On 21 December 1846 Robert Liston, the ‘Fastest Knife in the West End’, who could amputate a leg in two and a half minutes, carried out the first operation in the United Kingdom using ether, amputating the leg above the knee of Fred Churchill. His comment was, ‘This Yankee dodge sure beats mesmerism’.

On 21 December 1842 Pentonville Prison was opened, called the ‘Model Prison’ and with the aim to contain men in jail, although many would be transported to Australia

In 1841 the Metropolitan Police reported there were 9,409 prostitutes and 3,325 brothels known to the police across the 17 police districts

St Pancras station’s bricks are that famous red colour because they’re made from Nottinghamshire clay supplied by the Nottingham Patent Brick Co. Ltd.

St. James’s Palace and its park were formerly the site of a leper hospital for women dedicated to Saint James the Less, the palace was secondary in importance

Trafalgar Square was to have been called ‘King William the Fourth’s Square’ architect and landowner George Ledwell Taylor suggested its name

Charles I’s statute in Trafalgar Square stands on the site of the original Charing Cross marking where all distances from London start

Tradition has it that Pimlico is named after Ben Pimlico, a 17th Century Hoxton brewer who supplied London with a popular Nut Brown ale

Running between Old Street and City Road Bath Street recalls the location of London’s first purpose built outdoor facility the Peerless Pool

London has fewer bridges spanning its principal river than Paris but has 23 underwater tunnels more than any other city in the world

Arsenal were founded as Dial Square in 1886 by workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, but were renamed Royal Arsenal shortly afterwards

Bank is the only one-syllable station name and Knightsbridge is the only London street name with six consecutive consonants

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 14 December 1920, the first scheduled flight disaster occurred when an aeroplane carrying 6 passengers and 2 crew members took off from Cricklewood Airport for Paris and crashed into a house in Golders Green, of the 8 on board, only 2 survived.

On 14 December 1934 Western Avenue was formally opened, it was designed to take pressure off the old Uxbridge Road and to open up the industrial estates to the west of London

Bricks from the world’s first modern prison, Millbank Penitentiary, demolished in 1892 were used to build Millbank Estate, Westminster

London’s City Hall at Tower Bridge is nicknamed ‘The Testacle’ and the Swiss Re: Building in the City is known as ‘The Erotic Gherkin’

In 1829, with London running out of space to bury its dead, architect Thomas Wilson proposed building a 94-storey pyramid on Primrose Hill, interning 5 million corpses

Playwright Richard Sheridan first described The Bank of England as “The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” in a 1797 Commons speech

Charles Dickens based the haunted doorknocker seen by Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol on one he had seen in Craven Street

In December 1662 ice skating was first seen in St. James’s Park when exiled cavaliers from Holland donned their skates on the frozen lake

Dulwich and Sydenham Hill Golf Club is the closest 18-hole golf course to the City of London at 5 miles distant

Savoy Place leading to The Savoy Hotel is the only 2-way street in England that you must by law drive on the right hand side of the road

There is a gasholder in Southall with the letters ‘LH’ and a large arrow painted on it to guide pilots towards Heathrow airport

For £750,000 you can buy the remains of the Grade II Baltic Exchange damaged by the IRA and now stored in a Kent barn, the Gherkin replaced it

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 7 December 2006 at 11 am a tornado struck Chamberlayne Road and surrounding streets in Kensal Green with heavy rain and sleet, and debris flying through the air. Over 1 50 houses were damaged and six people were injured, one of them being hospitalised. Fire services sealed off the area. The clean-up operation and damage costs were in excess of £2 million.

On 7 December 1907 the National Sporting Club, 43 King Street, Covent Garden, witnessed a first: at the Tommy Burns and Gunner Moir fight, Eugene Corri became the first referee to adjudicate ‘inside’ a boxing ring

Britain’s first ubiquitous use of speed bumps preventing exceeding the speed limit, were installed on Linver Road and Alderville Road, Fulham in 1984

Taking just 5 months to build Crystal Palace was in 1850 the biggest building on Earth, vast enough to accommodate four St Paul’s Cathedrals

In December 1952 smog killed over 12,000 windless weather and cold led to 100,000 admitted to hospital with respiratory illnesses

St. Mary Axe recalls a legend about a princess who travelled abroad with her 11,000 handmaidens; all were killed by Attila using 3 axes

The ‘local palais’ lyrics in the Kinks’ Come Dancing was the Athenaeum, Fortis Green Road replaced by a Sainsbury’s store in 1966

Cultivated for over 900 years College Garden Westminster Abbey is the oldest garden in England, its surrounding walls are dated 14th Century

The spiritual home of Sunday football at their peak in the 1960s, Hackney Marshes had 5 areas offering 120 pitches, the largest in the world

The deepest car park is under Bloomsbury Square 60ft deep and 7 storeys 450 car capacity built in 1960 and ruined Repton’s landscaping above

The Bank of England issued its first banknotes in 1725 with a £100 note an amount that could rent a furnished house in Pall Mall for 5 years

Half a million years ago the Thames flowed from the Midlands through Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, East Anglia entering the sea at Ipswich

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 30 November 1936 fire broke out in the lavatory of the central transept at Crystal Palace, despite there being 88 fire engines in attendance most of the Palace was destroyed. The only elements left unscathed were Paxton’s bust and some sphinxes.

On 30 November 1016King Edmund II was reputedly stabbed in the bowels whilst in the ‘outhouse’ (toilet) and died in London on the same day

In 1736 gravedigger Thomas Jenkins received 100 lashes for selling dead bodies from St Dunstan & All Saints, Stepney High Street

The Strand (technically just “Strand” – look at the signs) was originally the north shore of the much-wider Thames – “strand” means “bank”

Dame Cicely Saunders founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, the world’s first hospice, eventually she died there herself in 2005

Pains Fireworks, still making fireworks, founded in the 15thC in the East End, sold the light gunpowder used in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605

The ArcelorMittal Orbit is the UK’s tallest sculpture, at 684ft, the structure incorporates the world’s tallest and longest tunnel slide

The Grand United Lodge of England on Great Queen Street, founded in 1717 is the oldest Masonic Grand Lodge in the world

Henry VIII played tennis at Hampton Court in silk or velvet drawers (the first shorts) slashed with ‘cuttes’ and edges sewn with gold cord

Below the control box on a puffin crossing is a little ridged bobbin which swivels indicating to the visually impaired it’s safe to cross

A ‘Seven Dials Raker’ was a Victorian prostitute who lived in the vicinity of Seven Dials but plied her trade elsewhere in London

The oldest living thing in London is the 2,000-year-old Totteridge Yew in St. Andrew’s churchyard, which stands on the ‘Tott Ridge’

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 23 November 2006 Russian dissident, Alexander Litvinenko, died at University College Hospital. His death was attributed to poisoning with radioactive polonium-210. The Russian government were suspected of his murder.

On 23 November 1896 Woolwich Arsenal’s Joe Powell broke his wrist in a league match, he died 6 days later from tetanus complications

It was at Francis Bacon’s studio at Narrow Street, Limehouse that he met lover George Dyer as Dyer attempted to burgle the place

The dome of the O₂ weighs less than the air contained underneath it; there’s only one curved piece of glass in the Gherkin – the one right at the top

In 1862, Dr Thomas Orton, one of London’s most senior physicians, established four sibling’s deaths in Limehouse were caused by vivid green wallpaper whose constituent was arsenic

Under Paddington Green is a disused Cold War command centre its entrance covered by a bush, nearby are the top-security jail cells for terrorist suspects inside London’s Paddington Green Police Station

A fight with a fashion designer at a party is said to have inspired Ray Davis to write The Kinks hit Dedicated Follower of Fashion

During World War II the south moat at the Tower of London was used by the Yeoman Warders as allotments to grow vegetables

The neon sign on Hornsey Road Baths is the sole survivor of 12 similar signs commissioned at various London baths in the 1930s

The eastern extension of the Jubilee line is the only Underground line to feature glass screens to deter ’jumpers’

Constructed in 1850 Crystal Palace had nearly 1 million square feet of glass, about a third of all the glass produced in England that year

The Clapham South wartime bomb shelter was later used to house the first ever Jamaican immigrants who arrived in 1948 on the Empire Windrush

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.