Ben Machell on the two types of London haunts that exist

There are two types of sights in London. The first are the obvious ones: the buildings, museums and monuments that always have an endless column of excitable Central European tweenagers queuing-up outside. These are the sights Hollywood directors use in zippy montages designed to telegraph the fact that action is now taking place in London, but which most of us walk past without even glancing at. Landmarks so visible you eventually stop noticing them altogether.

The second type of sight is more subtle and far more personal. These are the small, quiet, out-of-the-way places all Londoners have stumbled across over the years and to which we keep coming back; the places that never crop up in movie montages but which we nevertheless frogmarch friends and family members to whenever they’re down.

So for many years, it was impossible for my dad to visit without paying a trip to the Captain Kidd in Wapping. It wasn’t even an amazing pub but it was slap bang on the river and served competitively priced lager, which meant we could sit by a window, observe the tide and feel vaguely Pepysian. I’m assuming Samuel Pepys ate a lot of salt-and-vinegar crisps. But I’d recommend it to anyone.

Where else? I’ve spent hours in Postman’s Park near St Paul’s. You have to look hard for it but once you’re there, you’ll find an entire wall dedicated to Victorian men, women and children who lost their lives in acts of heroic self-sacrifice. So there’s Frederick Alfred Croft, who died saving a woman from a train at Woolwich Arsenal. Alice Ayres, ‘daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer’, who saved three kids from a burning house in Borough. John Clinton, just 10, who drowned near London Bridge trying to save ‘a companion younger than himself’. It’s incredibly poignant. There should be queues, but I’m always glad there aren’t.

And, most recently, I’ve discovered Temple Church. Arriving late at a friend’s son’s christening, I pushed open the heavy wooden door to find myself in a 12th-century building packed with medieval stone effigies of dead knights. The knights just lay there in full armour, patiently staring at the ceiling while half a dozen toddlers tried to climb on them. It was, for reasons I cannot fully explain, a strangely touching sight. I’m going back the first chance I get.

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