Category: Quirky London
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Hampstead Heath Seeks Volunteer Shepherds as Sheep Return to the Heath
A small flock of five sheep is returning to Hampstead Heath from 29 May to 8 June, and volunteers are being sought to help look after them while they graze on the Heath Extension.
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London’s Cosmic House
London’s Cosmic House is one of the strangest, cleverest private houses in the city: a Holland Park villa turned postmodern manifesto, cosmic joke, architectural puzzle box and museum.
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New Banksy appears on Pall Mall
A new Banksy appeared in Central London yesterday (Wednesday April 29th). This time its not graffiti but a sculpture standing atop a realistic, but plastic, plinth. The satirical sculpture of a man striding confidently off the plastic plinth with a wind blown flag wrapped around his face is presumably a comment on the ludicrous nature…
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North Korea’s London Embassy: Pyongyang by the North Circular
London’s embassies usually behave as you expect them to. They cluster in the expensive bits, drape themselves in flags, and occupy buildings that look as though they were designed for whispered diplomacy and carpets thick enough to swallow a scandal. Then there is North Korea’s embassy in London, which has chosen a different aesthetic entirely: detached house…
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The London Tree Slowly Eating a Postbox
London does eccentricity well, but sometimes the city doesn’t even need to try. In Chelsea, on the corner of Drayton Gardens and Priory Walk, a London plane tree is gradually swallowing an Edwardian postbox. Not metaphorically. Properly, visibly, bark-over-metal, as if the tree got bored of pigeons and moved on to infrastructure. The tree is…
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The London Pub That Floods
The White Cross isn’t just any riverside pub. It’s a pub where the river sometimes rises and takes over, transforming the outdoor seating area into a temporary lagoon.
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When Hampstead Heath Held a Ski Jumping Competition
London has many things—domes, towers, hidden rivers—but it does not have mountains. Or a ski jump. And yet, in March 1950, it tried to manufacture both.
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Gerry’s Pompeii: London’s Secret Cement Garden
London has a habit of hiding its strangest stories in plain sight. Not behind ticket barriers or museum glass, but along towpaths, under flyovers, in the margins where the city loosens its tie. Gerry’s Pompeii is one of those places. Set along the Grand Union Canal near Westbourne Park, it looks, at first glance, like an eccentric…
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The Harrods Zoo
For nearly two decades in the early 20th century, Harrods Pet Department sold the most exotic animals you could imagine.
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Hackney Council Swaps Tractors for Horses
Hackney Council is trying something in Springfield Park that looks, at first glance, faintly surreal: heavy horses working the land instead of tractors. But this is not a heritage stunt or a bit of East London cosplay. It is a genuine trial in low-impact park management. At Springfield Park, horses are being used to manage…
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Croydon’s Cameo: How a South London Shopping Mall Became the Star of a Taylor Swift Video
Croydon’s Whitgift Centre — a cavernous 1970s shopping mall that feels as architecturally unresolved as its future — now flickers into global view as the unlikely backdrop to Taylor Swift’s latest music video for Opalite. What was once just another concrete behemoth in South London has been recast, if only briefly, as a neon-washed shrine to nostalgia, dancing…
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The Camberwell Carrot: South London’s Most Elaborate Fiction
Some neighbourhoods give the world cathedrals. Some give it revolutions. Camberwell gave it a very large spliff. The “Camberwell Carrot” is not a strain, not a historical artefact, and not — despite what a certain shaggy prophet might imply — a local tradition passed down through generations of South London artisans. It is a joke.…
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Postman’s Park: London’s Secret Memorial to Everyday Heroes
Walk long enough through the City of London and you’ll find it: a small, sun-dappled square behind St Botolph’s Aldersgate, where the skyscrapers seem to pause to take a breath. Postman’s Park is easy to miss — hemmed in by office blocks, half-shaded, and utterly disinterested in your productivity. But stay a while and you’ll sense it…
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The Thin House of Thurloe Square
Stand at the wrong angle on Thurloe Square and you’ll miss it entirely. Blink and it disappears, slipping into the visual static of South Kensington’s immaculate terraces. But shift a few steps, tilt your head, and there it is: the Thin House, a red-brick optical joke wedged into one of London’s most self-possessed garden squares.…
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The False Wolf Spider: London’s Most Misunderstood Flatmate
London is a city that prides itself on tolerance. We welcome foxes into Zone 2 gardens, parakeets onto suburban bird feeders, and the occasional American tourist into Pret. Yet one recent arrival continues to cause disproportionate alarm: the False Wolf Spider, Zoropsis spinimana. A spider so large, so leggy, and so committed to appearing uninvited that…
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The Soviet Tank That Defied Southwark Council: The Strange, Glorious Life of “Stompie”
On a quiet patch of land off the Old Kent Road once stood a Soviet tank—yes, an actual tank—graffitied in pinks, greens, and slogans, facing down the local council like a stubborn Cold War relic that had lost its war but not its attitude. South Londoners called it Stompie, and for nearly three decades it was…
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The Coolest Launderette in London
A laundrette with soul Hidden among the sculptural concrete of the Barbican Estate hums a survivor from another age — a place of warmth, rhythm and stubborn beauty. The Barbican Launderette, is that rarest thing in London: a utility that became an icon. It’s been running since 1973 and looks it — in the best…
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The Farm House, Mayfair’s Gothic Oddity
In Mayfair, that district of polished limestone and quiet money, there stands a building that refuses to behave. At 22 Farm Street, a half-timbered fantasy squats between the restrained façades like a time-traveller who missed the memo on modernity. It’s called The Farm House — though there’s nothing agrarian about it except the faint whiff of myth…
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Too Much London: The Real Film Locations Behind Lena Dunham’s Netflix Drama
London doesn’t just set the stage for Too Much — it steals scenes.In Lena Dunham and Luis Felber’s Netflix drama, the city is the third lead: chaotic, magnetic, and perpetually late to its own story. It hums in the background of every heartbreak and hangover, reminding us that living here is an act of endurance and devotion.…
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Pharaoh’s Island: The Thames’ Most Curious Kingdom
On a languid bend of the River Thames, nestled somewhere between Shepperton and Weybridge, lies a place that sounds like it belongs in a mummy’s memoir or a Bond villain’s holiday brochure: Pharaoh’s Island. Yes, it’s real. No, it’s not a theme park. And contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to pledge allegiance to Ra…
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The Day a London Bus Jumped Tower Bridge
London has seen its share of moments but few events combine slapstick comedy and genuine peril quite like the morning of 30 December 1952, when a red double-decker bus — Route 78 to Dulwich — made an unplanned and entirely unsanctioned leap across Tower Bridge.
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London’s Wild Parakeets: Debunking Myths and Uncovering Their True Origins
London’s skyline, once dominated by pigeons and starlings, has been brightened in recent decades by flashes of emerald green and the raucous squawks of parakeets. These birds—specifically, rose-ringed parakeets (Psittacula krameri)—are not native to Britain, yet they have thrived in the capital’s parks and gardens, forming a sizeable wild population. But how did they get…
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Hollywood in Pinner
There is a slice of glamorous old Hollywood in the West London suburbia of Pinner. Simon Pollock from I Love Suburbia, tells us more.
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Neasden Temple: A Stunning Dream Next to the North Circular
Tucked between the A406 and a retail park, surrounded by the soothing white noise of perpetual traffic, rises something utterly incongruous and completely glorious: BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, known to most as Neasden Temple. It is not where you’d expect to find one of the largest Hindu temples outside India. Yet here it is, gleaming like a…
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Leake Street Tunnel: London’s Legal Graffiti Playground Beneath the Tracks
Hidden in the belly of London, just behind the polished façade of Waterloo Station, there’s a place where the city sheds its tie, grabs a spray can, and lets loose. Leake Street Tunnel—also dubbed The Banksy Tunnel—is a rare pocket of sanctioned anarchy in a city of rules and regulations, a subterranean catwalk for aerosol art…
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Lions, Bears, and Penny Dreadfuls: The Forgotten Spectacle of Shoreditch’s East London Aquarium
Before craft beer and beard oil took over Shoreditch, before the avocadoisation of the East End, there stood—believe it or not—an aquarium with real lions. Yes, lions. And bears. And seals. And a rifle range. Welcome to the East London Aquarium, Menagerie & Wax Work Exhibition: Victorian London’s most gloriously bonkers, ethically questionable house of…
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The Pagodas of London: A Tale of Two Towers
London, a city forever caught between history and reinvention, has many unlikely landmarks. Cheesegraters that scrape the sky. A gherkin with no pickling involved. And then—quietly, gracefully—pagodas. Not one, but two. Rising from very different soils, they are structures of rare symmetry and even rarer stillness. One is a Georgian fantasy, the other a Buddhist…
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Hoxton Street Monster Supplies: London’s Most Peculiar & Delightful Shop
Tucked away in East London, among the hipster coffee shops and art studios, lies a shop that defies logic, reason, and quite possibly the natural order of things. Hoxton Street Monster Supplies is a shop like no other—unless, of course, you happen to know of another retailer specialising in Tinned Fear, Cubed Earwax, and Zombie Fresh Mints.…
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Alfies Antique Market: A Time-Travel Treasure Trove
In a city that sometimes seems hell-bent on demolishing the old to make way for the identikit new, Alfies Antique Market is a glorious exception—a time capsule of curiosities tucked away on a corner of Church Street in Marylebone. It’s not just London’s largest indoor antiques emporium; it’s a place where you can stumble upon a…
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The Knowledge: Why London’s Black Cab Drivers Have Bigger Brains Than You
Picture this: you’re in a London black cab, running late, and muttering apologies to the universe. The driver, a middle-aged bloke in a flat cap, listens to your destination, nods, and immediately swings into action. No satnav, no Google Maps, no nervous hesitation—just pure, instinctive navigation. He cuts through side streets, dodges traffic, and gets…