On 8 July 1965 Ronnie Biggs, a member of the gang who carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963 escaped from Wandsworth prison by scaling a 30ft wall. A ladder was thrown over the wall during the prisoners’ afternoon exercise session. They climbed the ladder and lowered themselves into a waiting van. They were driven away from the prison in three cars. Biggs would evade capture for 36 years, in 2001 he returned to Britain.

On 8 July 1732 Francis Walford and Thomas Darby were acquitted at Newgate of murdering black William Stanley claiming he had hit them first

Bow Street Police Station was the only Victorian London police station with a white light outside rather than a blue light

For almost a century London was the most densely populated City on Earth. It was eclipsed by Tokyo in 1926

John Thompson was Royal Food Taster to 4 Monarchs: Charles II, James II, William III and Anne. He is buried at Morden College, Blackheath

Bethnal Green underground station doubled as a library during World War II with a stock of over 4,000 books, the station would be the scene of one of the greatest loss of civilian life during the war

Formerly ‘Pippen’ at 83-84 Hampstead High Street was where Annie Lennox working as a waitress first met Dave Stewart

Underneath the Ministry of Defence’s Main Building in Whitehall is Henry VIII’s wine cellar. In 1949 they moved the whole cellar, encasing it in steel and concrete and shifted it 9ft to the West and 19ft lower

West Ham’s ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles’ was inspired by trialist schoolboy Billy Murray who resembled the boy used to advertise Pears soap

Abandoned Tube stations include Strand (closed 1994); Down Street (1932); Brompton Road (1934); and Mark Lane, which is now an All Bar One

The gross domestic product of London is significantly larger than that of several European countries including Belgium and Sweden

Edward VII had so many mistresses that a special pew was reserved for them at his coronation. It was known as ‘the Loose Box’

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 July 1823 politician George Agar Ellis proposed to the Commons that it purchase an art collection, thus the National Gallery was seeded. By April 1824 the House of Commons agreed to pay £57,000 for the picture collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein “for the enjoyment and education of all”. The pictures were displayed at Angerstein’s house at 100 Pall Mall until a dedicated gallery building was constructed.

On 1 July 1987 Geoffrey Collier a City investment banker received the 1st conviction for insider trading having made £15,000 in under 1 hour

In 1597 Ben Jonson was charged with “Leude and mutynous behavior” and jailed in Marshalsea Prison for co-writing the play, The Isle of Dogs

To allow for high winds the skyscraper One Canada Square (Canary Wharf Tower) is able to sway 13.75 inches

Tomb of poet Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey contains unpublished works by admirers possibly Shakespeare who threw poems into his grave

Prior to 1707 Scotland was a foreign country and had an embassy in London. This was on the site of Great Scotland Yard

Manette Street in Soho is named after the character from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens describes the street having a golden arm

Dando the Notorious Oyster Eater’s trick was eating 30doz oysters a sitting ‘with proportionate quantity of bread, porter, brandy and water’

Millwall Football Club were formed in the summer of 1885 by workers at Morton’s Jam Factory on the Isle of Dogs mostly Scottish hence blue & white colours

There’s only one Tube station that doesn’t have any of the letters from the word mackerel in it: St John’s Wood

Howard House, 14 Fournier Street, Spitalfields is where the silk for Queen Victoria’s coronation gown was woven

The Great Fire of London 1666 raged for 5 days despite Mayor Thomas Bloodworth’s doubts when he declared, “Pish! A woman might piss it out!”

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 24 June 1699 the oldest house of worship for Ashkenazi Jews got the go ahead, when a committee lead by Rabbi David Nieto leased land at Plough Yard in Bevis Marks from Lady Ann and Sir Thomas Payntz. Curiously the Bevis Marks synagogue was constructed by Joseph Avis – a Quaker. The building was necessitated by the considerable influx of jews into east London making the synagogue in Cree Street unsuitable.

On 24 June 1830 Peter James Bossy became the last person to stand in a London pillory, tried for perjury sentenced to transportation for 7 years, but prior to that having to stand in the pillory for one hour

The original indictment of notorious highwayman Dick Turpin (real name John Palmer) is held in the National Archives in Kew, Richmond

The Monument commemorating the Great Fire of London in 1666 is the tallest isolated stone column in the world. It rises to 202ft on Fish Hill, 202ft away from where the fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane

A fragrance known as Madeleine was trialled at St. James Park, Euston, and Piccadilly stations in 2001, to make the Tube more pleasant, stopped within days after complaints from people saying they felt ill

On Sunday 24 June 1509 the Coronation of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon took place at Westminster Abbey

In Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927) featured the director making a cameo on the Tube

On 24 June 1963 saw the first demonstration of home video recorder at BBC Studios in London, using quarter inch tape it could record up to 20 minutes of low quality black and white television programmes

The earliest known account of sport in London was written in 1174 by William Fitzstepen, due to translation errors the game described is not apparent

London was the first city in the world to have a licensed taxi trade on 24 June 1654 the City of London authorised the use of 200 licenses

One City firm in the 1950s gave new employees a set of instructions including: ‘You will wear a bowler hat to and from the office’

On 24 June 1717 Premier Grand Lodge of England founded the Grand Lodge of London & Westminster latterly called the Grand Lodge of England

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 17 June 1789 Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, known for opera, was burnt to the ground during evening rehearsals. The fire had been deliberately started on the roof. The owner Giovanni Gallini offered a reward of £300 for the capture of the culprit who was never traced. The name of the theatre changes with the sex of the monarch. It first became the King’s Theatre in 1714 on the accession of George I.

On 17 June 1497 King Henry VIII leading a 25,000 strong army decisively beat an army of Cornishmen at Deptford Bridge who were rebelling against a tax levy ironically for war

Appeal Court Judge, Lord Bowen introduced the phrase, “The man on the Clapham omnibus”, to describe the average man in the street

To reduce noise wooden cobbles replaced stone in Victorian London, one of the last timbered roads is Chequer Street in Islington

The phase ‘pea-souper’ for a London fog refers to the fact that Londoners made pea soup from yellow split peas the colour of thick fog

The House of Commons’ press gallery bar is named Moncrieff’s in honour of respected political journalist, Chris Moncrieff – a teetotaller

Artist J. M. W. Turner lived at 118 and 119 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea using the roof as a vantage point for his painting

Priced at 7s in June 1935 the world’s first video was sold by Major Radiovision, Wigmore Street using discs to record 12 minutes of images

Opened in 1852 Islington’s Agricultural Hall (now Business Design Centre) was London’s first multi-purpose indoor arena, in 1878 a six-day walking race was held watched in 20,000

The London Underground is thought to be the third largest metro system in the world, in terms of miles, after the Beijing Subway and the Shanghai Metro

The original Royal Exchange was Britain’s first specialist commercial building reflecting London as the country’s premier trading port

On 17 June 1959 rhinestoned pianist Liberace won £8,000 damages from the Daily Mirror who claimed, quite reasonably, that he might be gay

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 10 June 2000 the Millennium Bridge opened, hundreds wanted to be the first to use the new pedestrian only bridge and got a fright as it began to wobble alarmingly. It subsequently was closed for two years enabling the enginers to solve the problem by installing ‘dampers’. In spite of the successful fix of the problem, the affectionate ‘wobbly bridge’ epithet remains in common usage among Londoners.

On 10 June 1845 New Oxvord Street was officially opened, with the demolition of the infamous St. Giles Rookery regarded as the poorest area of London

In June 1982 Italian banker Roberto Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge, his clothes weighed down with stones

According to a 2013 report London is the world’s 3rd greenest city behind Singapore and Sydney: 122 heaths; 600 parks; 1,500 laying fields; and 125 recreation grounds

There’s a mosquito named the London Underground mosquito found in tunnels notable for stinging Londoners sleeping there during the Blitz

In June 1815 Major Henry Percy interrupted a ball at 16 St James Square to announce that 3days earlier we had defeated the French at Waterloo

Much of James Cameron’s Alien was filmed in a disuded power station in Acton, and not in outer space as some might have thought

For those visiting Hamley’s toy store today, it was founded by Cornishman William Hamley in 1760, first named Noah’s Ark and sited in Holborn

Tennis legend Fred Perry is commemorated by two plaques in Ealing, his ashes are buried near his statute at Wimbledon

The total number of passengers carried during 2013/14 was 1.265 billion – making it the world’s 11th busiest metro

Bermondsey’s Tanner Street and Morocco Street and Old Leathermarket are reminders of when the leather industry was based there

In June 1871 two giants got married: Anna Swan (7′ 5.5″) married Martin Van Buren Bates (7′ 2.5″) at St Martins in the Field Church

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.