On 8 December 1660, the earliest extant cheque held by the Bank of England Museum is for £200 and was drawn by Vanacker on his account with Clayton & Morris. They were the leading bankers of the Restoration, with offices at Cornhill, their business was centred in the private market of lending money to landowners, a unique contribution to banking history integrating the mortgage as a form of long-term security for banking loans.
On 8 December 1995 head teacher Philip Lawrence was stabbed to death outside St George’s Roman Catholic School, Maida Vale, while protecting a pupil who was being assaulted
Watchhouse Coffee Shop, Bermondsey Street is a room where Victorian police once spied on grave robbers it overlooked an affluent graveyard
At 103 Borough High Street once stood the Queen’s Head Inn owned by the Harvard Family, the ones that set up Harvard University in the USA
Inventor of the pedestrian refuge Colonel Pierpoint left his club in St James’s Street stepped back to admire his work was run over by a cab
At the base of Big Ben is a cell to incarcerate any agitators causing trouble in The Houses of Parliament last used for Emmeline Pankhurst
On 8 December 1660 a Mrs. Hughes scandalised the public becoming the first woman actor to take to the stage in London
From 1934 to 1971 with the blessing of George V 1,500 bargeloads of sand were dumped by Tower of London creating at beach attracting 100,000
Laid out in the 1980s the Wood Lane Estate, Sudbury Hill has 11 streets named after sportspeople: Lilian Board Way; Mary Peters Drive etc
Maida Vale was the first Tube station to be manned without men – opened in 1915 with an all-female staff because of the First World War
The Greenwich Time Ball has several dents after renovations, builders assumed the historic ball was for the skip and played football with it
On 8 December 1954 a huge tornado ripped through Chiswick, Gunnersbury, Acton, Golders Green and Southgate
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.
On 1 December 1930 Matt Munro was born Terence Edward Parsons in Shoreditch. He also sang as Terry Fitzgerald, Al Jordan and Fred Flange
Traitors’ Gate at the Tower of London is not the original, in the 19th century they were sold to a Whitechapel shopkeeper for 15/-
Original Waterloo Bridge was to be named Strand Bridge, during construction the famous victory over Bonaparte took place so Waterloo it was
Just below Tower Bridge, marked by a sign, is ‘Dead Man’s Hole’ where bodies thrown into the river from the Tower and surrounding districts were retrieved and stored in a mortuary before burial
The Imperial War Museum has sections of the original Berlin Wall outside in the gardens, a stark piece of history that anyone can visit
London’s smallest statute in Philpot Lane is a lifesize mouse. It depicts the mouse that would regularly eat the builder’s lunch in 1700
You can drink a Churchill Martini at Browns Hotel where the war leader frequented. It’s rumoured they built a bomb shelter for his use
In 1879 rugby club Saracens named after mediaeval Muslim warriors merged with a club called the Crusaders
On 23 December 1865 Aldersgate Street Tube Station opened. It wasn’t until 1 December 1968 that it was renamed Barbican
Threadneedle Street was once part of the medieval red-light district of London and, as the haunt of prostitutes, rejoiced (if that is the right word) in the name of ‘Gropecuntelane’
The Old Kent Road is the only Monopoly property located south of the River and likewise Whitechapel is the only east London property
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