Sir John Soane's Museum & Hunterian Museum (The Battle of Lincoln's Inn Fields) - London, UK

15th October 2013

Tucked between the financial and legal bustle of Chancery Lane and Kingsway, sits Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest public square in Old London Town. Between 11 and 2 it serves as a leafy respite for young, bonny, soon-to-be-rich law students to drink coffee and talk loudly on their telephones. I enjoy the place for its myriad institutions and the people they attract: LSE - students, RCS - doctors, Queen Mary's - lawyers, the soup van - homeless people. 

Cliffe Castle Museum - Keighley, UK

3rd September 2013, Free (joined by Shelagh Deeney)

If they could see me now...

Cliffe Castle has always been a bit of a joke in our bustling metropolis of Bradford. Way out in the muddy backwaters of Keighley, we sophisticates saw nothing but a big house full of junk you'd find in your granddad's loft. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, a result of being dragged as a pre-teen on boring school trips through dusty corridors I'd seen a million times. That Tuesday morning was the last day of the school holidays in the region and you could tell, casualties of the never-ending summers you remember forever were everywhere. I empathised entirely. I know exactly how you feel, mate: school tomorrow and you're in Cliffe Castle. It was my mother's last day before the new term, so we celebrated by visiting a museum 100 metres away from the school in which she teaches, which was a noble sacrifice, indeed. 

The Clink Prison Museum - London, UK

30th August 2013, £7.50

Bring money

London, exceeding any city of which I'm aware, has a morbid titillation with the gruesome chapters of its past. We revel in the thumb-screws, the Halifax gibbet and the Tyburn Tree. We retrace the steps of the Krays and Guy Fawkes, and feel a rush of adrenaline when told the specifics of a Victorian madman tearing prostitutes apart. This may well be the saturnine aspect of all humanity, but nowhere is it more celebrated than the big smoke.