London's Literary Southbank

It's not just the bookshops that make the Southbank so literary, though. There's The Tabard inn, which is where Chaucer's Canterbury Tales supposedly started off and then there's the White Hart Inn and the George Inn (which still exists!), both immortalised by Dickens.

Better known... the Globe Theatre. Really worth going to have a look at if you haven't already. It's difficult to imagine anything more uncomfortable but I saw Titus Andronicus by Shakespeare there and it was fantastic. Nice and gory, plus a good easy plot to follow with plenty of mad characters. Saying that, the seats made my whole body go numb... You could always go as groundlings, though, and stand around the stage. Supposedly in longer plays, like Hamlet for instance, people actually collapsed from exhaustion on a regular basis... doesn't make the seats seem any more comfortable to be honest... 

For my fellow Harry Potter fans, the famous scene of the River Thames when the Death Eaters storm London sees the Millennium Bridge and Southwark Bridge very clearly, even if they are in the wrong sequence...

Slightly less literary, but next to The Globe theatre is the Cardinal Cap House where Sir Christopher Wren lived and where the future Queen Catherine of Aragon first sheltered on her arrival in London.

The Southbank also happens to be where one of my favourite pubs is... The Old Thameside Inn... I reckon someone famous and literary went there... you know... in olden days...