8th International Congress on Medical Librarianship

Special Attractions in London

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Sightseeing Bus

The famous London double-decker bus

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A traditional London double-decker crossing Westminster Bridge, with Big Ben in the background. A hint from a native: if you find yourself on a Number 12 bus, get off long before you get to Peckham

Several companies operate sightseeing tours on open-top buses. Take your pick at Piccadilly Circus or Victoria Station, and don’t be unduly influenced by the use of the words official, and so on. The tours have a commentary and on many of them you can hop on and off all day. And the buses have downstais where you can sit if it starts to rain.

Aerial View of Trafalgar Square trafalgar 1(12165 bytes)
A panoramic view, taken incidentally from the top of the headquarters of the Association of the british Pharmaceutical Industry, showing Nelson’s Column and the fountains, and doing no justice at all to Landseer’s huge lion statues, which look so good rom ground level.

The magnificent building the background is the National Gallery and the church spire to the right belongs to St Martin in the Fields, possibly the most inappositely named church in the world, which also serves as a concert venue, a centre for London’s homeless and a café (though not all mixed up together).

Nelson's Statute
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A clearer picture of the statue of Nelson than you will get in real life with the naked eye, when it is dwarfed by its surroundings. Nelson lost an eye and an arm at different times and, perhaps because of his death on board HMS Victory at the height of his triumph, he remains one of Britain’s greatest national heroes.

Trafalgar Square

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Man with Pigeons

There are thousands of pigeons in Trafalgar Square despite periodic official culls, and as you can see they are horribly, horribly tame. Kiosks sell bags of pigeon food, and whether or not you throw yourself into this particular tourist tradition depends on the balance between your senses of fun and of hygiene. They’re not always as bad as this. Yes they are.

Of the half-dozen sites that might be claimed as the very centre of London, Trafalgar Square probably has the strongest credentials. Named for Nelson’s decisive naval victory in 1805 against a combined French and Spanish fleet, it is described in The Rough Guide to London as "little more than a glorified, sunken traffic island infested with scruffy urban pigeons" — a description which manages to be both deadly accurate and gloriously unfair.

Trafalgar Square is dominated by a Nelson’s Column, a granite pillar topped with a statue of the Admiral who died in his moment of triumph. Extra attractions are fearsome but climbable bronze lions by the Victorian artist Landseer and the famous fountains design by Lutyens (who also designed the headquarters of the British Medical Association. The square is also dotted with statuary depicting the usual range of royalty and national figures, in varying degrees of pomp and fancifulness.

The north side of the Square is dominated by the classical façade of the National Gallery, and in the southwest corner is the entrance to The Mall, which leads down through St James’s Park to Buckingham Palace..

Trafalgar Square has a forum of national significance since it was built in early Victorian times. It provides a focus for national demonstrations and rallies provides a wonderful and telegenic setting for the closing rallies, although in recent years these have more often taken place in the less enclosed surroundings of Hyde Park than in the Square itself. It is also the centre of English celebrations of each New Year. (The Scots do it differently.) No sounding of midnight on December 31^st is complete without the traditional platoon of drunks embracing hypothermia by flinging themselves into the fountain.

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A view of the National gallery from the heart of Trafalgar Square, complete with ubiquitous pigeons and stone bollards for children to race round.
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National Portrait Gallery

National Gallery

The National Gallery houses one of the world’s great collections of paintings, ranking in Europe alongside the Louvre and the Hermitage. The magnificent building houses a collection which includes fine examples of every significant Western artistic tradition, although the national collection of 20^th-century art resides in the Tate Gallery along the Thames

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The centrepiece of the National Gallery. Just to the right of the picture are pedestrian- controlled traffic lights ensuring that you can reach the gallery in a fit state to enjoy it.


National Maritime Museum is one of London’s best and liveliest, and is housed in magnificent premises. And in a dry-dock by the river terminal is the Cutty Sark, a 19^th-century clipper ship beautifully preserved as a highly atmospheric museum of sail.


Victoria & Albert Museum

Royal College of Surgeons


Tower of London	Royal Family


London Butterfly House	London Aquarium

No. 10 Downing Street Downing St. (13478 bytes)

10 Downing Street has been the official residence of the Prime Minister since the 18^th century, more or less since we’ve had one. Although "Number Ten" is a fine house, it’s mostly offices, and the residential accommodation has proved two small for the current incumbent (who has two school-age children) and he has moved next door, swapping apartments with his bachelor Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister).

Downing Street is just off Whitehall and a five-minute walk from Parliament. Such is the traffic sometimes that if you are lucky (and fit) you can see the gates opened to let through the Prime Ministerial Jaguar, pelt down the road and be in time to see the PMJ emerge from the traffic jam and drop him off at the House of Commons.

Until fairly recently, it was possible to make a nuisance of yourself wandering about Downing Street. Mrs Thatcher had the pictured wrought-iron gates erected, ostensibly as an anti- terrorist measure but (many think) as an indicator of her growing distance from everyday life.

Official Wimbledon Page

Scotland Yard

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An undistinguished building, but one famous from countless detective stories and black-and-white British films. Whether admiringly following in the following in the intellectual wakes of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Whimsey, or actually protecting society off their own bat, Scotland Yard detectives formed Britain’s crimefighting elite for decades in both truth and fiction. Generations of miscreants went up these steps to meet their fate.

The Metropolitan Police is long gone from here, having moved to a modern office block half a mile west, but reassuringly called New Scotland Yard.


Tower Bridge	Piccadilly Circus A slightly raddled open space in the heart of the West End theatre and shopping district, famous for its wall of illuminated signs (dating back to the Edwardian era) and to the ornate Eros statue, which is not actually Eros but a representation of Christian charity in commemoration of a pillar of Victorian society. London’s traffic problems have led to successive remodellings of the area, making it more friendly (ie less certainly lethal) to pedestrians. Eros used to sit on an island in the middle of circulating traffic, and one of the most memorable events of this writer’s early childhood was sitting in a car being driven by his grandfather the wrong way round Piccadilly Circus.


Covent Garden
Greenwich In amongst the urban sprawl, the old village of Greenwich is still clearly to be seen, with a fascinating mix of architecture. With its naval connections and, later, its comfortable distance from the London miasma Greenwich has always been pretty well-to-do — and it still shows. There are a couple of special attractions worth the journey on their own. The ancient Greenwich Observatory is situated in the picturesque (or at least picturesque when it’s not impossibly crowded with relaxing South Londoners as it sometimes is) Greenwich Park and right on the meridian (ie 0° of longitude). There is a lot of loose talk about this making it of special significance for the millennium celebrations, which is a bit hard to follow, really, but the Observatory is both historic and interesting, and walking up the hill stretches the legs nicely after the ride down on the boat. The shops in Greenwich are varied and interesting and well worth a browse. There is a market spread through various sites, and this is covered elsewhere in our Market Guide.

Covent Garden

Greenwich
In amongst the urban sprawl, the old village of Greenwich is still clearly to be seen, with a fascinating mix of architecture. With its naval connections and, later, its comfortable distance from the London miasma Greenwich has always been pretty well-to-do — and it still shows. There are a couple of special attractions worth the journey on their own.

The ancient Greenwich Observatory is situated in the picturesque (or at least picturesque when it’s not impossibly crowded with relaxing South Londoners as it sometimes is) Greenwich Park and right on the meridian (ie 0° of longitude). There is a lot of loose talk about this making it of special significance for the millennium celebrations, which is a bit hard to follow, really, but the Observatory is both historic and interesting, and walking up the hill stretches the legs nicely after the ride down on the boat.

The shops in Greenwich are varied and interesting and well worth a browse. There is a market spread through various sites, and this is covered elsewhere in our Market Guide.