Buy beads at Beadworks

For your author, most shopping is pretty dull, and shopping for beads seems like about the most pointless idea in the world. However, it is important to cater for all, and some will want to buy beads. If they do, they could find few better outlets than Beadworks, in Covent Garden.


The Covent Garden Bead Shop has been operating from its current location on Tower Street since 1977, making it the oldest Bead Shop in Europe. It is, we are told, a worldwide pioneer of bead retail, and stocks around 6,000 beads. There probably is a reason why someone would need that many beads...

For more on Beadworks, see http://www.beadworks.co.uk/

Experience the awful service at Cafe Churchill

Right at the heart of touristland, at 49 Parliament Street, in Westminster, Cafe Churchill is a fascinating place. Obviously not worried about attracting repeat customers, the staff are amazingly abrupt, and prices for average food are inflated to the point that very few of the thousands of civil servants who work within a few hundred metres ever go back.


On one occasion, sitting in a completely empty downstairs area with friends for lunch, your author was asked to move to a smaller table, which he did. He ate at the new table, as his original one, and all others remained entirely vacant, and left before a single new customer had entered the room.

Your author doesn't want readers to think that he is annoyed with the Cafe at all, in fact he has been back fairly often, and finds the bizarre attitude of those who work there oddly endearing, but he wouldn't want people to misunderstand, and take this as a recommendation.

Even the student rioters seem to have taken it, graffiting the awning with the word 'revolution' during a recent protest, perhaps in an attempt to get the staff to notice them.

For more on Cafe Churchill, try clicking here.

Eat a Medieval Banquet in St Katherine's Dock

This one sounds so terrible, it could just be worth having a look. Medieval Banquet have been organising nightly banquets by flickering torchlight in the cellars beneath Ivory House, near Tower Bridge and the Tower of London, for 35 years.


A reasonably high fee gets you a four course meal with unlimited beer and wine, and a show featuring the 'real' King Henry VIII, and his knights, players, dancers and wenches. There is also after-show music and dancing until late.

It's not cheap, at £49 per person on Fridays and Saturdays, and £45 at all other times, and it has the potential to be excruciating, but maybe that's why the unlimited drink is on offer.

However, it will appeal to some people, and if not the American tourists are sure to lap it up. If it sounds like your sort of thing, see http://www.medievalbanquet.com/

Find the school where Dizzee Rascal got his break

The artist otherwise known as Dylan Mills now has multiple number one singles and various musical accolades, but he had a tough upbringing, raised as he was, "years ago on a run-down housing estate in Bow" by his Ghanaian mother, Priscilla, (his Nigerian father died when he was two). Though he now lives in Kent, and occasionally sounds off about Bow, he still admits he goes back all the time and loves it.


It was here on the Bow/Poplar borders that Dizzee got his break, partially as a result of founding Roll Deep with other Bow-based MCs in 2002, but initially as a result of his work at Langdon Park school, and the support he received from the then Head of Arts, Tim Smith.

Dizzee was, by all accounts, a disruptive pupil, but particularly took to Mr Smith's music teaching, and using Cubase music software during year 10 to produce some of his first music. This led to his joining summer holiday music workshops with Tower Hamlets Summer University, and his mother buying him some first turntables. The rest is history.

Langdon Park School is on Byron Street/St Leonard's Road, E14. Read more about Dizzee and Tim Smith in an article here or here, or for more about the school you could possibly try here.

_{^Picture courtesy of neonwar^}