• Down House
• Ham House
• Hampstead
• Hampstead Heath
• Highgate
• Highgate Cemetery
• Highgate Wood
• Kenwood
• Kew Gardens
• Lindow Man *
• Osterley Park
• Paxton & Whitfield
• Richmond
• Sutton Hoo *
• The Spaniards Inn
• The Wallace Collection

Down House

After Darwin returned from his Beagle voyages of 1831-6, he began to settle down. He married his cousin Emma Wedgwood and they sought a house in the country. His family were rich enough that he didn't have to make a living. Down House is no great beauty but it's a pleasant, solid squire's house of the late eighteenth century, with gardens and orchards amid the gently rolling hills of Kent. They lived there from 1842, Charles until his death in 1882, with seldom much travelling away from Downe because of his infirmity, and Emma remained for part of the years thereafter.

After her death it was used as a school for a while, and was turned into a museum in the 1920s. It was run by the Royal College of Surgeons but had fallen into disrepair when English Heritage took over in 1996 and restored it. It's now a lovely place for a visit, with quite interesting displays, and gorgeous walks in the countryside around if you have the good fortune to visit on a fine day in spring when primroses abound.

Remarkably, it's technically in London, so London transport passes get you around, but it's a world of farms and woods and fields, and the pubs in the little village of Downe (the George and Dragon and the Queen's Head, if I recall) are definitely country pubs. It must have changed little since Darwin's day. He enjoyed his walks to local beauty spots, and examining all the little flora and fauna in the woodland.

It was a family home. He and Emma had a happy home life, with lots of children bouncing around. The death of Annie (1841-1851) is said to be the final blow to his last vestiges of religious belief. By the time he moved into Down House he had the basic form of his theory of modification through natural selection. The gardens, the orchards, the greenhouses, all now carefully preserved in close to their original form, were his laboratory and inspiration.

Downstairs the lower rooms - study, parlour, and dining room - have been restored with a lot of original furnishings, equipment, and books. The books in his study! He must have read everything there was on every relevant subject, geology as well as natural history, journals from all over. But then there's that story - probably just an urban legend - that his shelves included the journal that Mendel's work was published in, but which he never saw. Upstairs there are modern displays outlining his life and work, and the inevitable room full of bright plastic displays for children. There's also - make sure you don't miss it, as it's just sitting there not emphasized - a big display case full of gorgeous stuffed birds.

For pictures, and a good feel for it by his granddaughter the artist and writer Gwen Raverat, see Down House. She was born a little after he died, but visited her grandmother there. Today it's open all year, a short bus trip away from Orpington or Bromley. And I recommend the venison pie in the Queen's Head too.

Ham House

The gardens are curious and unfamiliar to the present-day eye, because few such gardens survived the following centuries without being turned into vast sweeps of grass and grand avenues, or subsequent romantic wild grottos, or both. Ham House has the rather stilted look that comes from being composed mostly of geometrical portions, marked by tubs and urns and topiary. In its own day the emphasis was as much on smell as on sight in the choice of flowers.

Beyond the south facade of the house the main part is platts, or flat plots of grass divided by paths and marked by statues at each corner. The statuary is one of the victims of its slow decline in previous years, as the Duchess needed to pay her debts, and only now are the National Trust planning to restore as much of it as they can. It still has many statues in niches in the courtyard at its northern entrance, approached by spacious lime avenues.

The platts lead to a "wilderness", so called, a peculiar conceit borrowed from French fashionable gardens of the time. Splayed segments radiate from a centre, each segment surrounded by a low hedge, and filled with flowers and grass running wild, symbolizing the taming of the wilderness. To the west is a cherry garden, named from its main tree inhabitants, and to the east are vegetable gardens and the orangery, one of the earliest surviving orangeries, except that it's now the inevitable National Trust tea-room.

Nearby, just across the river, is another fine house at Marble Hill Park, also open to the public.

Hampstead

In Fenton House, which has the smallest garden of any National Trust property, there is a harpsichord and spinet collection and a lot of old porcelain and snuff boxes. On Hampstead Heath there is Kenwood, which has a superb little art collection, including Vermeer's Guitar Player and a Rembrandt self-portrait that has been voted the country's best painting. Also lots of Gainsborough, Reynolds, Morland, etc etc.

People outside Hampstead are very inverted snobbish about this area, but it really is one of the finest in London. High up on a hill, it boasts solid old houses, greenery and queer old lampposts. And all around it is Hampstead Heath, a fine area for walking around or lying on the grass or looking at paintings in Kenwood or (in a few parts) cottaging for sex.

Nearby, to the east, is the almost equally interesting village of Highgate, and between is the famous Spaniards Inn, haunt of Dick Turpin. The parliamenary constituency of Hampstead and Highgate is represented by Glenda Jackson, and the local newspaper is called the Ham and High.

Hampstead Heath

To the south-west is Hampstead, and to the north-east is Highgate, two parts of north London renowned for their elegance and character. Between them and sprawling to the north and south lies the Heath. There are so many different scenes here. To the south, on Parliament Hill, people fly bright plastic racing kites while others gaze out across at St Paul's Cathedral and the rest of central London laid out far below.

In the north is Kenwood, a grand eighteenth-century house with landscaped gardens and a superb collection of paintings, including Rembrandt and Vermeer. Between them are lush woods and rolling hills.

Down both sides of it are chains of ponds, artificial remnants of the rivers that rise here and feed the Thames. In the centre is a tumulus, perhaps a Bronze Age barrow, though excavation has revealed nothing but rubbish from a few centuries ago.

Across the main roads that enclose it to the north, the Heath has extensions, generally less well known than the main parts, and quieter walks. One of these goes up to Golders Green, and ends in an animal park where you may see deer, rheas, and numerous exotic animals such as mara. Another arm goes right up into the heart of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and here is a secret, the blackberry pickings are much better in these unfrequented parts.

There is not much history to Hampstead Heath, though there is great age: not much dynamic history anyway, with movements of people. During the anti-Papist Gordon Riots of the late 18th century, a mob moved towards Kenwood, and troops were sent to repel them. That and the renowned Spaniards Inn on the northern edge are mentioned in Dickens's Barnaby Rudge.

The Manor of Hampstead was given to the monks of Westminster by King Edgar the Peaceable in 970, and the adjoining manor of Tottenhall, a great long wedge extending from central London up to Highgate, is also of Saxon antiquity. For almost all its history the Heath was used for harmless pastoral occupations such as grazing sheep and giving tithes to the absent monks.

It was the last active Lord of the Manor of Hampstead, Sir Thomas Maryon Wilson, who brought the thing to a head in the mid nineteenth century, by proposing to sell off what he owned of it, which was most of it, for housing development. Remarkably, he failed, and the public outcry brought the Heath into public ownership as a place of repose and pleasure for all time. When the Greater London Council (GLC) was broken up in the 1980s it did not go to the neighbouring borough of Camden but to the Corporation of London, who rule the City of London itself.

The other important individual was the first Lord Mansfield, the late eighteenth-century Lord Chief Justice who abolished slavery in England. The Bishop of London had owned the northern woods from time immemorial, but Lord Mansfeld his tenant was so powerful that he had new roads built to suit his convenience and avoid his magnificent new house in Caen Wood, or Kenwood, which he had designed by Robert Adam, and his son had it landscaped by Humphrey Repton. This was an independent estate until the 1920s, when having passed through numerous owners and sales endangering it, it finally came to Lord Iveagh, who left it to the nation. It is now an English Heritage property, but is de facto an integral part of the Heath.

But it is the intangible beauties you go there for, over and over again: the solitude in the early morning before the dog-walkers and families have got there, or perhaps when it is all blanketed in fresh snow; seeing the swans with their cygnets, and the coots with their chicks; resting by the great silent oaks, six hundred years old, forming part of a boundary twice that age; the taste of chalybeate water from the spring; the soft look of enquiry of the girl playing the guitar in the Vermeer, or the imperious assuredness of Gainsborough's Countess Howe.

Part of JudyT's Golden Jubilee celebration of Britain.

Highgate

The meaning of the name seems obvious: it's the highest point, and there's a gate the Bishop of London made for the toll-road, long ago. But in fact the earliest recorded form of the name is Heighgate, that is hedge gate.

Now that girlotron has added to this and discussed a lot of the interesting points, I've expanded and rearranged mine by adding a few notes on buildings, mainly from Pevsner's guide to London. One of the oldest buildings is Cromwell House, at 104 Highgate High Street, an elegant red-brick building built 1637-8. This was owned by the da Costas family between 1675 and 1749, the first Jewish family to hold landed property in England since the Middle Ages. It is now the Ghanaian High Commission.

The Old Hall at 17 South Grove dates from 1691. It is on the site of an even earlier mansion, Arundel House, home of the Earl of Arundel. His guest Sir Francis Bacon died there in 1626, having taken cold from an ill-advised experiment with frozen food, going onto Hampstead Heath to collect snow to try to freeze a chicken with. Several local place names commemorate Bacon.

Nearby, the Flask pub is seventeenth-century, with exteriors remodelled to some extent a bit later, but soom rooms inside are well preserved. Also nearby are the finest houses in Highgate, numbers 1 to 6 The Grove, built c. 1688. One has plaques saying Samuel Taylor Coleridge and J.B. Priestley lived in it. These days film stars and rock musicians tend to occupy them, as no-one else can afford to. Across from those to the south is Witanhurst, a large building that's a prominent landmark when viewed from the Heath; that dates from 1913. These are all on the south side of the High Street, where there is a green space called Pond Square; however, the last pond disappeared in 1865.

Further north, Byron House at 13 North Road has no particular Byron connection, but A.E. Housman wrote A Shropshire Lad there, not in Shropshire. Beyond that there is a great modernist block of flats called Highpoint, designed by Berthold Lubetkin, worth the tourist's attention.

Highgate Cemetery

It was founded in 1839, when London's traditional burial places in churchyards were full, and the authorities established a ring of large cemeteries around London. The eastern and western halves are divided by the street, Swain's Lane, and the guides tell you some odd story about... I can't remember exactly, something like you're not allowed to disinter corpses from consecrated ground, that sort of thing... so there's a tunnel under the lane so that services could take place in the chapel on one side, then be carted over to the other, without ceasing to be inside consecrated ground. It's been a while since I did the tour.

The cemetery is now a charity, and a place of outstanding historic architectural interest. The eastern half is open all the time for a £2 fee at the gate (cameras £1 extra). This contains the hideous, gigantic, monstrous bust of Karl Marx (a modern addition, 1950s IIRC), and opposite him are many graves of freedom fighters from the Third World who died in exile in London, and other such with heroic credentials.

Tha main walks in this area are pleasant; here you will find the discreet slab to Sir Ralph Richardson. There are a lot of Victorian family tombs near the front, and little regions filled with Poles, Chinese, or Italians. Away from the gate the paths get narrower, and all the stone angels have been allowed to be covered in ivy, which is the great charm and characteristic image of Highgate cemetery.

The western part is open only by guided tour, and contains the enormous gallery circuit in vaguely faux-Egyptian style. This bit contains Radclyffe Hall and the founders of the English National Opera (Carl Rosa) and Cruft's dog show and Foyle's bookshop and Chubb locks. Eliot's and Faraday's graves are unfortunately in areas too dangerous for access now. Jacob Bronowski's is a very plain small slab.

If you're visiting it make sure to have a wander through the exquisitely beautiful Waterlow Park right next door.

The official website
and our very own gnarl's photographs

Highgate Wood

The name Highgate Wood was officially bestowed on it only in 1886, when it was handed over by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to the Corporation of London as a public park, saving it from the developer's axe. Before then it had been known as Gravel Pit Wood, and in the seventeenth century as Brewer's Fell.

Together the two areas may be called Highgate Woods, and in parts constitute a remnant of the original woodland that once covered much of Middlesex. But they are not entirely original: coppicing has been carried on in Highgate Wood since Anglo-Saxon times, and there are still areas that are cut down and set aside for regrowth.

Excavation has revealed an important Roman pottery on the site, active between about 50 and 150; and still discernible is a ditch and bank that formed a boundary - possibly in Celtic times, or possibly mediaeval when it formed part of the Bishop of London's hunting park.

It also contains a cafe, a sports field and a disused railway line. There is a nature hut with displays of the wildlife that can be found there. Even the moths alone deserve listing: the more interestingly-named ones include the

• angleshades
• blotched emerald
• brimstone
• brindled pug
• common lutestring
• common Quaker
• dark arches
• dun-bur
• fan foot
• green bell
• grey pine carpet
• grey shoulder-knot
• heart and dart
• Hebrew character
• herald
• ingrailed clay
• lesser broad-bordered yellow underwing
• lesser swallow prominent
• lime hawk
• maiden's blush
• mother-of-pearl
• mottled rustic
• mottled umber
• oak hook-tip
• pale brindled beauty
• popular hawk
• purple hairstreak
• purple thorn
• riband wave
• scalloped oak
• scarce silver lines
• shoulder-striped wainscot
• shuttle-shaped pug
• slender dart
• small dusty wave
• small magpie
• small Quaker
• snout
• spinach
• spring usher
• unknown (sic -- that's its name)
• wax
• yarrow pug

Kenwood

It has an excellent collection of paintings, including Rembrandt, Vermeer, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Turner, Joseph Wright of Derby, Angelica Kauffmann, François Boucher, and Frans Hals. It's probably the best private collection ever donated to the nation.

The house has a wide white frontage looking out and down across lawns where once sheep grazed (there is the possibility of reintroducing them for period authenticity) onto a lake, at the far end of which is a sham bridge. On the far side of the lake, nestled amid the woods and facing out to the great lawns, is (sometimes) a large acoustic shell where an orchestra sits for summer night concerts, often of popular classics with fireworks. The vast grounds of Kenwood Estate are, though legally separate, de facto part of the vast open range of Hampstead Heath.

The library is splendid, one of the most impressive rooms, with a ceiling covered in classically inspired scenes. As well as the paintings it is full of in almost every room, there are a few other artefacts of interest: one is a Merlin clock. (There is also a painting of its inventor Joseph Merlin.)

Kew Gardens

Where is the greatest biological diversity on the planet Earth? Madagascar? New Guinea? Probably not. It's probably here, in this pleasant and unassuming corner of south-west London. The Royal Botanical Gardens claim some completely unbelievably impossible figure like one-fifth of all plants. Someone challenged me on this when I told them, and I agreed, it sounds absurd. Then I considered the Order Beds.

At the Kew Gardens they have, in one small corner, these things called the Order Beds. They are beds containing every plant species they can manage to grow in the open air, arranged by order. They just go on and on and on. A little later I came across a reference work that gave numbers: yea many species in order Compositae, and so on and so forth. I strode over those beds, in my head, I added them up, how many I'd seen, and decided, yes, it was just possible they did have one-fifth of the world's flowering plants.

Today we went to see the titan arum, Latin name Amorphophallus titanum. This is probably the most stunning plant anyone will ever see. It's dominated by a single giant yellow inflorescence, a "spadix", that grows upward at almost a centimetre an hour, for the few days when it's active. It hits 3 m high, it's a native of the Sumatra rainforest, and to attract pollinators it stinks to high heaven, like rotting corpse and eggs and... but only for a few days. I queued up today to see and smell it, and though it's still huge, it's starting to close up, and there was no great smell left. Drat!

That's what Kew does so well: the preservation of rare plants. The cultivation of plants that barely survive in their native habitat. They're trying to restore plants that have virtually disappeared from their native Mauritius, Nepal, or whatever.

There are some trees dating back to its foundation in the mid 1700s. For the most part they're showing their age, very bulbous and bowed, propped up by metal bars, unwell. But a huge summer-house covered in ancient wisteria is breathtakingly beautiful.

It's an immense park. You can wander it for ages just enjoying the scenery. They are big gardens full of azaleas. There are woodlands with different species of pine, cedar, oak... There's an ornamental pagoda. There are these greenhouses where you learn about the world's plants.

In passing, I saw a family of baby ducklings. I saw piranhas, covered in what looked like gold dust. I saw stingrays, living coral, clown fish, mangrove roots, golden pheasants ...

At one point I looked at a map in the grounds to see what we'd missed. As with last time I was there, I found we'd seen only one little quarter. It's one of these places Britain has (others are the British Museum and National Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum) where it's completely impossible to cover any significant proportion of it in a single day.

So I'm glad this time I bought an annual ticket. If we're anywhere near it, Kew should be part of our lives. The River Thames nearby is beautiful too. The Gardens were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in July 2003.

Osterley Park

The original design was a square building of red brick with towers at each corner, in the manner reminiscent of fortification then current. The Elizabethan proportions are preserved in the nearby stable block, a handsome building of three sides now serving as shop and tea rooms, whereas Adam's improvements give the house a classical portico and wide steps on two sides, in the then fashionable grey stone, and expand the windows to Georgian sizes, which was no doubt better for the family living there but makes it look unbalanced, sitting oddly between the two dates.

Inside, however, it is all Adam, and all exactly right. By this time it had passed to the Child family, proprietors of Child's Bank (much later to be absorbed by the Royal Bank of Scotland). They were rich and wanted to make an impression, but they had good taste. Compared to some houses, there is no gaudiness, no excess. There is gold where it is needed to add lustre, there is opulence in the furnishing of the largest gallery, and there is richness and power in the overall effect, but it is on a very human scale, and very livable. The private rooms are beautiful, elegant, and subdued. Even the one with carmine walls: it is a pleasantly muted Georgian carmine. The proportions of the rooms are perfect, whether large or small, and the pictures on the walls are, if not masterpieces, always worth looking at.

One of the Child heiresses eloped to Gretna Green later that century, and the paterfamilias, though eventually forgiving her, ensured that Osterley passed not to her or her wastrel husband but to a younger of the children, and so in time (when she was eight, in 1793) the estate came to Sally, later to be Lady Jersey, "Queen Sarah", one of the great society hostesses of Regency London. She and Countess Lieven, wife of the Russian ambassador, could make or break an aspiring lady in good society, as her friend Beau Brummell could for a gentleman.

It was still in the Jersey family when it was given to the nation in 1949. The National Trust have bought up all the land around, part of the original patrimony, to ensure it is kept perpetually farmland and never encroached upon. Though, alas, on the north boundary is the terrible M4 motorway and from the south-west come incessant invasions of low-flying Jumbo jets from Heathrow, neither of which even the National Trust can prevent. Nearest Tube: Osterley, on the Piccadilly Line.

There are grounds with trees and long lakes, perfectly adequate for their kind, but the beauty is in the interior. The Victoria and Albert Museum ran it for the Trust for many years, but since 1996 the Trust themselves have started throwing out historically inaccurate changes the V&A made and getting it back to its correct appearance at the height of the Childs' possession.

Paxton & Whitfield

Sir Winston Churchill said, "A gentleman only buys his cheese from Paxton & Whitfield." - Nigella Lawson says "Pleasure beyond the telling", and I bet she knows a thing or two about that. - Bernard Levin once wrote that when the end of civilisation came and everyone else was fleeing for the hills, he'd be backing a large lorry through the plate glass window of Paxton & Whitfield, with apologies, to stock up before fleeing. - See a picture of their elegant shop window at their website www.cheesemongers.co.uk. They've been in their present shop for over a hundred years.

They have Royal Warrants to the Queen, the Prince of Wales, and the late Queen Mother. Their first royal appointment was to Queen Victoria. They are old-fashioned, polite, quiet, amiable, and while somewhat expensive they are not absurdly so. You're not paying for the tourist cachet they way you would be in Fortnum & Mason or Harrods, you're simply paying for the world's very best cheeses.

They do sell other things to complement their cheese, like oatcakes, port, and so on, but all that's strictly secondary. It's not a very big shop, it can only take about half a dozen customers and you have to squeeze along the one counter, but that's good. No crowds of tourists. Nice and cool.

What more can I say? I'd have to start describing individual cheeses, and that's virtually impossible. When I was there yesterday I got Torta, Vignotte, Cantal, and Rustic Sharpham. The first two are amazingly creamy and probably even worse for you than the general run of cheese, but when it tastes like this, who cares? Other favourites of mine are Lincolshire Poacher and Waterloo, which they often feature prominently, but they have complete ranges of goat cheese (getting quite pricy), blue cheese, and tiny unidentifiable things under thick grey mould.

There are also Paxton & Whitfield shops of similarly antique appearance in Bath and in Stratford upon Avon.

Part of JudyT's Golden Jubilee celebration of Britain.

Richmond

Richmond Palace was a great royal residence: the palace itself no longer exists, but several of its outbuildings, such as the gatehouse, still do, from the part rebuilt in Tudor times. King Edward III died here in 1377, Henry VII in 1509, and Elizabeth I in 1603. Before the rebuilding the area was known as Shene (a suburb to the east is still called East Sheen), but Henry VII renamed it after Richmond in Yorkshire. Richard II's much beloved queen, Anne of Bohemia, died at the old Shene Palace in 1394, and the grieving king had it demolished.

It is bounded by two open spaces, the Old Deer Park and the Green. Across the Green is the main town part of Richmond, and on the edge of the Green are elegant Georgian houses and my candidate for best pub: the Prince's Head, a Fuller's pub with no piped music and no drastic modernization.

Downriver from Richmond is Kew, and it's a short walk to the Lion's Gate entrance of Kew Gardens. Upriver from Richmond Palace is Richmond Bridge, and a towpath or footpath goes all the way up the river, probably as far as Hampton Court, though I haven't yet done that full walk. The Thames is beautiful all along here. In the stream there are a few small islets, one delighting in the name Eel Pie Island. Beyond the water meadows of Petersham lies Ham House, a seventeenth-century mansion (now National Trust), and across the river is Marble Hill Park (English Heritage). Horace Walpole's pioneering Gothic confection Strawberry Hill is a little further south.

Richmond Hill is a long ridge rising up from the town to the next village, Petersham, with increasingly impressive views across to the south and west, and fine public gardens tumbling down the hill. It was a view from here that inspired the naming of the Richmond in Virginia. Because of the elegance of the grand buildings along the hill, it is a good view from the river too. The 1790s popular song 'Lass of Richmond Hill', however, refers to the place in Yorkshire.

At the far end of the hill comes Richmond Park, which I think is probably the biggest open space in London. This is an old royal hunting preserve, and to this day is well stocked with deer, red and fallow, though I am hopeful that the gun-mad royals are not allowed to indulge their tastes as they used to in past centuries. Dotted amid the wilder forest regions of the Park are a few more attractions. Pembroke Lodge was the house where Bertrand Russell was brought up, and is now a tea-room. Within its grounds is a prehistoric barrow called King Henry's Mound. As well as having yet another magnificent view of the river lands in their splendour in one direction, in the other it looks through a 'keyhole' in a hedge, and carefully trimmed avenues, to far-distant St Paul's Cathedral, which is only just visible; but this is one of the seven protected views from the high points of outer London, meaning that it is illegal ever to build anything that obscures the view of the cathedral.

The London Borough of Richmond upon Thames also covers Kew, East Sheen, Mortlake, Twickenham, and extends as far as Hampton Court Palace. There is yet another palace in the borough, the small 1600s Kew Palace within the grounds of Kew Gardens, though currently being restored and not open to the public. The whole area is a must-see attraction of outstanding beauty.

The fountains of Russell Square

Urban architecture is largely ignored. We walk through cities on the urgent business of getting somewhere else, and seldom gaze around us at the beauties large and small; if, of course, we are lucky enough to be in a part of a city that has any beauty.

A fountain in an urban park bridges these two domains. We like to sit by it. We like the way everything is a little bit greener or more peaceful around it, peaceful even as it makes its constant splattering sound, because it's probably drowning out cars, a mandala of brown noise smoothing our perceptions and slowing down our lives, giving us some time.

Russell Square is in London, near the British Museum. Surrounded on all sides by elegant dark Georgian houses, it's a large grassy square with trees and flower-beds and a statue of someone nineteenth century, but in its centre is a fountain composed of nothing but jets of water.

No tritons spouting, no shell-shaped stone bowls to sit on the lip of, nothing but a flat space with thirteen jets shooting upward. The one in the centre is highest, reaching 5 or 6 m, the eight around it in a square reach perhaps 2 m, and there are four beyond those, perhaps a metre high. The water drains where it falls.

My passing thought when I first saw it was how wasteful it was spouting here where so few people saw it, then I immediately realised it could be constantly cycled. Then I wondered how much energy would be required to force water to those heights; and in seconds the whole absurdity of these thoughts fell away, and I stopped going where I was bound, and sat and watched the fountain.

I had been going to the British Museum, one of the world's great repositories of what we as a species value in ourselves: seeing what we made in the past, choppers from Olduvai Gorge, the turquoise double serpents of Central America, Benin and Yoruba bronzes, the gold and garnet clasps buried at Sutton Hoo, the red-figure ware of Athens, the hasty perfect sketches of Claude Lorrain...

It's a four-day holiday to celebrate our Queen's Golden Jubilee. I'm in a park, maintained by gardeners, with temporary palings all around the beds to protect the new grass. Then I'm going to Fortnum & Mason and Paxton & Whitfield to indulge myself with the finest tea, chocolate, and cheese I can find.

The fountain and all these others are what we do it for. The sordid world of business, cars, money, necessity, building, time, that's so far away when you're in a park watching a fountain. They are the servants, not the masters, of civilisation. Some of "us" are spending our whole days trekking through heat to carry water from polluted wells, so I'm keenly aware of what a painful privilege it is to say "we" look at Korean celadon and drink Assam for pleasure. But this is what we do it for.

A fountain is emblematic of our highest desires bonding with our deepest nature.

The one and two metre high jets look like solid columns, the smaller ones writhing like undines dancing in diaphanous costume, the larger ones like candles boiling at their peaks, sending down molten slurries, which branch out and fall away from the main body. But allowing for the speeding up of time, these are like solids surrounded by an outer halo of fluid activity.

The largest one never gave the impression of solidity, barely even in its lowest metre (I found out why later, I think). That was like a great thick laser, light made fluid, but for most of its height the large jet was equations brought to life, a tracery of the fiendishly complex Navier-Stokes equation for fluid flow which, according to legend, makes God despair. Metaphors of trees and candles and anything else tangible break down, and you see that this behaviour is vaster and more eternally changing than any attempt to grasp it.

I've seen one waterfall close up, England's highest, High Force in Yorkshire, but that's surrounded by so much natural beauty and ruggedness that you take it in in a different way, without concentrating on the pure glittering fall of water alone. And the television screen flattens out what documentary makers are trying their hardest to show you in Angel Falls, Mosi-ao-Tunya, Niagara. Surf storms breaking on the rocks would be closer, where I've admired the infinite variety of shapes the ropes and pearls of spume can make.

The pressure upward made the great jet take on forms different from those you'd expect. No downward rains of spray, no rainbows in the mist, but globules starting like blood corpuscles and distorting and splitting like the lava in the lamp. Gravity, I suppose, could not yet compete and turn them into teardrops. As I got up and walked round it a bit looking for an angle where I would see rainbows --

it shut off abruptly.

The jets lowered, and fell to almost nothing. This continued long enough that I went on my way. When I came back from the Museum several hours later they were almost flat, just bubbling over the edge of their mouths. I saw there were eight small sources closely circling the main jet, which is probably why its base had been much less solid. So I realised I had been lucky to see the fountain in its full splendour, and had I hurried through Russell Square at a different time I would have had none of these thoughts.

Yet it was now closer to lunchtime and there were more people in the square, in the central part of it, on the benches arranged for viewing the fountain, and they were viewing the water, shallow as it was, with the same pleasure we all get from the flow of water, when it calls to us to stop, and reconnect.

Part of JudyT's Golden Jubilee celebration of Britain.

The Spaniards Inn

The road between Hampstead and Highgate passes by its door, reduced to single-line traffic because on the east side is an eighteenth-century toll house. It is no longer in use as anything, but as both the inn and the toll house are listed buildings, widening the road is quite impossible. The road is called Spaniards Road on the Hampstead side, and Hampstead Lane beyond that.

The pub is especially associated with the highwayman Dick Turpin, as he was said to stable Black Bess there when he was lying low. More than one of the old coaching inns in Highgate and Hampstead cultivate a Turpin connexion. He was born in a pub where his father John Turpin was landlord; some sources say it was here, others the Crown in a village in Essex. Possibly the confusion arises because John Turpin was to become landlord of The Spaniards Inn after Dick was born.

It was originally a private house, built in 1585. Nothing that old remains, but a good deal of it is still rickety and twisted like an eighteenth-century building. The Spaniard of the name is debated: a Spanish ambassador, or Spanish innkeeper brothers, or both?

More real-life drama came in 1780, when the Gordon Riots broke out against Roman Catholics. London was in uproar, houses were being destroyed, and a mob was moving towards nearby Kenwood House, home of Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, who they thought was a sympathizer but who was presumably just upholding the rule of law against mob rule. When they stopped off at The Spaniards, the landlord plied them with drinks until messengers could summon troops to guard Kenwood, which was thus saved. The pub still displays relics from this event, and one of Turpin's bullets.

The beer garden is extensive and very pleasant, and haunted, possibly by Turpin. There are large wooden tables among the trees, and at one end an aviary with budgerigars. The Spaniards Inn, at the time of writing, does good food and drink, and is well worth a visit. Bus: 210.

Many famous people before you enjoyed their time at The Spaniards, which has passed into several famous works. Although Dickens used the Gordon Riots as the central historical basis of his Barnaby Rudge, it was in Pickwick Papers that he actually set a scene in the garden of The Spaniards.

Keats is said to have observed the nightingale there that inspired his Ode. However, I seem to recall his home in Hampstead, now the Keats House museum, also lays claim to having the plum tree where Keats observed his nightingale, or at least where he wrote the Ode.

It is also referred to in Bram Stoker's Dracula, as are the nearby Jack Straw's Castle and Highgate Cemetery.

The Wallace Collection

The Wallace Collection was amassed by the Marquesses of Hertford and their last successor, Sir Richard Wallace, after whose death it was bequeathed to the nation in 1897. It is still in the original house, Hereford House, kept together, and bears the imprint of the tastes of the various collectors in the family.

It is immensely rich in classical French painting, such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and many others, including some of their best-known works, such as Fragonard's Girl on a Swing, Poussin's Dance to the Music of Time.

There are great numbers of fine Medieval, Renaissance, and Dutch paintings, and other famous images include Frans Hals's The Laughing Cavalier and Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait of George IV.

The most surprising aspect is one of the world's best collections of arms and armour: gallery after gallery filled with breastplates, guisarms, bascinets, scimitars, morningstars, and everything else you've ever read of and wondered exactly what they look like. There are complete equipages for both men and horses (and clear proof that medieval folk were not shorter than us), endless sets of eastern armour (Persian, Indian, Japanese), and a Landsknechten sword light enough to be carried by infantry yet which could cut a man in half with one blow, which always gives those who read that pause for thought.

In nearby galleries however are beautiful little gold and enamelled snuff boxes. The rooms are all packed with overpowering furniture tending to the baroque and/or rococo, and clocks everywhere, too many of them ormolu and covered in cherubs, with the thousand variations of the horologer's art they so loved. There's marquetry and Sèvres porcelain wherever you turn, and in the medieval section there are miniatures and ivory carvings of exquisite detail.

The house is on Manchester Square, and was built in the eighteenth century for the Duke of Manchester. It served as Spanish Embassy for a bit, and as French Embassy in 1836-50, but mainly between 1797 and 1897 it was the London home of the four Marquesses of Hertford and then the last Marquess's illegitimate son Sir Richard Wallace. Lady Wallace gave it to the nation and it opened to the public in 1900. The family were phenomenally rich and voracious collectors, especially the 4th Marquess, who is said to have been "notorious for his invincibility in the sale room".

Manchester Square is in the back streets of Marylebone just north of Wigmore Street, and not far from Selfridge's on Oxford Street. Nearest tube: Bond Street, or if coming from another directon, get off at Baker Street and walk south.