By Oliver Clark When I told a friend I was planning a visit to Tilbury Fort over the Christmas holidays the reaction was a bemused ‘where’s Tilbury?!’ Unfortunately if people have heard of the town of Tilbury on the Essex coast at all, it’s probably for the wrong […]
After a joyous walk along the River Lea this afternoon, I finally got to see Olympic Park at close range, rather than merely on television as a backdrop for the evening news during the summer months. 2012 was of course the year of the London Olympics, so in […]
Back in Bristol for Christmas, it’s fascinating to see how much the city I was born in has changed and how much hasn’t. Bars, pubs, restaurants and shops I once frequented have disappeared – either replaced by new businesses or now boarded up. Bristol, like other parts of […]
Why is it that in such a bustling city as London, do we, Londoners, and visitors alike make such an effort to get out to discover the ‘undiscovered’ and ‘unseen’? Thousands of us take the Tube and visit Underground stations every day, yet tours of so-called ‘ghost’ (disused) […]
Ask a Londoner where the spiritual home of the curry is in the capital and, more likely than not, they’ll tell you to head to Brick Lane, just east of Liverpool Street station. And while you could argue as to whether the restaurants on this stretch serve the […]
Walking past the Beigel Shop in Brick Lane is a real treat. Whatever time of day (or night) it is you can’t fail to notice the wonderful smell of freshly baked bread oozing out. Inside, you get a real mix of people, from City workers to tourists, enjoying […]
If there’s one building that tells the Spitalfields story, it’s the Jamme Masjid Mosque on Brick Lane. Although only a Muslim house of prayer since 1976, it’s been a place of worship for major faiths – Christianity, Judaism and Islam – for some 250 years. The successive uses […]
There’s nothing that exciting about Canary Wharf’s soulless shopping malls and office complexes. Hosting corporate entities ranging from Starbucks and Costa Coffee to HMV and Topshop, you could be in any number of places in Britain, if not the world. And despite the wonderful river views, and the […]
Next to a Pret A Manager store in amongst Borough’s maze of narrow streets there’s an important preserved historical site that helps us remember the time when a major part of Southwark was ruled by a single powerful landowner, the Bishop of Winchester. Most of the Winchester Palace […]
Watching the jugglers, fire eaters and magicians entertain tourists and Londoners alike today at Covent Garden’s elegant piazza, it is hard to imagine that once this was where people lived in simple homes and socialised in timber built halls with thatched roofs. It was a place where residents […]
Past In The Present 