This Week In London’s History
- Monday – 26 August 1985: Controversial bare-footed athlete Zola Budd breaks the world 5000m record in Crystal Palace.
- Tuesday – 27 August 1967: Brian Epstein, manager of The Beatles, is found dead in his Belgravia home. A post mortem would conclude that he died of an overdose of sleeping pills.
- Wednesday – 28 August 2003: A large power outage causes significant disruption to most South London mainline rail services and the majority of the tube network.
- Thursday – 29 August 1947: James Hunt is born in Belmont (a village in what is now the London Borough of Sutton). He would become a popular and successful racing driver, winning the F1 World Championship in 1976.
- Friday – 30 August 1797: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is born in Somers Town. She would become known, under the name Mary Shelley, for her novel 'Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'.
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
Photo by Gary Kinsman via the Londonist Flickr Pool.
