London History, Up Close

On 14 January 1559, Elizabeth I climbed into a litter of cloth of gold carried by two mules and left the Tower of London for Westminster. The Elizabeth I coronation procession through London was not merely ceremonial. It was the new queen’s first and most important act of government. Her sister Mary had imprisoned her in the Tower five years earlier on suspicion of treason. Now she was queen, and the same walls that had held her were the starting point for one of the most elaborate public...

At 9.38am on 2 May 1990, a 58-year-old messenger named John Goddard walked down Nicholas Lane in the City of London, was stopped by a man with a knife, and surrendered his briefcase. Inside it were 301 bearer bonds worth £292 million. Goddard had no idea what he was carrying. The mugger jogged off into the rush-hour crowd. It was the largest street robbery in the history of the world, and it remains a Guinness World Record. Only one man ever went to jail for it. Bearer Bonds To...

A Quaker who founded a colony as a “holy experiment” in religious tolerance was baptised here in 1644. A future American president married here in 1797, writing home two days later to introduce his new wife to his parents. All Hallows by the Tower, the oldest church in the City of London, has an unlikely thread running through the founding of America – and the story of that thread is stranger, and more complicated, than the blue plaques suggest. The Boy Baptised by the...

The oldest church in the City of London has survived a medieval gunpowder explosion, the Great Fire of London, the Blitz, and several centuries of knife fights in its churchyard. It has sheltered sanctuary seekers and Knights Templar awaiting heresy trials, and gave Samuel Pepys a vantage point from which to survey the ruins of his city. All Hallows by the Tower is still standing. Everything around it, at various points, has not been. Older Than You Think All Hallows by the...

3 Queen Victoria street seems the site for skyscrapers. Nowadays you are glancing up at the ten-storey Bloomberg HQ peeking into the sky (fun fact, it is made of Derbyshire sandstone, not a local stone). Before 2010, you would have glanced up at fifteen-storey Bucklersbury house, London’s first tall slab after restrictions had been lifted on buildings above 30 metres in height after World War two. Both have made you look up, but the real treasure is below your feet.  Where you are...

Herbert Mason’s famous photo of St Paul’s in the Blitz. The south face of St Paul’s Cathedral looks out over St Paul’s Churchyard, the pedestrianised square that wraps around the building’s base. Christopher Wren’s dome rises above it. Look up at the triangular pediment on this side of the building and you’ll find a carved phoenix, wings spread, rising from flames. Beneath it, a single Latin word: Resurgam. I shall rise again. It...

St Paul’s Cathedral has a fire-filled history. Ludgate Hill rises gently from the heart of the City of London towards the west facade of St Paul’s Cathedral, the steps spilling down from the portico onto the churchyard below. The stone is worn smooth in places. Tourists cluster around the base of the steps. Office workers cut through on their lunch breaks. It looks, on most days, like a building that has always been here and always will be. That impression is not entirely wrong....

Clouds gather over St Paul’s Cathedral. The west towers of St Paul’s Cathedral rise above St Paul’s Churchyard like a pair of sentinels, topped with gilded pineapples that catch the light on a clear day. They are, even by the standards of a city that has never been shy about reaching skyward, extraordinarily tall. And in the eighteenth century, extraordinarily tall meant extraordinarily vulnerable, especially to the one force of nature that no architect, however...

The steps of St Paul’s Cathedral spill down from a portico of paired columns onto St Paul’s Churchyard, the pedestrianised square that wraps around the building’s south side. Christopher Wren’s stunning dome looms above – the one that survived the Blitz, which you can see from half of London on a clear day. Tourists gather here in clusters. Office workers cut through on their lunch breaks. On most days, this part of the City of London is busy but...