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Tomb of poet Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey contains unpublished works by admirers possibly Shakespeare who threw poems into his grave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