Who was Spring-heeled Jack? Was he anything to do with Jack The Ripper? I wasn't sure, so I asked Wikipedia and this is what it told me: Spring-heeled Jack is a folklore character of victorian times who was known for his bizarre appearance and startling leaps and bounds. The first claimed ... Read More...
London
Last week I inveigled you into imagining a movie starring Nicolas Cage gunning a Dodge Charger across the California desert to take some peyote and look at some concrete dinosaurs. Well, this week I thought I might ask you to try imagining roughly the same film, except with Robin Asquith gunning ... Read More...
Jonathon Green returns to his series on London and slang with a visit to the fishwives of Billingsgate... Billingsgate. As in fish. As in Belin’s Gate which may memorialize one Belin, who, according to Charles Dickens Jr’s Dictionary of the Thames (1881) and quoting Geoffrey of Monmouth, was a king and ... Read More...
It's London Fashion week, voluptuous mutations and pilots who sound like Roger Moore for Susan this week... Perhaps you can help me? I am trying to think of a suitable caption for this photograph. Incidentally, the logo on the front of the man’s sweatshirt says ‘Dope Chef’. I love living in the swirling ... Read More...
An old university friend once told me of an unusual habit his grandfather (an otherwise outwardly ordinary man) had when sitting down to Sunday lunch. If there was pork crackling in the offing, he would take a decent length of it, recline in his chair with head thrust back and, ... Read More...
This week the London Underground celebrated its 150th anniversary, so to mark the occasion here are four Tube Station songs... I love the Tube (except, of course, the Central Line at rush hour) and have done since I was a child and first grasped the elegant logic of Harry Beck’s map. ... Read More...
Judith Flanders is one of the leading historians of the Victorian period - and wrote a guest post on the Dabbler about the invention of detective fiction here. Today, Jonathon reviews her new book The Victorian City, Everyday Life in Dickens’ London... Dickens is 200 this year and no one has ever delineated ... Read More...
The 1960s was a decade of immense optimism, when anything seemed possible. Britain led the way in contemporary fashion - a group of young people was even sent to New York to show off ‘the London look,’ which, according to one journalist constituted a ‘youthquake.’ It was also a time of ... Read More...
First time visitors to Westminster Underground station may think they have walked onto the set of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on entering this subterranean cathedral of concrete, steel and chains. But such architectural gems are easily taken for granted on a daily commute. How often do we ignore wondrous feats of ... Read More...
Anyone who thinks Heathrow is a mess should fly to Paris. Pandemonium rules at both Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports. There are queues as far as the eye can see for luggage, taxis, buses and information. Ask someone if they can help you with directions and you’re met by ... Read More...
