Uptown Girls and backstreet boys,  West End Girls and East End boys.  These are the  Romeo-and-Juliet anthems of pop music

The Pet Shop Boys’ 80s synthopop song is a TS Elliot inspired tapestry of London imaginings;  where ‘the smoke’ is a waste land of dive bars (a pub in China Town) whispering voices, and faces on posters.

Just the kind of place an urban cowboy should ride though. That is what journalist and colleague ShandyPockets did, turning London’s urban beats into a country stroll. 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrReb0m1LNw

Alice in Wonderland.

As well as being a favorite place for Harry Potter Tours, a visit to Christchurch is part of an Alice in Wonderland tour.   On my tour we will see  picture Dean Liddell, head of College and the real Alice's father.   

When Alice was a child, there was no west entrance to the cathedral, so the Dean had to leave the deanery, walk along the Quad, round the cloisters and into the cathedral . The Dean was notorious for being late for services. Some say this was the inspiration for the White Rabbit.

The bells in the cathedral tower were unsafe so the Dean decided to remove them into a wooden shed. Charles Dodgson – or Lewis Carroll we know him - the author of the Alice book, compared the shed to a tea-chest, which we see in the books.

The Alice window in the hall features Dean Liddell’s name and family arms.

One of the most charming windows in the hall features the Queen and Duchess, White Rabbit and Mad hatter, March Hare and Mock Turtle, Knave of Hearts and Footman.

We will also see a fine portrait of Charles Dodgson – Lewis Carroll himself.

Join Marc Zakian for an Oxford tour with Alice In Wonderland.

It was a baby’s foot:   literally a slice of life from the 17th century. Floating in liquid and preserved in a jar, the infant limb is one of thousands of anatomical exhibits in the London’s Hunterian Museum.

The nameless baby was a victim of the smallpox – one of the relentless infectious diseases which ravaged the big cities.  After death, the child's foot became part of one of the oldest anatomical collections in the world – part of the burgeoning interest in documenting the workings of the human body.

If Damien Hirst opened a museum it would look like the Huntarian; arrays of shiny surgical glass jars line ultra-modern cases.  The meeting of flesh and bone with high-tech lets the visitor to observe rather than gawp. But behind the clinical cool of emerging modern medicine, lurks the macabre theatricals of the grave robbers and anatomy shows.

John Hunter, the 18th century surgeon who founded the collection, was one of the anatomists who benefited from the resurrectionists; grave robbers who would plunder graveyards for fresh corpses to sell to the surgeons and anatomisers.  On show is the truncheon used to fend off the families of hanged criminals trying to stop their relative’s remains being delivered to the dissecting table.

And then there’s the stuff Londoners flocked to see: the skeleton of the giant Charles Byrne who stood  seven feet and seven inches.  Hunter bought the skeleton for £130.  The cabinet of body parts devastated by the effects of syphilis -  a gruesome showcase that would  have fuelled many a Victorian moralist.

But beyond medical show-business, is the history of surgery:  the hellish pain of operations without anaesthetic;  the life-saving work of  Joseph Lister;  the pioneering of plastic surgery to treat First World War traumas; and the delicate magic of key-hole operations.

It’s a meeting with mortality which shocks and awes in the right way – letting us in on  the miracle of human life.

I am in sitting the attic where the English language was defined.  Where 40,000 words were identified, described and ordered by Dr Samuel Johnson, the author of first modern dictionary of the English language.  

When Johnson set to work in his Georgian house off Fleet Street  Italy had a dictionary,  and the French had produced their  dictionnaire in 1694.  We were later starters  -  Johnson’s dictionary was published after eight years of hard lexographic labour  in 1755.

Our dictionary was a home made effort - a great British compromise.  Poorly funded and short staffed (Johnson could only afford six helpers)  it was, like the English language itself,  a happy coincidence.  Fortunately for us the man the helm was the 18^th century’s greatest wordsmith.

Johnson’s house in Gough Square gives us the feel of the man;  covered with paintings of his circle, including his best friend the portrait artist Joshua Reynolds and the leader of the intellectual Bluestocking movement Elizabeth Montagu.  But it is the lesser lights that give us a real insight into his character:   Francis Barber, a freed Jamaican slave,  became Johnson’s trusted servant - the writer left his entire estate to him;  and then there is the collection of impoverished relatives and down-on-their-fortune acquaintances  who Johnson opened his house to.

On the library table an edition his work is open to browse.  The two volumes are an extraordinary achievement, with Johnson reading the entire literary canon in his search to define the English language.

But the joy of the dictionary is Johnson’s personality.   His definition of lexographer: ‘a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the significance of words’.

This year marks two-hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth.  We should celebrate it in two ways;  firstly by visiting his London house, supporting the preservation of one of the few grand Georgian houses still standing in the City of London. And secondly by reviving some of the words Johnson defined.

I have been urging people to bring back Fopdoodle (a fool; an insignificant wretch).  Episodes of Eastenders would be much less monotonous if they replaced the usual pseudo-mockney clichés with the best of Dr Johnson - how about hearing Dandiprat (an urchin) and  Jobbernowl (A blockhead) in Albert Square.

And given that Johnson’s house is now in the heart of the City of London, surrounded by the Hedge Funds and Merchant Banks,   what better moment than in these credit-crunched times to revive stockjobber – ‘a low wretch who gets money by buying and selling shares’. 

If you want to hear more about Dr Johnson, come to the National Portrait Gallery on the 28^th of March at 3pm.

It was the lure of the Spanish torture chair which made me cross the river to deepest south east London. It is one of the highlights of the Horniman Museum, a place which actually does deserve the overworn accolade hidden gem. 

Behind the honey coloured limestone façade, is a Victorian antiquary’s bequest reinvented for the 21st century. Here familiar natural history glass cases of stuffed animals are reinterpreted with information about diminishing habitat and evolution - Mr Darwin, who lived in the nearby Down House, would have been delighted.

My favorite label explained the origins of the idiom stool-pigeon. Before billions of carrier pigeons were hunted to extinction on he United States, live ones would be tied to a stool where their calls would attract others to come into the frenzied marksmen’s range.

The music gallery does everything a modern museum should; antique and modern instruments sparkle and intrigue in a high-tech display, with each one explained and brought to phonic life on the interactive screens. Now I know what a hurdy-gurdy looks and sounds like.

But the hidden gem’s hidden gem is the aquarium in the basement, where a sea-world of languid anemones, lapis-blue poison frogs and a hypnotic tank of pulsating jellyfish are an antidote to London’s winter weather.  

The museum park is perfectly kept, and from its little hill I could see the City of London skyline to the north, and the Kent Downs to the South. If this were in a more fashionable part of London, you’d never hear the end of it from the locals. Down in SE 23 they are keeping quiet, they want it for themselves and who can blame them. Every neighbourhood should have a house of wonders like this.