Tag: london

Croydon Airport Visitor Centre

Oops, I did it again. At Croydon Airport Visitor Centre

Madness is booking myself on another guided tour at another obscure London tourist attraction, run by retired volunteers and expect not to be bored to within an inch of my life.

Still, this is exactly what I did, when, after last month’s Crossness Pumping Station experience, I thought that a good way to spend the first Sunday of 2026 was to book a fun family day out at the Croydon Airport Visitor Centre in Purley Way.

To be fair, Croydon Airport did pop up in an after dinner conversation a couple of days before, and somebody did show more than a fleeting interest in the topic, although I will never know whether it was genuine, or because he is a perfectly well-mannered polite person, but anyway. I did look it up and Google said it was only open to visitors once a month on the first Sunday of each month, and it also said the tour would take about 45 minutes, and it sounded reasonable and it was only 20 minutes drive and we had no other plans, so we went.

Croydon Airport has the potential of making Croydonians proud of their history. As you are not likely to hear, ‘I am from Croydon and proud’, many times in your lifetime, this is not something to be sneezed at.

Croydon Airport boasts the world’s first air control tower, and it claims its place in history as London’s first commercial flights airport.

The airport was operational on its current Purley Way site between 1928 and 1959, when its conceded defeat to Heathrow. Apparently something to do with grassy fields around Croydon which did not make good runways, as opposed to concrete runways at Heathrow. The last airplane to take off from Croydon flew to Rotterdam. Yes, I did listen to some of it.

The place is interesting, the nostalgic spirit of yesteryear air travel becomes a palpable reality in the many rooms we went through.

Dress code rules for air travel were intriguing, the fact that the passengers were being weighed in before the flight was amusing. I was happy to learn about Amy Johnson’s solo flights and that it took 19 days to fly to Australia.

I am glad I saw it, but, My Dear Newly Born Baby Jesus, the tour did not half drag on!

Two hours! Two hours of technical detail after technical detail, information on propellers, re-fuelling, runway rules, history of airline name changes, as well as going over each map and diagram on each wall, the whole shebang.

My daughter and I would have been happy to see the artefacts, read the signs and notices, or not, and be out and inside Costa Coffee across the road within the promised 45 minutes.

Unfortunately, sneaking out early was not really an option, as the air control tower, arguably the most exciting part of the tour, was left to the end.

When it was all over, I was ready to apologise to my companions for the length of the tour, but curiously, the men in our group claimed they had found it fascinating and not at all too long. They must be the most well-mannered, most polite men in Croydon.

How to do the London NYE fireworks, by a newly qualified expert

When I told my friends that his year I was going to watch the London New Year’s Eve fireworks not from the safety and the comfort of my sofa but from the banks of the river Thames, they were concerned for my sanity.

One friend even sent me a compelling TikTok reel from a previous year’s disgruntled NYE reveller, in which he called the experience a fing sht, never to be repeated.

To be fair to him, he paid £45 for his ticket, so he was possibly justified in his discontent with a spot behind a row of portaloos behind the London Eye.

Not easily discouraged, and reluctant to change plans once we’ve made them, we went anyway.

It was great!

We did not buy tickets.

We did not camp out by the river from early afternoon.

We did not heed the ubiquitous online advice to leave the car at home.

We drove right into the eye of the storm, and parked a few minutes’ walk from Lambeth Bridge. As I am still buzzing from the night before, I am happy to share my parking slot here, even though one of you is now probably going to take it from me next year. Whitgift Street, free weekday parking from 6.30pm, yards from the NYE road closures.

We got there at 10pm. We walked up to the river and we inititially made a mistake of turning towards the London Eye. We soon noticed that everybody else was heading in the opposite direction, so we turned round and followed the crowd. We walked briskly back towards Lambeth Bridge, but we missed our chance to get on it by a few minutes. The police tannoy announced that the Bridge was now closed and would not reopen before midnight.

We kept walking away from the London Eye, with a new plan to get onto Vauxhall Bridge, which was still open.

In the end we abandoned that idea and settled on a spot half way between the two bridges. It was perfect.
We had less than an hour to wait now, and we spent it chatting, laughing, glancing at the river, checking phones and watches.

From where we stood, the fireworks did not disappoint. Since we had a sideway view of the London Eye, we missed the Wicked 2 product placement entirely, so we had no reason to be ‘outraged’ by it, unlike, allegedly, thousands of ticket-holders watching it face on from the North side of the river.

After the last blasts of the display went down in smoke, an unexpected exhilarating event broke up next to us, as small crowds of Asian men performed energetic dances to music.

The six of us provided momentary entertainment to a nearby group of tourists too, when we linked hands and sang auld lang syne at the top of our voices.

After that it was time to head home and that was the only time we experienced the tiniest teeny little glitch in our otherwise perfect night. We got stuck in back roads traffic for a very long time, which meant that the 6.5 mile journey home took nearly two hours. But we are not here to sweat the small stuff.
We got home at 2.40am and ended the night with Morley’s chicken and chips.

Happy New 2026 to all my Friends and Family!