London Hotels

Changing of the Guard

No visit to London is complete without seeing this military tradition. The Queen's Guard in London changes in the Forecourt inside the gates of Buckingham Palace at 11.30am every day in the summer and every other day in the winter. Get there early and view the spectacle from outside the front gates.

The men you will see in front of Buckingham Palace (and other locations) are not just ceremonial guards but also serving Soldiers. While upholding the traditions of the past, they also perform duties throughout the world as professional soldiers and are known as some of the most elite and skilled soldiers in the British Army.

The Palace is a working building and the centrepiece of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It houses the offices of those who support the day-to-day activities and duties of The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh and their immediate family. The Palace is also the venue for great Royal ceremonies, State Visits and Investitures, all of which are organised by the Royal Household.

Although Buckingham Palace is furnished and decorated with priceless works of art that form part of the Royal collection, one of the major art collections in the world today, it is not an art gallery and nor is it a museum. Its State Rooms form the nucleus of the working Palace and are used regularly by The Queen and members of the Royal family for official and State entertaining. Buckingham Palace is one of the world's most familiar buildings and more than 50,000 people visit the Palace each year as guests to banquets, lunches, dinners, receptions and the Royal Garden Parties.

London Sightseeing

The London Showboat offers a unique dinner and cabaret cruise on the River Thames, with a four-course meal, live music and dancing. The price includes a welcome drink and half a bottle of wine with your meal.

Imagine your favourite songs from the world's most famous musicals as the perfect accompaniment to the sights of London. Add a river cruise, a four-course dinner plus dancing and you have the perfect combination for an unforgettable evening.

The sights of London at night have to be seen to be believed and The London Showboat is the perfect way to do it. Aboard a modern RiverLiner?, we promise a dinner cruise with top quality entertainment both inside and out. Against the night sky the Houses of Parliament, the London Eye, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, Canary Wharf, the O2 Millennium Dome, the Thames Flood Barrier and many more London landmarks reveal their splendour. History unfolds before your eyes. Afterwards we'll have you dancing all the way back to Westminster to the strains of popular dance music from the last four decades.

This is the way to see one of the world's great Capital cities.

London's most famous square was laid out in 1829 to 1841 to commemorate Nelson's victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Dominating the square, on a column that is 185 feet high, is the 17 foot high statue of Nelson himself

Trafalgar Square, set in central London, is one of Britain's great tourist attractions. A visit to the capital would be incomplete without going to marvel at Nelsons Column and the four giant lions at its base, or to admire the lovely splashing fountains and to feed the pigeons, who have made their home here. Built to commemorate Admiral Nelson, the square was named after the Spanish Cape Trafalgar where his last battle was won.

Trafalgar square also contains a large number of statues and two fountains by Sir Edwin Lutyens, added in 1939. The square is surrounded by many great buildings. On the north side is the neo-classical National Gallery, built between 1834 and 1838. It houses a collection of more than 2300 paintings, including work from van Gogh, Renoir, Leonardo da Vinci and Claude Monet. On the east side the square is bordered by the Canada House, completed in 1827. Opposite the Canada House is the South Africa House, which opened in 1933.

The square itself is surrounded by roads on all sides, although traffic in recent years has been reduced in the interest of pedestrian safety.  Trafalgar Square in London also has a number of interested structures.  Four bronze lions made from recycled cannons from the French fleet can be found in the center of the square near Nelson's column.  Each corner of the square has a place for a statue, though only three actually contain statues.

Westminster Abbey is the place of the coronation, marriage and burial of British monarchs, except Edward V and Edward VIII since 1066. Visitors can see the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Royal Tombs and Shrine of Edward the Confessor, the Coronation Chair, Lady Chapel and Poets' Corner, the Royal Chapels etc. The current building dates largely from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries.

There has been a place of worship on this site for well over a thousand years, and every monarch since William the Conqueror in 1066, bar two, have been crowned under it's roof in an elaborate ceremony that is steeped in history and tradition. Westminster Abbey, or to call it by its correct name, The Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, is unusual amongst churches in England in being a 'Royal Peculiar'. This means it is under the jurisdiction of the crown and not within any diocese. This was an extremely important privilege in the Middle Ages as it gave the Abbey full control over its finances and day to day running and it soon grew into one of the wealthiest religious houses in the country.

The extreme length of the abbey, including Henry VII's Chapel , is 511 ft.; the width of the nave and aisles 79 ft.; and the height to the vaulting 102 ft., which is unusually lofty for an English> church . Exteriorly , the want of a central tower detracts somewhat from the general effect, and the eighteenth century western towers are poor compared with the rest of the building, but the grace and beauty of the interior, in spite of the incongruous tombs and monuments, are surpassed by few other Gothic churches in the world. Much judicious restoration of the fabric has been successfully carried out in recent years. Apart from the immediate monastic precincts, the abbey domains were very extensive, comprising numerous manors and other endowments, but most of these have now passed into other hands. The revenues of the abbey at the time of the dissolution amounted to £3471 (equivalent to about £35,000 or $154,000 at the present day), but though shorn of so many of its ancient possessions , the Chapter of Westminster is still a very wealthy collegiate body.

The great and ancient stone circle of Stonehenge is one of the wonders of the world. What visitors see today are the substantial remnants of the last in a sequence of such monuments erected between circa 3000BC and 1600BC.

More than nine hundred stone rings exist in the British Isles, and scholars estimate that twice that number may originally have been built. Scholars usually classify these types of megalithic structures as rings rather than circles, because the rough proportions for the different shapes are 2/3 true circles, 1/6 flattened circles, 1/9 ellipses, and 1/18 eggs. Stonehenge, however, is roughly circular. It is difficult to precisely date the stone rings because of the scarcity of datable remains associated with them, but it is known that they were constructed during the Neolithic period. In southern England the Neolithic period dates from the development of the first farming communities around 4000 BC to the development of bronze technology around 2000 BC, when the construction of the megalithic monuments was mostly over. Because of the limited nature of the archaeological record at the stone rings, attempts to explain the functions of the structures are often interpretive. Interpretations of the stone rings made in previous centuries tended to reflect the cultural biases of their times and were sometimes wildly imaginative. Only in the past few decades have truly comprehensive examinations of Stonehenge been conducted by archaeoastronomers such as John Michell, Robin Heath and John North. It is interesting to note that more than 40,000 megalithic sites have survived in the British Isles, this number exceeding the number of modern towns and villages, and yet only a small percentage of these have been thoroughly studied

The stones we see today represent Stonehenge in ruin. Many of the original stones have fallen or been removed by previous generations for home construction or road repair. There has been serious damage to some of the smaller bluestones resulting from close visitor contact (prohibited since 1978) and the prehistoric carvings on the larger sarsen stones show signs of significant wear.

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London Hotels