Blog Search Results

Power Bridge

  Tower Bridge is one of the most famous bridges in the world, and behind its iconic structure lies an amazing story. In the late 19th century London had grown to a city of 6 million, with a third of them living in the East End. To cross the river was a real problem - it still is - with the building of a foot tunnel by the Tower of London wholly inadequate. To solve the problem a competition was launched to design a bridge that had a clearance of 9 metres, so masted ships could pass beneath it and reach the Pool of London . The winners were Sir Horace Jones (who happened to be on the selection committee) and Sir John Wolfe Barry, son of Sir Charle...

The Senate and Students of London

  Dominating the leafy and literary area of Bloomsbury is the monumental Senate House. It’s part of the University of London and was built in the 1930s by that great architect of the London Underground, Charles Holden. It was built on land given by the Dukes of Bedford and funded by, amongst others, the Rockefeller family, Marks and Spencer and City livery companies. The shell of the building was made from steel, encased by hardy Portland stone, which has remarkable anti-pollution qualities: it’s only been cleaned twice in its 80 years. When it was completed in 1937 the Senate House was the tallest building (64m high) after St Paul’s an...

A Deer Little Ship

    Across the river on the Southwark side, opposite Cannon Street Station, you can see a small Tudor-like ship. This is the Golden Hinde II, a full-sized replica of Sir Francis Drake’s famous ship that circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1580 and made Drake and Queen Elizabeth I very rich. In December 1577 Drake set out from Plymouth with 5 ships, which included the Pelican; however this was changed to the Golden Hinde, in honour of Sir Christopher Hatton, one of the patrons of the voyage. His coat of arms featured a female red deer - a ‘hinde’. This epic voyage brought Drake into the Pacific, where he managed to plunder Spanish shi...

Pride of London

   Every October for the past 366 years an unusual service has taken place in the church of St. Katharine Cree, in Leadenhall Street. It is the Lion Sermon. On the 16th October 1643, while travelling to Arabia on a trading mission, Alderman Sir John Gayer became separated from his companions and, as night fell, became aware that a lion was lurking. But it did not attack him. In the morning he was found sleeping peacefully, with the lion’s footprints all around him. Like Daniel in the lion’s den, he had survived. In gratitude for his survival, Sir John made various gifts to good causes and in his will established an annual commemorative servi...

Hidden London

    In an anonymous-looking warehouse in Hackney you’ll find the Museum of London Archaeology Archives. and behind the brick and steel building in N1 I recently had the pleasure of enjoying a tour, led by two enthusiastic volunteers. Here are all manner of finds, from masses of bones to shards of pottery and large items deemed to big to store, are safely stored in buff-coloured boxes, clearly labelled. When anything is found at a dig they are deemed either ‘registered’ - of significant interest or man-made - or ‘general’, for items like broken shards or fragments of bone. Whenever a developer wants to build a new structure they have to...

The Royal Queens of Hammersmith

As we celebrate The Queen’s 70 years on the throne I’ve had a look at other royal connections to my nearby borough of Hammersmith.  As you emerge from Stamford Brook Underground station, to the left once stood the Queen Charlotte Maternity Hospital, named after the consort of George III, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818). It’s now in East Acton but when it was in W6, in 1945 Helen Mirren was born there. Appropriately she played Queen Charlotte in the film The Madness of King George. Further east, on the site of the present-day Latimer Prep School once stood Rivercourt House. For 4 years, between 1687 and 1691, it was the home of...