On 24 July 1987 Jeffery Archer was awarded record libel damages of £500,000 and costs from the Star newspaper for accusing him of paying a prostitute, Monica Coghlan, for sex. The former deputy chairman of the Conservative party told the jury he was a fool for paying £2,000 to her, but that he was not a liar when he denied having slept with her.

On 24 July 1969 after 4 years in a Soviet jail, Gerald Brooke returned to London. He had been swapped with the Krogers, a couple involved in the Portland spy case

London gangster Charlie Richardson claimed to have help bug Harold Wilson’s Downing Street phones for South African intelligence agency

Clerkenwell is named after the ‘Clerk’s Well’ that supplied Charterhouse. It can be seen through the window of Well Court, Farringdon Lane

There was a public latrine on Old London Bridge that plopped directly into the Thames, providing boatmen with a fresh source of worry

Voltaire, Edgar Allen Poe, Ho Chi Minh, Mahatma Gandhi, Vincent Van Gogh, Sigmund Freud, and Hiter’s older half-brother all lived in London

London’s home to the world’s largest block of acrylic by Tower Hotel it’s a 1-tonne cuboid reject for 2001: A Space Odyssey – black was used

Zog self-proclaimed King of Albania, fled to London when Mussolini invaded with his country’s gold. Booked into the Ritz and paid in bullion

London’s oldest sports building still in use for its original purpose is the Real Tennis Court at Hampton Court Palace, one of its walls dates back to 1625

On the eastbound platform a roundel still reads St. James’ Park, the rest have the current spelling and punctuation, St. James’s Park

The Queen’s Remembrancer the oldest legal post presides over the Trial of the Pyx where 26 gold smiths are sworn in to weigh Royal Mint coins

It’s an odd coincidence at £4m modern London Bridge cost the same as buying, transporting and re-erecting the old bridge at Lake Havasu, USA

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.