Monday Miscellanea

Dave Haste
By Dave Haste Last edited 147 months ago
Monday Miscellanea

This Week In London’s History

  • Monday19th December 1154: King Henry II of England is crowned at Westminster Abbey.
  • Tuesday20th December 1909: The distinctive Arding and Hobbs department store near Clapham Junction is destroyed by fire. Having been rebuilt, it is now a branch of Allders.
  • Wednesday21st December 1842: Pentonville Prison near Islington accepts its first prisoners.
  • Thursday22th December 1974: A bomb explodes at the Victoria home of Conservative leader and former Prime Minister Edward Heath. No-one is hurt.
  • Friday23rd December 1690: At Greenwich Royal Observatory, astronomer John Flamsteed catalogues what he believes to be a star as ‘34 Tauri’. It would later transpire that this is the first recorded sighting of the planet Uranus.

Random London Quote Of The Week

I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; — life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud; the sun shining upon houses and pavements; the print-shops, the old book-stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffeehouses, steams of soups from kitchens; the pantomimes — London itself a pantomime and a masquerade — all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand, from fullness of joy at so much life.

Charles Lamb, from a letter to William Wordsworth

Picture by Gregory Warran via the Londonist Flickr pool.

Last Updated 18 December 2011