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The most fascinating, frivolous and bizarre facts about London – all the really important stuff, that is – are the bits most people simply never get to hear about. Stuff they don’t even know they don’t know. Stuff like this:
FACT: Deliberately targeted on a point on the M1, and with an operating range of around 30 miles, the main guns on HMS Belfast would destroy Scratchwood Services if they were ever fired.
FACT: Arriving in London from Oxford, Christopher Merrett demonstrated how to make Champagne at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1662 – a full thirty years before Dom Perignon managed to do it in France.
FACT: When Sixties guitar legend Jimi Hendrix moved into Brook Street and found he was living next door to Handel’s Mayfair home he went straight out and bought himself a recording of the Messiah.
FACT: Never mind that dodgy kebab, London’s most unappetising meal was the inaugural dinner of the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in the United Kingdom. The 1862 menu included rhino pie and porpoise heads, panther cutlets, kangaroo steak and stew, and Japanese sea-slug soup.
FACT: The earliest known reference to mud-wrestling in London was in the 1730s when bouts were regularly held in the pleasure gardens at Belsize Park.
FACT: The world’s first ever traffic island was installed in 1864 so its inventor could cross the street to reach his Club. Unfortunately when Colonel Pierpoint turned to admire his creation he tripped and was knocked down by a cab.
FACT: By 1900 there were nearly 300,000 horses employed in the capital. Eating up to a million tons of food a year between them, each one deposited three to four tons of dung on London’s crowded streets.
FACT: Lost property handed in to London Transport over the years has included three dead bats in a box, at least two human skulls, more than a few silicon breast implants, a stuffed gorilla and an entire outboard motor.
FACT: In 1868 London’s first ever traffic light blew up killing a policeman and causing a passing platoon of cavalry to stampede.
The first of a new series covering a wide variety of essential subjects – and with each volume containing literally thousands of perfectly true but largely pointless facts – The Little Book of London is published by The History Press, a rich treat for trivia fans and London junkies everywhere and a popular gift purchase on Amazon.
Following rave reviews and strong sales a second volume will be published in time for Christmas 2009.