T&A journalist Mike Priestley reports on his nostalgic trip to London who found some new landmarks among his old haunts...

There is a way to get around London fast: by Underground, shoving your way up and down escalators, crushing into overcrowded metal cylinders as they rocket through tunnels, avoiding all eye contact and keeping a tight grip on your pockets and handbags.

Ands there is a way to get around London interestingly if you have plenty of time: looking down on it from the top deck of a bus which will spend quite a lot of its time crawling along in traffic jams.

It's particularly helpful if this is one of the tourist buses which ply their trade around the capital, some with a recorded commentary of the sights you are passing, others with a real-life guide playing to the audience as they sit there absorbing the atmosphere of this sometimes frightening but largely wonderful city.

London Pride, for example, charge £12 for a 24-hour ticket which allows you to hop on and hop off any of their buses anywhere along their eight routes around London.

It was on one of them that I made my way in the company of assorted Americans, Japanese, Germans and a few other Brits from Russell Square to the southern end of Blackfriars Bridge, travelling at a pleasant tourist pace along Fleet Street, up past St Paul's and the Bank of England then over London Bridge to return across the magnificent Tower Bridge and cross the Thames again via Southwark Bridge.

My aim from here was to enjoy London in the best possible way of all: on foot. Many, many years ago, in 1962 as an 18-year-old Bradfordian seeking (and failing to find) fame and fortune, I had worn out quite a lot of shoe leather on the pavements of London.

It was a way of passing the spare time from the job I managed to talk my way into with a small trade magazine in Farringdon Street - a street which has the advantage of running at right angles to Fleet Street, which in those days was filled with magic as the headquarters of most of England's newspapers and major magazines.

And so, on this sentimental journey 37 years later, I revisited that street and stood outside the office block in which I used to work. It had changed. In fact, it had virtually been rebuilt. But the pub was still next door and at the other side was the takeaway where I bought a steak-and-kidney pie which nearly saw me off with food poisoning, now standing empty. Serves it right.

I wandered around the nearby streets and alleys for a while, reliving lunchtimes when women in the office who took motherly pity on this oik from the North used to invite me to join them in various teashops and cafes for Welsh rarebit or sausage and mash.

Then I headed down through the lanes and alleys behind Fleet Street and chanced upon a place I'd somehow never come across during my wanderings: Dr Johnson's house, with a modern statue of a cat in the square in front of it.

Meandering further, I crossed Fleet Street and headed through the Temples, home to countless lawyers in buildings set around glorious squares, on my way to the Embankment.

I walked up-river towards Westminster Bridge, sticking to the gardens which run between the buildings and the traffic-packed road - tranquil places inhabited at this time of day by a mixture of tourists resting from their sightseeing and tramps surrounded by their black bin bags.

In one of these gardens I was surprised to come across an old friend, a statue of that pioneer of education W E Forster, who gave his name to Bradford's Forster Square where he is celebrated with another statue.

My destination was the pavement across the road from the Embankment tube station, in sight of that splendid new landmark the Millennium Wheel, where I was due to meet the other members of the press party who had been invited to London with the particular purpose of visiting the Millennium Dome.

We had gone there the previous afternoon. Now we were sightseeing after an evening spent walking from our hotel near the British Museum down through the vibrant tourist honey-pot of Covent Garden to the Adelphi theatre in the Strand to see Chicago.

Our meal before that outing had been in the carvery of the Kenilworth Hotel - another blast from the past for me, for it was at that same hotel at the age of 13, 42 years earlier, that I had stayed when I escorted my widowed grandmother on a coach trip to London, the solitary youngster among a party of Bradford pensioners who taught me a valuable lesson - that old people can be great company.

It had changed a bit. But haven't we all?

Rendezvous on this 1999 autumn day was on the Symphony, a glass-roofed, glass-sided boat which takes passengers on classy lunchtime and dinner cruises between Embankment and Westminster Bridge and Tower Bridge or as far down-river as within sight of the Dome in the evenings (other cruises from other companies run beyond the Dome to the Thames Barrier from Westminster Bridge but don't offer the same culinary delights).

Between mouthfuls, we were able to take in the giant wheel that had initially proved such a trouble to raise to its full height, the restored Globe Theatre and, in fact, much of the history of this city which grew up along its river.

"Once London has got into your blood, it never lets you go," a wise old man who used to look after the post at the offices in Farringdon Street told me back in 1962. He was right.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.