Cultural weekend break in London

A cultural weekend break is the perfect choice for those who want to escape from their weekly routine,  relax and forget about work preoccupations and London is the perfect destination for this.

The heart of London art is the Royal Festival Hall, built for the 1951 Festival of Britain. 

Sixty years on, it's still at the forefront of London's cultural scene. 

Although primarily a hall for major concerts, the ground-floor stage area is always busy with a free concert, exhibition or workshop, especially if you visit on a weekend. 

It can not be forgotten the Tate Modern. Little more than a decade old, it is now firmly established as one of the world's great modern art galleries. It's housed in the shell of the Bankside Power Station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also gave us the red phone box and Battersea Power Station.

If you want to know more about London's South Bank area click here.

Royal Festival Hall

It also worth a visit to some of the many museums in London. 

The choice is vast especially in South Kensington, where it is possible to visit the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum and the Victoria And Albert Museum, around the same tube station. 

Near to Buckingham Palace, the Queen's Gallery hosts changing exhibitions of treasures in the Royal collection. The gallery is located at the west front of the Palace.

And how we can not mention the British Museum with the endless series of galleries contain artifacts from just about every major civilization on earth? The Enlightenment rooms in the east wing are particularly fascinating, and usually crowd-free. 

The National Gallery is the national collection of Western European painting. It is on show 361 days a year, free of charge. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.

Moreover, London offers many hidden galleries to be discover, such as Auto Italia: an artist-run organisation that commissions and produces new work. It is a project space which aims to explore and support the practices of a growing peer group of artists.

by Sara Laccone

The Jewish Museum, Camden – try something a bit different

It might not be your first choice but head off the beaten museum track and step away from those Elgin marbles in the British Museum and you'll have a lot more room to breathe while taking in some amazing objects and hearing incredible stories. One example is the Jewish Museum.

This small museum on Albert Street, Camden (North London) is a must for any Jewish people coming to London or anyone else with an interest in Jewish culture and heritage. It's a bit of a hidden gem and although there are some old fashioned elements in the style of old artefacts crammed into cases in a dark room, they are giving it a bit of a refurb and there is lots here that will delight you.

Like the medieval mikveh - a bath that is used by Jewish women after periods and births and in conversion ceremonies - and the exhibition on immigration that draws parallels with how papers like The Sun talk about Eastern Europeans with how Jews were treated in past centuries in Britain. At the moment there is also an exhibition on the top floor called Entertaining the Nation, the admission to which is included in your £7.50 ticket price. On the ground floor, there is video footage of people's stories, a gift shop and a cafe.

Your best bet for exploring areas like Camden is probably to stay in one of our very central apartments like the Grosvenor apartments we have in Westminster or our St James apartment.