenth-century palace: old walls, timber galleries, lodgings, stores, stables and…