It’s brilliant, you can’t ever get bored of London ‘cos even if you live here for like a hundred and fifty years you still won’t ever know everything about it. There’s always something new. Like, you’re walking round somewhere you’ve known since you was born and you look up and there’s an old clock on the side of a building you never seen before, or there’s a little gargoyley face over a window or something.
Richard Rider, No Beginning, No End
On 22 February 1864, the last mass execution of condemned men outside Newgate jail took place. Found guilty of the murder of the captain of the ship Flowery Land Messrs. Blanco, Leone, Duranno, Lopez and Watts were hanged. The people of London would have to find their entertainment elsewhere in future and not before time, with the event almost as dangerous for spectators as the condemned – see below.
On 22 February 1907 London’s first taxi cabs with meters began operating in the capital to ensure overcharging did not occur
On 22 February 1807 40,000 watched Owen Haggerty and John Holloway be hanged outside Newgate in a panic more than 30 were trampled to death
The OXO tower restaurant has 3 windows advertising the iconic cube. Put up to avoid the ban in 1930 of advertising on the side of buildings
When one drinks a glass of London tapwater it has typically already passed through nine other people, just where it goes after you is a matter for speculation
On 22 February 1913 Suffragette Ella Stevenson arrested by Detectives Pride and Cock for placing dangerous substances in a letterbox
Dr Samuel Johnson once owned 17 properties in London, only one of which survives – Dr Johnson’s Memorial House in Gough Square
The world’s first plate-glass shop window was installed in 1801 by men’s outfitter Francis Place at 16 Charing Cross Road
Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum has possibly the largest collection of tennis-related artefacts in the world, including ‘The Whites of Wimbledon’ the changing styles of Wimbledon outfits and tennis fashion
The Corporation of Coachmen – London’s black cabs predecessor first secured a charter from Cromwell to ply for hire within London in 1639
Twining Teas opened 1707 on the Strand sold tea to Queen Anne and is the oldest business in Britain operating from their original premises
London’s oldest petrol station was the Village Green, Bloomsbury which opened in 1926, built for The Duke of Bedford on his London Estate
Trivial Matter: London in 140 characters is taken from the daily Twitter feed @cabbieblog.
A guide to the symbols used here and source material can be found on the Trivial Matter page.
For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.
In 1971 three men sat down and decided to open a coffee supply company in Seattle which within 40 years would become the largest coffeehouse company in the world.
Their choice of name would be prophetic for they chose a fictional seafarer. Their first favoured name was Pequod named after a whaling boat from Moby Dick this was rejected in favour of Starbuck the ship’s chief mate.
The coffee shop we know today came about after Howard Schultz, who had joined the company the previous year; he travelled to Italy and saw the potential to develop a similar coffee house culture in Seattle.
Using a coffee house to relax, talk with friends, meet and conduct business might have been novel to Howard Schultz but in London 300 years ago this was precisely what Londoners did in coffee houses. Only the business conducted would have been marine insurance, for the type of boat featured in Moby Dick. According to Dr Matthew Green who conducts coffee house tours of London the Starbucks in Russell Street, Covent Garden occupies the same site that 300 years ago stood Button’s Coffee House. It was here that people gathered to discuss the issues of the day. Journalists would gather stories with poets and playwriters would meet to discuss and critique each other’s work.
Nailed to a wall where the Starbucks community board now resides was the marble head of a lion with open jaws in which Button’s customers were invited to pop stories for a weekly publication.
London’s coffee culture had started in 1652 by a Greek, Pasqua Roseé and it wasn’t long before he was selling 600 dishes of coffee a day. The beverage was seen as an antidote to drunkenness and the coffee houses’ popularity would give rise to London becoming the world’s insurance capital.
The coffee houses became the centre for free thought as well as business and by 1663 there were 82 coffee houses within the old Roman walls of the City. By the 28th century, London had over 550 coffee houses each with its own identity, unlike today’s homogenised Starbucks.
London’s coffee houses would transform Britain. The exchange of ideas would make it the centre for invention and the arts.
The first stocks and shares were traded in Jonathan’s close to the Royal Exchange.
Lloyd’s Coffee House on Lombard Street (now a Sainsbury’s) attracted merchants, ships captains and stockbrokers.
How did the beverage taste? The 18th-century palate found it comparable to ink or soot for it was a thick, gritty but addictive drink which gave a physical boost.
Starbucks might produce a more sophisticated brew but the convivial atmosphere where debate and communicating (with laptops) did not originate in Seattle but within London’s Roman walls by a Greek.
Down in Farringdon Street the carts, wagons, vans, cabs, omnibuses crossed and intermingled in a steaming splash-bath of mud; human beings, reduced to their due paltriness, seemed to toil in exasperation along the strips of pavement, bound on errands, which were a mockery, driven automaton-like by forces they neither understood nor could resist.
George Gissing (1857-1903), The Nether World
On 15 February 1822, William Abbott became the first to donate his body for dissection. Having been hanged at Newgate jail for the murder of May Lees his corpse duly arrived at Hosier Lane. Every year a congregation gathers at Southwark cathedral, close by Guy’s hospital, they come to a service of thanksgiving for those who, over the previous year, have donated their bodies for students to dissect and learn. Mortui vivos docent is the Latin phrase. The dead teach the living.
On 15 February 1986 Eight police officers were injured and 58 people arrested in an outbreak of violence outside the News International printing plant in Wapping with strikers protesting over new working conditions
The Old Bailey’s Blind Justice roof statue is unusual in not having a blindfold. Her impartiality is said to be shown by her ‘maidenly form’
Lower Robert Street is the only remnant of underground streets below the Adelphi buildings built by the Adam brothers in 1773
The gravestone of the famous Elizabethan actor Richard Burbage in the graveyard of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch, reads simply ‘Exit Burbage’
The Houses of Parliament has 8 bars, 6 restaurants, 1,000 rooms, 100 staircases, 11 courtyards, a hair salon and a rifle shooting range
Senate House in Bloomsbury is the inspiration for The Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel 1984, it even has a Room 101
Cheapside get its name from the Saxon word for market – ‘chepe’ as this was London’s main market in medieval times
The highest concentration of public and private swimming baths ever recorded in Britain was in Islington, between 1743 and 1939, no fewer than 14 baths operated
Jaguar’s iconic C-type car was tested on the main runway at Heathrow. With 470,000 aircraft movements a year, it might be problematic today
Elephant and Castle derives its name from a craftsmen’s guild whose sign featured an elephant from the ivory handles of the knives they made
Shirts once only unbuttoned down to the chest. The modern front opening design was registered in 1871 by Aldermanbury gentleman outfitters
Trivial Matter: London in 140 characters is taken from the daily Twitter feed @cabbieblog.
A guide to the symbols used here and source material can be found on the Trivial Matter page.
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