| | | | | | | | | Days Inn Westminster - 3 Star Grange Rochester - 4 Star Express By Holiday Inn - London-Victoria Crowne Plaza Hotel - London-St. James | Tourist Attractions and points of interest in Victoria | | Victoria Palace Theatre - Billy Elliot | | Victoria Apollo Theatre - Wicked | | | Cafe Rouge - French
Address: Victoria Palace Shopping Centre, Buckingham Palace Road, SW1W 9SJ | Goring Dining Room - British
Address: 15 Beeston Place, Grosvenor Gardens, London SW1W 0JW | | | History of Victoria - London | North of Victoria Street In the 1860s, Victorian planners ploughed their way through the slums of Westminster to create Victoria Street, a direct link between Parliament and the newly built Victoria train station. The bland 1960s blocks that now line the street give you some idea of what the rest of London might have looked like if the developers had got it all their own way in that iconoclastic decade. The best feature of the street these days is the way in which it perfectly frames the London Eye. One tower block that deserves a special mention, however, is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, New Scotland Yard, on Broadway opposite the Strutton Ground market. The revolving sign alone should be familiar to many from countless TV detective serials and news reports.
Further down Broadway, at no. 55, is the austere Broadway House, home to Transport for London and St James’s Park tube station, and the tallest building in London when it was built in 1929 by Charles Holden. Round the corner, standing on its own in Caxton Street, is the former Blew-coat School (Monday Wednesday and Fri 10am-530pm,Thurs 10am-7pm), a lovely little red-brick building built in 1709 by a local brewer as a charity school for the poor and used as such until 1926. It now serves as a National Trust shop, though a statue of a blue-coated charity boy still stands above the doorway.
There’s more delightful Queen Anne architecture just to the north in Queen Anne’s Gate and Old Queen Street, two exquisite streets, originally separated by a wall, whose position is indicated by a weathered statue of Queen Anne. The Labour Party has its headquarters at number 16 in Old Queen Street, but Queen Anne’s Gate is the older and more interesting of the two, each of its doorways surmounted by a rustic wooden canopy with pendants in the shape of acorns. It’s worth walking round the back of the houses on the north side to appreciate the procession of elegant bow windows that look out onto St James’s Park. For a fantastic rage of Victoria London Hotels at discounted rates see this page from Online Discounted Hotels. |
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