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england posts
Travel safety: are swans dangerous?
Mar 5th, 2012 at 11:00AM:
Mr. Asbo is not a nice swan.
He's attacked numerous boaters on the River Cam at Cambridge, England, hissing and pecking at anyone who comes close. Back in 2009, he even attacked the Cambridge Rowing Team during their historic May Bumps race. The race had to appoint a special marshal to keep an eye on the naughty bird.
Swans are very territorial, especially when they have a nest full of ...
Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee: 2012's other major British event
Mar 2nd, 2012 at 11:00AM: In London, signs of the coming Olympics are everywhere. Barclays Cycle Hire docking stations have begun to expand into East London toward key Olympics sites, billboards urge drivers to begin to think about how they'll deal with increased traffic, and the Prime Minister is busy warning unions that the prospect of a strike during the Olympics would be "unacceptable and unpatriotic."
Meanwhile, ...English wildlife and nature to get more protection
Mar 1st, 2012 at 9:00AM:
I've said it before and I'll say it again--on a good day there's no country more beautiful than England. Fans of hiking, nature, and wildlife have a real treat with England's wild places, and those places just got a boost to the tune of £7.5 million ($12 million) in additional funding.
The government has selected twelve Nature Improvement Areas where nature will be protected and ...Shortwave radio memories: BBC World Service turns 80
Feb 29th, 2012 at 11:00AM: On this day in 1932, the BBC World Service started shortwave radio broadcasts.
It was a different world back then. Television was an experimental curiosity, satellites and the Internet were unknown, and so the only way to get news around the world instantly was via shortwave radio. Shortwave radio waves bounce off the ionosphere in our upper atmosphere to return to Earth hundreds or even ...Child on rocking horse is the latest statue on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth
Feb 25th, 2012 at 11:00AM:
The Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square has gotten its latest adornment--a giant bronze kid on a rocking horse.
Trafalgar Square is one of London's most visited spots. In fact, it's hard not to go there since it's right in front of the National Gallery and is a nexus of several important roads. Three plinths flanking Nelson's Column support statues of a king and two generals, and a fourth ...St. Bride's Church in London: a place to honor fallen journalists
Feb 23rd, 2012 at 1:00PM: I am not a Christian. I have read the Bible twice and have attended the services of several denominations and remain unconvinced. Despite this, any time I'm in London I go to an old church off of Fleet Street to pay my respects.
Fleet Street used to be the center of London's journalism industry and St. Bride's was the journalists' church. The newspapers have since moved away to less expensive ...New trail for medieval church paintings in England
Feb 13th, 2012 at 2:00PM: The church of St Mary the Virgin in the little village of Lakenheath, Suffolk, England, contains a treasure trove of medieval church paintings. They were discovered 130 years ago when Victorian workmen were cleaning off centuries of grime and lime wash from the walls.
What they found was a series of detailed paintings of religious subjects painted from c.1220-c.1610. The church was repainted ...Britain's Heritage Cities are ready for visitors
Feb 11th, 2012 at 8:00AM:
Thanks to the London Olympics, which will open on July 27, and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, 2012 is expected to be a boom year for tourism in Great Britain. In the hopes of capitalizing on this trend, six historic cities have teamed up to get noticed by travelers intent on venturing beyond the English capital.
Bath, Carlisle, Chester, Oxford, Stratford-Upon-Avon, and York, Britain's ...Photo of the Day: Getting cozy in the snow
Feb 9th, 2012 at 6:00PM:
Most of our favorite travel memories are from summer: school's out and the days are long, you can hit the beach, sit in a park, or people-watch at a sidewalk cafe. Spring and fall are great shoulder seasons for lower prices and fewer crowds, but winter tends to be underappreciated for travel. Outside of visiting family for holidays, winter travelers generally head to the ski slopes or Caribbean ...London hotel offers champagne baths
Feb 9th, 2012 at 12:00PM: While drinking a 2002 Dom Pérignon, have you ever thought to yourself, "Damn, this stuff is so good, I should take a bath in it!" Well, you're not the only one with such luxurious fantasies. Starting Valentine's Day and running through the next year, the Cadogan Hotel in London will be offering a menu of champagne baths to guests who want to try out the ultimate bubbly bath.
What's your ...Luxury Travel: Visit England's Highclere Castle, filming location of Downton Abbey
Jan 23rd, 2012 at 4:00PM:
Fans of English history will leap at any chance to tour the country's stately homes - but a private one-on-one with a real-life Earl and Countess might just be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Of course, any such experience comes with a price. For GBP 7,900, guests can step into the shoes of a Downton Abbey cast member with a private day trip to Highclere Castle, the filming location for the ...Is the British pub an endangered species?
Jan 19th, 2012 at 4:00PM: The figures are in for 2011 and it's more bad news for the British pub. An average of 14 a week shut down, and Oxfordshire alone lost 35 this past year.
The pub is an institution. More than just a place to drink real ale, it's a place to see friends, get out of the house, do the pub quiz, and watch football.
My family and I spend every Easter and summer in Oxford, and while we aren't big ...Five overlooked attractions in London
Jan 16th, 2012 at 9:46AM:
London is full of great places to see. No matter what your interests are, this city has something for you. In fact it has so much there are some incredible attractions that are overlooked by the majority of visitors. Here are five you might want to visit.
Kew Bridge Steam Museum
The Kew Bridge Pumping Station, built in 1838, once supplied water and power to London through massive steam ...
London's Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art opens Alberto Burri retrospective
Jan 15th, 2012 at 1:00PM: The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is one of London's best small art museums. Housed in an elegant Georgian mansion on a quiet street in the London borough of Islington, it has the best collection of modern Italian art in the city and perhaps the nation.
Its latest exhibition is Alberto Burri: Form and Matter, a retrospective of one of the leading Italian figures in modern art. Burri ...The British Museum has great lineup for 2012
Jan 12th, 2012 at 4:00PM:
Travelers to London this year will want to stop by the British Museum. Not only is it one of the top museums in the world, with huge collections from the Classical, Egyptian, Medieval, and pretty much every other period, it also hosts several temporary exhibitions every year. As a regular visitor to London I always make sure to see as many of these exhibitions as I can.
The first is Hajj: ...Luxury Vacation Guide 2012: East London
Jan 10th, 2012 at 10:00AM:
London, a perennial tourist favorite, is no stranger to the luxury travel market. What's relatively new is the proliferation of luxury hotels and other venues in traditionally working-class East London.
In 2012, East London's reputation as luxury territory will intensify. Why? The Olympics, mostly. London hosts the Summer Olympics from July 27 through August 13. The Olympic Village along ...Four top treats from my 2011 travels
Dec 31st, 2011 at 11:00AM:
Since I've been a travel writer for three decades, people often ask me if I don't get tired of all the traveling and writing. After all, when you do anything for 30 years, it must get boring, right?
Wrong! I guess that's one of the gifts of this line of work. Every trip, every place, offers something new, even if I've been there a dozen times before. This year I took four big trips -- to ...Sandal Castle, Yorkshire, to host medieval battle on New Year's Eve
Dec 30th, 2011 at 3:00PM:
A castle in Yorkshire will be the scene of a reenactment of one of England's most important battles.
The Battle of Wakefield, fought on December 30, 1460, will be reenacted by the Frei Compagnie. Members of the group will not only be fighting it out medieval style, but will also be displaying medieval arts and crafts and talking about life in the 15th century.
Sandal Castle has an ...Chinese tourists chart a new European Grand Tour
Dec 24th, 2011 at 11:00AM: According to BBC Travel and the China Daily, approximately 70 million Chinese nationals traveled abroad in 2011, up from 10 million in 1999. A chunk of this new crop of Chinese tourists is traveling to Europe, but their itinerary veers a little off the trodden path.
BBC Travel outlined some of the historical highlights of the "new" European Grand Tour: cities like Trier, Germany, the birthplace ...Your Paintings website puts UK's art collections at your fingertips
Dec 23rd, 2011 at 1:00PM:
An online collection now boasts half of all the publicly owned oil paintings in the United Kingdom.
Your Paintings was started in June by the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation and has already uploaded high-quality images of 104,000 oil paintings by 23,000 artists.
The goal is to put online all of the estimated 200,000 publicly owned paintings housed in some 3,000 institutions, making ...
