London is a museum world, and the museum, like the cathedral or the palazzo in their day, is the dominant symbol of our postmodern times. A museum is an imposing assemblage of bits and pieces, history for attention-deficit amnesiacs.
Wendy Steiner (b.1949), The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism
On 7 June 1832 the British Reform Act received royal assent and became law. The Act, pressed through by Prime Minister Earl Grey, forestalled a revolution by increasing the number of people who were eligible to vote. The Act created 67 new constituencies and broadened the qualification to vote to include small landowners, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers. Earl Grey tea was later named after the Prime Minister.
On 7 June 1977 more than one million people lined the streets of London to watch the Royal Family on their way to St Paul’s at the start of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations
An unrepealed law from 1313 makes it illegal to wear a suit of armour when entering The Houses of Parliament
The oldest apartments in London the Albany, Piccadilly founded in 1770 were until recently bachelor only accommodation and banned women
Measurements of skeletons at Christ Church Spitalfields are shorter on average than their medieval forebears probably caused by pollution
Her Majesty The Queen cannot enter The City of London without first asking permission from The Lord Mayor a ceremony performed at Temple Bar
A series of animal shapes have been highlighted in the London Underground map, first discovered by Paul Middlewick in 1988, created using the tube lines, stations, and junctions on the map
The top 50 tourist attractions in the world six are in London Trafalgar Square is 4th with 15 million visitors a year 44th is the London Eye
Bearing in mind the limited number of words that rhyme with ‘taxi’, users of rhyming slang must have greeted the arrival of Joe Baksi on the boxing scene of the 1940s with great delight
Heathrow Airport was the world’s first international airport to be linked to a city’s underground when the Piccadilly Line connected in 1977
Since 1910 the Goring Hotel has been run by the same family. It was the first in the world with full central heating and en-suite bedrooms
Hampstead Heath, Highgate Wood, Queen’s Park and Epping Forest are actually owned and managed by The Corporation of City of London
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.
For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.
I was contacted last year by the BBC inviting me to apply for the new series of ‘toughest place to be’, in which they planned to take a London cabbie out of his (or her) comfort zone and place them in a city where driving could be best described as challenging.
After reading the e-mail my wife and I speculated upon which city the hapless cabbie would find themselves trying to earn a living. We both concluded that one of the most chaotic cities in the world was Mumbai.
So when the programme was televised recently it was no surprise to find London cabbie Mason McQueen travelling to India’s most populous city.
Mason’s most and mentor was Pradeep Sharma who lives in a tiny two-bedroom house earning less than £10 a day driving his cab.
It wasn’t long before Mason finds driving on some of the busiest and most congested streets in the world. Far worse than London’s, in sweltering heat in a vehicle without air conditioning, he managed to carefully avoid the sacred cows, get his passengers on the side when getting lost and did all this with good humour.
But the most touching part of this documentary was the change in Mason’s perception of life. Starting out by complaining about life in London from his Epping home his first reaction upon seeing the slum where Pradeep and his extended family live is one of horror.
Later he is shown other cabbies who have come from the countryside to make a better life for themselves living in squalor 6-8 in a room sending their money home to a family they see only twice a year.
But the life-changing event is seeing a young mother with her children living under a flyover, sleeping on the central reservation of the busy road as they try to scratch a living by selling homemade brushes.
The documentary showed us how bad we may think our job is, and all London cabbies have those moments, others doing the same job have a much harder time.
At the end of the programme, Mason is seen in a cabbies hut trying to raise money to send back to India.
Instead of a short sizzle teaser, the producers are accelerating the timeline to make the full £2.5m feature film. This has been possible with the ‘industry noise’ needed to attract a substantial level of interest among London’s cabbies. In September, the producers are planning for the shoot and next year are going to Cannes with the finished movie, backed by the very people who keep London moving.
For some weeks now, this monster of a bird has been dominating our feeder. Is it a fledgling rook from the large rookery nearby, or a rare raven, usually only seen in London at The Tower?
This important junction, with no realistically feasible detour, which closed in June last year for work to replace the flyover that was scheduled to last 12 weeks, has still not opened after 12 months of chaos in the surrounding area. Forty-tonne lorries still trundle down the country lanes of Havering-atte-Bower. So chaotic is this upgrade that the Mayor, Sir Sidiq Khan, has been dragged into the row at City Hall.
After much deliberation, I’ve purchased a second-hand spotter scope on Ebay. A Hawke Sport Optics 20-60x85mm Angled Waterproof Spotting Scope, Bag, Stand & Box, since you ask. Five times more powerful than my binoculars, it should improve my trips to nearby Rainham Marshes.
In one week’s time I will have reached my eighth decade. It seems only yesterday that I worked for a City printer producing financial documents whilst going out after work to learn The Knowledge. Starting CabbieBlog wasn’t that long ago either.
Most read post – Ten things Londoners never do
Most read page – Taxi Tales
London is a city that has reinvented itself upon the remains of the past.
Leo Hollis (b.1972), London Rising: The Men Who Made Modern London
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