London - South Bank and Waterloo Travel Guides | London | Sub Regions | London - South Bank and Waterloo

Londoners have rediscoverered their river and the South Bank is booming. As architecture critic Ian Nairn noted back in the 1960s, the area is “a real skeleton key. London is bent around the Thames: however much the north bank might wish to forget it, the south holds the centre of gravity.” That’s never been more true than now. On the map, this is the centre of the city. The 18th-century obelisk in St George’s Circus, Lambeth, records the fact that this is the only spot exactly one mile from Westminster, Fleet Street (once the home of ‘the fourth estate’), and the City. Even so, it comes as some surprise that the riverside walk marketed as the Millennium Mile, from County Hall to London Bridge, has become a must for every visitor with more than a day to spend. Only a decade or so ago the faceless grey blocks of the South Bank Centre and the National Theatre were famous for being a dirty, graffiti-stained and inaccessible ghetto for culture vultures. Nowadays, especially on sunny summer weekends, the riverside teems with people from all over the world enjoying the unlikely conglomeration of attractions at County Hall and the big wheel of the London Eye or just taking in some breezy traffic-free views of the Thames. Further south, near St George’s Circus, is the sobering Imperial War Museum.

Sights

T 0870-500 0600, http://www.ba-londoneye.com. May-Sep Mon-Thu 0930-200, Fri-Sun 0930-2100; Jun Mon-Thu 0930-2100, Fri-Sun 0930-2200; Jul-Aug daily 0930-2200; Oct-Dec daily 0930-2000. £11, under-15s £5.50, under-5s free (advance booking available on the web, prices subject to change). M Westminster, Embankment or Waterloo.

The vast spoked white wheel of the London Eye beside Westminster Bridge has already become one of the most welcome additions to the London skyline in years. Well over 100 m in diameter, the largest structure of its kind in the world, it’s visible from unexpected places all around the city. The half-hour ‘flight’ in one of its surprisingly roomy glass ‘capsules’, moving at a quarter-metre a second, provides superb 25-mile views over the city, and is neither vertiginous nor at all boring. On a clear day you can see all of London and beyond, including Guildford Cathedral and Windsor Castle. If the weather is less fine, and there’s no banking on it if you’ve been sensible and booked in advance (or even stood in the queue for an hour), you’re at least guaranteed the peculiar sensation of looking down on the top of Big Ben and overlooking Nelson on his column.

M Westminster or Waterloo.

Built just before the First World War for the London County Council, the fate of this magisterial building, which became the seat of the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC), is one of London’s odder ironies. Since the GLC’s abolition by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1980s, London’s town hall has been thrown open to the people by its Japanese owners as a hotch-potch leisure and tourist development. It now houses the London Aquarium, a Macdonald’s, the Premier League Football Hall of Fame, a Namco videogame arcade, a 24-hour health club, and a Chinese restaurant, as well as a Marriot Hotel and a Travel Inn. Ken Livingstone, leader of the GLC in 1986, might have difficulty finding his way around it.

County Hall, T 020-7823 2363, http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk. Sun-Thu 1000-1800, Fri, Sat 1000-2200. Adult £8.50, £6.50 under-16s. M Westminster or Waterloo.

The new kid in the block is advertising guru Charles Saatchi’s contemporary art collection, so influential in launching the careers of the YBAs (Young British Artists) of the late 1980s and 90s. Much has been made of the disparity between the cut-and-thrust of the attention-grabbing artworks themselves and their serious official setting, a reminder of the effect of the ‘Sensation’ show at the Royal Academy in 1997. Probably the single most famous exhibit is Damien Hirst’s pickled shark, entitled ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ but it’s the sheer variety and accessibility of the sculptures (mainly) and also paintings that makes a visit here wonderfully provoking.

County Hall, T 020-7620 2720. Daily 1000-1730. £8.50, £7.50, £4.95 under-16s. M Westminster or Waterloo.

Next door, appropriately enough, is a gallery devoted to the famous 20th-century Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali, far from publicity-shy himself. The darkened rooms feature more than 500 works, including drawings and sculptures, and the opportunity to buy one.

T 020-7928 3144, http://www.sbc.org.uk. Mon, Thu-Sun 1000-1800, Tue, Wed 1000-2000. Adult £6 approximately. M Embankment or Waterloo.

A short walk downstream from County Hall and Jubilee Gardens, just beyond the Hungerford railway bridge with its spiky Golden Jubilee footbridges, stands the South Bank Centre (SBC). The largest arts complex of its kind in Europe, it grew up around the Royal Festival Hall, the centrepiece of the Festival of Britain. Apart from the main concert hall, the Grade I listed building also houses an exhibition space, a good bookshop, the Poetry Library, and the high-class People’s Palace restaurant. Nearby, connected by concrete terraces overlooking the river, are more concert halls, the Purcell Room and Queen Elizabeth Hall, as well as the cutting-edge Hayward Gallery. Opened in 1968 and one of the few remaining examples of ‘brutalist’ architecture in London, it has recently been refurbished and provided with an airy glass entrance hall and café. The cantilevered tower of neon tubes on its roof, a kinetic sculpture controlled by the windspeed, has become a familiar, very 1970s landmark. This is the place to come for major state-subsidized temporary exhibitions of contemporary art.

National Film Theatre, T 020-7928 3535, http://www.bfi.org.uk. Royal National Theatre, T 020-7452 3000, http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk. M Embankment or Waterloo.

Next up on the riverside, beneath the arches of Waterloo Bridge, is the National Film Theatre. Its restaurant and bar have become one of chattering London’s favourite meeting places. Major relocation of the cinema to Jubilee Gardens is planned in the future. Next door is the Royal National Theatre. The foundation stone was laid for the Festival of Britain in 1951, but architect Denys Lasdun’s terraced concrete ziggurat didn’t open until 1976, the new home for the National Theatre Company. Its grey blocks suit its position next to Waterloo Bridge, although Lasdun apparently hoped they would turn interesting shades of green once lichen and algae had bloomed on the textured walls. Air pollution has so far put paid to the desired effect. Theatre Square on the riverside is an open-air performance space for street entertainers and the occasional showcase event.

T 020-7416 5000, http://www.iwm.org.uk. Daily 1000-1800. Free. M Lambeth North.

Heading away from the river down Lambeth Road brings you to The Imperial War Museum, founded in 1917 to record the British Empire’s involvement in the First World War. Housed in the former Royal Bethlem lunatic asylum, it has since then dedicated itself to the history and consequences of all 20th-century warfare. The bronze cast of the Kalachakra Mandala, associated with world peace, is a good object of contemplation close to the grand entrance to the museum, guarded by a pair of the largest naval guns ever built. On the ground floor you’ll find an even more fearsome collection of military hardware, all quiet, cleaned up and cut away for easy viewing: tanks, mini-subs, aeroplanes and more peculiar equipment like the little observer’s pod that was dangled beneath zeppelins hidden in the clouds. A reconstructed First World War trench, ‘The Trench Experience’, is genuinely unpleasant, although thankfully nothing like as awful as the original must have been. An immensely informative and disturbing exhibition on the Holocaust also puts the whole bloody business in perspective, while the top floor houses a harrowing presentation on war crimes and genocide up to the present day.

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