The South Bank

Drawing in huge numbers of visitors for its high-profile tourist attractions, including the enormously popular London Eye, the South Bank forms a waterside cluster of London’s finest cultural institutions, including the National Theatre and Royal Festival Hall, while further south is the impressive Imperial War Museum. With most of London’s major sights sitting on the north bank of the Thames, the views from here are the best on the river, and thanks to the wide, traffic-free riverside boulevard, the area can be happily explored on foot, while for much of the year there’s some kind of outdoor festival going on along the riverbank. You can continue your wanderings eastwards along the riverside towards Tate Modern and Bankside.

For centuries London stopped southwards at the Thames; the South Bank was a marshy, uninhabitable place, a popular spot for duck-shooting, but otherwise seldom visited. Then, in the eighteenth century, wharves were built along the riverbank, joined later by factories, so that by 1905 the Baedeker guidebook characterized Lambeth and Southwark as “containing numerous potteries, glass-works, machine-factories, breweries and hop-warehouses”. Slums and overhead railway lines added to the grime until 1951, when a slice of Lambeth’s badly bombed riverside was used as a venue for the Festival of Britain, the site eventually evolving into the Southbank Centre, a vibrant arts complex, encased in a concrete shell. The South Bank’s twenty-first-century rejuvenation was kick-started by the arrival of the spectacular London Eye and the Golden Jubilee Bridges, two majestic double-suspension footbridges that flank the Hungerford rail bridge. Waterloo Bridge marks the eastern limit of the Southbank Centre, and is famous for more than its sunsets: it was built mostly by women during World War II, and was the site of the assassination via ricin-loaded umbrella of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov in 1978. Tucked underneath it is the city’s leading arts cinema, BFI Southbank, with the National Theatre and Oxo Tower just beyond.

Southbank Centre

Belvedere Rd, SE1 8XX • Weekly architecture and backstage tours, book online • £10–12 • 020 3879 9555, southbankcentre.co.uk • Waterloo

In 1951, the South Bank Exhibition, on derelict land south of the Thames, formed the centrepiece of the national Festival of Britain, an attempt to boost postwar morale by celebrating the centenary of the Great Exhibition. The most striking features of the site were the saucer-shaped Dome of Discovery, 365ft in diameter and inspiration for the 365m Millennium Dome, the Royal Festival Hall (which still stands) and the cigar-shaped steel and aluminium Skylon tower. When the festival ended, much of the site was dismantled and sold for scrap.

However, the great success of the festival eventually provided the impetus for the creation of the Southbank Centre comprising the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery. Initially, it failed to capture the public imagination in the same way. Since the early 2000s, there has been a transformation, with something of the original festival ethos revived as crowds of visitors enjoy its riverside location, free events, its avenue of trees, fluttering banners, food stalls, skateboarders and, at weekends, secondhand bookstalls outside BFI Southbank.

Royal Festival Hall

Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX • Foyers daily 10am–11pm, occasional closures for events • 020 7960 4200, southbankcentre.co.uk • Poetry Library Tues–Sun 11am–8pm • Free • poetrylibrary.org.uk • Waterloo

The only building left from the 1951 Festival of Britain is the Royal Festival Hall or RFH, one of London’s main concert venues, whose auditorium is suspended above the open-plan foyer – its curved roof is clearly visible above the main body of the building. The interior furnishings remain fabulously period, and exhibitions and free events in the foyer – the main space is the Clore Ballroom, though they can take over any of the five floors – are generally excellent. On the first floor, there’s a small exhibition on the original Festival of Britain, with a model of the colourful site as it looked in 1951. Look out, too, for the “Patchwork of the Century”, near the ticket desk, which was produced by the Women’s Institute in 1951; each one of its embroidered panels illustrates a year between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Festival of Britain.

At the little-known Poetry Library on Level 5, you can either browse or, by joining (membership is free), borrow from the library’s vast collection of poetry. Just outside, there’s a little children’s reading den, and kids (big and small) might also enjoy riding the “singing lift”(officially Martin Creed’s Work No.409 for elevator and choir) – the glass lift on the QEH side of the building, where a recorded choir announces each floor.

Queen Elizabeth Hall and Hayward Gallery

Southbank Centre, SE1 8XX • Hayward Gallery Mon, Wed & Fri–Sun 11am–7pm, Thurs 11am–9pm • Charge for exhibitions • 020 7960 4200, southbankcentre.co.uk • Waterloo

Architecturally, the most austere parts of the Southbank Centre are the Queen Elizabeth Hall (QEH) and the more intimate Purcell Room, which share the same foyer. Built in uncompromisingly brutalist 1960s style, they have recently been sensitively renovated. The concrete structures have also proved adept at accommodating new uses, not always intended. At ground level, the graffiti-covered space known as the undercroft has been a legendary skateboarding destination since the 1970s; after a successful campaign, it is protected as a skatepark for the foreseeable future. Up above is a lovely roof garden, which comes to life with wildflowers each summer. Immediately behind, and equally stark from the outside, is the Hayward Gallery, a large and flexible art gallery that puts on temporary exhibitions, mostly modern or contemporary art. Renovation of the gallery’s distinctive pyramid skylights, which leaked from the outset, means for the first time the upstairs spaces are flooded with natural light from above, as intended.

BFI Southbank

Belvedere Rd, SE1 8XT • Library Tues–Sat 10.30am–7pm • Free • Mediatheque Tues–Sun 10.30am–9pm• Free • 020 7928 3232, bfi.org.uk • Waterloo

Tucked underneath Waterloo Bridge is BFI Southbank (operated by the British Film Institute), which screens London’s most esoteric films, hosts a variety of talks, lectures and festivals, and also has a reference library and runs Mediatheque, where you can settle into one of the viewing stations and choose from a selective archive of British films, TV programmes and documentaries. The BFI also runs the BFI IMAX, housed within the eye-catching glass drum, which rises up from the centre of the roundabout at the southern end of Waterloo Bridge.

National Theatre

South Bank • Mon–Sat 9.30am–11pm • Backstage tours Mon–Sat normally 3–6 daily, times vary; 1hr 15min • £10 Costume tours select Sat 10am (book well in advance) • £12.50 • Sherling Backstage Walkway Mon–Sat 9.30am–7.30pm • Free • 020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk • Waterloo

Just east of Waterloo Bridge is Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre (officially the Royal National Theatre). An institution first mooted in 1848, it was finally realized in 1976, and, like the Southbank Centre, its concrete brutalism is a classic of the style, though it tends to divide opinion, with Prince Charles likening it to a nuclear power station. Lasdun’s design is most remarkable for the way it neatly accommodates three superb auditoriums: the 1160-seat Olivier, modelled after a Greek amphitheatre, with an extraordinary “drum revolve” that creates rotating and rising and falling sets; the 890-seat proscenium-arch Lyttleton; and the smaller Dorfman theatre. The excellent backstage tours, led by well-informed guides, are a great way to understand how the building all slots together. Exactly what you see depends on the theatre schedules, but you’re taken through the prop-making and set-construction areas; specialist tours, such as the costume tours, are also recommended. You can also get a glimpse of the inner workings of the theatre from the Sherling Backstage Walkway, which runs from the Dorfman theatre foyer out over the set-design areas.

Summer on the South Bank

The multilevel modernist spaces of the South Bank make a striking canvas for an inventive and incredibly popular series of events and installations throughout the year. In particular, between May and September, promenaders descend to enjoy the fantastic river views, weekend festivals and open-air bars. Check southbankcentre.co.uk for details, and look out for these recurring favourites:

Appearing Rooms (the fountain). Playing in Jeppe Hein’s large fountain installation might be the single most popular thing to do here on a hot summer’s day – at least for the under-10s (as well as the riverside sand pit). On the Level 2 terrace between the QEH and Festival Hall (usually June– or July–Sept).

Roof garden Queen Elizabeth Hall. Designed by Eden Project gardeners and created and maintained by people who have experienced homelessness or mental health problems, the garden, featuring banks of wildflower and raised beds, is a popular, not-so-secret spot to relax in summer, when there is a bar up here (usually April onwards).

Southbank food market Southbank Centre Square, behind the Royal Festival Hall. Incredibly busy, year-round market, with street-food stalls and local products (usually Fri noon–8pm, Sat 11am–8pm, Sun and bank holiday Mon noon–6pm; July & Aug Fri & Sat till 9pm).

Underbelly Festival A mini-festival site goes up in a space between the Hungerford Bridge and Jubilee Gardens, with bars and food stalls, plus cabaret and comedy in two temporary venues (May–Sept).

Gabriel’s Wharf

East of the National Theatre, past the 24-storey ITV building, the riverside promenade brings you eventually to Gabriel’s Wharf, an ad hoc collection of craft shops and cafés. It’s a refreshing change from the franchises that have colonized much of the South Bank, and one for which Coin Street Community Builders (CSCB; coinstreet.org) must be thanked. With the population in this bomb-damaged stretch of the South Bank down from fifty thousand at the beginning of the century to four thousand in the early 1970s, big commercial developers were keen to step in and build hotels and office blocks galore. They were successfully fought off – in this patch at least – and instead the emphasis has been on projects that combine commercial and community interests.

OXO Tower

South Bank, SE1 9PH • Exhibition Gallery Daily 11am–6pm • Free • Public viewing gallery Daily 11am–10pm • Free • oxotower.co.uk • Southwark or Blackfriars

East of Gabriel’s Wharf stands the landmark OXO Tower, an old power station that was converted into a meat-packing factory in the late 1920s by Liebig Extract of Meat Company, best known in Britain as the makers of OXO stock cubes. To get round the local council’s ban on illuminated advertisements, the company cleverly incorporated the letters into the windows of the main tower, and then illuminated them from within. Now, thanks again to CSCB, the building contains an exhibition gallery on the ground floor, plus a series of retail-workshops for designers on the first and second floors, and a swanky restaurant and bar on the top floor. To enjoy the view, however, you don’t need to eat or drink here: simply take the lift to the eighth-floor public viewing gallery (accessed through the bar; not prominently signed).

Waterloo Station

Built in 1848, Waterloo Station is the capital’s busiest train and tube station, serving the city’s southwestern suburbs and the southern Home Counties. Easily missed, the ornate Edwardian-style facade is hidden behind the railway bridge on Mepham Street. Without doubt Waterloo’s most bizarre terminus was the former London Necropolis Station, whose early twentieth-century facade survives at 121 Westminster Bridge Rd. Opened in 1854 following one of London’s worst outbreaks of cholera, trains from this station took coffins and mourners to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey (at the time, the world’s largest cemetery). Brookwood Station even had separate platforms for Anglicans and Nonconformists and a licensed bar – “Spirits served here”, the sign apparently read – but the whole operation was closed down after bomb damage in World War II.

West from the station concourse is the former Shell Centre, which, when it was built in the 1950s was the tallest building in London, though is being rapidly encroached upon by new high-rise developments surrounding it.

London Eye

County Hall, SE1 7PB • Daily: Jan–May & Sept–Dec 11am–6pm; extended times for holiday periods, including Easter holidays & June–Aug 10am–8.30pm; closed two weeks in Jan for maintenance • £23.45 online (£26 in person); child £18.95 (£21) • 0871 781 3000, londoneye.com • Waterloo or Westminster

Having graced the skyline since the start of the twenty-first century, the London Eye is firmly established as one of the city’s most famous landmarks. Standing an impressive 443ft high, it’s the tallest Ferris wheel in Europe, weighing over two thousand tonnes, yet as simple and delicate as a bicycle wheel. It’s constantly in slow motion, which means a full-circle “flight” in one of its 32 pods (one for each of the city’s boroughs) should take around thirty minutes. You can see to the edge of the city – bring some binoculars if you can – where the suburbs slip into the countryside, while its river location means it still has the edge for spectacular views across to Westminster and central London. Tickets are cheaper when booked online, though on arrival you’ll still have to queue unless you’ve paid for fast track.

County Hall

The monumental, colonnaded crescent of County Hall, completed in 1933, was designed to house the London County Council and enjoyed its greatest moment of fame in the 1980s as the headquarters of the GLC (Greater London Council), under the Labour leadership of Ken Livingstone, or “Red Ken”, as the right-wing press called him at the time. The Tories moved in swiftly, abolishing the GLC in 1986, and leaving London as the only European city without an elected authority. In 2000, Livingstone had the last laugh when he became London’s first directly elected mayor, and a new City Hall was built near Tower Bridge. County Hall’s tenants now include several hotels, an amusement arcade, the London Dungeon, an aquarium and the Shrek’s Adventure experience (shreksadventure.com). Combined tickets, including the London Eye and Madamme Tussauds, offer discounts for visits to two or more attractions.

Sea Life London Aquarium

County Hall, SE1 7PB • Mon–Fri 10am–6pm, last entry 5pm; Sat, Sun and school holidays 9.30am–7pm, last entry 6pm • £20.40 online, £26 on the day; child £16.30 (£21) • Behind the scenes tours Daily hourly 10.30am–3.30pm, Fri–Sun also 4.30pm; July–Sept also 5.30pm • £32 including entry • Snorkelling with Sharks Experience £150 • visitsealife.com • Waterloo or Westminster

The most enduring County Hall tenant is the Sea Life London Aquarium, housed in the basement across three subterranean levels. Impressive in scale, the largest tanks, viewable from several levels, house a wealth of large creatures, including several shark species in the biggest tank, eerie large rays that glide over the walk-through glass tunnel, a magnificent green sea turtle and, in an Antarctic area, a few Gentoo penguins. Smaller tanks have jellyfish, “nemo” clown fish and much more besides, including species native to the Thames. This is an attraction that’s pretty much guaranteed to please kids – especially feeding times (check online or ask for daily schedule).

London Dungeon

County Hall, SE1 7PB • Mon–Wed & Fri 10am–5pm, Thurs 11am–5pm, Sat & Sun 10am–6pm; school holidays closes 7 or 8pm • From £21–28.50 online; £30 on the day • 020 7654 0809, thedungeons.com • Waterloo or Westminster

Gothic horror-fest the London Dungeon remains one of the city’s major crowd-pleasers – to shorten the amount of time spent queuing (and save money), buy your ticket online. Teenagers and the credulous probably get the most out of the trip through various ludicrous live action scenarios such as “Jack the Ripper”, each one hyped up by the team of ham actors dressed in period garb, plus a couple of horror rides, the Henry VIII-themed “Tyrant Boat Ride” and “Drop Dead Drop Ride”, finishing up at a mock-Victorian pub for a drink.

North Lambeth

Away from the river, you leave the South Bank (and lose the crowds) and reach what used to be the village of Lambeth (now a large borough stretching south to Brixton and beyond). Just by Lambeth Bridge, Lambeth Palace is the impressive private home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, though visiting requires prebooking. From this stretch of the riverbank, which leads on to Vauxhall, you get the best views of the Houses of Parliament. Inland lies London’s most even-handed military museum, the Imperial War Museum.

Lower Marsh and the Cut

Though criss-crossed by railway lines, the area south of Waterloo, once marshland known as Lambeth Marsh, retains a few intriguing streets. In the nineteenth century a market stretched from Lambeth Walk (made famous by the song from the 1930s musical Me and My Gal) along Lower Marsh as far as the Cut. Now, the market remains only on Lower Marsh, where there are weekday street-food stalls, and a produce and flea market on Saturdays (Mon–Fri 10.30am–5pm, Sat 10am–3pm), plus interesting, offbeat shops. Just off it, you’ll find the Leake Street Graffiti Tunnel. In 2008, Banksy used this disused tunnel for his “Cans Festival” of street art, and since then it’s been constantly reworked by graffiti artists; off here are the Vaults (entrances on Leake & Launcelot streets; thevaults.london), an atmospheric series of performance spaces and bars in the tunnels. The Cut, on the other side of Waterloo Road, is home to the Old and Young Vic theatres, while parallel and to the north is charming Roupell Street, a pristine strip of workers’ cottages from the 1830s.

Florence Nightingale Museum

Lambeth Palace Rd, SE1 7EW • Daily 10am–5pm • £7.50 • 020 7188 4400, florence-nightingale.co.uk • Lambeth North

On the south side of Westminster Bridge, a series of red-brick Victorian blocks and modern white accretions make up St Thomas’ Hospital, founded in the twelfth century, which moved here from its original location by London Bridge in 1862. At the hospital’s northeastern corner is the Florence Nightingale Museum, celebrating the devout woman who revolutionized the nursing profession by establishing the first school of nursing at St Thomas’ in 1860 and publishing her Notes on Nursing, emphasizing the importance of hygiene, decorum and discipline. The small exhibition is imaginatively set out, aided by listening posts and interactive screens. It puts the two years she spent tending to the wounded of the Crimean War in the context of a lifetime of tireless social campaigning. Exhibits include the Turkish lantern she used in Scutari hospital, near Istanbul, that earned her the nickname “The Lady with the Lamp”, and her pet owl, Athena (now stuffed). There’s a small display on Jamaican-born nurse and herbalist Mary Seacole, who also worked in the Crimea and went on to the battlefields, and her statue now stands in the grounds of the hospital.

Lambeth Palace

Lambeth Palace Rd, SE1 7LB • Tours Book online, usually on Thurs or Fri • £12, plus booking fee • Garden (including Great Hall) April–Aug first Fri of month noon–3pm • £5 • 020 7898 1200, archbishopofcanterbury.org • Westminster, Lambeth North

A short walk south of St Thomas’ stands the imposing red-brick Tudor Gate of Lambeth Palace, London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury since 1197, which is well worth a visit, although guided tours need booking in advance. The most impressive room is, without doubt, the Great Hall (now the library), with its very late Gothic, oak hammer-beam roof, built after the Restoration by Archbishop Juxon. Upstairs, the Guard Room boasts an even older, arch-braced timber roof from the fourteenth century, and is the room where Thomas More was brought for questioning before being sent to the Tower.

Among the numerous portraits of past archbishops, look out for works by Holbein, Van Dyck, Hogarth and Reynolds. The final point on the tour is the palace chapel, where the religious reformer and leader of the Lollards, John Wycliffe, was tried (for the second time) in 1378 for “propositions, clearly heretical and depraved”. The door and window frames date back to Wycliffe’s day, but the place is somewhat overwhelmed by the ceiling frescoes by Leonard Rosoman, added in the 1980s. Best of all is the fact that you can see the choir screen and stalls put there in the 1630s by Archbishop Laud, and later used at his trial as evidence of his Catholic tendencies for which he was executed in 1645. The elegantly landscaped palace gardens, with many mature trees, are open once a month in summer, when the palace also opens the Great Hall for visitors.

Garden Museum

Lambeth Palace Rd, SE1 7LB • Mon–Fri & Sun 10.30am–5pm, Sat 10.30am–4pm • £10; tower £3 • 020 7401 8865, gardenmuseum.org.uk • Westminster or Lambeth North

Next door to Lambeth Palace stands the Kentish ragstone church of St Mary-at-Lambeth. This is home to the excellent Garden Museum, which is located here thanks to two John Tradescants (father and son), gardeners to James I and Charles I, who are buried in the former churchyard. The Tradescants were tireless travellers in their search for new plant species, and John the Elder set up a museum of curiosities known as “Tradescant’s Ark” in Lambeth in 1629. Among the exhibits were the “hand of a mermaid… a natural dragon, above two inches long… blood that rained on the Isle of Wight… and the Passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone”. The Ark formed the nucleus of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, but now several curious items have been loaned back to the Garden Museum, including a “vegetable lamb” that’s in fact a Russian fern and a Native American ball-headed club. The upper galleries feature displays on landscape design and all facets of the British obsession with gardening, from a garden shed showing videos of people talking about their allotments and a Tony Blair-lookalike gnome to a computer game where you travel the world in search of seed specimens. It’s not all whimsy, though, and there’s a delightful gallery of horticulture-themed artworks.

The garden, enclosed by bronze-clad-and-glass pavilions, has been designed by Dan Pearson, and incorporates the original Tradescant memorial, which features several unusual reliefs, such as a seven-headed griffin contemplating a skull. The other famous name resting here is Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, whose sarcophagus is topped by an ornamental breadfruit. A café looks out on the garden, and you can clamber up the 131-step, spiral staircase to the top of the original fourteenth-century tower for uninterrupted views straight across to the Houses of Parliament.

Imperial War Museum

Lambeth Rd, SE1 6HZ • Daily 10am–6pm • Free; charge for some special exhibitions • 020 7416 5000, iwm.org.uk • Lambeth North

From 1815 until 1930, the domed building at the east end of Lambeth Road was the infamous lunatic asylum of Bethlem Royal Hospital, better known as Bedlam. When the hospital was moved to Beckenham in southeast London, the wings of the 700ft-long facade were demolished, leaving just the central section, now fronted by two enormous World War I naval guns, announcing the presence of the Imperial War Museum, by far the capital’s best military museum. It’s surrounded by a surprisingly serene park and landscaped gardens with picnic benches.

The atrium and First World War galleries

The treatment of the subject is impressively wide-ranging and fairly sober – the main atrium’s large exhibits are described not as weapons but as Witnesses to War. What could be merely a militaristic display of guns, tanks and fighter planes is thoughtfully presented and counterbalanced with other vehicles, such as a Reuters-owned Land Rover that was shot by an Israeli helicopter in Gaza in 2006, which sits beneath a soaring Harrier jet and a 1940 Spitfire, while the giant V-2 rocket, which landed near the museum, is used to tell the problematic tale of the relationship between these weapons and the twentieth-century space race. Off the atrium is the entrance to one of the museum’s most effective (and affecting) displays, the First World War galleries, where the many stories of the war at home and on the front are told through multimedia displays, archive propaganda films and hundreds of artefacts, from military hardware and reconstructed trench to the partial face masks wounded soldiers wore on their return.

First and second floors

On the first floor, the World War II collection, under the moniker Turning points: 1934–45, hasn’t been given the same immersive treatment, but you can see plenty of famous exhibits, among them Tamzine, one of the littlest of the Dunkirk Little Ships, and General Montgomery’s Humber staff car. Make sure you take a look at A Family in Wartime, which traces the wartime lives of one local family, the Allpresses, who lived nearby in Lambeth.

The second floor covers post-1945 warfare, starting with the Shadow of the Bomb and a casing for the “Little Boy” atomic bomb as used in Hiroshima. The War on the Doorstep section awkwardly combines Northern Ireland and the Falklands War into one narrative – the connection incongruously suggested by the Spitting Image puppet of Margaret Thatcher tucked into a corner. At the far end, Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country (2006), pays tribute to the service personnel killed in the second Iraq war. The floor also has sections on divided societies and terror, while the Secret War gallery goes full Bond in its coverage of MI5, MI6 and the SOE (the wartime equivalent of MI6).

The art galleries and Extraordinary Heroes

The museum’s art galleries, on the third floor, put on superb temporary exhibitions, many taken from its own vast collection of works by war artists, official and unofficial, while others are very topical. On the top floor, the Extraordinary Heroes exhibition displays the largest collection of Victoria Crosses in the world, collected by Lord Ashcroft, alongside videos and artefacts that tell the moving stories of each recipient.

The Holocaust Exhibition

Many people come to the Imperial War Museum specifically to see the Holocaust Exhibition (not recommended for under-14s), which starts on the fourth floor and continues on the third floor. The museum has made a valiant attempt to avoid depicting the victims of the Holocaust as nameless masses, by focusing on individual cases, and interspersing archive footage with accounts from survivors. The exhibition pulls few punches, bluntly addressing prewar anti-Semitism across Europe, and how the European powers refused to accept any more Jewish refugees. The genocide is catalogued in painstaking detail, with a vast white, scale model of (what is, in fact, only a very small slice of) Auschwitz-Birkenau as the centrepiece, detailing what happened to the two thousand Hungarian Jews who arrived at the camp from the town of Beregovo in May 1944. Sections on life and death in the camps are especially harrowing, and it’s as well to leave yourself enough time to listen to the reflections of camp survivors at the end, as they attempt to come to terms with the past.

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