Opposite the church of St Mary The Virgin, Mortlake a path called Tapestry Court leads to the River Thames. Here you will find a plaque memorialising the seventeenth century Lower Dutch House, one of the former buildings of the Mortlake Tapestry Works.

Observant visitors heading to the RHS Garden Wisley may spot a gothic tower beside the A3 near Cobham, unaware that this is one of the follies within Painshill Park, situated a short distance from London’s Ring Road, the M25.

Most London Blue Badge Tourist Guides have a backstory. Mine involved a seventeen-year career in the pharmaceutical industry working for a joint-venture French/American vaccine company. As Head of Medical Information, I set up the very first telephone Vaccine Information Service – in the days before Google!

This is the final article in a series written by London Blue Badge Tourist Guides, who used to be key workers in our capital city. Kathryn Hallam-Howard was a law enforcement officer for over thirty years, working in the West End, South London and at New Scotland Yard. She tells us about her work in the police before she became a guide.

Deep under Whitehall – the home of the United Kingdom’s major government departments – is a secret lair to rival anything created by a James Bond baddie intent on world domination. The Churchill War Rooms were constructed secretly as the bomb-proof centre of wartime government. Churchill was initially reluctant to go underground but he fought fascism here from 1939 to victory in 1945. With him was his wartime coalition ‘cabinet of all the talents’, his senior chiefs and advisors – and a small army of military and civilian staff, all engaged in top-secret work.

David Hockney is a celebrated British artist, who was born and lives in Yorkshire and is well known in the USA after living for many years in California. This summer Hockney has an exhibition at the Royal Academy which was inspired by his trip to Normandy in 2020. It starts on 23 rd May and continues to late September. If it is anything like his show there in 2012 it will be an uplifting experience and not to be missed.

The recently re-elected Mayor of Greater London Sadiq Khan has launched a ‘Let’s Do London’ campaign to promote the capital as a major world tourist destination once again. Blue Badge Tourist Guides aim to play a major part in the re-opening of tourism in London.

This is the fourth in a series of articles written by London Blue Badge guides who used to be key workers in the capital. Janet Robinson writes about her work as a nurse before she became a London Blue Badge Tourist Guide.

Let me take you back to the Britain of 1951. The Second World War had ended just six years earlier. London, like many other British cities, had been bombed relentlessly and still bore the scars of the Blitz. Surviving buildings were covered in layers of dark sooty dust and rationing was still the order of the day and, for fresh meat, remained in place until 1954.

The death of Prince Philip at the age of ninety-nine was announced by Buckingham Palace at midday on 9th April 2021. Prince Philip and the Queen had been married for seventy-three years since their wedding at Westminster Abbey in 1947. He was the longest-serving consort to a monarch in the history of the United Kingdom.

One of London’s best-known events is the annual Boat Race, a contest between crews from Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Clubs held every spring on the River Thames. The two teams go head to head over a 4.2 mile (6.8 kilometre) course that stretches between Putney and Mortlake.

For centuries men lived in one sphere and women in another and they would come together for marriage and having children. It seemed that the sexes co-existed mainly to continue the human race. Love and sex can be very different factors but, when put together, they can produce the most electric sensation. This was no different for kings and queens who were close to their favourites. Many kings – and one queen – may have been gay, members of what we now call the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bi- and transexual) community.