Interesting stuff and knowledges about London

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6 MEN WHO FOUNDED LONDON HOSPITALS

1. Rahere: St Bartholomew's (1123)

A courtier, perhaps a jester, at the court of Henry I, Rahere travelled on a pilgrimage to Rome in the early 1120s. En route he is said to have caught malaria and vowed to build a hospital and church if he survived. Returning to England, he was granted land in Smithfield by his royal master, and St Bartholomew's, the oldest hospital in London, was built in 1123. Rahere also founded a priory nearby and his tomb stands in the church of St Bartholomew the Great, the only surviving part of his foundation. Members of staff at Bart's hospital over the years have included William Harvey, the man who first described the circulation of the blood; the cricketer WG Grace; Edward Wilson, who died with Captain Scott on the way back from the South Pole and the eighteenth-century physician John Abernethy, a robustly commonsensical doctor who once said to a lady suffering from depression, 'Don't come to me; go and buy a skipping-rope.' In the Conan Doyle stories Sherlock Holmes is introduced to Dr Watson at Bart's. Attempts to close the hospital in 1992 were thwarted and it still stands as a monument to nearly nine centuries of patient care.

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2.Thomas Guy: Guy's (1723)

Guy's Hospital was established in 1723, using ?18,793 from the fortune of Thomas Guy. Guy, a bookseller, had made his money from illegally importing bibles from Holland (he was breaking a monopoly in doing so) and through careful investment in the stock of the South Sea Company before the company's bubble famously burst. Guy died at the age of eighty, the year after the foundation of his hospital, leaving further finance for it in his will and a stipulation that it should 'receive and entertain therein four hundred poor persons, or upwards, labouring under any distemper, infirmity or disorders thought capable of relief by physic or surgery'. Three doctors at Guy's have given their names to diseases. Richard Bright (Bright's Disease), Thomas Addison (Addison's Disease) and Thomas Hodgkin (Hodgkin's Disease) all worked at the hospital in the early nineteenth century.

3.Thomas Coram: Foundling Hospital (1741)

The Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Children, soon known as the Foundling Hospital, opened in 1741. The driving force behind it was a former sea-captain, shipwright and colonial entrepreneur (he had spent many years of his life in America) called Thomas Coram. On his return to London from the American colonies, Coram had been appalled by the number of destitute children on the streets of the city and the Foundling Hospital was the result of his determination to do something to help them. One of the first governors of the hospital was the artist William Hogarth, who designed the uniform and the coat of arms, and the composer George Frederick Handel also donated his talents to the cause. Annual performances of Handel's Messiah provided money for the hospital for many years. In the fourteen years between 1756 and 1769, almost 15,000 babies were admitted, of whom more than 10,000 died. Even this apparently terrible mortality rate was better than that in parish workhouses. Some parts of the original hospital still survive in what is now called Coram's Fields, including the lodges where mothers unable to look after their babies left them to receive Coram's charity.

4.Benjamin Golding: Charing Cross (1818)

Golding was a wealthy medical student in Regency London when, in his own words, 'I opened my house ... to such poor persons as desired gratuitous advice and presented myself daily for all such applicants from eight o'clock in the morning until one in the afternoon.' In 1818, he established what he called The West London Infirmary and Dispensary' in Suffolk Street which was later to move premises and change its name to Charing Cross Hospital.

5.William Marsden: Royal Free (1832) and Royal Marsden (1851)

When Marsden's first wife died from cancer, he realised that, as he wrote in a letter at the time, 'we know absolutely nothing about the disease'. He went on to create the first hospital intended solely for patients with cancer which was established in Canon Row, Westminster, in 1851. Its present buildings in Fulham Road opened in the early 1860s. This was not the first hospital Marsden had been instrumental in founding. More than twenty years earlier he had chanced upon a young woman dying on the steps of St Andrew's Church, Holborn, and had been unable to find a bed for her because all London hospitals at the time demanded a letter of recommendation from a subscriber. Outraged, Marsden had gathered together a group of like-minded colleagues and, in a meeting at the Gray's Inn Coffee House, they had committed themselves to creating a hospital which would not require either payment or a letter from a subscriber for admission. This was the beginning of what became the Royal Free Hospital.

6. Sir Morell Mackenzie: Throat Hospital (1863)

Morell Mackenzie was a high achiever at an early age and established the first hospital specifically for those suffering from diseases of the throat in Golden Square before he was thirty. Twenty years later a spectacular misdiagnosis was to reduce his reputation to tatters. Summoned to treat Queen Victoria's son-in-law, the German Crown Prince Frederick, for a throat condition, Mackenzie pronounced his patient's illness to be non-malignant and, bringing relief and comfort to the royal family, was knighted. The following year the condition proved only too malignant and Frederick, by now German Emperor, died. Mackenzie was in disgrace and he failed to improve his standing when, in an attempt to defend himself, he published a book in which he suggested that Frederick's death might have been due not to his throat disease but to syphilis.

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6 LOST LONDON RIVERS (INCLUDING I THAT MAY NEVER HAVE EXISTED)

1.The Fleet Flowing from Hampstead and Highgate towards Blackfriars, the Fleet was much the most important of the Thames tributaries. It was driven underground in the eighteenth century. In the 1730s, it was arched over from Holborn Bridge to Fleet Bridge along what eventually became Farringdon Road and the stretches south to the river were covered some thirty years later. Nearly all the literary references to the Fleet emphasise its appalling pollution, much of it caused by the blood and entrails of the animals slaughtered in nearby Smithfield Market. In The Dunciad, Alexander Pope writes of 'where Fleet Ditch with disemboguing streams/Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames'. Bridewell, first a royal palace and then a prison, stood at the mouth of the Fleet where it emptied into the Thames, on a site now occupied by the Unilever Building.

2.The Effra Beneath the streets of South London flows the River Effra which rises near Crystal Palace, journeys through Norwood and Brixton, runs close by the Oval and then enters the Thames near the MI6 building at Vauxhall Bridge. The Effra is now entirely underground and mostly incorporated into the city's sewage network but it must once have flowed freely. Elizabeth I is supposed to have travelled along the Effra by royal barge to visit Sir Walter Raleigh, who had a house in Brixton. 3.The Tyburn Another tributary of the Thames, the Tyburn flowed from Hampstead to Westminster, giving its name to a village which eventually became the principal site of London executions during the eighteenth century. Thorney Island was an island at the mouth of the Tyburn which has long since disappeared under Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.

4.The Walbrook The Walbrook divided Roman London in two, flowing from the area north of Moorgate and Liverpool Street Station to join the River Thames at Dowgate.

5.The Westbourne Rising in Hampstead, the Westbourne flowed southwards through Kilburn towards Bayswater and Hyde Park, on through Knightsbridge (which takes its name from a crossing over the river), continued through Kensington and Chelsea and entered the Thames near what is now Chelsea Bridge. The river was dammed in the eighteenth century to form the Long Water and the Serpentine and disappeared underground as London developed in the second half of that century and the early part of the next. At one point, it passes through a nineteenth-century conduit pipe which can be seen crossing the tracks from the platforms at Sloane Square tube station.

6.The Langbourne One of the wards of the City of London is called Langbourn and the sixteenth-century historian of the city John Stow wrote that it took its name from a lost river that flowed nearby. Not only was Stow wrong about the derivation of the name-almost certainly it comes from a medieval version of the world 'Lombard' – but he was probably mistaken in believing that there was any river,lost or otherwise, in the vicinity.

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6 MEMORABLE LONDON FIRES (OTHER THAN THE GREAT FIRE OF 1666)

1.The Great Fire, 1212 A fire broke out in the city on the night of 11 July 1212 in which many people died. City dignitaries met at the Guildhall about a fortnight later and a record of their deliberations and recommendations survives. As well as bemoaning the fire which 'to our greatest dismay, utterly destroyed London Bridge and many other splendid buildings, and sent innumerable men and women to their graves', they suggested ways of preventing such conflagrations in the future. They recommended, among other things, that 'all cook-shops by the Thames should be whitewashed and plastered, inside and out' and that it would be 'advisable to place in front of each house a wooden or stone tub full of water'.

2.Cornhill Fire, 1748 Caused by a maidservant who 'left a candle burning in the shed whilst she was listening to a band performing at the Swan Tavern', the fire raged for ten hours on 25 March in the streets and alleys around Cornhill. More than a hundred buildings, including many of the well-known taverns and coffee-houses in the area were destroyed and a dozen people killed.

3.Albion Mills Fire, 1791 Arguably the mill Blake had in mind when he wrote of 'dark, satanic mills', Albion Mills was a corn mill built at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge by Matthew Boulton, the industrialist, entrepreneur and partner of James Watt. The largest and best-equipped mill of its time, it nonetheless went up in flames on 2 March 1791. Boulton's strong suspicion that the cause of the fire was arson, possibly by a business rival, was never proven and the Albion Mills were not rebuilt.

4.Houses of Parliament Fire, 1834 The fire was started when servants at the Palace of Westminster were instructed to destroy a large number of tally sticks, lengths of wood which were used in an ancient method of accounting. The practice of using the tally sticks was obsolete but thousands of them were littering the palace and it was decided they should be consigned to the furnace. Unfortunately, there were so many that the fire grew out of control, the wooden panelling of the buildings caught light and soon the entire palace was on fire. The Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time, Lord Althorp, on arriving at the scene of the fire, is said to have shouted, 'Damn the House of Commons. Let it blaze, but save the Hall'. The dramatic sight of the parliament buildings blazing attracted thousands of spectators, amongst them the artist JMW Turner, who sketched what he saw and later painted two large canvases of the fire lighting up the skies across the Thames.

5.Tooley Street Fire, 1861 The fire started in a riverside warehouse on 23 June and spread to other buildings along the Thames. James Braidwood, the fire chief, was killed during the blaze when a wall collapsed on him. It took two days to bring under control and the ruins continued to smoulder for a fortnight. The scale of the disaster and the vast insurance claims led to a parliamentary enquiry and the establishment of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade. A memorial plaque which records Braidwood's heroism can still be seen in Tooley Street.

6.Crystal Palace Fire, 1936 A small fire, possibly caused by faulty electrical wiring, was spotted by the manager of the Crystal Palace, Harry Buckland, who was out walking with his young daughter (whom he had named Chrystal) and his dog on the evening of 30 November 1936. Despite the efforts of Buckland and two night-watchmen, the fire took hold and spread from an area in the central transept to the entire structure. The fire crews that began to arrive could do little to stop it. At the height of the fire eighty-eight fire engines and more than a thousand firemen were fighting the blaze but, by morning, the Crystal Palace was a smouldering ruin of twisted iron and melted glass. The television pioneer John Logie Baird had workshops in the South Tower of the Crystal Palace and lost much of his equipment in the fire.

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6 LONDON PUBS NAMED AFTER PEOPLE YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF

1.The Ship and Shovell, Craven Passage, WC2 The improbably named Cloudesly Shovel rose from cabin boy to admiral. Although, in his day, he was one of the most famous sailors in the Royal Navy, he is now remembered today, if at all, for the manner of his death. His ship was wrecked off the Isles of Scilly in 1707 and eight hundred men were lost, including the admiral. It has been claimed that he was alive when he was cast ashore on one of the islands but that a local woman murdered him on the beach for his emerald ring. The woman confessed to the crime on her deathbed many years later. The immediate consequence of the disaster was an urgent reconsideration of the system of navigation in the navy and the government offered an enormous prize, later won by the clock-maker John Harrison, for an accurate method of determining longitude at sea.

2.The John Snow, Soho In 1834 the clergyman and wit Sydney Smith wrote in a letter to a friend that, 'He who drinks a tumbler of London Water has literally in his stomach more animated beings than there are Men, Women and Children on the face of the Globe.' One of the consequences of the impurity of London water was that the capital was regularly ravaged by outbreaks of cholera, although no one at the time believed that the disease was carried in the drinking water. John Snow was a physician who was the first person to realise that contaminated water was causing the cholera to spread. During an outbreak of the disease in Soho in 1854, he analysed the mortality statistics and mapped them against the sources of water supply. He was able to prove that a single pump in Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) was the site of infection. The pub, once known as The Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was renamed in his honour to mark the centenary of his discovery, although, since Snow was a vegetarian teetotaller, a pub isn't the most appropriate monument to him.

3.Dirty Dick's, Bishopsgate 'Dirty Dick' was the nickname of an early nineteenth- century ironmonger called Nathaniel Bentley.A kind of male version of Dickens's Miss Havisham, Bentley became a recluse when his fiancee died the day before their wedding. Nothing in his house was touched or cleaned for decades. When Bentley died the landlord of the pub that stood here bought up the contents of his shop and house. The mummified bodies of Bentley's dead cats were still on display in the pub in the early 1980s. The present building is a newer one.

4.Crocker's Folly, Aberdeen Place Frank Crocker was a nineteenth-century entrepreneur who built the pub as a hotel called The Crown at what he believed would be the site for a new rail terminus for lines from the Midlands. It has been claimed that, when the terminus was built at Marylebone instead, Crocker, deciding he was a ruined man, committed suicide by throwing himself off the roof of the hotel but he died a natural death in 1904. Soon after it was built, the pub was nicknamed Crocker's Folly and it was officially renamed in the 1980s.

5.Old Dr Butler's Head, Mason's Avenue, EC2 The pub takes its name from a physician in the reign of James I. More quack than scientist, William Butler had a reputation for unconventional cures (once firing a pistol near an unsuspecting patient to scare him out of his epilepsy) and was the creator of Dr Butler's Purging Ale, a medicinal brew with a powerful laxative effect. The ale, surprisingly popular for many years, was sold at houses displaying the sign of 'Butler's Head'. The pub in Mason's Avenue is on the site of one of these, destroyed in the Great Fire and rebuilt and renovated several times since.

6.Marquis of Granby, Chandos Place, WC2 There are pubs of this name all over England (there are nearly a dozen in London alone) but few people have any idea who the Marquis of Granby was. John Manners, Marquess of Granby, was a hero of the Seven Years' War, a general who was victorious against the French at the Battle of Warburg in 1760. This particular Marquis of Granby in Chandos Place, then called the Hole in the Wall, was allegedly the pub in which the Bow Street Runners finally cornered the gentleman highwayman, Claude Duval.

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