Things I Love (in no particular order)....
30 Sept 2007
HISTORICAL STUFF
- 55 BC Julius Caesar invaded England. The capital of the Roman occupation was established at 'Londinium' just under a century later.
- 1066 Norman invasion of England. William the Conqueror, after defeating King Harold at Hastings, is crowned king in Westminster Abbey. 1066 - the most famous date in English history. Every school child knows what happened in that year, when King Harold was beaten by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings, a victory which changed the face of English history.
- 1644-45 The Great Plague. The official death toll was 68,596
- 1666 The Great Fire of London. Starting in a bakery in Pudding Lane,
- 1710 St. Paul's Cathedral completed.
- 1710-1820 Dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
- 1837 Euston, London's first railway station was built. This improved transport and encouraged the rapid growth of the city.
- 1854 The Year of the Stink. The smell of waste in the Thames was so awful that the Members of Parliament had to leave the Houses of Parliament, and people crossing the river felt sick.
- 1914-1918 World War One. 2,500 people die in German air raids.
- 1936 Crystal Palace fire. Crystal Palace, the site of the Great Exhibition in 1851 burns to the ground.
- 1941 The Blitz. During World War Two, over 30,000 people died and huge areas of London were destroyed.
- 1984 The Thames Barrier was completed. This can be closed at any time to prevent the flooding of London at high tides.
- 1986 The Big Bang. The London Stock Exchange was computerised in order to compete better with world markets.
- 2000 Millenium celebrations on the Thames
The bright lights of Piccadilly Circus are famous through-out the world. So is the Statue of Eros. Look closely and you’ll see that Eros isn’t really a statue but a fountain on which a small figure rests, commemorating the philanthropic Earl of Shaftesbury. Some say that the figure is really a pun on Shaftesbury’s name as the bow doesn’t have an arrow in it and is pointing downwards as if the arrow (or shaft) has already been shot and is “buried” in the ground. Nearby Trafalgar Square, famous for Nelson's column is also where London distances are measured. The actual point is on the corner of Strand and Charing Cross Road, near the statue of Charles 1 - there is even a plaque on the wall confirming this.
Marble Arch is a well-known landmark, seemingly lost on its own island. It was originally built as the entrance to Buckingham Palace but not used. Inside the Arch is a tiny office which used to be a police station.
On the traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road & Marble Arch is a plaque which most people ignore, marking the site of the Tyburn Tree, London’s main execution spot, where about 50,000 people were executed. Nearby in Bayswater Road is the Shrine and Tyburn Convent where the nuns still pray for the souls of those whose lost their lives.
Covent Garden is really a spelling mistake! The area used to be the market garden for what is now Westminster Abbey monastery and convent.
The architect of the Oxo Tower originally wanted to use electric lighting to advertise the meat extract product but permission was refused so he re-designed it with OXO incorporated as windows on all four sides of the window which shined out the advertising message. The building now houses restaurants, design shops and galleries.
In 1881 the Savoy Theatre became the first theatre to be lit by electricity. The Savoy Hotel stands on the site of the Palace of the Savoy – see the panels on each side of the approach to the hotel recording its history. Cars coming from the Strand to the Savoy must travel on the right, not left – this is the only place we’ve heard of in Britain where this happens.
Events that will change the world sometimes take place in innocuous places. John Baird first demonstrated how television would work above what is now Bar Italia in Frith St, Soho.
At one stage the Tower of London was like a zoo - it housed a menagerie of all kinds of animals includings lions. The moat used to have water in it but was drained in 1843 and during the war was used to grow vegetables.
Much of the land is London is still owned by The Crown and a handful of rich families. The largest and most lucrative of these historic estates is that of the Grosvenors, much of whose land is in Mayfair & Belgravia. Part of the reason that this area looks so smart is because the Grosvenor estate exercises strict control over the upkeep of properties, ensuring they are all regularly painted in a magnolia cream colour, don’t have satellite dishes and in some cases have the coat of arms on them. You can get a walking tour map of Mayfair & Belgravia from the estate office.
Criss-crossing London’s bridges and following the Thames Path (now the longest riverside walk in Europe) is a great way to see London. The oldest surviving bridge is the Clattern Bridge at Kingston dating back to the 12th century. Richmond Bridge is the oldest Thames surviving Thames bridge (built 1774) and is a great starting point for a leisurely walk to Ham House.
The Thames used to be incredibly dirty because it was where all waste from London ended up. In 1858 the stench became so bad it was known as "The Great Stink" - so plans were drawn up to provide proper sewers and drainage. The Victoria Embankment between Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges houses some of these and provides a major route from Westminster to the City.
The Public Record Office at Kew holds the original documents from key historical moments through-out the ages. You can see the Doomsday Book, view Guy Fawkes’ confession and extracts from Pepys' diary as well as researching your family or house’s history.
Londons squares are famous (even more so thanks to Notting Hill) through-out the world, tranquil oases even in the most central areas. Most of them are very private, but many will open to the public for just one day on the 8th June 2003.
From the outside the Bank of England looks an impenetrable building but you can get a glimpse of the workshops behind the curtain wall by visiting the Museum there.
It’s easy to rush by Banqueting House on Whitehall without realising there’s a wonderful Rubens ceiling inside what was once part of Whitehall Palace and where Charles I was executed.
Get a glimpse of what happens behind the usually closed doors of a strictly A list celebrity celebration at Madame Tussaud’s Blush, where visitors become part of the action.
Florence Nightingale is well known as a nurse in the Crimean War but did you also know she was a brilliant statistician. Learn more at the Florence Nightingale Museum near St. Thomas’s hospital.
Many of London’s theatres offer backstage tours – you can also find out more about the history of the threatre at the Theatre Museum, at Shakespeare’s Globe or take a trip backstage at the Royal Opera House royaloperahouse.org
Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields houses a wonderful collection which he accumulated through-out his interesting life. The house itself is like a tardis, opening up into unexpected rooms and alcoves. Don’t forget to ask the wardens to open up the shutters to show you the Hogarth paintings which are otherwise hidden from view.
Somerset House in the Strand is full of surprises – another imposing London building which it’s easy to pass by without realising just how much you can see inside. It’s home to three wonderful collections - the Courtauld Institute Gallery, Gilbert Collection and Hermitage Rooms, and offers splendid views of the Thames. It was built to house the Navy Board and has been the home to many different learned societies and institutions.
London’s been used as the setting for many films. You can “spot” the location of various scenes from 101 Dalmations in many familiar London places such as Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square, Burlington Arcade, Battersea Park and Kenwood House. The churches used in Four Weddings & a Funeral include the chapel of the Royal Naval College at Greenwich. Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels was “shot” at various places around London including Borough Market, Bethnal Green Town Hall and Staples Market in Camden.
You can see “scenes” (I’ll run out of puns soon) from Shakespeare in Love being “played out” in the Great Hall at Middle Temple (acting as the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall Palace), Marble Hill House, St Bartholomew the Great and the River Thames near Barnes. Sliding Doors features Gwyneth Paltrow in Bertorelli's restaurant in Charlotte Street, at Fat Boys Diner, the Blue Anchor pub in Hammersmith, and on Albert Bridge over the Thames.
Oscar Wilde uses Somerset House, Borough Market, Lincoln's Inn and Middle Temple, and the Cadogan Hotel in London.
In Harry Potter Little Whinging Zoo is really London Zoo, while Gringotts Bank is Australia House on The Strand. Kings Cross railway station has become more popular thanks to Platform 9 ¾ (filmed on Platform 4).
The Underground
His map was originally rejected by the powers that be at London Transport1, mainly because it was not geographical. Indeed he enlarged the central areas and compressed the outer areas to make the whole complex map clearer. The map proved to be a great hit with the public and most other major cities (including New York, St Petersburg and Sydney) used his map as the basis for their own underground maps.
How Helpful Is it?
Despite the above, the map is often reviled as it bears very little geographical relationship to where the stations are and even less geographical information on how far apart stations are.
As Bill Bryson pointed out in his book, Notes From a Small Island, an out-of-town visitor using Mr Beck's map to get from, say, Bank Station to Mansion House, would quite understandably board a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, transfer to the Circle Line and continue for another five stops to Mansion House. At which point they would emerge 200 yards down the street from the location they'd started at.
However someone on the Internet has kindly devised a real geographical tube map to go some way to avoiding the above situation and also to try to stop the many tourists getting on at Covent Garden and travelling one stop to Leicester Square. This is only 0.16 miles by foot and is indeed the shortest distance between two stations on the whole network (if you don't count the Docklands Light Railway)2.
One is also not sure of its use when trying to beat the world record for travelling around the entire London Underground system in a single day. The record for travelling to each one of 282 stations (which includes the new Jubilee Line Extension) is 19 hours, 59 minutes and 37 seconds. Some other forms of public transport were used in this record completed by Robert Robinson. He attributed his success to knowing the tubes like the back of his hand: 'every single platform, every signal, every entrance and exit - everything.'
Someone has actually devised 'The Way Out' tube map which is a pretty useful invention, since it shows where the nearest exits are when you reach a station, allowing you to shave valuable time (possibly whole minutes) off your journey.
The Tube Map as Art
The London Underground map has also been the subject of a piece of art in the somewhat controversial 1997 Royal Academy Sensation exhibition. Put simply The Great Bear by Simon Patterson takes the tube map but changes the names of stations to artists, footballers, newsreaders, comedians, philosophers, saints, etc.
The map suddenly seemed to offer the opportunity to travel the famous names of history and popular culture, passing a succession of comedians on the way to a philosopher. Patterson uses familiar systems for the classification and the ordering of information and undermines their authority by imposing new yet similarly familiar information. He has used the forms of maps, typewriters, circuits, slide-rules, air traffic route plans and constellation diagrams. They become metaphors for the connectedness of things, they suggest new relationships between them, parallel readings, other ways of configuring the data which govern our lives
- British Council.
The map is such a design icon that it has also formed the basis of many posters (mainly commissioned by London Transport), clothing, towels, washbags and a variety of other items.
Ian McLaren was a former student of Harry Beck and pondered on what Mr Beck might have thought if he were alive today and could see all the tourist goods that have sprung from his map.
The diagram is reproduced over 60 million times each year by companies other than London Transport... It is doubtful whether Beck ever imagined that his design would become such an icon of London; or that he would have expected such a dry subject as a public transport route diagram to be the basis of so many witty and commercially successful souvenir products and poster images.
Given the sense of sheer fun which his design has engendered, and the degree of affection and international respect for it; I cannot believe that despite the vicissitudes of his relationship with London Transport, he would today resent that his ideas have created the means to help preserve the design heritage of London. So on balance, to misquote Queen Victoria; yes, I am inclined to believe that Harry Beck would 'have been amused'.
If anyone has seen the map adorning particularly strange items, it would be great to start a discussion here.
The London Underground Font
A discussion of the map is not really complete without a nodding reference to the famous London Underground font and indeed the London Underground logo itself.
We have a man called Frank Pick to credit for both of these. Frank Pick was Chief Executive of London Transport between 1913 and 1938. He had a great interest in visual arts and commissioned both the London Underground font and the famous logo. He said:
The test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish.
- From a lecture made by Frank Pick to the Edinburgh branch of the Design and Industries Association in 1916
Wise words indeed, as the font is still in wide use by designers and the London Underground logo is almost a symbol of London itself.
So, following his words above, the font had to be modern yet easy to read. The sign representing the Underground (or roundel, as it's widely known) needed to be inconspicuous, yet recognizable. Something that would signify a station entrance or interchange among the thousands of distractions Londoners face on a daily basis.
Pick asked the calligrapher, Edward Johnston, to design the font in 1915. In 1916 after collaboration with Eric Gill (he of Gill Sans font fame), the Johnston Sans Serif font was produced. A few minor modifications later and we have the Johnston Underground Font which is still used on all London Underground maps, stations, posters and materials today. The New Johnston Underground font can be downloaded, too. Great for London Underground-themed parties and the like!
What a Classic
1 comment:
I don't think so! - although they had an art exhibition down there recently! and they set a Lara Croft game scene in there too!
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