On 4 September 1909, Robert Baden-Powell organised the first rally for all scouts at Crystal Palace with 11,000 boys attending, a number of girls dressed in uniform and calling themselves girl scouts. This led to the founding of the Girl Guides in 1910.

<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-13946" src="https://cabbieblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/1ca39-488a3-on-this-day_thumb.gif&quot; alt="" width="40" height="40" /On 4 September 1930 the Cambridge Theatre opened with André Charlot’s revue Masquerade starring Beatrice Lillie

In 1952 a Nigerian visitor was fined £50 for committing an indecent act with a pigeon in Trafalgar Square and £10 for having it for tea

In September 2015 the Royal Vauxhall Tavern was given Grade II listing, the first location in the UK to be listed for LGBT significance

Into computing? Half of Charles Babbage’s brain is preserved at the Science Museum, the other half is at the Hunterian Museum

Peter Piaktow aka Peter The Painter was the anarchist gang leader responsible for the murder of 3 policemen at the Siege of Sidney Street in 1911

The Marianne North Gallery at Kew Gardens holds the record for the longest exhibition by a single female artist in the world

Brick Lane Music Hall, North Woolwich Road in a converted church is the world’s only permanent music hall showing daily Cockney Singsongs

The public reaction to the £400,000 Zion logo for London 2012 Olympics was that it resembles the Simpsons cartoon character, Lisa Simpson performing fellatio

If you say Finsbury Park backwards you get a Krapy Rubsnif and Balham is the only Underground station that doesn’t have any of the letters of the word ‘underground’ in it

Harrod’s has 11,500 bulbs on its façade. To keep its nightly appearance 300 have to be changed every week. But how many men does it take?

Zoological Society of London found that 83 per cent of Londoners when asked to name something commonly found in the Thames declared a shopping trolley

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 28 August 1996 Buckingham Palace issued a press release regarding the decree absolute of the divorce between the Prince and Princess of Wales. The press release stated that Diana had lost the style of Her Royal Highness and instead was styled Diana, Princess of Wales.

On 28 August 2003, a blackout put 500,000 people in the dark and shut down half the railways in London, lasting 34 minutes it was the biggest blackout in England since 1987

Winston Churchill attended the scene of the Siege of Sidney Street and narrowly escaped death when a stray bullet was fired through his hat

The first revolving public door in Europe was installed at the Midland Grand Hotel St Pancras in 1873 with 3 compartments to allow for dresses

Steve Mars a BMW fanatic, was buried beneath a life-sized replica M3 convertible in Manor Park Cemetery and a parking ticket was affixed

Above Quo Vadis-Dean Street is the bedsit Carl Marx described an old hovel so dirty that to sit down becomes a thoroughly dangerous business

Bizarrely, the film The Siege of Sidney Street (1960) was filmed in Dublin instead of Sidney Street as Dublin was more like Sidney Street

Regent Street was the location of one of the first late-night shopping events in 1850. Shopkeepers let their stores stay open until 7pm!

Bad weather meant the final two events in the London 1948 London Olympics were held at dusk, with athletes illuminated by car headlights

Waterloo Station is the largest Boris bike docking station. In 2015 bike number 16191 was the most ridden, 2nd was 15901; and 3rd 14630

Pure-finders got 8d a bucket (of dog faeces) from Bermondsey tanners But collecting a bucket may take 2 days so you would guard it all night

Rocky outcrops in St. James’s Park for pelicans to alight are artificial Pulhamite created by James Pulham who took secret recipe the grave

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 21 August 1936 Senate House, the University of London’s administrative building, the tallest building in the country at the time, was officially opened. It would be where George Orwell fictionalised Room 101.

On 21 August 1996 the new Globe Theatre was opened with a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona

More people were executed at Tower of London in the 20th century than in all other centuries combined 15thC-1; 16thC-5; 17thC-1; 18thC-3; 19thC-0; 20thC-11

According to one estimate, there are a staggering 8.3 million trees in London with 47 per cent of Greater London physically green

At 9 Curzon Place where Cass Elliot of Mamas and Papas died in 1974; Who drummer Keith Moon also died from drugs in the same flat – both aged 32

When Lenin was in London reading Marx’s work some believe they first met in the Crown Tavern, Clerkenwell Green

Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street famous sax riff was played by Raphael Ravenscroft and was reportedly paid £27.50 for the work – the cheque bounced

Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre dubbed ‘Piccadilly Circus of South London’, Europe’s first covered mall was voted London’s biggest eyesore

Plucky minnows Walthamstow Avenue FC famously held both Arsenal and Manchester United to draws in the FA Cup during the 1950s, lasting 88 years before merging into non-existence

At Whitechapel station something ludicrous happens: the London Overground passes underneath the London Underground

Before Roy Hudd went into comedy he studied art and design – one of his teachers was Harry Beck, creator of the London Tube map

In 2003 the Environmental Agency ship the Thames Guardian had dropped onto its deck a red-bellied piranha no doubt by a very stunned seagull

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 August 1888 an audio recording of the composer Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord, one of the first recordings of music ever made, was played during a press conference introducing Thomas Edison’s phonograph cylinder in London.

On 14 August 2011 the London–Surrey Classic Cycle race took place, starting at Pall Mall and covering 50 miles through Surrey, it was a precursor to the 2012 Olympic Games

The heads of executed traitors were displayed on spikes on London Bridge is now commemorated by a giant white spike on the current crossing

Unusual street names: Ha Ha Road Greenwich; Hooker’s Road Walthamstow; Quaggy Walk Blackheath; Cyclops Mews & Uamvar Street Limehouse

St George’s, University of London was founded near Hyde Park Corner in 1733 and was the second establishment in England to formally train doctors

Stalin, Lenin, and Trotsky met at the Brotherhood Church, Islington for the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party it’s now a Tesco Metro

The Beatles played their last gig on the roof of Apple Corps at 3 Saville Row. It’s now an Abercrombie & Fitch, after 42 minutes the police asked them to turn down the volume

When war broke out in 1939, BBC TV shut down half way through Mickey Mouse cartoon. In 1945 the cartoon resumed with apology for the break

The Rom Skate Park in Hornchurch was built in 1978, and was the first skatepark in Europe to be given protected Listed status

All 22 stations on the Metropolitan Line from Amersham to Liverpool Street have an ‘R’ in their name, only Aldgate hasn’t on the whole line

The plinth supporting the South Bank Lion on the south side of Westminster Bridge has a room for security guards to have a cup of tea

You could fit either the Great Pyramid at Giza or the Statue of Liberty inside the O₂ Arena, the largest structure of its kind in the world

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 August 2011 rioting and looting spread across London and beyond. Brixton, Enfield, Islington, Wood Green and Oxford Circus were scenes of the rioting – many looters didn’t even bother to mask themselves.

On 7 August 1746 Jacobite captain, James Dawson, was hanged, drawn and quartered on Kennington Common, his fiancée died seconds after watching the execution

In 1959 at Wandsworth Prison Guenther Podola became the last man to be hanged in Britain for killing a police officer

Sir Christopher Wren’s first design proposal for St Paul’s featured a 60ft high stone pineapple atop the dome, it would be one of many rejections

The terracotta animals on the façade of the Natural History Museum extinct creatures are to the east of the entrance, the living to the west

At 4 Henrietta St, Covent Garden in August 1922 writer T. E. Lawrence (…of Arabia) tried to enlist in the RAF as John Hume Ross

When the rebuilt Covent Garden Theatre in 1809 raised ticket prices by 1/- riots broke out during the première of Macbeth

In summer 1974 Nude Show what is now the Peacock Theatre had Lindy Salmon’s bikini removed by dolphins Pixie and Penny

In the London 2012 Olympics Sarah Attar later became the first woman from Saudi Arabia to compete in an Olympic athletics event, when she ran in a heat of the 800m

London buses were not always red. Before 1907, different routes had different-coloured buses, London General Omnibus Company painted their fleet of buses red in order to stand out from the competition

7 Bruce Grove, Tottenham was the home of Luke Howard, the ‘namer of clouds’ who proposed the nomenclature system in use today

Etched into the frosted windows of the Albert Tavern in Victoria Street is an image of Prince Albert’s penis, just don’t ask the barmaid where it is situated

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.