I love London and spent almost six years there during my overseas experience. There’s so much history in and around the city with Georgian, Victorian and modern buildings crammed together. Intriguing blue plaques mark buildings and places of interest and it’s fascinating to wander the streets where both the aristocracy, merchants and ordinary people went about their business. Although a Celtic community established itself around a ford across the river Thames, it was the Romans who first developed the square mile now known as the City of London.

Here are thirteen random things about historical London.

1. By 1750 London was home to 10 per cent of the population.

2. The city bustled at all hours and the noise was incredible. “I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly, thinking there was a mob,” wrote Horace Walpole in 1791, only to realize it was usual Londoners ‘sauntering or trudging’ down the thoroughfare.

3. The Great Fire began in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner, where the golden figure of the fat boy still occupies the site. He was once accompanied by an inscription noting “This boy is in memory put up of the late fire of London, occasioned by the sin of gluttony, 1666.”

4. In May 1718 a great meat pudding, eighteen feet two inches in length and four feet in diameter, was dragged by six asses to the Swan Tavern in Fish Street. Apparently its smell became too much for the Londoners. They routed the escort and devoured the pudding.

5. They had fast food back then with a huge variety of street-stalls and hawkers selling chicken, rabbit, milk, water, eels, pies and pastries.

6. London buildings are built upon refuse. Discarded and forgotten objects, left among old foundations, help support the weight of the modern city.

7. At Letts Wharf, on the southern bank of the Thames Londoners used to sift and pick through the refuse. Most of them were women. It was an old profession, passed from mother to daughter.

8. It has been estimated that in the 1740s and 1750s there were 17,000 Gin-houses. The slogan, copied by Hogarth for his portrayal of Gin Lane, ran ‘Drunk for 1d, dead drunk for 2d, clean straw for nothing.

9. Gentlemen drank as deeply and freely as the poor.

10. Clubbing is first used as a term in the seventeenth century. In July 1660, Pepys wrote that ‘We went to Wood’s, our old house, for clubbing.’

11. At the beginning of the seventeenth century complaints started about the pollution. The pollution caused by coal fires became worse during the nineteenth century. In 1873 there were seven hundred ‘extra deaths’, nineteen of them the result of pedestrians walking into the Thames, the docks or canals.

12. The river Thames was the lifeblood of the city. Many Londoners earned their living directly off the river. From a distance it looked like a forest of masts with approximately two thousand ships and boats on the river each day.

13. Many of the rivers of London are buried, concealed and encased in tunnels and pipes. The lost rivers are thought to be responsible for many allergies and still create dampness and a stench. One recent investigation of patients in London hospitals revealed that 38 out of the 49 allergic patients lived within 180 yards of a known watercourse.

Source: London the biography by Peter Ackroyd.

Do you think you’d like to travel back in time to experience London?

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