Sights of london.

Stretching for more than thirty miles at its broadest point, Lon-m is by far the largest city in Europe. London consists of so many parts. There is the West End and the East End; Westminster and the City, Holborn and Bloomsbury, Kensington, and Soho and many hers, all differ from each other.

London's geographical centre is Trafalgar Square. This place is worth visiting. On the column in the centre there is a statue of Admiral Nelson. The British are proud of his having defeated the French at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In the north of Trafalgar Square there is the National Gallery which exhibits all schools of European painting from the 13th to the 19th centuries. Not far from Trafalgar Square is Whitehall, a street of government offices. Walking a little further we come to Parliament Square; Westminster Abbey is on the one side, the Houses of Parliament on the other. The building of the Houses of Parliament is not old inspite of its having been built in the Gothic style. It is the seat of the British Government. The Clock Tower is famous for the hour bell and the clock named Big Ben.

One of the most beautiful of all English buildings is Westminster Abbey founded in the 11th century. The oldest part of the building dates back from the 8th century, it was a monastery the West Minster. Five hundred years later it had been transformed into a church and then, in the 16th century, the wonderful chapel was built. There are too many tombstones, monuments and statues here. Here is the Poet's Corner. Famous poets and writers being buried here makes the Poet's corner one of the tourist attractions.

The parts of the West End are Mayfair and Marylebone, Soho and Kensington. The grand streets and squares of Mayfair and Marylebone, to the north of Westminster, have been the playground of the rich since the Restoration, the busiest shopping zones being concentrated here. They also contain a very fine art gallery, the Wallace Collection, and one of London's biggest tourist attractions, Madame Tussaud's, the oldest and largest wax museum in the world.

The West End entertainment district includes a large number of theatres, cinemas, clubs, flashy shops, cafes and restaurants making it popular with tourists. Many tourists can't help visiting Soho, which retains a uniquely unorthodox and slightly raffish air, and gives visitors the best and worst of London. Covent Garden's transformation from a fruit and vegetable market into a fashion-conscious piazza is one of the most enduring developments of the 1980s.

Hyde Park together with its westerly extension Kensington Gardens covers a distance of two miles from Speakers' Corner in the north-east to Kensington Palace in the south-west. Other districts go in and out of fashion, but Kensington has been in vogue ever since royalty moved into Kensington Palace in the late seventeenth century.

Aside from the shops around Harrods in Knightsbridge, however, the popular tourist attractions lie in South Kensington, where two of London's top museums — the Victoria and Albert, Natural History and Science museums — stand on land bought with the proceeds of the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Chelsea's character is slightly more bohemian. In the 1960s, the King's Road carved out its reputation as London's catwalk, it was the epicentre of the punk explosion in the late 1970s. Nothing so ris-quft goes on in Chelsea now, though its residents like to think of themselves as rather more artistic and intellectual than the purely moneyed types of Kensington.

The City of London is at one and the same time the most ancient and the most modern part of London. Settled since Roman times, it is now one of the world's greatest financial centres, yet retains its share of historic sights, notably the Tower of London and St. Paul's Cathedral.

To the north lies the university quarter of Bloomsbury, home to the ever-popular British Museum. In the first place the British Museum is a great library, one of the largest in the world; secondly, the British Museum is a great scientific institution, generally known as Natural History Museum; then there is an enormous collection of manuscripts; there is also one of the most important Print Rooms in the world, and a Medal Room. Lastly, the British Museum is a national museum of antiquities and ethnography.