culturevoyage.co.uk
Broadening the mind and uplifting the heart
The new St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London has taken 76 years to return to its original use. Developed by Manhattan Loft Corporation at a cost of £150 million, it offers everything you would expect from a five-star, modern establishment. Yet its past has not been forgotten as so much of the original has been retained. […]
John Bartlett is an artist who has marched to his own creative beat all his life. His depiction of the poll tax riots caused controversy and his subject matter meant commercial galleries shunned him. His day job as a gallery assistant at London’s National Gallery inspires his work, surrounded as he is by the Old […]
Born in Frankfurt in 1647, Maria Sibylla Merian was, from a very early age, fascinated by insects and, in particular, the process by which butterflies and moths made a complete transformation from an egg to a beautiful flying creature. Praised by David Attenborough as being among the most significant contributors to the field of entomology, […]
London’s latest tourist attraction is 800 feet above ground and it takes two lifts to get there – but The View from The Shard is likely to become one of the capital’s major visitor experiences, despite the relatively high entrance price. Designed by the famous Italian architect Rienzo Piano, the building makes full use of […]
The Museum of London will be holding an exhibition about the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in the autumn of 2014, the first major temporary exhibition about the sleuth since the 1951 Festival of Britain. It will stress his links to the capital and the Victorian/Edwardian environment in which his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was […]
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Profumo Affair, when the War Minister slept with a good-time girl called Christine Keeler while she was, allegedly, also bedding the Assistant Soviet Naval Attaché. Coming in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis and the continuing threat of nuclear annihilation posed by the Cold War, a […]
Ladybird Books, those wonderful, pocket-sized publications which – for those of a certain age – offered the reader the basics of every subject from magic tricks to King Arthur, celebrate their centenary in 2015. To mark the occasion, London’s House of Illustration is holding an exhibition about the history of the series with many original […]
The View from The Shard near London Bridge offers a 360-degree panorama of the city from just below the summit of the tallest building in Western Europe. Rienzo Piano’s skyscraper, owing its inspiration not just to shards of glass but also the old crane derricks which used to line the nearby Pool of London, is […]
Simon Schama, Professor of Art and History at Columbia University, has been working with the National Portrait Gallery’s Chief Curator, Dr. Tarnya Cooper, to create five new displays for the gallery which reflect his personal view of British portraiture through the ages. Explaining that his motivation came from Rembrandt and British history itself, he said […]