This blue plaque appears on a house in Lymington Road, West Hampstead. For 10 years this was the home of Edmund Clerihew Bentley, a journalist and crime author who introduced the world to a much-loved literary form, a bit like a limerick. It's called the clerihew, and here's the first one Edmund wrote at the age of 16.
Sir Humphry Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.
Clerihews are short four-line poems about a famous person. Their name must form the first line, the pairs of lines must rhyme and there has to be something amusingly biographical about the whole. Lines don't have to scan. Here are my attempts at clerihews about two other West Hampstead residents...
Joan Armatrading
Was musically crusading.
She sang to perfection
Of love and affection.
Evelyn Waugh
Made Brideshead top drawer.
His first name was Arthur
But he chose something smarter.
This inscription appears on the west side of Kingston Bridge. There's been a Thames crossing here since Anglo-Saxon times, indeed there were no other bridges between Staines and London Bridge until 1729 when Putney Bridge was added. This made Kingston Bridge really important, not just to the local economy but to trade in southeast England generally. A succession of wooden bridges was followed by the building of the current stone bridge in 1825, its first stone laid by the Prime Minister exactly 200 years and one week ago. A toll was imposed to help repay the construction costs of £40,000, and the wardens promptly demolished the old timber crossing so nobody could cross for free.
This Bridge Made Free March 12 1870
It took over 40 years for the unpopular toll to be removed. An act of Parliament was required, the snappily-titled Kew and Other Bridges Act 1869, which also applied to the crossings at Kew, Hampton Court, Walton-upon Thames and Staines. This redirected the levies from London's wine and coal duties to pay off the remainder of the bridges' debts, with Kingston paid off first. Residents of the town celebrated with a fireworks show and by burning the toll gates on Hampton Green.
The dates other Thames Bridges were made toll-free 1782: London 1785: Blackfriars 1859: Richmond 1864: Southwark 1873: Kew 1876: Hampton Court 1878: Waterloo 1879: Albert, Battersea, Chelsea, Lambeth, Vauxhall 1880: Hammersmith, Putney, Wandsworth
This is Border Road in Sydenham. You can tell it's on a boundary because the street sign on the left has a green background and the street sign on the right has a light blue background. Border Road (green) is in the borough of Bromley and Lawrie Park Road (light blue) is in the borough of Lewisham. The historic boundary between Kent and Surrey once passed very close to here but Border Road doesn't match that particular border, instead referring to the historic division between the Hundred of Blackheath and the Hundred of Bromley and Beckenham. The large houses hereabouts were all built in the 1850s, and this would have been the relevant boundary at the time.
There are two other 'Border' roads in London...
• Border Crescent, SE26 - essentially a continuation of the aforementioned Border Road
• Border Gardens, CR0 - a modern cul-de-sac in Spring Park, a few metres from the historic boundary between Surrey and Kent (now Croydon and Bromley)
...and several 'Boundary' roads, of which I think the following fourteen are related to administrative boundaries.
This is the festive abomination I saw yesterday in Castle Green.
Christmas tree, inflatable Santa, holly wreath, dangly decorations and 'Merry Christmas' banners. There are 6 weeks to go until Christmas, it's not even the second half of November, it is too early.
What really broke me was the banner in the window wishing passers by a 'Happy New Year'. There are 7 weeks to go until 2026, it is much much too early. Even if the householder is being ironic, this is punishably premature.
Still, at least it wasn't as out of date as the nearby garden bedecked with VE Day flags.
