Leisure and entertainment
Within the City of Westminster, the entertainment district of the West End has its focus around Leicester Square, where London and world film premieres are held, and Piccadilly Circus, with its giant electronic advertisements. London's theatre district is here, as are many cinemas, bars, clubs and restaurants, including the city's Chinatown district (in Soho), and just to the east is Covent Garden, an area housing speciality shops. The United Kingdom's Royal Ballet, English National Ballet, Royal Opera and English National Opera are based in London and perform at the Royal Opera House, the London Coliseum, Sadler's Wells Theatre and the Royal Albert Hall as well as touring the country.
Islington's 1 mile (1.6 km) long Upper Street, extending northwards from the Angel, has more bars and restaurants than any other street in the UK.[203] Europe's busiest shopping area is Oxford Street, a shopping street nearly 1 mile (1.6 km) long—which makes it the longest shopping street in the UK and home to many shops and department stores including Selfridges. Knightsbridge—home to the Harrods department store—lies just to the southwest.
London is home to designers Vivienne Westwood, Galliano, Stella McCartney, Manolo Blahnik, and Jimmy Choo among others; its renowned art and fashion schools make it an international centre of fashion alongside Paris, Milan and New York. London offers a great variety of cuisine as a result of its ethnically diverse population. Gastronomic centres include the Bangladeshi restaurants of Brick Lane and the Chinese food restaurants of Chinatown.
There are a variety of regular annual events in the city. The beginning of the year is celebrated with the relatively new New Year's Day Parade, fireworks display at the London Eye, and the world's second largest street party, the Notting Hill Carnival is held during the late August Bank holiday each year. Traditional parades include November's Lord Mayor's Show, a centuries-old event celebrating the annual appointment of a new Lord Mayor of the City of London with a procession along the streets of the City, and June's Trooping the Colour, a formal military pageant performed by regiments of the Commonwealth and British armies to celebrate the Queen's Official Birthday.
Literature, film and television
Keats House, where Keats wrote his Ode to a Nightingale. The village of Hampstead has historically been a literary centre in London.
London has been the setting for many works of literature. The literary centres of London have traditionally been hilly Hampstead and (since the early 20th century) Bloomsbury. Writers closely associated with the city are the diarist Samuel Pepys, noted for his eyewitness account of the Great Fire, Charles Dickens, whose representation of a foggy, snowy, grimy London of street sweepers and pickpockets has been a major influence on people's vision of early Victorian London, and Virginia Woolf, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the 20th century.
The pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer's late 14th-century Canterbury Tales set out for Canterbury from London – specifically, from the Tabard inn, Southwark. William Shakespeare spent a large part of his life living and working in London; his contemporary Ben Jonson was also based there, and some of his work—most notably his play The Alchemist—was set in the city. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel Defoe is a fictionalisation of the events of the 1665 Great Plague. Later important depictions of London from the 19th and early 20th centuries are Dickens' novels, and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Modern writers pervasively influenced by the city include Peter Ackroyd, author of a "biography" of London, and Iain Sinclair, who writes in the genre of psychogeography.
London was the setting for the films Oliver Twist (1948), Peter Pan (1953), The Ladykillers (1955), The 101 Dalmatians (1961), Mary Poppins (1964), Blowup (1966), The Long Good Friday (1980), Secrets & Lies (1996), Notting Hill (1999), Match Point (2005), V For Vendetta (2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street (2008). The television soap opera EastEnders, first broadcast in 1985, is also set in the city. London has played a significant role in the film industry, and has major studios at Ealing and a special effects and post-production community centred in Soho. Working Title Films has its headquarters in London.
Museums and art galleries
London is home to many museums, galleries, and other institutions, many of which are free of admission charges and are major tourist attractions as well as playing a research role. The first of these to be established was the British Museum in Bloomsbury, in 1753. Originally containing antiquities, natural history specimens and the national library, the museum now has 7 million artefacts from around the globe. In 1824 the National Gallery was founded to house the British national collection of Western paintings; this now occupies a prominent position in Trafalgar Square. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the locale of South Kensington was developed as "Albertopolis", a cultural and scientific quarter. Three major national museums are located there: the Victoria and Albert Museum (for the applied arts), the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. The national gallery of British art is at Tate Britain, originally established as an annexe of the National Gallery in 1897. The Tate Gallery, as it was formerly known, also became a major centre for modern art; in 2000 this collection moved to Tate Modern, a new gallery housed in the former Bankside Power Station.
Music
London is one of the major classical and popular music capitals of the world and is home to major music corporations, such as EMI, as well as countless bands, musicians and industry professionals. The city is also home to many orchestras and concert halls, such as the Barbican Arts Centre (principal base of the London Symphony Orchestra), Cadogan Hall (Royal Philharmonic Orchestra) and the Royal Albert Hall (The Proms). London's two main opera houses are the Royal Opera House and the Coliseum Theatre. The UK's largest pipe organ can be found at the Royal Albert Hall. Other significant instruments are found at the cathedrals and major churches. Several conservatoires are located within the city: Royal Academy of Music, Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Trinity College of Music.
The O2 Arena
London has numerous venues for rock and pop concerts, including large arenas such as Earls Court, Wembley Arena and the O2 Arena, as well as many mid-sized venues, such as Brixton Academy, Hammersmith Apollo and the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Several music festivals, including the Wireless Festival, are held in London. The city is home to the first and original Hard Rock Cafe and the Abbey Road Studios where The Beatles recorded many of their hits. In the 1970s and 1980s, musicians and groups like Elton John, David Bowie, Queen, Elvis Costello, Cat Stevens, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Madness, The Jam, The Small Faces, Led Zeppelin, Iron Maiden, Fleetwood Mac, The Police, The Cure, Squeeze and Sade, took the world by storm, deriving their sound from the streets and rhythms vibrating through London.
London was instrumental in the development of punk music, with figures such as the Sex Pistols, The Clash,[209] and Vivienne Westwood all based in the city. More recent artists to emerge from the London music scene include Bananarama, Wham!, The Escape Club, Bush, East 17, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Spice Girls, Jamiroquai, The Libertines, Babyshambles, Bloc Party, Amy Winehouse, Coldplay, and George Michael. London is also a centre for urban music. In particular the genres UK garage, drum and bass, dubstep and grime evolved in the city from the foreign genres of hip hop and reggae, alongside local drum and bass. Black music station BBC 1Xtra was set up to support the rise of homegrown urban music both in London and the rest of the UK.
In the 1980s London was the main city in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal era which made bands like Iron Maiden and Motörhead famous worldwide. During the same decade, the city became influential in the New Wave and New Romantic movements, providing the background for acts like Culture Club, the Pet Shop Boys and Spandau Ballet.
All About London
- London
- Demography of London
- Religion in London
- Sport in London
- Education in London
- Economy of London
- Tourism in London
- Transport in London
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