Monday Miscellanea

Due to earlier technical vexations of a non-Stratford-related variety, Monday Miscellanea is a bit later than usual today...

This Week In London’s History

Monday – 12th November 1974: A 9lb salmon is caught in the Thames – the first time that such a fish has been caught in the dirty old river since 1834 – and sent to the British Museum for identification. Improvements in the water quality are hailed.

Tuesday – 13th November 1642: During the First English Civil War, the Royalist and Parliamentary armies face off against each other in the Battle of Turnham Green. Wednesday – 14th November 1973: Princess Anne marries Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey… Thursday – 15th November 1977: … and four years later gives birth to their first child, Peter Mark Andrew Phillips, at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. Friday – 16th November 1961: Franklin Roy Bruno is born at Hammersmith Hospital. He would become a successful boxer, winning the WBC Heavyweight championship, as well as a pantomime ‘celebrity’.

Random London Fact Of The Week

As we may have mentioned before, during the 1960s craze of demolishing iconic architecture in favour of ugly concrete eyesores, there was a jaw-droppingly appalling plan to destroy the magnificent neo-gothic façade of St Pancras Chambers.

Fortunately this idiocy was halted at the last moment, largely as a result of a campaign led by poet laureate John Betjeman. Were it not for his intervention, we suspect that we would have written many fewer articles about how much we like this splendid building.

As Betjeman put it:

What [the Londoner] sees in his mind's eye is that cluster of towers and pinnacles seen from Pentonville Hill and outlined against a foggy sunset, and the great arc of Barlow's train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic of the hotel seen from gloomy Judd Street.

London’s Weather This Week

If you haven’t done so already, now would be a good time to dig out your winter coat. You might also want to make sure you know where your umbrella is sometime around the middle of the week.

Picture taken from grytr’s Flickr photostream under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 licence.