It’s a sad fact of modern life that if you drive long enough, sooner or later you must leave London behind.
Ben Aaronovitch (b.1964), Moon Over Soho
All posts by Gibson Square
London Trivia: Straw bail
On 24 December 1997 Home Secretary, Jack Straw’s 17-year-old son was given police bail after a Daily Mirror journalist following an anonymous tip-off had met him in a pub and been offered a small chunk of cannabis resin for £10 claiming it was “good strong hash”. The editor of the Mirror had phoned Jack Straw to confront them with the story and the minister apparently insisted that his son received no special privileges.
On 24 December 1832 thirteen-year-old Princess Victoria recorded in her diary at Buckingham Palace ‘we then went into the drawing room . . . on tables were placed two trees hung with lights ad sugar ornaments’
The first man to wear a top hat in public caused so much hysteria and commotion in St. James’ that he was arrested for disturbing the peace
During World War II number 77 Baker Street was requisitioned by the Special Operations Executive, using it as a homing station for message-carrying pigeons
Aldgate tube station is built on the site of a plague pit mentioned by Daniel Defoe in Journal of a Plague Year in which over a thousand were buried
The Penderel Oak, High Holborn is named after yeoman farmer, Richard Penderel, who helped Charles II escape by hiding him in a wood
The opening scene in The Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night was shot at Marylebone Station not Liverpool’s Lime Street as depicted
In the mid-19th century Thomas Barry was famous for sailing between Westminster and Vauxhall Bridges in a tub towed by four geese
Smithfield was once the play area of London, where jousting and tournaments took place, later it would be where William Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered
The Thames still handles more material by tonnage annually than all of London’s airports combined, the equivalent to 400,000 lorries every year
As a boy Charles Dickens worked in a boot polish or blacking factory on Villiers Street off the Strand. Embankment station now occupies the site
Diarist Samuel Pepys buried his parmesan cheese and wine in his garden to protect them from the Great Fire of London in 1666
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.
Previously Posted: Derailed
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.
Derailed (23.11.2010)
Kensington Palace is undergoing cosmetic architectural surgery and a total facelift to the grounds. The ambitious plan to remove most of the railing to “encourage a more intimate connection with the Palace and the Park itself”, by removing the physical and some might feel mental barrier between the great house and the public.
Republicans might rejoice at another barrier being removed between the privileged few and the citizens of England, but what next? Daily I see crowds of tourists, noses pressed against Buckingham Palace’s railings, are these to be removed to provide a more intimate connection.
During the war most of the fashionable houses of London were shorn of their railings, the metal was needed for the war effort, so to retain one’s own was at the very least unpatriotic, in fact very little of this wrought iron was ever used – but hey, there was a war on.
Now cast your mind back to late September of 1997, Tony Blair had recently won a convincing victory for New Labour and the young were optimistic of a brave new world for Britain.
Then tragedy struck the young icon (and that’s not an exaggeration) of their generation – Lady Diana died in a Paris underpass. Within days a sea of flowers had been placed around Kensington Palace, each bearing a note expressing the outpourings of so many lives.
We were living through a seismic moment in our nation’s history, not just in the perception of the English character but also in our attitude to the Monarchy. Britain almost overnight lost its stiff upper lip and we started acting like, and here it pains me to say it – Europeans.
Day after day I would be taking distressed; grieving girls to lay flowers in what had become a very visible break with our staid Victorian post.
And those railings became the focus of the media; every day the field of flowers grew, and the railing began to symbolise the division of Queen and her subjects. The railings became a secular altar as a place to grieve for the loss of the hopes and dreams for England. So those railings are in short history.
We often have to decide what to keep and what to obliterate, only time can judge our decisions which we make today. But I fear that the Simon Schama of future generations when educating our great grandchildren about the late 20th century might say a few words of criticism at the decision to destroy this symbol of England.
A White Christmas?
How fantastic it would be to wake up on Christmas morning, pull back the curtains and see the landscape covered by a thick layer of snow? Muffled sounds; hearing the crunch of car tyres as they drive by; the shriek of excited children; and a robin perched on your garden fork, Christmas card perfect.
We love snow on Christmas Day because it’s the one day of the year many of us don’t have to travel anywhere. We’re already where we need to be, the entire public transport network has already been shut down for the day and we couldn’t drive safely anywhere after last night’s bender.
Will there be a White Christmas this year? Well, no, sorry, there won’t, and with climate change, it’s not likely in the future.
A snowy Christmas Day in London is a rare event. Even rarer is a ‘proper’ White Christmas, rather than a single flake of snow falling on the Met Office roof will do for the definition that the bookies now use.
December’s always been a bit early in the winter for snow, we are more likely to see snow between January and March with snow or sleet falling an average of 3.9 days in December, compared to 5.3 days in January, 5.6 in February and 4.2 in March, and with the world having the hottest year on record this year, the entire 21st century looks like we’ll not see another White Christmas.
White Christmases were rather more common here during the ‘Little Ice Age’, back when the Thames used to regularly freeze over, but the last London Frost fair was held as long ago as 1814.
The most recent time London had a snowy holiday was in 2022, with 2021, 2020, and 2017 also being classed White Christmases.
But most of us think of a white Christmas as blankets of snow covering the UK – yet London hasn’t seen a truly white Christmas for 20 years. In the previous century, only ten Christmases in London have been white. That’d be 1916 (sleet), 1927 (snow, falling and lying), 1938 (sleet, but 15cm of snow lying on the ground), 1956 (snow), 1964 (snow), 1968 (sleet), 1970 (snow, falling and lying), 1976 (snow), 1996 (sleet) and 1999 (sleet). You may also remember a white 1963 and 1981, but that year doesn’t officially count because no snow fell actually on Christmas Day itself.
I remember the 1962-63, when a wintry outbreak brought snow on 12–13 December 1962, technically it didn’t snow on Christmas Day, but London had heavy snow late on 26–27 December, it wasn’t until the 6 March the first morning of the year without frost in Britain. Temperatures rose to 62.6 °F and the remaining snow disappeared.
London Underground in the snow: East Finchley station. View NW, towards Finchley Central and High Barnet/Mill Hill East, London Underground (Northern Line). Until 1939 this station had been on the LNER (ex-GNR) suburban section and goods trains (steam-hauled) were still working past here to Mill Hill East for the Gas Works until 10/62. This morning the ice had already been cleared and Tube trains were running by Ben Brooksbank (CC BY-SA 2.0 DEED)
Pedicabs might meet their match
Amongst all the tradition and flummery, with Black Rod using his eponymous stick to hit a door and the new King making his first Gracious Address, between the promise to safeguard the future of football clubs and a commitment to tackle antisemitism, His Majesty uttered fifteen words that could be a relief for many Londoners: “A bill will be introduced to deal with the scourge of unlicensed pedicabs in London.”
This is not before time. Current laws governing pedicabs date back to the 1800s, but we’ve been down this road before, a similar announcement was made in the final Queen’s Speech last May, but the measure was kicked into the long grass before making any progress. but maybe Parliament will at last act to regulate these sometimes dangerous nuisance vehicles that plague the West End.
CabbieBlog 