When Joseph Bazalgette created his marvellous (and still used) sewer system the 1860s, he pushed back the banks of the Thames and buried his main ‘Low Level’ pipes in the reclaimed land. This is now The Embankment, ground that throughout history was subject to the twice-daily wash of the tides, now parks, roads and the riverside pavement. This reclamation of land from the river led to a couple of foreshore constructions to be landlocked.  Exhibit 1 is the great archway entrance to Somerset House. Now a glass fronted doorway facing the road and the river it was, until Bazalgette, an open a ..read more

On a refurbished Edwardian office block at 13-15 York Buildings – just down from Strand on the way to Embankment Gardens – is a green City of Westminster plaque that was unveiled by HMQ on Valentine’s day 2019. It commemorates the first home – and the centenary of the founding – of the ‘Government Code and Cipher School’. This anodyne name was given to the organisation that came about from the merger of two of the codebreaking outfits of WW1, the Navy’s ‘Room 40’ (which was their original location in The Admiralty) and the Army’s ‘MI1(b)’. It is therefore the original home of the present day i ..read more

A Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for supporting this blog. The year past has seen record numbers of visitors and page views, so thank you very much for reading, commenting, sharing and otherwise engaging with these posts. Here’s the end of year review (the 2021 one is here), kicking off with the most-viewed posts of the past 12 months. Henry VIII’s Wine Cellar (last year’s position =1) Scientists’ Corner, Westminster Abbey (last year’s position =2) The Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey (up 1 place from no. 4) The Opening Ceremony at the Tower of London (new entry!) The American Mem ..read more

Among the 28,000 names listed in the ‘Roll of Honor’ in the American Memorial Chapel in St Paul’s will be that of William Meade Lindsley Fiske III. And in the crypt of the cathedral, close to the tomb of Nelson, is a larger memorial to the man known as Billy Fiske.  He wasn’t the first American serviceman killed in WW2 (that seems to have been Robert M Losey, a US military attache caught up in the German invasion of Norway in May 1940), but he was certainly one of the first combatants to lose his life, dying in hospital on 17 August 1940 from burns after his Hurricane crash landed followi ..read more

As an adventure in Google, in maps, in diving down rabbit holes, my plan to post up a photo I took of one of the protective sphinxes that watch over Cleopatra’s Needle on the Embankment, is a lesson in a) how easy it is to research things on the web, b) the limits on researching things on the web, and c) how I can waste hours of time when I Should Be Doing Something Important. To begin near the beginning. A swift bit of googling brought up that the sphinxes were sculpted by George John Vulliamy, the ‘superintending architect’ to the Metropolitan Board of Works (the precursor to the London Coun ..read more

On the south west corner of Parliament Square, directly over the road from Westminster Abbey, is the Supreme Court building. The final court of appeal for the UK, the twelve justices sit in what was once the Middlesex Guildhall. The current building is the third such Guildhall on the site, and was designed by the architect James Glen Sivewright Gibson, in a style described as “art nouveau gothic” (!), and has statues and sculptural friezes by Henry Charles Fehr. As the home of the Supreme Court, the building keeps alive a link with the process of justice, because one of the uses of the Guildha ..read more

Squatting next to the elegant Queen Anne revival of the Old Admiralty Building (and more on that at some point) on the north side of Horseguards Parade is the proto-brutalist bulk of The Citadel. This is another relic of London’s WW2 history, the secure communications and operations centre for the Royal Navy, built in 1940/41 to withstand aerial attack. Look closely and you will see gun loops to also protect against ground assault; the Citadel would have been the last redoubt if German tanks ever had rolled down The Mall. Form definitely follows functions here. The foundations are 30ft deep, a ..read more

On 14 July 2006 the magistrates’ court opposite the Royal Opera House on Bow Street tried its final cases before being closed and redeveloped as a hotel. This brought to an end over 260 years of ‘law and order’ in Bow Street that encompassed the 18th century ‘Bow Street Runners’ (thought of as a precursor to Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force), a police station with ‘beats’ around Covent Garden and the court that saw appearances from Oscar Wilde, Dr Crippen, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the Kray twins and many more. There is now a small museum that incorporates some of the old police cells ..read more

In a bomb-proof concrete bunker 60 feet below the ground of what was once RAF Uxbridge is one of the most important sites in 20th century British history. It is no exaggeration that without this Battle of Britain control room and the integrated air defence system of which it was a part, the course of WW2 might have followed a different track entirely, because had the Luftwaffe gained air superiority in the battle, there would have been an attempted invasion of the UK by the German armies based in France. This was the operations room of 11 Group, charged with the air defences of London and the ..read more

A map! (Another map). I’ve tried to put the locations on the map referred to in the blog posts. Click on a location pin and there’ll be a link (or more than one link) to the relevant text. Further updates and classifications to come. The post Locations from the Blog first appeared on Stuff About London ..read more