Victoria Summerley: Town Life

No freebies involved here, I promise - I just thought I'd mention the London Eye because anyone I've ever taken on it loved it, but it's genuinely difficult to explain to people what makes it good.

I've never quite felt the force of the argument that the country is a better place to bring up children. There appear to be no pavements, for a start, so how would they walk to school? And how do you study art or music if you can't nip into the Tate or the Festival Hall every five minutes? And what on earth do you do during a wet Easter holiday if there's no Science Museum or Natural History Museum?

I'm being facetious, of course, before you all write in extolling the virtues of living next door to industrial-scale crop spraying and hanging round the village chip shop on a Saturday night (OK, OK, pax, pax). But one of the genuine joys of living in London, especially during the school holidays, is that there are always things to do. And very often those things are the sort of things that people come from all over the world to do.

There's a lot to be said for doing touristy things in London, even if you live here. It can give you a whole new perspective, as I realised the other day when I set off with my sister and her children, who live in Oxfordshire, to have a touristy day out. Highlights of the day's itinerary, which took in St Paul's, Tate Modern and the Wobbly Bridge (as it is now indelibly nicknamed) were - as ever - the London Eye and the London Eye river cruise.

It's always difficult to explain the allure of the London Eye to people who've never been on it. You get in a capsule, you go round, you get off again. But on the way, you are completely beguiled by the strangeness of seeing the city from not just one different angle but dozens.

You can see the arch of the new Wembley stadium, for example, looking as if it's just a couple of streets away. You have to hunt for Nelson's Column, the size of a toothpick, to get an idea of just how big, and how far away, Wembley must be. You can see toy-sized trains going in and out of the back of Charing Cross station.

But it's when you get down to river level, on the tour boat, that you're conscious of how much the city is changing, how glamorous it all is - and how little, even as a native, you know about it. I never realised, for example, that Waterloo Bridge, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, who was also responsible for Battersea Power Station, was built mainly by women because it went up during the war. I never knew the founder of Harvard University, John Harvard, was baptised in Southwark Cathedral.

Indeed, Southwark Cathedral, which boasts one of the most unattractive settings of any of London's churches, looks quite romantic glimpsed from the river - especially when you've just glided past the gobsmacking Globe Theatre and your head is full of Shakespeare.

But you can also see, now you're looking through touristy eyes, that many of the ooh and aah moments on the Thames today involve modern architecture. There's Norman Foster's Gherkin and his London Assembly building, Tate Modern, the restored Oxo Tower, and of course the Eye.

Amid all these, the much-criticised, Brutalist concrete of the poor old National Theatre looks almost nostalgically cosy - just another page in London's history of architecture. And the fact that all these buildings are all vying for attention alongside centuries-old landmarks such as Westminster Abbey, St Paul's and the Tower of London only makes the trip even more magical.

I can remember going on a similar boat tour when I was around the same age as my 11-year-old niece, and drifting past what seemed like endless dreary grey corrugated-iron hoardings and disused docks. Now, as well as all the picture-postcard landmarks, the river is lined with converted warehouses and other residential edifices dripping with plants and windowboxes on their shiny glass and metal balconies.

It's easy to be snooty about all these expensive new developments. But from where I was sitting, they sure as hell improved the view - and the image of London that we present to the rest of the world.