This Week In London’s History
- Monday – 16 September 1977: Iconic glam rock musician Marc Bolan dies in a car accident in Barnes, southwest London.
- Tuesday – 17 September 1961: Police arrest more then a thousand demonstrators at a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) protest in Trafalgar Square. Bertrand Russell is amongst those arrested.
- Wednesday – 18 September 1970: Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is found dead in his basement flat in Notting Hill, west London. A subsequent inquest records an open verdict on his death, noting that he drank wine and took nine sleeping pills the previous night, and indicating that he may have misjudged the pills’ potency.
- Thursday – 19 September 1997: Six people die as a high-speed Intercity 125 train collides with a freight train in Southall, north London. An inquiry would find that the driver missed two warning signals, and that the train’s two safety systems that could have averted the accident were inoperative.
- Friday – 20 September 2000: An anti-tank missile is fired at the MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross, causing minor damage to the eighth floor. The Real IRA is later blamed for the attack.
Random London Quote Of The Week
It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. I have felt these things at times so strongly that I have said – "Ah London, you too then are impossible?" But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; as one who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world.
Henry James
Photo by roll the dice via the Londonist Flickr Pool.
