Category Archives: Tour Guiding

Memoirs of a Blue Badge Guide

This is a very special blog post to me. In March, I qualified as a Blue Badge tour guide, and I am proud to be following in my Grandma’s footsteps. She has been a Blue Badge Guide since 1972! I decided to use all my extra lockdown time to interview her and hear some of her guiding stories.

When England went Bananas

On 10th April 1633, the earliest recorded bananas went on sale in England, in an apothecary on Snow Hill in London.
I’ve read more about bananas in the last 24 hours than I have in my entire life, but it was completely worth it – a bit of creative writing, a bit of fascinating history!

Harrington and Hogarth: (Street) Art in London

Comparing the 18th and 21st centuries, William Hogarth and Conor Harrington, the collision of the galleries and the streets of London.

A Very London Christmas

London has some wacky Yuletide traditions, a few of which I’ll share with you today. So sit back with your glass of mulled wine, put on a Father Christmas hat and some reindeer slippers, and enjoy… (and press play on the Christmas Hits playlist. You know you want to.)

Foundling

Two mothers and two Foundlings. Two strands of a story woven together in eighteenth century London.

Fanakapan and Claesz: (Street) Art in London

Another comparison between two seemingly polar opposite worlds! Fanakapan and his hyper realistic balloons to be compared to… *drum roll please*…
Pieter Claesz!
No, don’t know him? Well, all that’s about to change. He was part of the still life wave which took off in the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.

Old, New, and Wonderful: Cannon Street

I want to start a new little segment. The Old, the New, and the Wonderful. There’s so much to do in London and you’d need a lifetime to do it all, so to help out all of my fellow Adventurers, I’ll be putting together three things at a time: one old, one new, and one a little bit unusual. Today we’re looking at the area in and around Cannon Street in the City of London.

Death at the National Gallery

I know it sounds morbid, but it’s still sort of Halloween, right? And over the centuries humanity’s obsession with death and what happens after we shuffle off this mortal coil has had a continuous and exciting influence on art.
Here are just a few examples…