Book Of Lists London , livre ebook

The Book of Lists
LONDON
by
Nick Rennison
PERMISSIONS FOR IMAGES USED IN THE TEXT
Every effort has been made to gain permission for works quoted and images used, however, the publisher will be happy to rectify any omissions in future editions. Many of the images came from Wikipedia, the international web-based free-content encyclopedia. Others are listed below, with thanks:


Millennium Bridge © Paul Lomax


London Cab © Jake Brewer


Duke of Wellington duel © The Trustees of the Tabley House Collection, University of Manchester/The Templeman Library


Saucy Jack postcard (1888) © The Metropolitan Police Authority. Material held by the National Archive in the copyright of the Metropolitan Police is reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Police Authority


London Eye © Ryan Waddell


UK Tea Company advertisement © Illustrated London News


Roman bikini bottoms © Museum of London


Book jacket, JG Ballard The Drowned World © Harper Collins Perennial


Boris Karloff © www.doctormacro.com


Chelsea FC, 1905 © EMPICS


Scotland v England match at Wembley © Action Images/MSI


1908 Olympics © Topfotos


Baird’s receiver © Early Technology


Tube mouse mat © Annie Mole/www.london-underground.blogspot.com


Poem on the Underground © Annie Mole/www.london-underground.blogspot.com


Jumbo the Elephant © Illustrated London News
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION


1 BUILDINGS AND STREETS


2 PEOPLE


3 CRIME


4 LONDON PAST


5 LONDON PRESENT


6 LONDON IN LITERATURE


7 THE ARTS


8 SPORT


9 MISCELLANY


INDEX
INTRODUCTION
Hundreds of books are written and published on London past and present each year. Some are weighty volumes which provide scholarly surveys of its two-thousand-year history or which analyse in enormous detail its social structures. This is not one of them. The Book of Lists: London is unashamedly lighter in weight. If readers are looking for profound historical insights or careful exercises in urban geography, they should go elsewhere. If, on the other hand, they would like to know why London Underground once employed a one-legged man to ride up and down the escalators at Earl’s Court tube station, who gave her name to a rhyming slang term for a banana, why Beckton Gasworks once masqueraded as the killing fields of Vietnam, which symbol of American liberty was built in Whitechapel and what Hitler planned to do with Nelson’s Column, then this is the book to consult. In the dozens of lists in it, they will learn about the Bengal tiger that once seized a small boy in the Commercial Road, London’s only medieval mummy, a prostitute named Clarice la Claterballock, seven Cherokee chiefs who met King George II, a plan to stand the Crystal Palace on its end, a hotel suite in Mayfair that was once Yugoslav territory, a beer flood in Tottenham Court Road that drowned nine people and where tourists can see a pair of Queen Victoria’s knickers. London is full of stories, curiosities and echoes of its past. I have tried to include as many of them as possible in the lists that make up this book.
1
BUILDINGS AND STREETS

15 C URIOUS L ONDON S TREET N AMES


10 W ELL -K NOWN L ONDON S TREET N AMES AND W HAT T HEY M EAN


T HE 32 L ONDON B OROUGHS AND W HAT T HEIR N AMES M EAN


9 U NUSUAL L ONDON P UB N AMES


6 L ONDON P UBS N AMED A FTER P EOPLE Y OU ’VE N EVER H EARD O F


10 L ONDON B UILDINGS T HAT M IGH t H AVE B EEN


T HE 5 T ALLEST B UILDINGS IN L ONDON ( AS OF J ANUARY 2006)


6 L ONDON B UILDINGS D ESIGNED BY R ICHARD R OGERS


6 L ONDON B UILDINGS D ESIGNED BY N ORMAN FOSTER


12 L ONDON B RIDGES


7 C ITY G ATES


22 T OWERS W ITHIN T HE T OWER OF L ONDON


8 D EEP -L EVEL S HELTERS


9 H ISTORIC L ONDON H OTELS


10 L ONDON L ANDMARKS T HAT H AVE B EEN D EMOLISHED


7 L ESSER -K NOWN F ACTS A BOUT N ELSON’S C OLUMN


6 O VERLOOKED M EMORIALS IN L ONDON


5 B EASTLY S ITES IN L ONDON


12 L ONDON R UNS IN THE K NOWLEDGE


T HE 14 C HURCHES AND W HAT T HEIR B ELLS S AY IN THE S ONG ‘O RANGES AND L EMONS’


15 CURIOUS LONDON STREET NAMES
Bleeding Heart Yard, EC1 Cardinal Cap Alley, SE1 Crooked Usage, N3 Cyclops Mews, E14 Dog Kennel Hill, SE22 French Ordinary Court, EC3 Frying Pan Alley, E1 Ha Ha Road, SE18 Horse and Dolphin Yard, W1 Kitcat Terrace, E3 Mount Nod Road, SW16 Puma Court, E1 Quaggy Walk, SE3 Tweezer’s Alley, WC2 Uamvar Street, E14
10 WELL-KNOWN LONDON STREET NAMES AND WHAT THEY MEAN

1. Pall Mall Pall Mall is named after a popular game, not unlike an extended version of croquet, which was played on the site of the present thoroughfare. In Pall Mall, a mallet was used to drive a ball down a course, several hundred yards long, towards a hoop at the end. Whoever took the fewest shots to reach the hoop and propel the ball through it was the winner. The name derives from the Italian words ‘palla’ (‘ball’) and ‘maglio’ (‘mallet’). Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary for 2 April 1661: ‘So I went into St James’s Park, where I saw the Duke of York playing at Pelemele, the first time that ever I saw the sport.’ Pepys saw the game being played on the site of the present Pall Mall but, soon after he wrote in his diary, the course was moved, allegedly because the dust from the carriages passing by disrupted play too often. The phrase ‘pell-mell’ is sometimes said to have derived from the game, referring to the speed with which players moved to strike the ball with their mallets, but the derivation is an invented one. ‘Pell-mell’ actually comes from the old French ‘pêle-mêle’, meaning ‘mixed together’.
2. Piccadilly ‘Pickadils’ were small squares of material used in Tudor costumes either to disguise the stitching around the armholes of doublets and bodices or to help support the stiff, starched collars known as ruffs. In 1612 a wealthy London tailor called Robert Baker built a house on what was then open country to the west of the city. The house was mockingly nicknamed Piccadilly Hall, in reference to the pickadils which had helped to make Baker his fortune. As the city expanded and buildings spread westwards, Baker’s house was soon surrounded by others and eventually demolished, but the name ‘Piccadilly’ was retained for the new thoroughfare.
3. Houndsditch Today this is a street running between Bishopsgate and St Botolph Street but, in the Middle Ages, it was the name given to the ditch that ran beneath the city walls from the Tower to the old River Fleet. First recorded in the thirteenth century as ‘Hondesdich’, it was said by the Tudor chronicler John Stow to take its name from the dead dogs that were so often thrown into it. Others have suggested that it simply referred to a place where dogs were kept or that it derives from ‘Hunesdic’, meaning a defensive ditch raised against the ‘Huns’, those who dwelt in the marshes and forests outside the city.
4. Crutched Friars Called ‘Crouchedfrerestreete’ or ‘Chrocit Friars’ in the medieval records, the street takes its name from the House of the Friars of the Holy Cross which was situated in it. In Middle English, the word often used for ‘cross’ was ‘crouche’, derived from the Latin ‘crux’, and this was corrupted to ‘crutched’.
5. Soho Square The name ‘Soho’ is usually said to have derived from a hunting cry. In the years before the Great Fire, the area was open country with only a handful of cottages close to what is now Wardour Street. The land, much of it owned by the Palace of Westminster, was used for hunting and ‘So-Ho!’, like the better known ‘Tally-Ho!’, was called out when the prey was spotted. According to an old manual of field sports, ‘When a stag breaks covert the cry is "tayho!" … when a hare it is "soho!"’ After the Great Fire of 1666, land was needed for the building of new houses and Soho Fields were covered by developments in the last decades of the seventeenth century but the old connection to the chase was preserved in the name. Some etymologists have disputed the traditional derivation.
6. Threadneedle Street There are several suggestions as to how the street in which the Bank of England stands got its name. Some say that it refers to the ‘three needles in fesse argent’ that appeared on the coat of arms of the Needlemakers’ Company which is traditionally supposed to have had premises on the street, others that it is a corruption of ‘Thryddanen’ or ‘Thryddenal’ Street, meaning the third street that ran between Cheapside and the road from London Bridge to Bishopsgate. However the street got its current name there can be little doubt that it is an improvement on the one it had in the Middle Ages. It was then part of the medieval red-light district of London and, as the haunt of prostitutes, rejoiced (if that is the right word) in the name of ‘Gropecuntelane’.
7. Poultry Variously recorded in the Middle Ages as ‘Polettar’, ‘Poletria’, ‘Puletrie’, ‘Le Pultree’ and ‘Poultrie’, it took its name from the poulterers’ market that was held in it.
8. Old Jewry First recorded as ‘The Jewry’ in 1181, it was so called because it was the area in which London’s Jewish population lived. Most of the Jews in London in the early Middle Ages descended from a group invited to the city in 1070 by William the Conqueror who wished to make use of their capital and commercial expertise. These Jews had settled in the street off Cheapside which still bears the name ‘Old Jewry’. The Jewish population was expelled from London, and from England, by Edward I in 1290 and were not to return until the time of Cromwell.
9. Seething Lane Few street names in the City have more variants in the records or more disputes about their meaning than Seething Lane. In 1257 it is documented as ‘Shyvethenestrat’. A few decades later it has become ‘Synchenestrate’ and, a century later, in 1386, it has been transmuted into ‘Cyvyndonelane’. One suggestion about its origin is that it owes its name to an Anglo-Saxon called Seofeca an