Craig Cross's Blog

Everyone has a few CDs they keep secret from their friends (usually ABBA) they turn all the spines back to front so nobody knows they're a fan. Well this is my museum equivalent of that. People think that the Bank of England Museum is going to be a dull day out but if you're into Ye Olde London then there are lots of interesting pictures and paintings to look at. Apparently we've got the French to thank for the Bank of England because shortly after they beat us at the Battle of Beachy Head...

If you were lousy at school then you did art. If you were lousy at art as well then they sat you down at the back of the class and got you going on some hand prints or potato prints, or those glitter pictures that your mother stuck on the fridge, and told you to make a painting for the Tate. Because that's where the Tate gets all their pictures from. Some people do a stencil and pretend they're Andy Warhol, some people kick a paint pot on the floor and pretend they're Jackson Pollock. If you...

We don't often talk about Germany's good guys but they've had a few -- take Boris Becker for example. Everyone raves about Alexandra the Great conquering half the known world by the age of 21 but Boris Becker won Wimbledon when he was eighteen. And David Hasselhoff is sort of German and Arnold Schwarzenegger is Austrian which basically makes him German. But our favourite German in England is definitely Prince Albert -- especially if you've been watching that Victoria show on the telly....

Do you remember all the toys and little stickers we used to get in cereal boxes every time a big movie came out. I used to pick my cereal by which one had the better stickers in it. As soon as my parents got the shopping out of the car boot and into the kitchen I'd rummage my hand around the inner bag to fish it out and then I'd pour out big bowls every morning so they'd have to buy another box quicker. My bedroom door ended up covered in luminous pictures of ET riding his bike across the...

If you only have time to visit one art gallery in London then make it this one. This is the granddaddy of galleries. The Tate Modern is supposed to be the most popular by visitor numbers but what have they got on display: a load of crushed up Coke cans and tipped-over paint pots. The National Gallery has got every great painter from the 13th-century onwards: Leonardo Da Vinci, Titian, Turner, Monet, Manet, Rembrandt, Raphael, Botticelli, Canaletto, Vincent Van Gogh... the only guy I can't...

Imagine flying all the way home after a week away, dumping your bags by the door, slumping down on your couch... and then realising you forgot to take a photo of Tower Bridge. You'd have to put your shoes back on, drive back to the airport, get back on the plane, fly back to London, get the tube into town, the bus back to the bridge and take your photo because you can't go into work on Monday morning without one. You'd be showing off all your London photos and they'd be going, Where's Tower...

The Queen is surrounded by dangerous threats... what if Prince Charles decides to mount a coup? What if Fergie tries to gatecrash one of the family gatherings? What if Meghan Markle's mad dad turns up uninvited? The Queen needs 24-hour protection against these potential perils and that's why they've stationed three regiments of Her Majesty's Household Division a few hundred yards from her front door. There are actually five regiments of Foot Guards (the Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Irish...

Everybody's heard of Buckingham Palace, Kensington Palace, Hampton Court and Windsor, but hardly any tourists know about the most senior Royal palace in the country: St. James's. Maybe they've seen it without realising when they walked up The Mall, but if they did then they've only seen it from the boring back side, and not realised there's a big Tudor gatehouse round the front. Back in the 1530s, when Henry VIII was living a short walk across the park in Whitehall Palace, he also had...

If you want to watch some pomp and pageantry but don't like big crowds, or you've got a little kid who can't stand around for an hour without needing a wee, then how about this one -- this is the parade for people with no patience. You only need to give this one thirty minutes from start to finish so you can squeeze it in between some other attractions. It takes place behind those horse boxes at Horse Guards. (I don't mean the parade ground -- I mean that tiny little courtyard on the...

If you want to watch some pomp and pageantry but don't like big crowds, or you've got a little kid who can't stand around for an hour without needing a wee, then how about this one -- this is the parade for people with no patience. You only need to give this one thirty minutes from start to finish so you can squeeze it in between some other attractions. It takes place behind those horse boxes at Horse Guards. (I don't mean the parade ground -- I mean that tiny little courtyard on the...