What's on - London

Love/hate relationship with London - top 10

There are hundreds and thousands of things I love about London, but our cosmopolitan capital often appears to hold both the best and the worst of what the wide world has to offer. So here are 10 dark, dim and dismal things I really hate about the big bright city.

1 - Tate Modern: The power-station turned art power-house beside the Thames may attract more than five million visitors a year and be our biggest tourist attraction after Blackpool pleasure beach. But it makes me feel ill. True, I like the fact that it's free and that I can simply take the lift to the top-floor café for one of the best views over London, but as a place for enjoying modern art - or any art - it's appalling. The pictures are hung senselessly and, given the dire lighting, almost invisibly. The building may be vast, but inside there is so very little to see. And toiling up that epic slope in the basement at the end of a winter's afternoon, with the riverside entrances shutting early, I feel as if I am walking straight into the jaws of Hell.

2 - London Dungeon: Any queue is a cue for me to keep well away. And it's hard to believe that the long lines of people on the pavement below London Bridge station are shuffling towards being fleeced of large amounts of money to view sick and sordid re-creations of the gore of history. Welcome to our very own All the Fun of Torture museum. I mean, you're welcome to it.

3 - Oxford Street: Oh the clamour and the crush and the rush to… get away from this street of shopping nightmares as quickly as possible.

4 - Madame Tussauds: Since many of our current celebrities are evidently made of wax, with bland and expressionless coverings over great wads of cardboard in place of brains, why would we want to see their (un)likenesses in, er, wax? Plus, there is another queue and another huge cost here. Far better is the unhyped museum below Westminster Abbey with uncanny funeral effigies of many British monarchs, plus our very own Admiral Lord Nelson. The head of Henry VII is absolutely unforgettable.

5 - Weekend transport: If you are coming to London on a Saturday or a Sunday you can virtually guarantee that any trip across the capital by Tube or train will be disrupted by engineering works. Phone 020 7222 1234 before setting out to find that particular combination of chaos that awaits you from this ongoing programme of 'improvements'. (What we used to call 'repairs'.)

6 - Livingstone's buses: Claiming he was 'investing' in public transport, former mayor of London Ken Livingstone blithely and cynically made a manifesto pledge to save our beloved Routemasters. Instead, at vast cost, he promptly drove them off the roads. The bendy mayor gave us bendy buses, above, and blasted new double-deckers - the common theme being that passengers are now imprisoned between stops (and even then distracted, and occasionally demented, drivers may decide not to let us off). So we sit fuming in traffic congestion and the frustration of imprisonment is doubtless a factor in the appalling tide of violence on these conductorless buses. Current mayor Boris Johnson is all set to bring in a new fleet of Routemasters. Meanwhile I'm avoiding London buses like the plague.

7 - Crime: London is now the crime capital of Europe so be wary. Street crime abounds - at Marble Arch last week I was pestered by a Romanian gipsy brandishing a sedated infant and demanding money. When I shook my head she said: “I hope you die.” The Metropolitan Police now decline even to investigate the majority of reported crimes in the metropolis. So why, then, bother to report most forms of offence unless you need to do so for an insurance claim? Police inertia and incompetence are the main reasons why recorded crime is falling. Safer and more peaceful we are not.

8 - 2012 Olympics: Expect more and more problems in the months and years ahead from this enormous white elephant, running rampage across swathes of East London and beyond - pictured above the stadium for the 2012 London Olympics starts to take shape in Stratford - and causing cuts in arts budgets all over the country. In 1948 we staged the Austerity Games and, after the endless choreographed displays from Beijing which to me were more chilling than thrilling, that is exactly what we should do again. The focus should be on the sport alone and let's skip the pricey parade of national chauvinism.

9 - Westminster Abbey: Well, I love it, of course. But a building so crucial to our history for more than a thousand years, and on ongoing place of worship, should not have to charge for admission.

10 St Paul's Cathedral: See above.