This Week In London’s History
- Monday – 6th December 1983: Britain’s first heart and lung transplant operation takes place at Harefield Hospital in Uxbridge, west London. The operation goes well, but sadly the patient would die 13 days later.
- Tuesday - 7th December 1732: The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden is opened. It would later become the Royal Opera House.
- Wednesday - 8th December 1868: London’s first traffic light is positioned at the junction of Bridge Street and Great George Street in Westminster.
- Thursday - 9th December 1608: John Milton is born in Cheapside in the City of London. He would become a famous poet, best known for his poem Paradise Lost.
- Friday - 10th December 1907: Anti-vivisectionists march through central London to protest at the dissection of a brown terrier dog several years earlier. The ‘anti-doggers’ clash with police at Trafalgar Square, in what would become known as the Brown Dog Riots.
Random London Quote Of The Week
I came to London. It had become the centre of my world and I had worked hard to come to it. And I was lost. London was not the centre of my world. I had been misled; but there was nowhere else to go. It was a good place for getting lost in, a city no one ever knew, a city explored from the neutral heart outwards until, after years, it defined itself into a jumble of clearings separated by stretches of the unknown, through which the narrowest of paths had been cut.
V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness
Picture by Burningphotography, used under a Creative Commons licence.
