Banquets, Minis and being very fashionable!

A busy and varied week in London, as always! I’ve picked 3 highlights to tell you about – a medieval banquet, a Mini tour and a fashion show which was part of London Fashion Week.

First up we have the Medieval Banquet which is an evening extravaganza just by the Tower of London. You go into a vaulted underground cellar and are offered a range of period costumes to dress up in (especially good for kids of all ages!) You get a meal (soup, a cold meats plate, chicken with potatoes and veg and then a fruit pie) and unlimited wine/beer while the cheery, costumed and charming staff entertain you. Sitting in your section of the room you enjoy the dancing, singing, acrobatics, sword fights, magic tricks and much more When all this finishes much more modern music takes over and you can have a good old dance. A fun night out, probably best for groups but we had fun as a two, it’s a bit different, a bit silly and you just have to join in!
.

Small Car Big City are all about the Minis – the cars, not the very short skirts in case you think we are onto the fashion already! Rob and Oli met at an interview for a job neither of them wanted and over a consoling beer found they were both nuts on Minis and the company was born. They do tours of London in their beautifully restored Minis – see photo. We had Rob who is a real London lover and has tons of great stories to entertain his passengers as he nips around the streets of London with confident ease and the Mini lets him sneak through the tiniest gaps. We managed to see so much in our hour and I’d really recommend taking one of their tours if you are 1,2 or 3 people, we were 3 and we all fitted in just fine. (http://www.smallcarbigcity.com/). It’s great fun and lots of tourists stop to take pictures of you as you whiz past. We saw a new sculpture by Lorenza Quinn on Park Lane which fitted the car theme, called Vroom Vroom (!) – this time a Fiat 500 and a huge arm which you can see in the photo. We finished in Maida Vale and dropped into Gordon Ramsay’s gastropub, The Warrington, and sampled the grand decor and the amazing ploughman’s lunch.

London Fashion Week 2011 is with us and I was lucky enough to be given a ticket for an up and coming pair of British Designers who work under the name of Jena Theo. London Fashion Week is when all the top designers and fashionistas from all round the world descend on London and parade around looking gorgeous! The show I went to was a proper loud, laser enhanced catwalk show with more photographers than I’ve seen for a long time. The clothes were remarkably wearable for one of these events with good mixtures of denim and leather on good tailoring. The crowd were of course fascinating and we particularly loved the shoes in the photo which is not a trick, they really don’t have heels! The other photos show you the room and the models with their dramatic striped eye make up. All this at 11 in the morning!

Bye for now,
Sue