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Part 3 - Things to do

The Ceremony of the Keys is a ritual, which is performed at the Tower of London every evening. It is not simply a spectacle for tourists, as it has continued daily without fail for around seven hundred years and performs a valuable security function.

At precisely seven minutes to ten The Chief Yeoman Warder equipped with a candle lit lantern is accompanied by an armed escort and proceeds to the Bloody Tower where he picks up two sentries, and locks two oak doors at the Middle and Byward Towers.

The return route passes the dark and brooding archway of the Bloody Tower where another sentry keeps a lonely vigil. He shouts "Halt, who comes there?"

The Chief Warder replies "The Keys", to which the response is "whose keys?" "Queen Elizabeth's Keys!" "Pass Queen Elizabeth's Keys - all's well" is the final phrase, and the party disappears through the arch.

A limited number of tickets are available by post, which can be obtained by writing to the Tower of London. If you do decide to apply for tickets, try and specify at least one alternative date, as places are strictly limited.

A visit to the City should never be on a weekend if you really want to embrace the heady atmosphere of the place. A weekend will certainly be very quiet but also dull as the vast majority of wine bars, restaurants and pubs all remain closed; you'll probably find yourself wandering between looked doors through eerily silent streets.

It is a good idea to try and experience a bottle of claret or mug of ale in a city establishment. For food, try Sweetings on Queen Victoria Street. This restaurant accepts no credit cards, no bookings, opens only for lunch and seems to have barely changed since people realised the world was round.

You can eat excellent fish dishes here, which seem all the more excellent when they are washed down with a pewter tankard of Black Velvet (Guinness and champagne)! Some of the tankards have remained sturdy servants at Sweetings for well over a hundred years!

There's a whole myriad of watering holes in the city from slick and trendy bars to a heap of underground wine bars and pubs. Two companies (Balls Brothers and Davy's of London) own a large number of the wine bars, which are invariably atmospheric and Dickensian in character.

Davy's ones tend to have such names as The Chopper Lump, or The Bung Hole, which I think only landlords might know the origin of!

El Vino's is something of an institution and has a couple of ancient wine bars but I believe they insist on a jacket and tie rule.

All of these places are characterful and have fine selections of wines as well as the occasional ale.

Just off Fleet Street is the exceptional Olde Cheshire Cheese - the haunt of such literary luminaries as Dickens, Bernard Shaw and Thackeray.

For tours of the City of London click here.