<![CDATA[Bowl Of Chalk - London Walking Tours

<![CDATA[Bowl Of Chalk - London Walking Tours - Blog]]>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:42:54 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Looking Up at London’s Women]]>Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:18:35 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/looking-up-at-londons-womenIf you start looking up at London’s public statues and busts (and you absolutely should), you’ll quickly notice something. There are a lot of men.

In fact, around 90% of London’s public statues are of men. There are reportedly more statues of named animals in the capital than there are of real or non-mythical women.

So, in honour of International Women’s Day, here’s a wander through some of the brilliant women who have made it onto London’s plinths.

It’s not exhaustive. But it’s a start.

Queen Victoria – The Reigning Champion of Plinth Space
If there were an award for “Most Statues in London”, Queen Victoria would win it without breaking a sweat. She has twelve statues in the capital alone. Ten of them are full-length public sculptures. The most famous, of course, is the vast Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace.

Whatever you think of the Victorian era, Victoria certainly cornered the market in commemorative stone.

Millicent Fawcett – Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere
In 2018, history shifted slightly in Parliament Square. For the first time, a statue of a woman was installed there: Millicent Fawcett.

A leading figure in the suffrage movement, Fawcett campaigned for women’s voting rights for over sixty years, favouring debate and persistence over militancy. She’s depicted holding a banner reading: “Courage calls to courage everywhere” - words she spoke after the death of Emily Davison.

Fittingly, the statue was created by Turner Prize winning artist, Gillian Wearing - the first statue in Parliament Square made by a woman, too. Read more here.

Florence Nightingale - The Lady with the Lamp
A pioneer of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale led teams during the Crimean War, transformed hospital hygiene, and revolutionised medical statistics. Her statue at Waterloo Place shows her as the “Lady with the Lamp”, the nickname earned during her night-time rounds tending to wounded soldiers.

There’s another at St Thomas’ Hospital - fittingly close to where generations of nurses have trained in her shadow.

Mary Seacole – A Long Overdue Tribute
Installed in 2016 in the grounds of St Thomas’ Hospital, the statue of Mary Seacole honours the Scottish-Jamaican nurse who set up the “British Hotel” during the Crimean War - part convalescent home, part morale-boosting haven.

Posthumously voted first in a poll of “100 Great Black Britons”, Seacole’s recognition was long overdue.

Noor Inayat Khan – Spy, Hero, Storyteller
In Gordon Square Gardens stands a bust of Noor Inayat Khan, the British-Indian Special Operations Executive agent who worked undercover in occupied France during WWII.

Captured, tortured, and executed at Dachau in 1944, she was posthumously awarded the George Cross. Her memorial stands close to the Bloomsbury home where she once lived - a quiet square honouring extraordinary courage.

Virginia Woolf – Bloomsbury’s Literary Rebel
In Tavistock Square you’ll find a bronze bust of Virginia Woolf.

Modernist. Feminist. Literary rule-breaker. A born and bred Londoner and a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf lived in the area for over three decades. The bust, unveiled in 2004, quietly marks her long connection with Bloomsbury - a neighbourhood that helped reshape 20th-century culture.

Boudicca – Destroyer of Roman London
At the entrance to Westminster Bridge stands one of London’s most dramatic sculptures: a larger than life-size bronze statue of Boudicca and her daughters in a rearing chariot.

Positioned opposite Parliament and close to the Palace of Westminster, there’s a neat irony here: she once led the rebellion that burned Roman London to the ground.

Ada Lovelace – Look Up!
Always look up in London. On Horseferry Road, high on a modern apartment building, stands Ada Lovelace.

Lovelace is celebrated mathematician and technology pioneer, at a time when few women entered those fields. Often described as the world’s first computer programmer for her work with Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Today she’s become a symbol for women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).

Amy Winehouse – Camden’s Daughter
In Camden Market stands a bronze of British singer and songwriter, Amy Winehouse, forever mid-stride, hair piled high. Music fans and tourists pose with, and celebrate, the beloved late singer in her former stomping ground of Camden - the part of town where Winehouse also tragically died in 2011, aged 27. The statue was unveiled three years after her death.

Mary Wollstonecraft – A Controversial Tribute
When a memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled on Newington Green in 2020, it caused debate.

Rather than a conventional likeness, the sculpture, by Maggi Hambling, shows a silver female figure emerging from a swirl of forms. Its unveiling provoked a backlash from some who have queried the inclusion of a naked female figure.

A radical and writer, Wollstonecraft, best known for ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ which is seen as one of the earliest feminist works for challenging the contemporary notions that women existed only to please men and championing women’s independence.

Edith Cavell – Duty Without Distinction
Just off Trafalgar Square, in St Martin’s Place, stands the memorial to Edith Cavell. A British nurse from Norfolk, Cavell worked in German-occupied Belgium during the First World War. She treated wounded soldiers from both sides without distinction, because, to her, care came before politics.

She also helped around 200 Allied soldiers escape. For that, she was arrested and executed by German firing squad in 1915.

Her memorial bears the simple word: Humanity.

Emmeline Pankhurst – Deeds, Not Words
Walk into Victoria Tower Gardens from Parliament Square and you’re immediately greeted by an icon: Emmeline Pankhurst.

Leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union, Pankhurst took a far more militant approach than Millicent Fawcett. Her rallying cry? “Deeds, not words.”

The statue was unveiled in 1930 by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, just two years after women finally achieved equal voting rights with men.
It stands within sight of Parliament. Which, to me, feels exactly right.

Still a work in progress. Across the UK, only 2.7% of statues depict real, non-mythical, non-royal women.

London is improving, albeit slowly, but it’s still a city of generals, politicians and bewhiskered Victorian gentlemen.

So next time you’re out walking, look up. Look around. And notice who’s on the plinth - and who isn’t.

]]><![CDATA[Word on the Water: London’s Floating Bookshop on Regent’s Canal]]>Tue, 24 Feb 2026 13:20:42 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/word-on-the-water-londons-floating-bookshop-on-regents-canal

Fancy telling friends you discovered your latest favourite read floating on Regent’s Canal in King’s Cross? Step aboard ‘Word on the Water’, a 50-foot barge turned bookshop, and you’ll find far more than just a good book.

Moored on the towpath beside Granary Square since 2015, this 100-year-old Dutch barge is packed, quite literally, from floor to ceiling. Every nook and cranny has been cleverly claimed for shelves of new and second-hand titles: classics and cult favourites, contemporary fiction and children’s books.

It’s chaotic in the most charming way possible.

A book shop and then some
Visitors are invited on board to browse at their leisure or cosy up by the stove with a potential purchase. But this is no ordinary bookshop. Throughout the year it hosts author events and poetry slams, and in summer gigs are played on the roof, powered by its own solar sound system.

The idea for a floating bookshop was born from chance. Paddy Screech moored his boat beside Jonathan Privett’s, and the pair quickly discovered a shared love of literature. Paddy had studied English at Oxford; Jonathan was completing a Master’s in American Literature while selling books outside London Underground stations and at his Archway Market stall, Word on the Street - the template for the boat’s eventual name.

When friend, and latterly, business partner Stéphane Chaudat offered them a 1920s Dutch barge in 2011, the dream became reality. The early years weren’t easy. With only a cruising licence, the shop had to be regularly dismantled, moved and re-moored. In 2015 it finally secured a permanent berth near The Lighterman restaurant and has been a fixture on the towpath ever since.

Jonathan Privett sadly died from cancer in September 2023. Today, Paddy and Stéphane continue to run the bookshop, with Jonathan’s daughter Megan now involved in curating - ensuring the barge’s literary spirit endures.

Make a day of it
King’s Cross itself is well worth exploring. Not long ago this was one of Europe’s largest brownfield sites. Today it’s a thriving canal-side neighbourhood of restored warehouses, independent shops and dining hot spots. Wander the towpath, browse the boat, linger over lunch - and leave with a story in your bag.

I do regular weekend walks around King's Cross, and can also arrange a private tour if you would like to do a deeper dive into the area.

Definitely a day out to bookmark!

London’s bookshops
I have been highlighting some of the excellent independent bookshops that London has to offer over on my social platforms. In a year where we’re celebrating the National Year of Reading, it feels more important than ever to champion the spaces that keep curiosity alive.

To see more, head to:
Bowl of Chalk tiktok: Word on the Water
Bowl of Chalk tiktok: Burley Fisher Books
Bowl of Chalk tiktok: Stoke Newington Bookshop
Bowl of Chalk tiktok: Pages of Hackney
Bowl of Chalk tiktok: Brick Lane Bookshop

]]><![CDATA[Introducing the Fitzrovia Chapel – A Jewellery Box of a Building in the Heart of Westminster]]>Mon, 16 Feb 2026 17:43:32 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/introducing-the-fitzrovia-chapel-a-jewellery-box-of-a-building-tucked-away-in-westminster

Stroll through the maze of glass fronted residential apartment blocks that now occupy the site of the old Middlesex Hospital and, if you’re lucky, you’ll stumble across a small red-bricked chapel that looks rather unassuming.

Step inside and you’re in for quite a treat!

The Fitzrovia Chapel was built in the 1890s within the heart of the Middlesex Hospital complex. Coincidentally, the hospital is where my parents first met during their early medical careers – though I should clarify, not in the 1890s.

When the hospital was demolished in the early 2000s as part of a major Westminster redevelopment, almost everything was reduced to rubble. The chapel survived – thanks largely to its Grade II* listed status and architectural significance. And thank goodness it did.

From the outside, you’d be forgiven for thinking there’s little remarkable about it. It’s a rather plain little red-brick, Gothic-style building.

Inside, however, is an entirely different story.

The chapel is a Byzantine inspired jewellery box of gold, mosaics and no fewer than 40 different types of marble. The reason? Originally, the building was hemmed in by hospital wards, so hardly anyone saw the exterior. As a result, all the money, craft and imagination were lavished on the interior – and lavished they were.

The chapel was designed by the eminent Victorian architect John Loughborough Pearson and completed by his son. Construction began in 1891 and took 25 years to finish. It offered a place of solace, prayer and rest for staff and patients and their families.

Between 2013 and 2015, a £2 million restoration project led by conservation architects Caroe & Partners carefully revived the building’s extraordinary interior. Today, Fitzrovia Chapel is an independent charity, open to the public on Mondays to Wednesdays and one Sunday each month. It is also licensed for weddings and civil ceremonies, and regularly hosts art exhibitions, talks and book launches.

You may even recognise it, as it was chosen as the setting for the King’s Christmas Day speech in 2024.

It’s a building that doesn’t shout about itself. You have to find it. But once you do, it’s hard to forget.

You can find opening times, events and more of its fascinating history on the Fitzrovia Chapel website. I was lucky enough to have a tour with the Chapel's Director, but it is well worth a visit even if just to marvel at the setting.

I made a short video about the Fitzrovia Chapel after my visit - take a look here.

]]><![CDATA[Why Strawberry Hill House is Well Worth a Visit]]>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 09:16:23 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/why-strawberry-hill-house-is-well-worth-a-visit

Horatio Walpole (Horace to his friends), born in 1717, is one of those characters from London’s history books that I’d love to have met in real life. Lauded as a brilliant man of letters, historian and antiquarian, he was also, by all accounts, a legendary socialite, prolific gossip…and an unapologetic eccentric.

Luckily for us, a generous slice of Horace’s eccentricity survives. You can still visit the incredible home he built (his self-described “little gothic castle”), Strawberry Hill House, tucked away in Twickenham.

From the outside, you’d be forgiven for thinking it looks like something dreamed up by Disney – brilliant white, with turrets, battlements and a distinct fairy-tale feel. But Strawberry Hill is better known for its theatrical interiors and is widely regarded as the finest example of Georgian Gothic Revival architecture in Britain. Ever the trend-setter, Horace built it long before the Gothic revival properly took off – about a century early, in fact!

Inside, Strawberry Hill is theatrical to the point of excess – and all the better for it. From chamber to library, chapel to gallery, the whole place is gloriously, unapologetically fantastical. There’s a royal bedchamber that was never slept in and corridors deliberately kept dark to create what Horace described as “gloomth” – his own word for atmospheric medieval doom and gloom, dialled up to maximum drama.

The house was so fantastical that it became a tourist attraction in Walpole’s own lifetime. And being Horace, he handled public interest with characteristic flair, printing his own guidebooks for visitors and imposing strict rules - only four visitors per day and absolutely no children!

A bit more about Horace
Horace came from rather grand stock. He was the fourth son of Sir Robert Walpole, the man who dominated 18th-century English politics for 21 years and is widely regarded as Britain’s first Prime Minister.

Horace entered Parliament at the age of 24 and sat in the House of Commons for 25 years, representing various boroughs conveniently controlled by the Walpole dynasty. But, in the best traditions of the Georgian era, his father also arranged a series of comfortable sinecures, those wonderfully named (cushy) “jobs” requiring little or no actual work, which gave Horace the financial independence to become a man of leisure and letters.

In fact he was a prolific letter writer – nearly 6000 over 60 years – entertaining his readers with his acute and sardonic observations of Georgian social trends. On the mid-18th-century obsession with spa towns and sea bathing, he wrote: “One would think that the English were ducks; they are for ever waddling to the waters.”

Back to the house
Strawberry Hill is easy to reach from London. Trains run from Waterloo to Strawberry Hill station in around 35–40 minutes, followed by a short, pleasant walk.

The house is typically open for guided tours from Saturday to Wednesday (and yes, children are allowed these days), and even if you don’t venture inside, Strawberry Hill’s 5 acre, Grade II listed garden is a lovely space for picnics and pottering.

If you like your history serious and sensible, this might not be the place for you. But if you enjoy characters, drama and a healthy dose of Gothic flair, delivered by a man who coined the word “gloomth”, then I think you’ll find Strawberry Hill an absolute delight.

]]><![CDATA[London’s Secret Underground Railway: The Story of Mail Rail]]>Tue, 03 Feb 2026 09:25:31 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/londons-secret-underground-railway-the-story-of-mail-rail

For 76 years, between 1927 and 2003, London’s post was whisked beneath the city streets on a railway few Londoners even knew existed.

Seventy feet underground, driverless electric trains rattled through nine-foot-wide tunnels, carrying letters and parcels between sorting offices. This hidden network, which became known as the Mail Rail, stretched for 6.5 miles, linking Mount Pleasant in Clerkenwell to Paddington and quietly keeping the capital connected.

The idea of an underground postal railway was first floated in the mid-19th century, when horse-drawn carts and clogged streets were slowing London’s mail to a crawl. But bureaucracy, budget wrangles and the outbreak of the First World War meant the plan didn’t become reality until 1927.

At its peak, Mail Rail ran for 22 hours a day and carried up to four million letters daily. However, the decline in letter-writing told its own story. In 2003, the railway was deemed uneconomical and suspended, almost overnight, and remains closed for postal purposes.

Thankfully, this extraordinary slice of London history wasn’t lost.

Take an immersive ride on the Mail Rail
Today, Mail Rail forms part of the award-winning The Postal Museum at Mount Pleasant. Visitors can hop aboard a specially adapted train and take an immersive ride through the tunnels, learning how this secret system worked and why it mattered so much to the city.

Once a month, there’s also the chance to walk a 1.2-kilometre stretch of the tunnels on foot – a rare opportunity to explore one of London’s most unusual underground spaces.

The museum itself makes for a brilliant, family-friendly day out. Alongside the Mail Rail ride, you’ll find hands-on exhibitions, fascinating stories of innovation and design, and Sorted, a popular play space for younger visitors up to the age of eight.

Behind the scenes, the museum cares for hundreds of thousands of objects, from pillar boxes and postage stamps to uniforms, vehicles and, of course, an entire underground railway. Together, they tell the 500-year story of British postal communication and its lasting impact on everyday life in the United Kingdom.

There are also plenty of special events running during February half term 2026 – so if you’re looking for something a little different to do in London, this hidden railway is well worth uncovering.

Watch my Fun London Fact video about the Mail Rail on TikTok.

Find out more at the Postal Museum website.

]]><![CDATA[5 Small London Museums You May Not Have Visited]]>Wed, 28 Jan 2026 12:17:30 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/5-small-london-museums-you-may-not-have-visited

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,“ wrote Dr Samuel Johnson.

I totally agree with Sam’s sentiment. London has an extraordinary ability to keep surprising you - especially when you step away from the bigger attractions and into its smaller, more personal museums.

These are places you might walk past a dozen times without noticing. Former homes. Quiet townhouses. Buildings that still feel more like someone has just popped out for a stroll than formal museums.

Here are five small London museums I love – and that you may not have visited yet, starting with the aforementioned Dr Johnson’s former home.

Dr Johnson’s House
Dr Samuel Johnson is considered one the greatest literary figures of the eighteenth century and is perhaps best known for his monumental A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755.

He worked on the Dictionary while living at 17 Gough Square - a beautifully preserved 17th-century townhouse tucked away in the courts and alleys off Fleet Street. It’s the only surviving part of the original Gough Square development, and stepping inside feels like slipping through a crack in time.

This incredible four-storey townhouse has retained many of its original features, including historic panelling, an open staircase, wooden floorboards, coal holes and even the original eighteenth-century front-door security system, complete with a heavy chain, corkscrew latch and spiked iron bar. Burglars consider yourselves warned!

What I particularly love about Dr Johnson’s House is how immersive it feels. You’re encouraged to sit on the chairs and window seats, to pause, to linger – and to imagine Johnson pacing the rooms, wrestling with definitions and deadlines.

Handel Hendrix House
Apart from being famous musical marvels, what have George Frideric Handel and Jimi Hendrix got in common? By a remarkable coincidence, they lived next door to each other on Brook Street in central London, albeit two centuries apart.

Handel moved into 25 Brook Street in 1723, at the height of his fame. A couple of centuries later in 1966, Hendrix came to London and he lived in a flat at 23 Brook Street for couple of years with his then girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham, while the Jimi Hendrix Experience took the UK by storm.

The Handel Hendrix House is now a museum, combining both residences and carefully recreated to reflect life in their respective centuries. You can wander from baroque London to swinging sixties London in the space of a staircase, with plenty of music to accompany you along the way.

Benjamin Franklin House
Benjamin Franklin could never be accused of underachieving. Despite only having two years of formal education, he not only went on to become a founder of the United States, but he is considered to have helped advance the Age of Enlightenment through his experiments with electricity, his inventions, writings, and his extensive activities as a printer and philosopher.

At 36 Craven Street, just off Trafalgar Square, is the world's only remaining home of Benjamin Franklin. He lived here for 16 years between 1757 and 1775, and during that time the house effectively became the first unofficial US embassy in London.

It opened as a museum in 2006. Today, the house is a museum and uses live interpretation, sound, lighting and visual projections to bring Franklin’s London years to life. One small warning: it’s a tall, narrow, five-storey house with uneven floors and stairs. You may be stepping back into the eighteenth century, but mind your footing while you do.

Sir John Soane’s Museum
Sir John Soane’s Museum may be the smallest of the National Museums, but it’s an absolute treasure trove. Soane is considered one of England’s greatest architects, and he built and lived in the house, until his death in 1837.

The house is preserved exactly as Sir John left it, offering visitors a wonderful opportunity to journey through the rooms, learning about his life and his vast curated collection of over 30,000 architectural drawings, models, sculptures and paintings. It feels like a brilliant, eccentric mind made physical – a place you could visit ten times and still notice something new on each visit.

2 Willow Road
If modernist architecture is more your thing, 2 Willow Road in Hampstead is well worth seeking out. Designed and lived in by architect Ernő Goldfinger and his family, the house was built in 1939 and is one of only two modernist houses in the UK open to the public.

Now a National Trust property, it offers a rare chance to see modernist design principles applied to everyday family life. Knowledgeable guides are on hand to explain how a philosophical and artistic movement became a way of living.

The house is due to reopen on 5 March 2026, and visits must be booked in advance – so a little forward planning is required.

These small museums are reminders that some of London’s richest stories are tucked away behind unassuming front doors.

And if a few of them sound familiar, that’s no accident. Many of these places, and plenty more like them, crop up in my book, Why is Downing Street Painted Black?: and 364 Other Fun London Facts, where I explore the quieter corners of the capital and the stories they tell. After all, as Dr Johnson knew, London rewards curiosity - and there’s always another door worth pushing open.

My book can be ordered here.

]]><![CDATA[Exhibitions Coming to London in 2026 – My Top Picks]]>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 16:13:55 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/exhibitions-coming-to-london-in-2026-my-top-picks
One of the great joys of London is that just when you think you’ve seen it all, another blockbuster exhibition pops up and drags you somewhere entirely unexpected - into a writer’s mind, an artist’s studio, or a world made of plasticine and penguins.

There are some fabulous exhibitions coming to London this year and I wanted to share my top five - plus one extra that I couldn’t quite leave out.

Agatha Christie: 50 years of mystery
British Library - opening October 2026

Fifty years since her death feels like the perfect excuse to revisit the woman who turned murder into a national pastime. This landmark exhibition promises to delve into Agatha Christie’s life, work and extraordinary cultural legacy, from Poirot’s moustache to Miss Marple’s quiet brilliance.

The British Library is promising a wealth of evocative photographs, personal belongings, notebooks, early manuscript drafts and excerpts from her novels – some of which have never been on display before. This is your chance to explore how Christie’s life, travels and interests became the foundation for her most unforgettable stories. It’s a must see for crime fiction or Agatha Christie fans!

Frida Kahlo: The Making of an Icon
Tate Modern - opening June 2026

Frida Kahlo’s image is everywhere, but the woman behind it is often simplified or mythologised. This major Tate Modern exhibition promises to explore how Kahlo consciously shaped her own identity and image, and how that image has travelled the world.

The exhibition will feature over 130 works by Kahlo, her contemporaries and the artists she inspired from later generations. It will also include some of her most well-known paintings, as well as documents, photographs and memorabilia taken from Kahlo's archives.

David Hockney: A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting
Serpentine Galleries - opening March 2026

Hockney never really slows down, does he? This exhibition focuses on his time in Normandy, where he recorded the changing seasons with relentless curiosity and colour.

It has been conceived in close collaboration with the artist and brings Hockney’s celebrated ninety-metre-long frieze ‘A Year in Normandie’ which was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry (coming to the British Museum this year), to London for the first time.

Anish Kapoor
Hayward Gallery - opening June 2026

If you like your art subtle and polite, Anish Kapoor probably isn’t for you. His work tends to loom, swallow, distort and unsettle - and that’s exactly why I’m drawn to it.

The Hayward Gallery feels like the perfect setting for Kapoor’s large-scale, immersive pieces. This is likely to be an exhibition you feel as much as see - one that messes with your sense of space, scale and certainty.

Renoir and Love
National Gallery - opening October 2026

This major exhibition exploring Renoir through the lens of love - romantic, familial and artistic, sounds too good to miss. With over 50 works 'Renoir and Love' will be the most significant exhibition of the French impressionist’s work in the UK for 20 years. Expect softness, sensuality and some very fine brushwork indeed.

Bonus exhibition - Wallace & Gromit (and friends)
Young V&A - opening February 2026

If you grew up anywhere near a television in the 1990s, this one needs no selling. The Young V&A’s exhibition celebrating Aardman’s most beloved creations looks set to be joyful, inventive and quietly brilliant, much like Wallace & Gromit themselves.

Expect sketches, models, sets and a deep dive into the craft behind the animations that include Morph, Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit. Proof, if any were needed, that British eccentricity is one of our finest cultural exports.

Whether your taste runs to murder mysteries, modern masters, impressionist romance or animated dogs and wrong trousers, 2026 is shaping up to be a very good year for exhibition-hopping in London. My advice? Book early and remember that this city rewards curiosity, especially when you follow it indoors on a rainy afternoon.

]]><![CDATA[What’s new in London for 2026? Quite a lot, actually…]]>Tue, 20 Jan 2026 10:24:01 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/whats-new-in-london-for-2026-quite-a-lot-actually
London has never been very good at standing still. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, the city quietly reinvents itself - opens a new museum, restores a Victorian market, launches a bus that turns into a boat, or decides you should now be able to channel your inner chimney sweep from Mary Poppins and walk on rooftops.

Here are a few things coming up in 2026 that have caught my eye - and might just take your fancy too.

Smithfield Market: a museum comeback story
Coming to the historic Smithfield Market at the end of the year is the first phase of the new London Museum (formerly the Museum of London), which boldly claims it will “reconceive what a museum could be.” The mind boggles!

This glorious Victorian market complex closed back in the 1990s, so it’s wonderful news that it’s being brought back to life as the new home for the museum’s vast collections, after it outgrew its London Wall site and closed in 2022.

The General Market Building will open later this year, showcasing the museum’s permanent collections. The Poultry Market will follow in 2028, housing collection stores, learning spaces and major temporary exhibitions. Smithfield, it seems, is finally getting its second act.

The 2026 French exchange
In July 2025 France and England signed a historic loan agreement. In return for some treasures from across all four nations from the UK, including some chess pieces, the British Museum will receive the 70m long Bayeux Tapestry, which is essentially an embroidered cartoon from 1066 depicting the Battle of Hastings.

The tapestry is due to go on show at the British Museum in the autumn and will be the first time that it has been shown in the UK since it was made, almost 1,000 years ago. It’s expected to be one of the museum’s most popular exhibitions ever, so prepare to queue!

Is it a boat? Is it a bus? No it’s the duck tour!
I’m all for encouraging people to step off the tube and explore London above ground, so I was delighted to hear that the amphibious ‘duck tours’ are officially returning to London this year.

Fifteen years ago, these bright yellow bus-boats were a familiar sight, trundling through the streets before splashing into the Thames. They were forced to close in 2017 when their launch site was swallowed up by Thames Water’s super sewer works.
Dates for the official launch are yet to be announced, but worth keeping a look out for!

Talking about transport…
Londoners love to complain about its transport network (that and the weather), but the city wouldn’t function without it – and there are some intriguing developments on the horizon for 2026.

These include a trial of self-driving cabs across 20 London boroughs, the possible pedestrianisation of Oxford Circus, and the arrival of the new Piccadilly line trains. Expect walk-through, air-conditioned carriages, more capacity, double doorways, real-time digital displays and a smoother, more energy-efficient ride.

No confirmed dates for any of the above yet - so try not to get too excited

Grosvenor Square’s glow-up
After more than 300 years of quietly minding its own business (and watching Mayfair strut past), Grosvenor Square is having a glow-up. And this is not just any makeover. This multi-million pound transformation marks only the fourth redesign since the 1720s - proof that even London’s grandest addresses like to reinvent themselves every few centuries.

Now managed as a public garden on a not-for-profit basis by Grosvenor Property UK, the new Square is due to open this summer. Designed as a natural haven for wildlife and habitats, it blends historic design with modern eco-thinking, and beauty with biodiversity, creating a place where residents and visitors pause and reconnect with nature. I, for one, can’t wait to visit.

V&A East Museum - opening April 2026
The long-awaited V&A East Museum opens its doors on 18 April 2026. More than a decade in the making, this new branch of the Victoria & Albert Museum will be a cornerstone of the East Bank cultural quarter in Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Conceived as part of the legacy of the 2012 Olympics, the project takes inspiration from South Kensington’s post-Great Exhibition boom and the South Bank after the Festival of Britain.

The museum will feature two free permanent Why We Make galleries, displaying over 500 objects spanning global art, architecture, design, performance and fashion. Its first temporary exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story, explores 125 years of Black music-making in Britain. The exhibition will feature Joan Armatrading’s childhood guitar, fashion worn by Little Simz and newly acquired photographs by Jennie Baptiste, Dennis Morris, Eddie Otchere and Sam White, as well as a partnership with BBC Music and East Bank.

Up on the roof at Ally Pally
Opened in 1873, Alexandra Palace, or Ally Pally, as it’s affectionately known - is getting a brand-new perspective in 2026.

From 14 February, visitors will be able to take part in the Ally Pally Rooftop Adventure, the UK’s highest roof walk. Guided group and private tours will run at different times of day, from sunrise climbs to sunset and after-dark London lights experiences.

It’s open to families, couples and anyone with a head for heights (or a taste for adventure). Booking slots are already available - and the views, I’m told, are rather spectacular.

Fancy going a bit deeper?
If all this has whetted your appetite for more London stories, allow me a small plug. This year I’m launching the Curistorian Club - a series of intimate evening events celebrating London’s history and culture.

Each Curistorian Club night takes place on the last Tuesday of the month, upstairs at The Devereux, a cracking pub tucked just off Fleet Street. I host the evenings and invite two London experts along, one with a historical angle, the other more cultural, to share their specialist knowledge or chat it through with me. The first two events are already sold out. You can find out about future events here!

If you like your London stories told in person, in a pub, by people who really know their stuff - I’d love to see you there!

]]><![CDATA[Inside the Freud Museum]]>Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:40:40 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/inside-the-freud-museum

Tucked away on a quiet, leafy residential street just off the busy Finchley Road in north London, 20 Maresfield Gardens looks like any other attractive London townhouse. Which is exactly what makes it so good. This was the final home of Sigmund Freud (1859 – 1939), the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud fled here in 1938 after the Nazis annexed Austria, bringing with him his family, his library, and enormous collection of ancient artefacts.

When Freud came to London, he was suffering from heart problems and mouth cancer. He died a year later in 1939 and the house continued to be a family home for 44 years. Anna Freud (1895 – 1982), the youngest of Sigmund and Martha Freud’s six children, continued to live in the house after her father’s death up until her own death in 1982. After that, she left instructions in her will for 20 Maresfield Gardens to become a museum dedicated to the life and work of her father, which opened in 1986. The house has been preserved in a way that feels intimate rather than shrine-like. You’re not stepping into a grand museum; you’re stepping into someone’s living room.

Freud’s study is arranged to resemble, as closely as possible, the rooms he practiced in during in his lifetime. His famous couch is here, sitting quietly in the study like it’s waiting for you to lie down and start talking. It’s covered in rugs and throws and surrounding it are shelves crammed with hundreds of books and objects Freud collected throughout his life – Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Asian – all of which he believed helped him think. These really are a set of bookshelves that make you feel you need to up your game.

One of the joys of the Freud Museum is that it’s small. It’s not overwhelming. Instead, you poke around rooms, read a few labels, and gradually realise you’re learning things without being lectured at. It is full of intriguing snippets. From Freud’s fascination with the Biblical figure of Moses, despite the fact he rejected religion, to his begonia still very much alive and thriving at the museum, years after his death.

The museum regularly hosts talks, tours, events and presents exhibitions of work by contemporary artists which resonate with Freud’s life and work. The current exhibition Cathie Pilkington: Housekeeper is enthralling. Cathie Pilkington’s work explores domestic spaces and female identity and she combines sculpture with immersive installations using diverse materials and studio furniture. At the Freud Museum she sheds light on the care and work of Paula Fichtl, the Freud family’s live-in housekeeper. “She knows this place better than all of us” Freud said of her. Placing Pilkington’s sculptures inside Freud’s former home is inspired and slightly unsettling – in the best possible way.

Her uncanny figures appear in corners, on furniture, half-blending into the house itself. They feel like they belong there, whilst also disrupting the spaces in a mischievous way – as if they’re whispering to each other as soon as you turn away. The exhibition plays with ideas of care, control, and the roles people occupy within domestic spaces – themes that breathe new life into Freud’s own home.

The Freud Museum is one of those places that rewards curiosity. You don’t need to know your id from your ego to enjoy it. Just turn up, have a wander, and let the house and gardens do their thing. You’ll leave having learned something – about Freud, about art, about houses, or possibly about yourself.

Things to know:

The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday.

Cathie Pilkington: Housekeeper exhibition dates: 29 October 2025 – 1 March 2026

Other places of interest near the Freud Museum: Hampstead Heath, Fenton House and Garden, Camden Art Centre, Kenwood, 2 Willow Road.

]]><![CDATA[Bowl of Chalk's CURISTORIAN CLUB]]>Wed, 07 Jan 2026 08:24:32 GMThttps://www.bowlofchalk.net/blog/bowl-of-chalks-curistorian-club

STRAIGHT TO CURISTORIAN CLUB TICKETS

I’ve thought for a long time it’d be nice to organise some events related to London history and culture and invite different speakers to share their specialist London knowledge . Well, I’ve got my arse in to gear and am delighted to announce the first three Curistorian Club events kicking off later this month. Each event will take place in the evening on the last Tuesday of the month in a room above The Devereux, a lovely pub nestled off Fleet Street, next to one of the Inns of Court.

Every Curistorian Club night will be hosted by me and involve two guests either presenting their specialist subject or doing a Q and A with me. One guest will have a historical angle and the other a more cultural emphasis and all of them will be London experts of some sort. I’ve booked in the guests for January, February and March and they include: a Thames Mudlark, a crime writer, two artists, a nature writer / London tree expert.

Tickets are £15 per person and available through Eventbrite, with only 30 or so tickets available for each night. Here’s the full line up:

Tuesday 27th Jan (7pm – 11pm)
Curistorian Club #1

Ben Wilson & Monika Buttling-Smith (chewing gum art and a Thames river finds)

Ben Wilson
Better known as ‘the Chewing Gum Man’, Ben Wilson has spent over two decades painting amazing miniature pictures on to discarded pieces of chewing gum so it’s entirely possible you’ve already come across him. For the last 10 years or so he’s been an almost permanent fixture on the Millennium Bridge, but you can find his tiny bits of masticated art all over the city’s streets …and elsewhere in the UK and beyond. I’ll be chatting to him about his life, his art, how he came to be ‘the Chewing Gum Man’ and encouraging him to share with us some of his adventures along the way.

Monika Buttling-Smith
Monika Buttling-Smith co-founded and runs the popular Hands on History Mudlarking Exhibitions, which pop-up all over London. She is a member of the exclusive Society of Thames Mudlarks and a major contributor to the London Museum's Secrets of The Thames Exhibition (ends 1st March). Monika and her museum-worthy treasures have been regularly filmed and published, and she’s ditching her muddy boots and knee pads to share with us some of her most special finds, including a rare medieval Pax, a religious artefact so demonised by Henry VIII and Edward VI that owning one could lead to your death!

Tuesday 24th February (7pm – 11pm)
Curistorian Club #2

Paul Wood & Nadine Matheson (London tree hunting and not so cosy crime)

Paul Wood
Paul Wood is a London-based writer, blogger and photographer who bloomin’ loves trees. His book London’s Street Trees was the first book dedicated to the city's frontline trees, is now in its third edition and has not been out of print since it was first published nine years ago.

He has written three other books about trees and urban nature:

Tree Hunting: 1,000 Trees to Find in Britain and Ireland’s Towns and Cities (Particular Books 2025), London is a Forest (Quadrille 2019, 2022) and London Tree Walks (Safe Haven 2020), he is also the editor of the Great Trees of London Map (Blue Crow Media 2021).

I’m looking forward to learning more about London as an urban forest and hopefully becoming more aware of the nature that surrounds us …even in London.

Nadine Matheson
Nadine Matheson is a born and bred Deptfordonian (if that’s a word) criminal defence lawyer who somehow finds time to write amazingly brilliant crime novels set in and around south east London. Her first crime novel, The Jigsaw Man was shortlisted for the Dead Good Reader and the Adult Diverse Book Awards in 2022, and has been translated into fifteen languages. Her latest book The Kill List was longlisted for the Theakston Crime Novel of the Year in 2025. Nadine is currently the chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, and host of the podcast, The Conversation with Nadine Matheson. As it happens, her fifth novel The Shadow Carver is being published in February, so I’m hoping she’ll tell us all about that, her career thus far and reveal more about her ties to Deptford and its inspiration in her novels.

photo credit - London Soul Photography

Tuesday 24th March (7pm – 11pm)
Curistorian Club #3

Ed Gray & Jonnie Fielding (Painting London and fun London facts)

Ed Gray
For the last thirty years, Ed Gray has dedicated his life to painting London in all its grime and glory, capturing from real life Hogarthian scenes of the modern metropolis. Through attentive observation, Gray records everyday individuals in his sketchbooks, later translating these studies into multi-layered compositions that resonate with allegory and symbolism. Many of his paintings are massive, crammed with real life characters, reflecting back the ever changing cityscape and those who inhabit it. His paintings were once described as “an ongoing transmetropolitan tapestry”. He’s going to join me for a special Q and A to get under the skin of his work and to share with us his fascination for London and his ceaseless desire to commit it to canvas.

Jonnie Fielding
Jonnie Fielding …is me. I’ve been a tour guide in London for 16 or so years and have run Bowl of Chalk for 14. It’s been an amazingly tumultuous journey, but one which I continue to enjoy immensely through my regular walking tours and online videos. Last year I was lucky enough to have a book published, ‘Why is Downing Street Painted Black? (and 364 other fun London facts). I’ll be talking in more depth about some of the fun London facts I’ve discovered and answering any questions you might have about London and / or stories from my years guiding in London.

In a nutshell

Bowl of Chalk’s Curistorian Club is an informal way to meet like-minded people in the cosy setting of an historic London pub and learn from experts about London, its history and how it continues to inspire writers, musicians and of course the incurably curious. I hope you’ll be able to join us for one of the events.

I will be hosting more monthly events to be announced soon, so keep an eye on my website, Instagram and other channels for updates.

Tickets for all three Curistorian Events are available HERE.

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