Curated playlist
Areas of London
- SohoIn 1854, removing a pump handle in Soho stopped a cholera outbreak. Physician John Snow had mapped where the sick lived.
- BayswaterBayswater holds 17,500 people in every square kilometre. It is a built-up district of the City of Westminster, in west Central London. Kensington Gardens lies to its south, Paddington to its north-east and Notting Hill to its west. The…
- WoolwichWoolwich, a market town in south-east London and part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich, sits 13.7 kilometres from Charing Cross. Its Thames frontage runs for 2.5 kilometres along the south bank. From the water the ground climbs quickly up…
- ShoreditchShoreditch is the district whose bells promise riches in the nursery rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". The line goes: "when I grow rich say the bells of Shoreditch". The place behind that line lies in the London Borough of Hackney, just…
- SouthwarkSouthwark, a London district, sat just outside the City's legal reach. That gap made it the city's entertainment center.
- GreenwichGreenwich, an affluent district of south-east London, still drops a ball every day at 1 p.m. to mark the exact moment. Yet no working astronomical observatory remains there. The district sits 5.5 miles east-south-east of Charing Cross,…
- East End of LondonIn 1936, up to 100,000 East Londoners turned out to block a fascist march. It became the Battle of Cable Street.
- WestminsterWestminster began as a soggy island a charter called a "dreadful spot". Monks settled there, and a royal abbey followed.
- Blackfriars, LondonBlackfriars, in the south-west corner of the City of London, takes its name from a piece of clothing. Records from 1317 already use it, spelled in many different ways. The black in the name points to the outer garment, called a cappa, worn…
- West End of LondonLondon's West End began as a smoke-free place to live. Westminster sat upwind of the City of London's smoke.