City Guide - Sightseeing

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London is a thrilling place. Its museums and galleries - the British Museum, the Tate, and scores of others - are among the finest in the world, while monuments from the capital's more glorious past are everywhere to be seen, from medieval banqueting halls and the great churches of Sir Christopher Wren to the eclectic Victorian architecture of the triumphalist British Empire. The major sights - Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, St Paul's Cathedral and the Tower of London - draw in millions of tourists every year. Yet there is as much enjoyment to be had from the city's quiet Georgian squares, the narrow alleyways of the City of London, the riverside walks, and the quirks of what is still identifiably a collection of villages. And even London's traffic pollution - one of its worst problems - is offset by surprisingly large expanses of greenery: Hyde Park, Green Park and St James's Park are all within a few minutes' walk of the West End, while, further afield, you can enjoy the more expansive parklands of Hampstead Heath and Richmond Park.

Attractions

Trafalgar Square
It's the heart of visitors' London, beating with tour buses, cameras and flocks of persistent pigeons. On the square's northern edge is the cash-strapped National Gallery, which has one of the world's most impressive art collections. Famous paintings include Cézanne's The Bathers and van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding. Entry to the gallery is free, which means if you feel like dropping in and looking at just one or two pictures, you can do so at your leisure without feeling obliged to cover extensive territory.
Also in the vicinity are the National Portrait Gallery, a place to see lots of faces from the Middle Ages to modern times, and < the in Martin>, with an adjoining craft market and a brass-rubbing centre in the crypt.

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Westminster Abbey
The resting place of the royals, Westminster Abbey is one of the most visited churches in the Christian world. It's a beautiful building, full of morose tombs and monuments, with an acoustic field that will send shivers down your spine when the choirboys clear their throats. The roll call of the dead and honoured is guaranteed to humble the greatest egoist, despite the weighty and ornate memorabilia. In September 1997, millions of people round the world saw the inside of the Abbey when TV crews covered Princess Di's funeral service. Since then the number of visitors has increased by 300%, and the visit is now more restricted, with some areas cordoned off.

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Houses of Parliament
The awesome neo-Gothic brilliance of the Houses of Parliament has been restored thanks to a recent spring clean of the facade. The building includes the House of Commons and the House of Lords, so the grandeur of the exterior is let down only by the level of debate in the interior ('hear, hear'). There's restricted access to the chambers when they're in session, but a visit around 6pm will avoid the worst of the crowds. Check the time on the most recognisable face in the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben.
Nearby, Downing St, the official residence of the prime minister (no 10) and the chancellor of the exchequer (no 11), has been guarded by an imposing iron gate since the security forces realised that the lone iconic bobby outside Maggie's door was not sufficient to stop the IRA mortar bomb attack in 1989.

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Tate Britain
The Tate Britain is the keeper of an impressive historical archive of British art. Built in 1897, the Tate is currently undergoing an ambitious programme of expansion. When all is complete, there will be six new galleries for temporary exhibition and nine new or refurbished ones for the Tate's permanent collection of peerless Blakes, Reynolds, Gainsboroughs, Hogarths, Constables, Turners and Pre-Raphaelite beauties.
Its sister gallery, the brand-spanking new Tate Modern, is housed in the former Bankside Power Station. The Tate Modern displays the Tate's collection of international modern art, including major works by Bacon, Dalí, Picasso, Matisse, Rothko and Warhol, as well as work by more contemporary artists. The building is as exciting as the art: gorgeous industrial-strength red brick with a 325ft-high (99m-high) chimney. The former turbine hall, below street level and running the length of the vast building, now forms the awe-inspiring entrance to the gallery.

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Buckingham Palace
The Queen opened Buckingham Palace to the public for the first time in 1993 to raise money for repairs to Windsor Castle. The interiors range from kitsch to tasteless opulence and reveal nothing of the domestic life of the Royal Family apart from a gammy eye when it comes to interior decor. The changing of the guard is a London 'must see' - though you'll probably go away wondering what all the fuss was about.
Not far off and definitely worth a stroll is St James's Park, which is the neatest and most royal of London's royal parks. St James's Palace is the only surviving part of a building initiated by the palace-mad Henry VIII in 1530. Just near the park's northern edge is the Institute for Contemporary Art, a great place to relax, hang out and see some cutting-edge film, dance, photography, theatre and art.

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Covent Garden
Once a vegetable field attached to Westminster Abbey, Covent Garden became the low-life haunt of Pepys, Fielding and Boswell, then a major fruit and veg market, and is now a triumph of conservation and commerce. The car-free piazza is surrounded by designer gift and clothes shops, hip bars and restaurants. Stalls selling overpriced antiques and bric-a-brac share the arcaded piazza with street theatre, buskers and people-watchers.

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British Museum
The most trafficked attraction in Bloomsbury, and in the entirety of London, is without a doubt the British Museum. It is the oldest, most august museum in the world, and has recently received a well-earned rejig with Norman Foster's glass-roofed Great Court. The museum is so big and so full of 'stuff' collected (read: stolen?) by Victorian travellers and explorers that visitors often make the mistake of overdosing on the antiquities. See as much as you want to see, not as much as you believe you should. Highlights include the weird Assyrian treasures and Egyptian mummies; the exquisite pre-Christian Portland Vase and the 2000-year-old corpse found in a Cheshire bog. With the removal of the British Library to St Pancras, the Reading Room is now open to the public, sadly making Reader's tickets a thing of the past.
Bloomsbury is a peculiar mix of the University of London, beautiful Georgian squares and architecture, literary history, traffic, office workers, students and tourists. Its focal point, Russell Square, is London's largest square.

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St Paul's Cathedral
Half the world saw the inside of St Paul's Cathedral when Charles and Di tied the knot here in 1981. The venerable building was constructed by Christopher Wren between 1675 and 1710, but it stands on the site of two previous cathedrals dating back to 604. Its famous dome, the biggest in the world after St Peter's in Rome, no longer dominates London as it did for centuries, but it's still quite a sight when viewed from the river. Visitors should talk low and sweetly near the whispering gallery, which reputedly carries words spoken close to its walls to the other side of the dome.

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Victoria & Albert Museum
The Victoria & Albert Museum, on Cromwell Rd in South Kensington, has an eclectic mix of booty gathered together under its brief as a museum of decorative art and design. It sometimes feels like an enormous Victorian junk shop, with nearly four million artefacts on display. It's best to browse through the collection whimsically, checking out the Chinese ceramics, Japanese swords, cartoons by Raphael, sculpture by Rodin, the Frank Lloyd Wright study and the pair of Doc Martens.
Also on Cromwell Rd, the Natural History Museum is one of London's finest Gothic-revival buildings, but even its grand cathedral-like main entrance can seem squashed when you're confronted with hordes of screaming schoolkids. Keep away from the dinosaur exhibit while the kids are around and check out the mammal balcony, the Blue Whale exhibit and the spooky, moonlit rainforest in the ecology gallery.

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Camden Markets
The huge Camden Markets could be the closest England gets to free-form chaos outside the terraces of football stadia. They stretch between Camden and Chalk Farm tube stations, incorporating Camden Lock on the Grand Union Canal, and get so crowded on weekends that you'll think you're in the Third World. The markets include the Camden Canal Market (bric-a-brac, furniture and designer clothes), Camden Market (leather goods and army surplus gear) and the Electric Market (records and 1960s clothing).
After Camden Market, the colourful Portobello Market is London's most famous (and crowded) weekend street market and is best seen on a Saturday morning before the gridlock sets in. It's full of antiques, jewellery, ethnic knick-knacks, second-hand clothes and fruit and veg stalls. Starting near the Sun in Splendour pub in Notting Hill, it wends its way northwards to just past the Westway flyover.

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Hyde Park
Humongous Hyde Park used to be a royal hunting ground, was once a venue for duels, executions and horse racing, and even became a giant potato field during WWII. It is now a place of fresh air, spring colour, lazy sunbathers and boaters on the Serpentine. Features of the park include sculptures by Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore and the Serpentine Gallery, which holds temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.
Near Marble Arch, Speaker's Corner started life in 1872 as a response to serious riots. Every Sunday anyone with a soapbox - or anything else to stand on - can rant or ramble on about anything at all.

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Kew Gardens
Kew Gardens, in Richmond, Surrey, is both a beautiful park and an important botanical research centre. There's a vast expanse of lawn and formal gardens and two soaring Victorian conservatories - the Palm House and the Temperate House - which are home to exotic plant life. It's one of the most visited sights on the London tourist agenda, which means that it can get very crowded, especially in the summer. And with nearby Heathrow continuously spitting out jets, there isn't much chance of total peace and quiet.