The Houses of Parliament Visitor Services Department working in conjunction with Tour Guides Limited and their extended team of Blue Badge Tourist Guides recently won the Best Company or Venue Offering Guided Tours at the recently held 2015 UK Group Travel Awards.  

Windsor Tourist Guides Ltd, run by Guide London/Association for Professional Tourist Guides member Amanda Bryett, has won “Best Overall Walking Tour in Britain” awarded by CIE Tours International.  The company who run round Britain coach tours, mainly for the American market, ask their clients to rate every aspect of their tour. The Windsor town walk achieved a client satisfaction rating of 93.5%.  

Since 1769, famous artists, aspiring professionals and amateurs have submitted their work for the event of the summer – the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition. It is the world’s oldest open-submission exhibition that had famous artists such as Reynolds, Constable and Turner; amateur artists such as Winston Churchill (1955) showing off their talents at this prestigious event. This is a popular event with an annual 200,000 people visiting the exhibition.  

London welcomed more international visitors than ever before in 2014. The city’s cultural attractions and world-class sporting events proving irresistible draws for millions, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics International Passenger Survey (IPS).

It is not often that the name of Sir Norman Foster is associated with gardening. He is more well known for being the architect behind the Gherkin (he is thought to hate the nickname and prefers 30 St Mary Axe), the British Museum Great Court, City Hall and Wembley Stadium. But gardens?  No, not really until the opening of Crossrail Place in early May. 

Open Garden Squares Weekend takes place in London this year with 218 hidden and little-known gardens opening to the public on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June. The gardens range from the historic and traditional to the new and experimental. They include classic London square gardens, roof gardens, community allotments, urban wildlife and ecology centres as well as the gardens of historic buildings, institutions, restaurants, schools and shops.

The Fighting History exhibition launching at Tate Britain in June will focus on the conflict, martyrdom and catastrophe found in history painting from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Tate Britain will open the first major Barbara Hepworth exhibition in London for almost fifty years. Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) is most commonly associated with St Ives, Cornwall, where she lived from 1939 until her death in 1975.

The Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London explores the richness of life beneath the waves and the importance of these delicate ecosystems and includes more than 200 specimens spanning corals, fish and fossils, a live coral reef and a virtual dive through stunning imagery from the Catlin Seaview Survey. 

Spring is here and Whitehall Gardens offers an ideal place to sit awhile and enjoy the colourful spring flowers that are in bloom.

Few visitors to the Natural History Museum are aware of the ‘living exhibit’ in the grounds. However, this year, the low-profile Wildlife Garden celebrates its 20-year anniversary.

Although on display at the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, the desk was privately owned and although it had been passed down through the Dickens family after his death in 1870, it was auctioned for the Great Ormond Street Charitable Trust in 2004.