Famous places within 5 minutes walk of my house Numbers 12, 13, 14 and 15
That's about it for famous places within 5 minutes walk of my house. I've been trying to restrict this local history to places that are actually famous, rather than merely historic, so I'm quite pleased to have found so many in such a small area. Matchgirls, Suffragettes, Gandhi and an Olympic village (amongst others) isn't a bad haul for a mere one-fifth of a square mile of East London. I don't know how well you'd get on looking for famous places within a quarter of a mile of your house... (unless you're the Queen, in which case presumably it's quite easy).
Here's a final round-up of a few other vaguely famous places within 5 minutes walk of here, and then tomorrow I'll spread the net wider to 10 minutes. 12) Lord Edmund Sheffield, who used to live a few doors down from me, captained the huge galleon The Bear against the Spanish Armada in 1588. 13) King James I had a hunting lodge in Bromley-by-Bow, called the Old Palace. The ornate state room on the ground floor, complete with Jacobean oak panelling and moulded ceiling, was rescued when the building was demolished three centuries later and can now be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. 14) In 1686 King James II established a May fair in central London. You can probably guess where. The revels lasted a full fortnight, complete with boxing, copious amounts of food and alcohol, prostitution and fighting. In 1765, as Mayfair moved upmarket, this drunken fair was moved instead to a new site in Bow, in what is now Fairfield Road. Crime, vice and violence flourished, until Bow moved upmarket too and the fair was closed forever in the 1820s. (More here) 15) The Black Swan pub, on the corner of Bow Road and Bromley High Street, was one of the first buildings in the UK to be destroyed in an air raid. In 1916 the pub was hit by a 100kg bomb dropped from a Zeppelin, killing four people. The landlord's two dead daughters, Cissy and Sylvia, are said to have come back to haunt the pub after it was rebuilt.
Famous places within 5 minutes walk of my house
