Vienna

2 April 2026

We had a lovely time in Vienna last week, visiting the Schonbrunn Palace - the summer residence of the Hapsburgs - where we walked through the room where the six year old Mozart first performed for the Empress. We enjoyed the Gustav Klimt collection at the Belvedere Palace and walked through the Prater amusement park to see the famous Ferris wheel. We went to the Musikverein to see a great concert by The Orchestral Association of the Society of Friends of Music - Vienna's oldest amateur orchestra (founded in 1859 - 11 years before the Musikverein opened). We also visited the stunning Kunsthistoriches Museum and the Albertina - a lovely art gallery within a beautiful Hapsburg palace. We had a day trip to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, where the Old Town is very pretty, with pastel coloured buildings and open squares. We also went by train to the small town of Melk (population 2,000), set on the banks of the Danube in Lower Austria, which is dominated by the dramatic, imposing and enormous Benedictine Monastery, Sift Melk, which sits on a rock, high above the town. Back in Vienna we managed to get cheap standing tickets for the Vienna State Opera where we saw 'The Bartered Bride'. We were in the ground floor standing area at the back of the stalls with a surprisingly good view. It was great to see the inside of the opera house and to see the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. You can see a few of my holiday photos here. 

The Postal Museum

14 November 2025

For the majority of the seven years I worked for Making Music our office was in Rosebery Avenue in London, just a few hundred yards from the massive Royal Mail Mount Pleasant Sorting Office. Despite walking past the building every day it was only last weekend, more than 20 years later, that I got around to visiting the Postal Museum. The museum houses a fascinating and entertaining exhibition which walks you through the history of the UK postal service - from 1516 when Henry VIII established a ‘Master of the Posts’ to the present day. I realised I have now reached an age when I spend too much of my time in museums exclaiming “I remember having one of those”! But the main attraction at the Postal Museum is the opportunity to ride in the tiny Mail Rail train under central London. London's Hidden Postal Railway runs for 6.5 miles from Paddington to Whitechapel. It opened in 1927 and only ceased being used in 2003. Now you can squeeze into new passenger carriages and travel around one loop of the railway line, passing through narrow tunnels and disused station platforms, accompanied by an audio-visual history of the service. It’s an eerie and intriguing experience - a mixture of ghost train, theme park ride and archeological dig. 

Cruise from Malta

10 April 2025

We had a very enjoyable Mediterranean cruise last week on the P&O ship Azura, visiting Valletta in Malta, Athens in Greece and Heraklion and Chania in Crete. We particularly enjoyed our first visit to Valletta - a beautiful old town set on a plateau on a narrow peninsula with water on three sides. It's very pretty with some very grand buildings, all in a distinctive sand coloured stone, built in a grid system. In Athens we visited the Temple of Olympian Zeus next to Hadrian's Gate. This temple was larger than the Parthenon but only 15 of its 100 columns are still standing. There are good views from the site across to the Acropolis. We also visited the National Archaeological Museum which has an extensive collection of artifacts from ancient Greece, many dating from 3,000 years BC. From Heraklion we went to the Palace of Knossos - a fascinating archaeological site with some of the buildings reconstructed (in cement) by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated the site in 1900. These reconstructions are gradually being replaced but they do give an idea of the scale of some of the buildings. Chania is a pretty town with a picturesque harbour but we didn't see it at its best, having arrived during a torrential thunderstorm. We had a lovely, relaxing cruise with good food, company and dancing.

Battersea Power Station

31 January 2025

On Saturday we made a first visit to the recently restored Battersea Power Station in London. This iconic Art Deco building designed by J. Theo Halliday and Giles Gilbert Scott has been beautifully refurbished to create a complex of shops, restaurants and a cinema on the banks of the Thames. Compared to the Bankside Power Station that became the Tate Modern Gallery with its huge turbine hall, Battersea is on a different scale with its dual turbine halls and immense chimneys. It feels like a secular version of a Norman Cathedral - but bigger! We were there to see The Light Festival 2025 - a free interactive art trail of eight light installations by artists inside the Power Station and in the area outside it. We also took the journey up Lift 109, a large circular elevator that rises through one of the Power Station's giant chimneys to emerge above the top of the chimney (like 'Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator') with 360 degree views across the Thames and most of London. It was a bright sunny day and the views from 109 metres above the river were spectacular. But it's the building itself that's the star, a redbrick Art Deco behemoth dwarfing everything around it. Well worth a visit.

Leighton House and Sambourne House

14 April 2023

On Saturday we were in London to visit Leighton House in Kensington, London, the home of the late Victorian artist Lord Frederic Leighton. One of a series of houses and studios designed and built by artists in the streets around Holland Park in the 18060s, Leighton House has recently reopened to the public after a major refurbishment. It’s an amazing building, packed with textiles, pottery and other objects collected by Leighton on trips to Turkey, Egypt, Syria as well as his own works of art. The building is part showpiece, part home and part studio and the exhibitions about Leighton and his contemporaries are fascinating to see within the house where he lived. We also visited the nearby partner property Sambourne House, which was the home of the illustrator and Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne - a contemporary of Leighton’s. This is a more conventional Victorian town house, but the lavish decoration and furnishings are a celebration of late Victorian society. And every room is crammed with Sambourne’s drawings. Both museums are well worth a visit.

Buckingham Palace Garden

10 March 2022

On Sunday we were in London for a guided tour of the Buckingham Palace Garden. While large crowds gathered in front of the Palace for the Changing of the Guard It was fascinating to be part of a small group taken around the 39 acre garden behind the Palace. This large green space in the centre of the city was much more like one of the London Royal Parks than the formal gardens I had been expecting. Our guide told us about the work of the Palace gardeners and recent changes to the garden to improve biodiversity. It was also interesting to see the Royal Mews and the back of Buckingham Palace at close quarters - a rare glimpse into a hidden world.

Tom Robinson

12 November 2021

Drapers’ Hall is one of the few Regency buildings in Coventry. It was built in 1831-2 as the headquarters of the Coventry Drapers’ Guild but was last used as a youth magistrates’ court over 30 years ago. Working with The Princes’ Foundation, Historic Coventry Trust has restored the building as a home for Coventry Music Service and a music and events venue. On Thursday evening we were at Drapers’ Hall for the first public event there for more than 30 years, a concert by Tom Robinson. The building, right in the centre of Coventry next to the Cathedral and opposite the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, is in Greek Revival style and consists of a series of grand ceremonial spaces lit by rooflights. It reminded me of the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh and Bath. Regular readers will know I am a big fan of Tom Robinson who we saw perform many times across the country in the 1990s. He spent many years away from touring when he became a regular presenter on BBC 6 Music so it’s been great rediscovering him since he started performing live again (reviewed here in August 2014, November 2015 and October 2017). Thursday’s concert at Drapers’ Hall was a solo performance drawing on Tom’s extensive back catalogue of songs and anecdotes. Now 71 years old he has lost none of his energy, wit, musicality and political passion - adding additional verses to many of his older songs to reference climate change, Brexit and the current UK government. Tom Robinson has always generously supported emerging young artists and it was lovely to see him introducing local singer/songwriter Dolly Mavies, who he had featured recently on his BBC Introducing Mixtape programme, to open the evening at the beautifully refurbished Drapers’ Hall.

Hampton Court Palace

19 February 2016

Last Sunday we made our first visit to Hampton Court Palace – Henry VIII's royal palace on the banks of the Thames in Surrey. Hampton Court is one of those iconic historic buildings that feels immediately familiar. We worked our way through the historic maze and explored the parts of the palace that showcase the influence of Henry VIII and William III. It's a huge site that you could easily spend all day discovering. One of our highlights was the newly opened Cumberland Art Gallery – a small suite of rooms in the centre of the palace that now houses a selection of paintings from the Royal Collection. These include works by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Gainsborough and a whole room of Canalettos.

Baltic Cruise

3 October 2014

Our Baltic cruise on the P&O ship Adonia was a wonderful holiday. We sailed through the Kiel canal in North Germany and spent a couple of days in Kiel, during which we took a train to the pretty medieval town of Lubeck which I last visited with the Manchester Youth Orchestra nearly 30 years ago. Some parts of the town were familiar but I failed to find the bar in which the orchestra's leader Angela Ceasar wowed the locals, singing 'Summertime' with the house band. From Germany we sailed to Estonia, stopping at the beautiful island of Saaremaa before spending a day in Talinn. Talinn is a fairytale city – like a Disneyland version of a medieval European town. The architecture is reminiscent of Switzerland or Austria but more brightly coloured and with some clear Russian influences. We loved Talinn's narrow cobbled streets, high town walls and stunning central square. Our next port of call was St Petersburg – my first visit to Russia. St Petersburgh is an amazing place – intimidating and austere on the outskirts, with a magnificent city centre. Like Paris, the centre of St Petersburg was designed and built as a single project, giving the streets and buildings a consistency missing from most major cities. There are some incredibly impressive buildings, dominated for me by the Church of Our Saviour over Spilled Blood – an incredibly colourful, extravagant, onion-spired showpiece of a building. We also visited the Hermitage – an enormous museum which reminded me of the Louvre in Paris (and can be similarly crowded, though it wasn't too bad when we were there). We had a guided tour of the Hermitage and saw works by Rembrandt, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh and Leonardo da Vinci. Our visit to Stockholm was also dominated by a fantastic museum: the Vasa Museum houses the preserved remains of a warship which sank in 1628. The museum gives a fascinating insight into the history of the period, through a series of displays all linked to the Vasa itself, ever-present as you walk around the four floors which provide a range of views over the huge ship. It's brilliantly done – one of the best museums I have ever visited. We were similarly charmed by the much smaller David Collection in Copenhagen which includes extensive displays of early Islamic art, beautifully presented with lots of background information about the history of much of the Middle East and North Africa. It was great to return to Copenhagen – one of my favourite European cities. Regular readers will be relieved to know that we finally managed to see the Little Mermaid. You can see a selection of my holiday photos at: http://www.culturaloutlook.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Baltic2014.

Antwerp

9 May 2014

We had a lovely holiday in Antwerp last week. Antwerp is Belgium's second largest city and the de facto capital of Flanders. It was also the main port in Northern Europe until overtaken by Amsterdam. The historic centre of the city is very pretty and the main square, Grote Markt, has a lot of similarities to the Grand Place in Brussels (which we visited in May 2013) and the main square in Bruges (which we visited in June 2009). Antwerp was the home of the painter Peter Paul Rubens and it was interesting to see several of his works in their original setting in Antwerp Cathedral, and to visit the Rubenshuis museum to see the building where he lived and worked. We also visited the Antwerp Opera House to see the Vlaamse Opera production of Bela Bartok's one-act opera 'Bluebeard's Castle' combined with a staged version of Schubert's 'Winterreise'. This was a spectacularly bizarre evening in the theatre, which demonstrated the incredible visual imagination of the director, Kornel Mundruczo. It incorporated close-ups of the singers captured by an actor with a video camera and projected on a large screen at the back of the stage, an impressive model railway, two large flying fish and a huge stage set which gradually exploded into its constituent parts. It was fascinating to watch but somewhat distracted from the music – which was excellent. All three singers (Stefan Kocan, Asmik Grigorian and Toby Girling) and the orchestra (conducted by Martyn Brabbins) were very impressive. Antwerp is also known for its restaurants and we had some excellent meals, sampling French, Italian and Flemish cuisine in some amazing old buildings. We also enjoyed a visit to Antwerp Zoo which sits directly alongside the fantastic Antwerp Central Station – one of the most beautiful railway stations in the world and the setting for that brilliant 'Sound of Music' flashmob performance in 2009 (well worth another look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k).

Northumberland

30 September 2011

We had a lovely time in Northumberland last week. We were staying in the tiny hamlet of Thorngrafton, just South of Hadrian’s Wall – no far from the town of Haltwhistle, which claims to be the Centre of Britain. We did some great walks along the Wall, in Allendale and on the banks of Keilder Water. We visited the Housesteads and Vindolanda Roman forts. Vindolanda was particularly interesting – lots to see and new discoveries being made all the time. The collection of wooden tablets with messages inscribed on them in Latin was fascinating – the banality of many of the messages (an invitation to a party, a request to borrow something etc) reminding us that people in Roman Britain were not that different to ourselves (these tablets being the emails of their day!). I was also reminded that most of the ‘Romans’ building and protecting Hadrian’s Wall were not from Rome: they were mostly soldiers from conquered territories in Belgium and the Netherlands. Young men from Britain were similarly pressed into service as Roman soldiers in other corners of the Empire. 

New York

7 April 2011

We had a brilliant week in New York. It was my first time there and we did just about all the main tourist attractions – and walked for miles! We stayed in an apartment in the Upper West Side with views over Central Park and quickly got the hang of the grid system and the subway. Manhattan is an amazing place – self-contained and small enough to find your way around easily but littered with iconic landmarks and a sense of familiarity from hundreds of movies. At the end of our first, exhausting day we collapsed into a cinema for a rest and chose the first available film which was ‘The Adjustment Bureau’ starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt, only to discover that not only was it set in downtown Manhattan but that we had just visited most of the places featured mere minutes before! We had great weather for most of the week – glorious sunshine and cloudless blue skies but extremely cold (even for New York). I think our highlight was the boat trip to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island: the Museum of Immigration is fantastic, particularly with the audio tour which puts the voices of people who passed through the entrance hall and tiled corridors to secure their American citizenship in your ears as you tread in their footsteps. And it was amazing to discover that this huge operation of screening people for suitability to enter the USA resulted in just 2% being turned back to the ships that had brought them. We enjoyed the views from the ‘Top of the Rock’ (the roof of the Rockefeller Center) and the Empire State Building, the tackiness of Times Square and the preponderance of excellent cheap cafés, each with an enormous range of fresh food. We visited Ground Zero, though there is not much to see at the moment as new buildings are well under way and the area is now a fairly inaccessible building site. The Frick Collection – a relatively small but elegant art gallery with a passing resemblance to London’s Wallace Collection – was charming and the massive Metropolitan Museum of Art was awe-inspiring. To cap it all, as we approached the Met we noticed crowds gathering outside and police positioning barriers along the side of Fifth Avenue. We asked a police officer what was happening and she told us that President Obama was about to drive past so we joined the crowds and caught a fleeting glimpse of the President as his motorcade sped past. Manhattan felt very safe and clean and we found most New Yorkers extremely polite and welcoming. We had a great time.

Victoria & Albert Museum Medieval and Renaissance galleries

23 February 2010

On Saturday we visited the new Medieval and Renaissance galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The exhibits are beautifully presented – there’s lots of space and light much like the refurbished Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (reviewed here in November 2009). I felt there was less of a coherent narrative than at the Ashmolean: the V&A tends to present historic objects as art. But the new galleries are visually stunning and there are some real gems to discover.

The Ashmolean Museum

19 November 2009

It’s been a week for first visits: on Friday I made my first trip to Britain’s oldest museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford which has just reopened after a massive refurbishment. It’s a fascinating building, with the modern extension seamlessly integrated into the classical original. I loved the apparent randomness of the layout: you wander from small, low-ceilinged galleries into vast, cavernous rooms and you can see through glass panels from one gallery to the next, enticing you onwards. Just walking around the building creates a sense of exploration. The thematic grouping of displays – rather than a traditional chronological approach – adds to the feeling of eclectic channel-hopping. I worried a little that I was drawn more to the text and graphics than to the actual objects on display. It was particularly interesting to finish the day by looking at the displays on Ancient Egypt which are the one part of the museum yet to be refurbished and now appear extremely old-fashioned: the display cases are crammed with huge numbers of objects and cards containing masses of very small text and the galleries feel quite cramped and claustrophobic compared to the airy modernity of the rest of the museum. You can easily spend a whole day in the Ashmolean (and entry is free). And if the queues in the basement café are long I can recommend popping across the road to the café in the foyer of the Playhouse Theatre.

Dorset

21 September 2009

We had a lovely week in Dorset in a cottage outside Thorncombe, close to the borders with Devon and Somerset. We had some glorious weather, particularly towards the end of the week, and did lots of walking. Highlights were the walk up the coastal path to Golden Cap (the highest point on the south coast of England), the beautiful National Trust gardens at Barrington Court, the fascinating tiny volunteer-run museum in Sherborne and the exhibition of Tudor portraits from the National Portrait Gallery at Montacute House.

Belgium and The Netherlands

18 June 2009

We had a lovely week in Belgium and the Netherlands, spending a couple of days in each of Bruges, Ghent and Utrecht. All three are charming, medieval, towns with cobbled streets and tree-lined canals. Bruges is beautiful but more of a tourist trap than the other two and feels like an historic theme park. Ghent has a much younger feel with a big student population. The historic centre of Utrecht has more residential accommodation and the narrow streets were much busier: it’s quite an effort to avoid being mown down by thousands of bicycles as you stroll along! We enjoyed a concert of music by Monteverdi given by the Anima Vocalis choir in Bruges, an exhibition about the wonderful Belgium impressionist painter Emile Claus in Ghent and a big band concert in Utrecht. We also loved the museum of automatic musical instruments in Utrecht ('Museum Van Speelklok tot Pierement: From Musical Clock To Street Organ') – fascinating guided tour and demonstrations.

Snowshill Manor

4 November 2005

Really enjoyed a visit last Sunday to Snowshill Manor – a National Trust property near Broadway in the Cotswolds – a rambling building dating from 1500 with the most fascinating and eccentric collection of things (early bicycles, spinning wheels, Samurai armour, unusual musical instruments, truncheons etc etc). I could have spent days there – it was great.