This Week In London’s History Monday – 14th January 1437: The Great Stone Gate at the south side of London Bridge collapses, taking down two bridge arches and several houses with it. Tuesday – 15th January 1867: The ice on Regent’s Park Lake gives way while hundreds of people are skating on it. Dozens drown. Wednesday – 16th January 1599: Poet Laureate Edmund Spenser is buried in Westminster. His coffin is borne by other......

9. London Leviathans In 2006 many onlookers marvelled at the appearance of a bottlenose whale that became stranded in the Thames – the first recorded sighting of such an animal since 1913. However during the summer of 1658 another whale turned up at Greenwich; unfortunately the creature had been struck with a harping iron out at sea, become weakened and died. In a newsletter written by a John Barber to the Viscount Scudamore, dated......

We are the people who live in London. Some of us are born here and some of us will die here. Some of us have been here forever and some came here yesterday. Some of us will stay forever, like it or not. We have been those people for nearly 2000 years and our consciousness has shaped our environment from our gardens to Parliament, from our market stalls to the London Eye. The way......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 25th June 1953: John Christie is sentenced to death for the murder of his wife, whose body was found with several others hidden beneath the floorboards of his house in Notting Hill, West London. His conviction casts serious doubts on a previous murder trial that resulted in the conviction and execution of his fellow tenant Timothy Evans, who would be posthumously pardoned in 1966. The resulting controversy......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 30th April 1999: “London nailbomber” David Copeland plants his last bomb, in the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho. Three people are killed and dozens are injured. Tuesday – 1st May 2000: The May Day anti-capitalism protests bring mass violence and vandalism to central London. On the same day one year later, police detain thousands of protesters and unwitting bystanders in Oxford Circus for about 6 hours. Wednesday......

This Day In London’s History 1961: Rioting outside the Belgian embassy as demonstrators protest against the killing of Patrice Lumumba, ex Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the summer of 1960, Patrice Lumumba was elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, becoming the country’s first democratically elected leader after it gained independence from Belgian colonial rule. However his brief rule over the troubled country was hardly plain-sailing......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com Event of the Week Opening of the new Time Galleries at Royal Greenwich Observatory At Londonist, we rarely find ourselves with time on our hands. Not so, the Greenwich Observatory, where making time is their business. The hilltop attraction has been drawing in temporal tourists for centuries, and forms......

We’re really not liking the sound of this one. Reports out today suggest that all those statues and sculptures that have gone missing lately may be the work of one gang. And, not content with nicking lesser-known suburban art, they now have their sights set on landmark statues. Specifically, ‘Eros’. The Piccadilly Square monument was identified by police as the possible next target. Despite its prominent location, it would be relatively easy to wrench......