London’s cultural scene combines the assurance of long-standing tradition with the verve of regained creativity. The sheer breadth of cultural activities on offer in the capital is breathtaking, with over 150 theaters and 300 art galleries. Contemporary figures like Tracy Emin and Zadie Smith complement the rich heritage of Turner and Shakespeare.

The hulking concrete mass of the South Bank Center, South Bank, SE1 , is one of the city’s cultural Meccas. It houses theHayward Gallery and three concert halls - the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. Next door is the flagship Royal National Theater, South Bank, SE1 . Flying the cultural flag north of the river, the labyrinthine Barbican Center, Silk Street, EC2 , is an all-inclusive performing and visual arts venue with a varied all-year program of events.

London Tourist Board’s Visitor Call service and the weekly Time Out magazineprovide details of the week’s entertainment. Ticket agencies include First Call Ticketing and Ticketmaster UK .

Music: The world-famous Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, WC2 , is home to the excellent Royal Opera. However, despite some attempts to cut the price, ballet and opera tickets are still often fairly expensive. More accessible are performances by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum, St Martin’s Lane, WC2 .

Large-scale concerts are staged at the Royal Festival Hall (see above), home of the London Philharmonic Orchestra , or the Barbican , home of the London Symphony Orchestra . The Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, SW7 , can also stage huge concerts, including London’s annual musical highlight, the summer series of the Proms.

Music connoisseurs should head for the traditional but friendly surroundings of the Wigmore Hall, 36 Wigmore Street, W1 , to hear impeccable chamber music and solo recitals. More informal concerts take place in halls and churches all over the capital, including St Martin-in-the-Fields , St John’s, Smith Square, SW1, and St James’s, Piccadilly, W1.

Theater: Within the extraordinary diversity of London’s theater scene (there are over 100 theaters in the capital, including 50 in the West End), the Royal National Theater and the Royal Shakespeare Company compete for audiences with commercial West End theaters, repertory companies, ‘off-West End’ productions and fringe theaters. The National Theater’s three auditoria - The Olivier, The Cottesloe and The Lyttleton - allow productions of different scale, from classics to new writing. The Royal Shakespeare Company, performing primarily Shakespeare and based out of Stratford-upon-Avon, did use the Barbican as its London home but will now perform in a range of venues including the Barbican.

The Old Vic, The Cut, Waterloo, SE1 , offers inspired traditional drama. Meanwhile, down the road, at 66 The Cut, the Young Vic presents modern productions of contemporary and classic plays. The Royal Court Theater, Sloane Square, SW1 , continues to foster excellent new writing.

Quality innovative productions can also be expected from ‘off-West End’ theaters, such as the Donmar Warehouse, Earlham Street, WC2 , and the Almeida, Almeida Street, N1 . Fringe theater, ranging from the inspired to the insane, is performed in dozens of local venues, including the King’s Head, 115 Upper Street, N1 , which is the oldest pub-theater in London, and the Finborough Theater, 118 Finborough Road, SW10 .

From May to September, the Globe Theater, New Globe Walk, SE1 , stages open-air productions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. There are also outdoor summer performances at the Open Air Theater in Regents Park, NW1.

Theater tickets in the West End cost £15-40. They can be purchased in advance from the theater box office. Alternatively, for purchases on the day of the performance, there is a booth on the south side of Leicester Square, formerly called the Half-Price Theater Ticket Booth, now called tkts . It is open Mon-Sat 1000-1900 and Sun 1200-1500. This is the official Society of London Theater’s booth; visitors should avoid touts and other outlets in the area. The booth sells mainly half-price tickets, although some tickets at 25% discount and some full-price tickets. Because of the booking fee, when only full-price tickets are available for that night’s performance, visitors are advised to go to the actual theater box office. There is also a new tkts outlet in Canary Wharf DLR Station (platform 4/5), open Mon-Sat 1130-1800.

Dance: Touring dance companies perform mostly contemporary dance at the Sadler’s Wells Theater, Rosebery Avenue, EC1 . Ticket prices are usually more reasonable than at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, WC2 , which is home to the Royal Ballet .

Film: Local cinemas are less expensive than those in the West End, where tickets cost approximately £10. Two main cinema chains are Odeon and Vue (formerly Warner) , with venues all over London, their biggest in Leicester Square, WC2. Barbican Screen, Silk Street, EC2 , is London’s leading independent cinema showing independent, arthouse and blockbuster movies, along with the National Film Theater, on the South Bank, SE1 . IMAX magic can be experienced at the largest cinema screen in the UK, the new BFI London IMAX Cinema, South Bank, SE1 .

The Ealing Studios in west London presented English eccentricity and black humor in a distinctive London setting in the ‘Ealing Comedies’, such as Passport to Pimlico (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955). Before the war, Alfred Hitchcock established his reputation at Elstree Film Studios, with London-based thrillers such as The 39 Steps (1935), featuring Richard Hannay (Robert Donat) hanging precariously from the clock face of Big Ben. Recently, Sliding Doors (1997), Shakespeare in Love (1998) and Notting Hill (1998) have achieved huge success by combining a London setting with the box-office draw of Hollywood stars. The compelling gangster face of East End London has also been portrayed in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and Snatch (2000). Less blockbuster, more critically acclaimed, London has been portrayed in Blow Up (1966), Mona Lisa (1986) and Wonderland (1999). The most recent movies shot in the capital include Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001), Dirty Pretty Things (2002), About a Boy (2002), 28 Days (2002), Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Love, actually (2003).

Cultural Events: New Year revelry (sometimes of the unruly and even violent sort) has long been a London tradition, with the focus on an overcrowded Trafalgar Square. A few weeks later, Lion Dancers welcome in the Chinese New Year in Chinatown, WC2. July brings the fun and festivities of the Coin Street Festival at Gabriel’s Wharf, SE1, the arts extravaganza that is the Greenwich and Docklands Festival and a chance for the city’s gay and lesbian population to strut their stuff in the Mardi Gras parade and festival. The Notting Hill Carnival (a two-day celebration of Afro-Caribbean culture during the August Bank Holiday weekend) is Europe’s largest street carnival, attended by over two million people. More sedate events include the Trooping the Color, celebrating the Queen’s official birthday in June, and the impressive Lord Mayor’s Show in November, which is a colorful display of the long-standing independence of the City of London. November also sees the two-week London Film Festival .

Summer brings the hugely popular music festival known as the Proms, with concerts running from July to September. Tickets for these BBC Promenade Concerts (website: www.bbc.co.uk/proms) start from £4 (non-seated) and the Last Night, led by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (website: www.bbc.co.uk/orchestras/so), is one of the few occasions when unabashed patriotism is the order of the day. Summer also brings many other music festivals, including the City of London Festival (website: www.colf.org), outdoor performances running from June to July in the gardens of Kenwood House, on Hampstead Heath, NW3 , and outdoor opera at Holland Park theater , from June to August.

Literary Notes: London has sheltered and inspired writers for centuries. Bunhill Fields’ graveyard has monuments to John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and William Blake. Bloomsbury gave its name to a literary set that included Virginia Woolf, while the leafy suburb of Hampstead was once home to John Keats, H G Wells and D H Lawrence. Some of the country’s most famous writers are commemorated in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The seething mass of 19th-century London life (and its legendary fog) is vividly recreated in the novels of Charles Dickens. Sinister goings-on in the capital surface in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stephenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Secret Agent (1923) by Joseph Conrad. Graham Greene captured the unique atmosphere of wartime London in The Ministry of Fear (1943).

More recently, Martin Amis’ London Fields (1989), a depressing portrait of a London in pre-millennial decline, Chris Petit’s Robinson (1993), which delves deep into Soho life, Tobias Hill’s Underground (1999), a poetic murder mystery woven around the Tube, Jake Arnott’s The Long Firm (1999), set in the London underworld of the 1960s, and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) a tale of life in multicultural London, have added their names to the rich London literary canon. A lively and impressively detailed history of London that captures the essence of the city’s spirit is Peter Akroyd’s London: A Biography (2000). If you are into travel writing with a twist, try Tim Moore’s Do Not Pass Go (2002), a travelogue of one man’s journey around the Monopoly board and an epic history of London’s progress since the lauch of this very popular game. Also worth mentioning is Brick Lane, by newcomer Monica Ali (2003), a moving account of a young woman’s journey from her native Bangladesh to the East End of London.

Sport:

London will be hosting the Olympic Games in 2012, and the city is already getting ready for this momentous event, which will see the best athletes in the world converge on the capital for two weeks of sporting extravanganza.

The most famous sporting events in the capital are the London Marathon (website: www.london-marathon.co.uk) in April and the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, Church Road, Wimbledon, SW19 in June and July. Just outside London, Ascot Racecourse, Ascot, Berkshire and Epsom Downs Racecourse, Epsom Downs, Surrey host Royal Ascot and The Derby, both held in June.

Most Londoners are fanatical about football and the FA Cup Final in May was always held at Wembley Stadium. However, the famous Towers have been demolished and work has begun on a new national stadium. The FA Cup Final will be held in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff in the interim, until Wembley re-opens in May 2006. An impressive feature of the London skyline, the new Wembley Stadium is taking shape. Standing 133 meters above the central concourse, the controversial arch provides a striking landmark for the 90,000 seat stadium which will be the biggest in the world.

Support for one of London’s several Premiership football clubs divides the city. Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur are based in north London and are keen rivals, while Chelsea and Fulham are based in the southwest of the city. West Ham United has a loyal following in the east, while Charlton Athletic represents the Premiership in the southeast of the city. Arsenal (also known as ‘The Gunners’) were Premiership champions in 2003-2004, and in 2004 broke Nottingham Forest’s record of 42 matches without a loss (set over two seasons between 1977 and 1979). Rivals Chelsea, however, won the Premier League in 2004-2005.

National and international Rugby Union is based at Twickenham. Successful local clubs include Harlequins , Wasps , Saracens and London Irish. Rugby has been growing in popularity since England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003, beating Australia 20-17 with a breathtaking drop goal by Jonny Wilkinson just 26 seconds from the end of a thrilling final in Sydney.

The home of cricket’s governing body, the Marylebone Cricket Club - MCC , founded in 1787, is Lord’s, St John’s Wood Road, NW8 , which also hosts league, cup and International Test matches. Major athletic events in London take place at Crystal Palace National Sports Center, Ledrington Road, SE19 .

Tickets to major sporting events can be purchased through Ticketmaster UK .

Fitness Centers: Public fitness centers where it is not necessary for one to be a member include Chelsea Sports Center, Chelsea Manor Street, SW3), and the massive Oasis Center, 32 Endell Street, WC2 , situated right in the heart of the West End.

Golf: Regent’s Park Golf and Tennis School, Outer Circle, Regent’s Park, NW1, offers professional lessons, as well as driving practice. The English Golf Union have information on many of the capital’s golf courses.

Swimming: Seasonal open-air swimming pools include Brockwell Lido, SW9 , and Parliament Hill Lido, Hampstead Heath, NW3 . The Oasis Center has an indoor as well as an outdoor pool and is open year round.

Tennis: Outdoor public courts are available at Regent’s Park, NW1 , and at Islington Tennis Center, Market Road, N7 , which also has indoor courts.

Watersports: Sailing tuition is offered at Docklands Sailing and Watersports Center, Millwall Dock, 235A Westferry Road, E14.