Photographic Panoramas - Day 1

I've just completed the first day of a two-day course in panoramic photography with City Lit. We started off by taking hand-held panoramas which we stitched in Photoshop. We were advised to avoid any foreground interest because of the problems caused by parallax error.
This is an image that I took at the junction of Kemble Street and Kean Street in Holborn:

I like the overall composition, but I'm disappointed with the blown highlights on the pavement on the right. I converted the image to black and white to tone down the effect of this. I probably made an error when metering the scene because all of the camera settings were on manual. The man on the left is Michael who is one of the people on the course.

After lunch, we were shown how to set up some of the panoramic heads designed to minimise parallax error. We then ventured out to take 360 degree panoramas, which were again stitched in Photoshop.
This was taken in St Mary's Church, Aldwych:

I'm quite pleased with this as a first attempt, and would perhaps consider bracketing next time to prevent the windows from blowing out.