Bloggers picks: 19 free things to do in London Time Out 21st July 2015

Adjacent to St Paul’s Cathedral is shopping centre One New Change. Ignore the plethora of shops and restaurants, and take the glass-walled lift to the top. A platform there gives unparalleled views of Londoners’ favourite historic building. The novelist Guy de Maupassant ate daily at the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant so he didn’t have to look at the structure, and from this vantage point you can’t see the goldfish bowl beneath you.

Bloggers picks:15 things to do in London this Autumn Time Out 4th September 2015

See Victorian London blaze into life
There aren’t many places left in the capital where you feel like you may be in Dickensian London, but Kensington Palace Gardens is one of them. At night you’ll notice the soft glow emanating from the street lights: they’re a handful of the 1,500 Victorian gas lamps remaining in the city. Just five lamplighters maintain them – it’s a job so popular that vacancies are rarely advertised by British Gas. As dusk falls and the birds start to roost in the trees, a clockwork device inside each lamp turns on the gas jet, which is ignited by the continually burning pilot light. The flame then heats a silk casing coated in lime oxide which turns white-hot and gives off that misty glow. For a short time, modern-day London is but a memory.