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Feeling CoLD

In Bride lane, a narrow street off Fleet Street, you’ll find the City’s only gin distillery. Walk down the steps and it seems you’re entering a smart gentlemen’s club, with leather sofas and dimmed lighting. A quick glance to the right, however, and you’ll spot a still, all gleaming copper and twisted pipework. In recent years gin has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance. It was only a few years ago that Beefeater was the sole London maker but now a whole load of boutique businesses have cropped up: Sipsmith, Portobello Road and Bloom. It seems the thirst for a G & T is unquenchable! The City of London Distillery was founded in November...

All Aboard the Mail Rail!

The Mail Rail once transported letters and parcels from Paddington Station to as far as the Tower of London. When it closed in 2003 after more than 75 years’ service the Post Office were stuck with what to do with it. Ideas varied from converting it to a subterranean cycle lane to creating an extensive mushroom farm. But then they thought: why not open it to the public?  London’s newest attraction opened in 3 years ago and has already proved popular. Discovering a part of hidden London is always exciting and this journey under the streets of London is no exception. You travel about 1.6km along the tracks, at no great speed but enough for younge...

Hidden London

    In an anonymous-looking warehouse in Hackney you’ll find the Museum of London Archaeology Archives. And behind the brick and steel building in N1 I recently had the pleasure of enjoying a tour, led by two enthusiastic volunteers. Here are all manner of finds, from masses of bones to shards of pottery and large items deemed to big to store, are safely stored in buff-coloured boxes, clearly labelled. When anything is found at a dig they are deemed either ‘registered’ - of significant interest or man-made - or ‘general’, for items like broken shards or fragments of bone. Whenever a developer wants to build a new structure they have to...

500 years of Physicians

It was in 1518 that King Henry VIII granted his physician Thomas Linacre the right to establish an institution that would grant licences to those with qualifications in 'physic' to practise their art. Initially this was in London and its surroundings but 5 years later their remit was extended by Act of Parliament to the whole of England. 500 years ago its membership numbered just 12; today that figure is 15,000. The Royal College of Physicians has had 5 addresses in that time. For many years they  were in Amen Corner and Warwick lane in the City (a plaque marks their original home) but since 1964  they’ve been in Regent’s Park, surrounded by t...