- Monday – 20th February 1913: Two suffragettes set fire to the tea pavilion at Kew Gardens at around 3am, destroying it completely.
- Tuesday – 21st February 1946: Alan Rickman is born in Hammersmith. He would become a multi-award-winning film, television and stage actor.
- Wednesday – 22nd February 1807: A huge crowd gathers outside Newgate Prison to witness the hanging of convicted murderers John Holloway and Owen Haggerty. In the crush and chaos, as many as one hundred people are killed through trampling or suffocation.
- Thursday – 23rd February 1633: Samuel Pepys is born in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street. His detailed private diary from the 1660s would become well-known when published in the 19th century.
- Friday – 24th February 1987: The London Daily News, a newspaper owned by Robert Maxwell, is launched. Intended to rival the Evening Standard, it would collapse just five months later.
Random London Quote Of The Week
London is enchanting. I step out upon a tawny coloured magic carpet, it seems, and get carried into beauty without raising a finger. The nights are amazing, with all the white porticoes and broad silent avenues. And people pop in and out, lightly, divertingly like rabbits; and I look down Southampton Row, wet as a seal's back or red and yellow with sunshine, and watch the omnibus going and coming, and hear the old crazy organs. One of these days I will write about London, and how it takes up the private life and carries it on, without any effort.
Virginia Woolf
Picture by Duncan Harris via the Londonist Flickr Pool.
