Charles Dickens features a graverobber, the nastily named Jeremy Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities. We actually see him digging up the coffin - so does his young son, who admits to his father that he wants to be a bodysnatcher when he grows up. Obviously readers of Dickens’s novels wouldn’t have thought this scene ridiculously far-fetched…

There aren’t too many reminders of the London bodysnatchers. But take yourself off to St Matthew’s church in Bethnal Green and you can see  a macabre reminder. At the corner of the road stands a watch house - dating from 1754. (It’s now on the corner of St Matthew’s Row and Wood Close).

The watchman was given a blunderbuss to defend the churchyard, with a reward of 2 guineas if he caught any bodysnatchers. Apparently the churchwardens still have the right to take a shot at you as long they give you warning - by sounding a sort of football rattle.

The watch house is a sweet little building, made of brick with contrasting white voussoirs of the two arches that contain the window and door of the ground floor. (Later, it was extended to house the parish fire engine.) But the innocent look of the building belies its macabre purpose.

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Some things make me very cross. Here’s one of them. It may not mean much to you.

The British Museum puts the Etruscans under ‘Roman’.

Okay, let’s explain. The Etruscans were the original inhabitants of much of Italy - before the Romans. They had a culture which was much more friendly to women (Rome was notoriously misogynistic), which produced brilliant art, which welcomed immigrants from Greece and Phoenicia, and which was highly literate (though we have only a few words of their language).

The Romans destroyed the Etruscans. They stole bits of Etruscan culture but they destroyed Etruscan society.

So it strikes me that filing the Etruscans under ‘Roman’ is not just ironic. It’s rather disrespectful.

Still, at least they have their own room - Room 71. And here you can see some really lovely work from their civilisation - which lasted five hundred years and which, many Etruscans seem to have believed,  would have a finite lifecycle just like a man, a tree, or a horse.

Etruscans were fine metalworkers in both bronze and precious metals. Even the bronze helmet, which must have been primarily functional, has an incredibly crisp design and execution. More startling is the gold jewellery, which uses techniques like filigree and granulation to create shimmering surfaces - incredibly detailed work considering these metalworkers had no magnifying glasses to make their work easier.

There are amazing bronze mirrors, too, with scenes from mythology incised on the back. Quite often, the Etruscans take Greek mythology as their subject - they had no qualms about borrowing stories from other pantheons and other peoples. Looking at the sheer number and beauty of these mirrors you just know that the Etruscans were a people who took their appearance very seriously.

And incredibly, you can even see a piece of Etruscan painting, 2,500 years old.

But the piece I always feel closest to is a sarcophagus - the tomb of Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, who must have died about 150 BC and was buried near Chiusi, in Tuscany. It’s a fine work - look at the way she’s holding a mirror in her left hand, and wearing all her finest jewellery. She was clearly a wealthy woman.

She died when she was about 55 - we know this, and quite a lot of other things, from the analysis of the remains within the sarcophagus. We know what she looked like - her face has been recreated from the skull - and we know that this sarcophagus is, though idealised, a real portrait of her. We know that she had a bad accident in her teens - perhaps a riding accident. We know she had bad arthritis, and an abcess that probably gave her bad breath.  She probably couldn’t speak very easily, and mumbled, because of her jaw injury.

And we know this is a real portrait. You’re looking at a real woman here - an incredibly strange and powerful feeling.

There are so many other things to see in the British Museum. Romans, Greeks, Ancient Egypt; Lindow Man and medieval clocks, Japanese prints and Assyrian gates. But don’t miss the Etruscans. They’re worth knowing - as is Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa

Photo credit: Seaianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, courtesy of Alun Salt on flickr 

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He’s about two thousand years old, so I like to make sure he’s okay.

But on a recent visit I found he’d upped sticks!

Pete Marsh is a well preserved male body (well, the upper half, anyway) found in a bog in Cheshire in 1984. The bog gave him his name - Peat Marsh, geddit?

He must have been some kind of sacrifice, having been killed in three ways - strangled, his throat cut, and knocked on the head as well. (Either that or he was an early football fan…)

And chemical analysis shows that although we believe the ancient Britons ran around covered in woad (which is blue), Pete was actually a little green man - painted with green vegetable dye before he was killed.

He is mysterious. Perhaps he was a Druid prince (the body showed no signs of hard labour - he’d lived the life of a scholar, or a noble, looked after by others). And he’s also rather gruesome in his little glass case.

But if you want to see him, you’ll have to take a trip to Manchester where he’s currently the star of his own exhibition - Lindow Man: A bog body mystery at  the Manchester Museum. He won’t be back in the BM till April 2009.

Oh yes, Lindow Man is his official name. But I prefer Pete. It suits him, somehow.

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The Sherlock Holmes pub is conveniently located not far from the National Gallery, the Houses of Parliament and Trafalgar Square. It’s in Northumberland Street, just off the main drag.  If you’re looking for a cooling pint after your touristic endeavours, it’s an atmospheric place to relax. It’s recreated Sherlock Holmes’s digs in 221B Baker Street - though I do wonder why this was done here, and not anywhere nearer to Baker Street itself!

It serves real ale - Greene King Abbot Ale for instance, or Speckled Hen. (Don’t be fooled by the Sherlock Holmes ale - a bit of detective work shows that it’s rebadged Morlands, apparently.)

However if the rather touristy feel of the Sherlock Holmes puts you off, just take a little walk up to the Strand where the Ship & Shovell in Craven Passage has a ramshackle charm. And serves beers you won’t find everywhere - Badger beer to be precise, including the famed Tanglefoot.

Even better, you have a choice of two tiny bars, one each side of the alleyway. One is snug, with wooden benches and fine mirrors, and the other is even snugger - practically just a bar with a tiny allotment of space for you to stand in. Difficult to choose between the two. I suppose if you wanted to be entirely free of bias you could always drink in the alleyway itself…

Now there’s a little bit of history here because you’ll probably have noticed the odd spelling of Shovell. That’s because it doesn’t refer to a digging implement, but to Sir Cloudesley Shovell - the admiral who got his fleet lost in the English Channel. Having refused to listen to a sailor who  was a rather better navigator than he was, the admiral ended his life on the rocks of the Isles of Scilly. It’s said that he struggled ashore alive, but a local woman killed him and cut off his finger in order to get at his expensive ring.

All in all, just as interesting a story as anything in the casebook of Sherlock Holmes!

Photo credit - Tore Urnes, on Flickr

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Charing Cross is named for the ‘Eleanor cross’ that stood here from 1290, in what was then the hamlet of Charing. A Gothic style ‘cross’ - really more of a pinnacle -  still stands in front of the Charing Cross Hotel, on the Strand, though it’s a Victorian replacement designed by E M Barry, who also designed the hotel and assisted his father on the Houses of Parliament. The original was demolished by Purtians in the 1640s as a symbol of both royalty and ‘popery’.

The story of the Eleanor crosses is rather touching. Edward I’s marriage to Eleanor of Castile was a standard medieval royal marriage, arranged for reasons of state rather than sentiment, but the couple seem to have come to care deeply for one another. (Unusually for an English king of the day Edward seems not to have had any other families besides the one he had with Eleanor!)  When she died, near Lincoln, on a journey with her husband, he had her body eviscerated and embalmed, and brought to London to be buried at Westminster Abbey. (Her heart was buried at Blackfriars in the City of London, her entrails in Lincoln Cathedral - not an unusual way of dealing with royal or noble bodies at that time.)

Everywhere that the funeral cortege stopped, Edward erected a fine cross in her memory. There were originally twelve - only three now remain. This Victorian version is probably rather more  decorative than the original, to judge by the relative plainness of the surviving three (at Geddington, Northampton and Waltham). The crosses were a moving testimony to his regard for his dead wife - and though he married again, he attended a memorial services for her to the end of his life.

If you want to carry on with the story of Eleanor, you can see her tomb in Westminster Abbey - with a marvellous gilt bronze effigy of the queen by William Torel, who had also made the effigy of Henry III.

By the way, this isn’t the original site of the cross. If you look over the road to Le Sueur’s fabulous statue of Charles I on horseback, that’s where the cross would originally have stood - and it’s ‘point zero’ for London, the place from which all road distances are measured.

Photo credit: Mark Shirley’s photo on flickr shows the Eleanor Cross at Geddington,  which probably gives us a good idea of what the original Charing Cross would have looked like.

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Westminster Cathedral is one of the great sights of London - in my book, anyway.

First of all, I’d better make sure no one confuses it with Westminster Abbey. The Abbey is where Kings, Queens, poets and the Establishment are buried; it’s a medieval building in the Gothic style, and an Anglican church. The Cathedral, on the other hand, is a Victorian building in neo-Byzantine style, and it’s a Roman Catholic church.

The foundation stone was laid in 1895. Architect JF Bentley didn’t choose the Gothic or classical styles that competed elsewhere in London for space - he looked to Byzantium and in particular to the great church of Hagia Sophia with its immense dome. Like the Byzantine churches, this one is mainly in brick - and brick that’s not hidden by stone cladding, but proudly proclaimed in the white-and-red decorative fabric of the great west front.

It’s a magnificent building, even though on a busy day it sometimes reminds me of a large railway station - there’s the same booming acoustic, the same to-ing and fro-ing, the same muted hum. It’s huge, for a start - 342 feet longm, 148 feet wide, with three great domes and using over 10 million bricks.

The other thing that rather puzzles me is why this cathedral looks so much like an Ottoman mosque. I know the Turks were much influenced by Hagia Sophia, so perhaps there’s a mutual influence there -  but the west front, with its little domed turrets cascading down from the great dome, really does look incredibly like one of the great mosques of Istanbul - Sultanahmet perhaps, or Suleymaniye. And the tower looks almost as much like a minaret as it does a Byzantine tower.

Whether it makes you think ‘Ottoman’ or ‘Byzantine’, there’s undeniably something exotic about this church.  You won’t find anything quite like it in London (though the Natural History Museum comes close.)

The interior is splendidly decorated with marble and mosaic. The marble used in the decoration comes from Greece, from Languedoc (the red), from Verona (the yellow),  and from Carrara in Italy (the capitals at the top of each column). The altar, on the other hand, is made out of Cornish granite - and apparently weighs ten tons.

Don’t miss the Stations of the Cross. They were carved by the great Eric Gill - a master stonemason and engraver. His work is clearly twentieth-century and yet it has something of the intensity and concentration of the best medieval art about it.  (His impassive, finely carved figures weren’t understood at the time when they were unveiled in 1915-16 - they were widely derided as flat and undevotional; it’s only later that Gill’s real artistic value was understood.)

Entrance to the cathedral is free, but there’s a charge to ascend the campanile - a marvellous red-and-white striped needle - for a marvellous view of London. And there is a lift - in case you were worried about your ability to manage all those steps.

The cathedral choir is also renowned, particularly for its performance of Spanish Renaissance music. The wonderful acoustic doesn’t hurt either. Go to choral vespers and it’s rumoured you won’t even have to sit through a sermon - just smells and bells and the most marvellous music.

Where: Victoria Street, SW1(Victoria tube station)

When: cathedral 7 am to 7pm, tower viewing gallery 930-1230 and 1-5pm.  Cathedral closes 530 pm on public holidays.

How much: cathedral free, admission charge for tower

Photo credit: Nick Richards on flickr

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I’ve always loved looking out of the plane as we come down into London, trying to find landmarks I can recognise. The trademark squiggle of the Thames around the Isle of Dogs; the green spaces of Kew. But it’s all crammed into a packed five minutes as you come in to land at Heathrow.

Now you can take a more leisurely look. An airship will carry you silently and slowly through the air above London. I’ve been told it’s the same as being on a sailing boat - you feel the eddies and currents of the air, more than you do on a plane, and you hear nothing but the wind going past. Very different from the experience of flying into Heathrow.

It feels more natural - and it’s more environmentally friendly too. Because the airship is filled with helium, which is lighter than air, it only has to expend energy on moving around - not getting up in the air in the first place. (Anyone concerned about the rumoured propensity of airships to burst into flames should know that this applied only to the early hydrogen-filled blimps - helium is much safer!)

On the negative side, airships are slow compared to planes - one left London for Dubai in November 2006 and still hasn’t got there, though that was because the Egyptian government wouldn’t let it overfly the Pyramids and it ended up turning tail for the  Friedrichshafenairship centre instead. No airship - even the ‘new generation’ aerodynamically designed blimps - has ever managed more than 100 miles an hour.

Of course you’ll get the most out of any experience like this if you already know London. It’s much more fun pointing out different places to your friends - and quarrelling about whether they’re right, or you are - than just looking at a landscape you haven’t seen before.

The flights are expensive. £180 for a half hour flight,  £360 for an hour.  But I’m sorely tempted. It’s not an opportunity that’s going to be around for long, either - the airship is only going to be in London till August 21st.

Photo credit - Les Chatfield on Flickr

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Half way along Whitehall stands the Banqueting House - the last remnant of Whitehall Palace.

The palace of Whitehall had grown up during the Middle Ages as a straggling, rather random collection of buildings. Into this Gothic and Tudor muddle, Inigo Jones placed a monument of classical reason - it must have come as a shock,  a building more Italian than English, clashing with everything around it.

Of course  later on, classical style became pretty common in London - Nash’s terraces, Lutyens’s neo-imperial, every other bank and insurance company using pediments and colonnades. But this was pretty much the first classical building of any prominence in the city.

James I commissioned it, and he must have been looking for a touch of ‘modern’ style.  He got a masterpiece.

Outside,  the building is a triumph of symmetry - none of the quirkiness of native Jacobean building. Jones uses alternating round and triangular pediments to set up a fine rhythm, and the whole facade feels light and elegant.

It’s the interior though that is the reason I’d put the Banqueting House on my London top ten list. It was Charles I, James’s son, who commissioned the ceiling,  showing his father’s apotheosis. And it was commissioned not from an English painter, but from the Flemish baroque painter, Peter Paul Rubens - probably the wealthiest and best known painter in the Europe of his day.

This was very different from anything that had been painted in England before. If you look for instance at the allegorical portraits of Elizabeth I, you can see they’re really just portraits with some extra scenery. This is completely different - it’s an entire panorama in which the figure of James is almost lost. (I think you can understand how Parliamentarians and Puritans, looking at this, would have been amazed and disturbed by this imperialist depiction of the divine nature, not just the divine right, of kings!)

If you’re interested,  you can make a little visit to the National Gallery afterwards, to see the preparatory sketch Rubens made for a similar ceiling in the Duke of Buckingham’s house.

Why ‘Banqueting House’? Well, the Stuart court was addicted to masques - small dramas  which were acted by members of the court, with songs and dances, and usually a final chorus praising the King or one of the royal family. Inigo Jones provided the scenery for many of these, working with his friend, the dramatist Ben Jonson. The Banqueting House was a place for staging masques and other court events - a sort of cross between a dining room and a theatre. It opened in 1622 with the Masque of Augurs.

The great irony of the Banqueting House is that it was built as a piece of propaganda for the Stuart dynasty. Yet it was from one of the windows of the upper storey that King Charles I stepped out on to the scaffold in 1649.

Where: Whitehall

When: 10-5 Mon-Sat 

How much:  £4.50 (£3.50 concessions and £2.25 children)

Photo credit: Matt Brown on flickr 

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Whitstable is famous for its oysters.Head straight down to the harbour, with its Victorian clapperboarded buildings and fish market, to taste them. (But only if there’s an R in the month, otherwise you’ll have to make do with crab or fish, or cockles or winkles.)

Or wander the little alleyways of the town; the fact that one is known as ‘Squeeze Gut Alley’ should give you some idea of just how narrow some of them are. This landscape goes back to the seventeenth century, perhaps earlier, and it’s the sign of a traditional fishing town -  go up the East Coast and you’ll find the ‘Scores’ in Lowestoft or the ‘Rows’ in Yarmouth.

Most seaside towns have a pub on the prom. Again, Whitstable is different, with a pub actually on the beach - the Old Neptune. I’m always amazed it doesn’t just float off at high tide.  It’s a pretty old building, and like much of the rest of Whitstable, feels rather Dickensian.

In fact if you’ve seen the television adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel ‘Tipping the velvet’ , you might have a bit of a feeling of deja vu in Whitstable - it was used as one of the filming locations for the series.

And although it’s not Whitstable’s main draw, there is a beach - Tankerton beach, a little way out of town. I’d describe it as ‘bracing’ on most days - there always seems to be a wind blowing! Tracy Emin used to have a beach hut here, and it does have a certain attraction, though if you’re after sunbathing I can think of better places.

You can get to Whitstable in a bit less than an hour and a half from London Victoria.

Photo credit: Mark Kelly on flickr

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Some of the most famous inhabitants of St James’s park are its five pelicans.

They’ve been here  a long time. Since the 1660s to be exact. (Not the same pelicans, obviously. Though the great white pelican can live for fifty years, so these are venerable birds.)

The first pelicans were presented to Charles II by the Russian ambassador. At the time, diarist John Evelyn was not impressed - he described them at the time as “between a stork and a swan”.    Which isn’t particularly accurate, and fails to describe their most unusual and noticeable attribute - the huge pouches under their beaks.

(Charles was also presented with two gondolas by the Doge of Venice; they plied a little canal.  St James’s Park in the Restoration clearly had something of the charm of Las Vegas today!)

I haven’t been able to find out the names of all of the pelicans. But two of them are known as Vaclav and Rusalka - they came from Prague  to replenish the small flock.

If you happen to be passing St James’s Park around 230 in the afternoon,  you can catch the pelicans being fed - definitely something  that will fascinate kids. Apparently each bird eats five kilos of fish a day. (Occasionally, they have been known to display more omnivorous tendencies - a couple of years ago, one of them decided to eat a pigeon.  The pelican’s beak is more than large enough to fit a pigeon in there, whole.)

The pelicans may be relatively recent arrivals in the history of London  - but they have become as much a part of the city as the ravens of the Tower. So perhaps it’s not surprising that there’s now a myth that if the pelicans ever leave St James’s Park, it will be the end of civilisation as we know it…

If you want to know more about the pelicans, and enjoy seeing members of the British establishment in playful mood, you’ll want to look up theHansard report of a debate in the House of Lords about the pelicans.  It includes the fact that each one costs £78.50 a week  - though that’s probably gone up by now; the debate was in 1995.

Photo credit: Kathleen Conklin, on flickr 

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