Trivialising Matters

Trivia seems to be the lifeblood of any good tour. Back in the day when I used to take actual people on actual tours and actually talk to them I could go into an interesting ramble about pre stressed concrete construction and at the end get barely a flicker of appreciation. However, deliver a decisive one liner like “Although there is a Bond Street underground station there isn’t actually a Bond Street” and you’d probably be asked to become Godparent to their Children.

Personally I like both sets of facts, the mundane and the trivial, but then I’m a London Nerd and these things seem to fill my waking hours. When you sit down and think about the reason for the vast percentage of us delighting in trivia it does make you wonder why?

Is it because our brains are too full or through evolution now no longer capable of storing larger facts, or is it just modern life as with the tour trivia, “I’m here, I’m partially interested in what you’re saying, I’ve a lot to do so fact me up with something small so I can relay it at the next book club / dinner party“

So now I’ve dangled the bait, I suppose I’d better deliver the trivia, but not all of it, I need to keep some of it up my sleeve.

There is a crater on Mars named Tooting.

The area of New Cross was for the many centuries known as Hatcham.

The American chat show host Jerry Springer was born in Highgate underground station during an air raid.

There are no pole type street lights within the City of London*. All lighting is cantilevered from the buildings to minimise street clutter. There are also no rubbish bins.

The silver piers on the Thames Barrier are internally clad in pine wood.

There’s a postbox in Holborn that carries two royal ciphers, that of Queen Victoria and Edward VII. It’s the only one in London.

There have been 152 Lord Mayor’s named John.

Lambeth Bridge is painted red to match the seating in the House of Lords, while Westminster Bridge is green to match the ones in the House of Commons.

The Area of Knightsbridge boasts six consecutive consonants in it’s name.

St Johns Wood contains none of the letters found in the word Mackerel.

Two underground stations contain all the vowels in their name. South Ealing and Mansion House.

Walk along this part of Gower Street in Bloomsbury and you’re walking over a room below street level that contains 100,000 live mosquitos**.

When the sun shines in a particular direction on Waterloo Bridge you can……… No this one’s too good to just throw it away. I’ll reveal the answer in another post.

*This turns out not to be factually correct as post lighting has been installed in Upper Thames Street to aid traffic visibility, but as it’s a post war street it doesn’t really count.

**You’re walking over the basement rooms of the London School of Tropical Medicine who keep live mosquitos for research purposes.