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Category: Europe: British Isles

Re-counting World Heritage sites: #7 (Westminster)

My very first visit to London, nearly 15 years ago, happened sometime before we started travelling extensively abroad, which explains London’s sites’ relatively early sequential numbers on my World Heritage roster. On that week-long business trip I ended up with sufficient spare time to check out main attractions of the…

My favorite sights of Glendalough, Ireland

A bit of a misnomer, the title of this post. While I certainly want to include another country in this series at this point, we have neither spent significant time in Ireland, nor photographed it enough, in order to properly designate destinations or sights as “favorite”. Nonetheless, Glendalough Valley, within…

My favorite sights of Cotswolds

Like any homogeneous rural region elsewhere in the world, Cotswolds have their own unique charming features, from distinct architecture of quaint cottages to the wide expanse of sheep-dotted pastures. Our exploration of the area was nothing short of delightful. Unfortunately, we brought a lemon of the camera with us to…

My favorite sights of Wales

Wales is the land of breathtaking landscapes, magnificent castles and quaint towns. We only made one trip there, visiting several places of interest over the course of a few days, and brought back a significant number of photographic memories. I was pleasantly surprised with how many shots I had to…

My favorite sights of London

When you lived in a given city for several years but you always approached it as a kind of “tourist”, targeting specific points of interest, never failing to admire the scenery, and practically never walking down its streets without a camera in hand, you end up with much more than…

Random Illustrations: Green Chain Walk

As I have been wandering around the neighborhood area to rack up steps on my pedometer, I frequently find myself on the paths of the Green Chain Walk, a loosely connected walking circuit in Southeast London that we first explored more than two years ago. Here is a stretch of…

London Imagery: Canary Wharf from a distance

From my little backlog of pictures taken with the expressed goal of eventually being published here on the blog, here is a view of the Canary Wharf financial district from the Grand Square of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich. Only 20 years ago, there were no skyscrapers in…

London Imagery: Regent Street at night

I am not very much inspired to write anything at the moment, so instead I am picking an item from my little backlog of random illustrations. This is not a particularly good picture, but I sort of like the feel of it. It was taken with my little pocketcam in…

London Imagery: Hamilton Terrace

This is one of the most-fashionable streets in St John’s Wood in Northwest London. I took a few pictures of it with my pocket-cam when we were last in the area, and then managed to stitch a couple of them in a serviceable wide-angle picture.    

London Tour: Blackfriars to London Bridge

Continuing our walk along the Thames Path (which we started here), we can more closely see the fine buildings at the Blackfriars Bridge end of the Victoria Embankment on the north side of the river. The red one on the left is the “new” Sion College building (dating to 1886),…

London Tour: Southbank

The Thames Path along Southbank, from the London Eye (seen in the previous installment) to the London Bridge, is one of my favorite walking routes in Central London. At intervals, it gets very congested with tourists and other gawkers, but it is mostly tolerable. The views, though, are great. Here…

London Tour: Thames and London Eye

Westminster Bridge is always chock-full of tourists and you often need to step into the roadway to cross it. However, it offers brilliant views over the Thames, so after walking past the Big Ben, we made the requisite effort. Here is what the river looks like.     The London…

London Tour: Parliament Square

Continuing with our walk around London sights (previous entry is here), we come to the Parliament Square. Despite the fact that it is one of the busiest traffic circles in central London, the actual square in the middle – obscured by the bus in the picture, unfortunately, – is a…

London Tour: Buckingham Palace

We have seen dozens of royal palaces around Europe, and the Buckingham Palace in London is one of the outwardly dullest of them, grey, blocky, and all. (The interior is quite impressive, though, if you ever manage to visit it during the two months in the summer that the palace…

London Tour: St James Park

Walking along The Mall (which we entered via Admiralty Arch) towards the Buckingham Palace, we leave the lovely St James Park on our left. Even in February, on a warm day, you’ll find people basking in the sun here. Imagine what it looks like on a balmy summer weekend (yes,…

London Tour: Admiralty Arch

One of the streets converging on Trafalgar Square (the previous entry in the series) is The Mall, which runs straight to the Queen Victoria Memorial and the Buckingham Palace. Access to The Mall from the square is through Admiralty Arch. Its name symbolizes solely the fact that it adjoins the…