Monday Miscellanea

There was a lot of walking this weekend in London...

10 people walked 20 miles in 8.5 hours and raised £2,106.00 for Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres on Friday night. And on Saturday and Sunday, over 700 buildings opened up to the public for Open House Weekend. And yet more walking - on catwalks - for London Fashion Week. Foot rubs and long, hot baths are likely to continue well into this week, but lindseymclarke's photo shows the magic of seeing London at night, on foot and why it's all worthwhile.

This Week In London’s History

Monday - 20th September 2000: An anti-tank missile is fired at the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, causing minor damage to the eighth floor. The Real IRA is later blamed for the attack.

Tuesday - 21st September 1969: More than 200 policemen storm a mansion in Piccadilly, Central London, evicting a large number of squatters. Wednesday - 22nd September 1955: A new television channel, ITV, launches at a ceremony at the Guildhall. Its broadcasting initially only covers the London area, but would be spread to the other UK regions over the next seven years. Thursday - 23rd September 1939: Renowned psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, suffering from cancer, commits ‘assisted’ suicide at his home in Hampstead. Friday - 24th September 1917: A zeppelin drops a 50 kilogram bomb that lands just outside the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury. 13 people are killed and a further 26 injured.

Random London Quote Of The Week

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners - all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. I have felt these things at times so strongly that I have said - ''Ah London, you too then are impossible?'' But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life - the most complete compendium of the world.

Henry James