Monday Miscellanea

A Summer Solstice special calculation on Londonist...

04:52 sunrise

21:22 sunset

16 hours, 38 minutes of daylight today

452 + 2122 + 1638 = 4,212 which is an appropriately sun-filled pub near Victoria Park, as captured by Slaminsky for the Londonist Flickr pool. It can be interpreted as a London version of Stonehenge, where Londoners can go to worship the longest evening of the year, with a pint and a packet of peanuts.

This Week In London’s History

Monday - 21st June 1887: Queen Victoria celebrates her Golden Jubilee with a procession through London that, according to Mark Twain, “stretched to the limit of sight in both directions”.

Tuesday - 22nd June 1907: The deep-level ‘Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway’ opens. It would later form part of the Northern Line. Wednesday - 23rd June 1912: Alan Turing is born in Maida Vale, West London. He would become a leading World War II cryptographer, whose techniques would be instrumental in breaking a number of German ciphers at Bletchley Park. He is considered by some to be the father of modern computer science. Thursday - 24th June 1509: A lavish double coronation takes place in Westminster Abbey, as Henry VIII and his new wife, Catherine of Aragon, are crowned. Friday - 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 would contribute to the abolition of the death penalty in the UK.

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