Mick's Guide to London
A subjective guide to what is worth visiting, mostly around London and a couple of day trips.. Some of you will be familiar with many of these places, while others may not. Your tastes will be different from mine (I hope!) so you takes' yer pick. Many of the obscure ones are only open at specific times, so you would need to check that out. I have marked the ones 'out of town' that can easily be reached by train. The rest will need wheels.
Castles.
Several of the famously scenic ones are just that. They look great, often come wrapped in a landscape garden that is far from 'period appropriate', and have a story to tell, but the buildings themselves haven't got a lot in them beyond the stonework. Examples, Hever, Leeds and Bodiam. An obvious exception is WINDSOR CASTLE, which has its staterooms, art collections and whatnot. Windsor itself is characterful and sits next to twee Eton, where you can laugh at the posh boys. (Trains)
I like proper ruins. The best ones are BERKHAMSTED (Train) and WALLINGFORD, both of which played pivotal roles in history. In both cases, you need to add imagination to build out from what's left. The latter also has a decent chunk of the old walls around the town raised by Alfred the Great, dozens of other old buildings and a digestible museum. Ewelme is nearby. Great little place, especially for fans of landscape history. My write-up is Section D in this old blog post : Ewelme
Cathedrals, Churches and Dead People.
WINCHESTER Cathedral isn't as snazzy as Salisbury but, sitting on roof beams, you can see the chests containing the bones of around a dozen old Saxon Kings, including Cnut, Mrs Cnut (Emma of Normandy) and Æthelred the Unready. Unlike London, towns like this have a lot of buildings that predate the Great Fire. The medieval Great Hall is nearby with the 'Round Table'. Not King Arthur's sadly, but original by Edward 1st and artwork by Henry 8th. (Train)
You know WESTMINSTER ABBEY, but have you looked carefully? Much better than St Paul's if, like me, you are a fan of dead people and a great reminder that legendary figures were once flesh and blood.
Other great places to find historic dead people are obvious. Highgate Cemetery for Marx and Douglas Adams (!). Kensal has more weirdos. Bunhill for the intellectual outriders. The one-offs (Pocaontas, Burton) don't really offer enough to merit the travelling.
In London, it would be easy to put together a walking tour of the best old City churches. My faves are: St Etheldreda's, really old, it survived the Great Fire and the Blitz, St Magnus incorporates the gate to the old London Bridge, All Hallows has a good crypt, St Bride's is the prettiest, and Temple has the grave of William the Marshall, the man who saved England from itself and the French.
REALLY OLD STUFF. There are lots of hillforts around the Southeast, but unless you share my interest in what are basically mounds of earth, they won't excite you. My blog post on them is here: Hillforts. If you are interested in vernacular buildings, the places people used to live in, the WEALD AND DOWNLAND MUSEUM in Sussex took endangered old houses and rebuilt them. I've been four times so far. Surveyor porn.
Once you have been to Italy, you can't get excited about Roman stuff here. But on a nice day, the 1.5 mile walls at SILCHESTER make it worth a visit just to get an idea of the scale of the place. The 'mounds' that are what's left of the earlier Oppida of the Atrebates tribe are next to it. There are also lots of Roman remains at St Albans, but they are heavily sanitised. (Tarin & a few miles walk)
You will probably have been already, but my No. 1 day out in town is GREENWICH ,not least because it can be done with a ride down the river on the Thames Clipper. Cutty Sark is good, but the urge to show you its 'copper bottom' (where the expression came from) rather spoils it. I love the National Maritime Museum. Most visitors don't get as far as Inigo Jones' Queens House, or Wren's Old Naval College with its amazing baroque-style ceilings. Plus the Observatory & views from the hill.
Also, if you like the wooden ships and the whole Nelson story, the Victory at PORTSMOUTH is worth a trip, and there is more naval stuff there to see, submarines and other vessels that you can poke about in.
NOOKS & CRANNIES.
We mentioned Dennis Severs' House. Go when it's dark, preferably when they have decked out for Xmas.
Ditto the 'Museum of the Home' in Hackney, a room for each period of the modern age & better than it sounds.
The John Soane Museum in Holborn is like a very upmarket junk shop. Interesting, bizarre and funny.
The free exhibition at the British Library features everything from the Domesday Book and the Magna Carta to Michelangelo and Leonardo.
On the rare occasions it is open, 2 Temple Place is an eccentric pastiche of medieval Gothic created by William Waldorf Astor of hotel fame. They host small & eclectic exhibitions. Top off around the corner by splashing out on a cocktail in the Savoy Hotel's famous 'American Bar.' There are lots of bits thereabouts, a Roman cistern in Strand Place and the lights running on sewer gas in Carting Lane.
Lots of stuff is ignored by tourists around Clerkenwell. Charterhouse in the City must be one of the oldest medieval survivors, and hasn't been mucked about too much. My No. 1 is the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green, where you can see the office from which Lenin planned the revolution. He & Stalin drank at the Crown, nearby. Marx himself was a piss artist and would have known every pub between Soho and Camden. (He lived over what is now the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street).
There are lots of famous people's houses. Most aren't worth a look. Offbeat, you might fancy are Handel's and Hendrix's place in St James and (although it's a pig to get to) Darwin's house in Down, Kent.
Lots of stuff underground, much of which you will have heard of. A rarely visited (or visitable) place is the 'Paddock' bunker in Dollis Hill, now a damp dump but once WW2's alternative Cabinet War Rooms. The bunker for WW3 (from the Cold War) is Kelvedon Hatch, which is open regularly.
If you haven't been, go to the Natural History Museum mainly just to see the building, but there are always quiet corners to poke about in. My favourite is Alfred Russell Wallace's colourful beetle collection. Sloane had a hand in this as well.
There are many small and rather odd exhibition galleries, often hidden away in the old Victorian societies. The Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in Albermarle Street is a good one for those with some acquaintance with science. (If you are down there, look at the south entrance to Green Park Tube station. Those are real fossils!)
The Royal Geographical Society in Kensington has stuff on the old explorers and currently has a 40ft tall gorilla on the roof. The University of London has the Grant & Petrie museums, both dusty and chaotic & all the better for that.
TRANSPORT. Not sexy, I agree. The London Transport Museum in Covent Garden is only for tourists, nerds and kids. But the TFL Depot/warehouse in Acton is huge & much more fun on the rare (maybe 3 days a year) when it is open. At Brooklands in Surrey, they have everything from old pushbikes through racing cars to a Concorde. (Train in theory, car better).