Having a capital time
By Lee Marlow
Writer Samuel Johnson famously said that the man who is tired of London is tired of life.
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The Crown Plaza Hotel family rooms are £295 a night.
Johnson, clearly, never spent the weekend in London with my wife.
He wouldn't have said that then. He would have been in the bath, with a tin of strong European lager, moaning about his poor blistered feet and his frazzled mind.
I love London. I love the way that, somehow, even when it looks like it shouldn't work, it does. I like its new buildings and its old ones. I like its pubs, parks, statues, Tower Bridge, the Thames, its constant ebb and flow, the smell of the underground and the fact that you are never more than a few yards away from a newspaper.
I'm not so keen on weasel-faced Chelsea fans, camera-wielding Japanese tourists and the way my laid-back wife is transformed as soon as she steps off the train at St Pancras
During our two days in London, we walked and walked, and then walked some more. We showed our kids every sight they'd ever heard of in London and some they probably hadn't.
We criss-crossed our capital on the tube so often that we turned the £5.40 off peak all day travel card into the best value travel card in the world.
"Is that about it then?" I could be heard saying regularly. "We'd better think about the kids, eh? It's a lot for them..."
Yet if I was looking for solidarity from them, I was mistaken. They were lapping it up.
They loved it so much I found myself pondering the dreadful thought that when they're older they might want to live here. (London is no place for a more vulnerable member of your family to live.)
Yet it wasn't, necessarily, the splendour of the smoke that did it for them. It was the simple things.
It was the man saying 'mind the gap' on the underground. It was the tacky gift shops; those steep escalators on the underground; the spaghetti mess of the tube map, which, after two days, they were beginning to work out for themselves, the parks, and the posh hotel in Kensington where we stayed which they confidently declared was the one of the best hotels we had ever stayed in. They may have been right, too.
This is what we did. Some of it was good. Some of it was surprisingly bad. Nearly all of it was spirit-crushingly expensive but, you know, that's London for you.
I've only got space to tell you about the very good and the very bad. For a far more detailed and informative guide to what's good in London and what's not, try these websites: www.visitlondon.com and www.london-budget.com, which seems to have plenty of thrifty tips.
Madame Tussaud's
I thought this would be dreadful; full of hare-brained, Heat magazine obsessed goons posing next to wax statues of their favourite D-list celebrities. Where's the fun in that?
An hour and a half later – with our camera full of pictures of all of us posing like goons next to wax statues of our favourite D-List celebrities – our minds were changed. It was a laugh.
Tickets are expensive – adults £22, kids £18.50, although going off-peak is cheaper – but there are worse places to spend your cash.
The Aquarium: Like here, for example. Two floors below the old county hall building, right next to the London Eye, the Aquarium was a massive and expensive disappointment. 'See the sharks get fed at 2.30pm,' said the sign. So we did. I'm not joking when I tell you that as they were actually being fed, we wondered if we'd missed it. It was that uneventful.
For a man who has seen Jaws more times than he can remember and whose kids have Shark Top Trumps cards, we were all disappointed.
It was hard to know which fish were which – there were so many signs missing – and in one tank, we spotted a giant fish of some exotic description lying dead at the bottom of the pool.
The Thames Clipper: They say if you want to see London at its best, then you should see it from the river. Whoever they are, they might be right.
The Clipper is an exhilarating way to see London, especially as many of its best landmarks – Parliament, Canary Wharf, St Paul's Cathedral, the Gherkin, the Dome, Tower Bridge, etc – are best viewed from the Thames.
Hyde Park: Situated in posh Kensington, Hyde Park might not be London's biggest park but its surely its best.
Its picturesque 350 acres somehow manages to be both quintessentially English and yet cosmopolitan and stylish.
The Princess Diana Memorial fountain is here. I vaguely remember reading that this was some kind of architectural shambles and that it didn't work properly.
Bloody journalists. It's nothing of the sort. It's brilliant. Our kids loved it and it's welcome place to soothe your aching feet after two days in one of the best cities in the world.
Information
You can get to London from Leicester with East Midlands Trains in one hour and six minutes. Prices vary depending when you travel and when you book.
The Crown Plaza Hotel is in Cromwell Road, Kensington. It's a great hotel and the full English breakfast is lovely. A family room is £295 a night. For more information, contact 0207 373 2222 or
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