5. Quiz – Answers

1. a

John George Haigh has come to be known as the ‘Acid Bath Murderer’. He was convicted of six murders but may have committed more. He was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in 1949.

2. c

It starred Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johansson and Ian McShane, but this London-set romantic comedy thriller went straight to DVD in the UK.

3. c

3 Savile Row. It was from the roof of this building that The Beatles played their final gig.

4. c

Charing Cross Road. The statue in bronze by Thomas Brock was paid for with donations from other actors and unveiled in 1910.

5. b

The Bruton Street address was the London home of her maternal grandparents, the 14th Earl and Countess of Strathmore. The Duke of Edinburgh was born on Corfu; Prince Michael of Kent made his first appearance in the world in Buckinghamshire.

6. b

The Dyers and the Vintners are now the only owners of Thames swans other than the Crown. The Dyers mark theirs with a nick on one side of the beak; the Vintners mark theirs with a nick on each side of the beak. The pub name ‘The Swan with Two Necks’, in which ‘necks’ is a corruption of ‘nicks’, refers to this practice.

7. b

Opened in 1663, it was one of the few taverns in the City of London to escape the blaze.

8. a

Tired of taking a pounding from the Luftwaffe while the West End remained relatively unscathed, the Cockneys were fuming.

9. a

The author of Tristram Shandy died in poverty in lodgings in Old Bond Street in 1768. According to one story, the two men who laid out his corpse stole his gold cufflinks by way of payment.

10. b

The building, designed by William Wilkins, met with much criticism when it was opened in the 1830s and was compared to a cruet stand, presumably because of the assortment of cupolas with which it is crowned.

11. c

A pickadil was a type of stiff lace collar popular in the early seventeenth century. It is thought that the street is named after a house built in 1612 on what was then open country to the west of the city by a wealthy tailor named Robert Baker. The house was mockingly nicknamed Piccadilly House after the pickadils that had made Baker’s fortune and the name stuck.

12. c

Once ubiquitous in the City of London, the bowler was apparently created by Lock & Co. for a gentleman called Coker who was looking for a practical curved hat that his country estate’s gamekeepers could wear without getting snagged by branches.

13. a

Legend has it that a local Fleet Street baker named William Rich modelled the wedding cakes he created on the three-tiered spire of St. Bride’s. Other bakers followed suit and now the traditional wedding cake always takes that shape.

14. b

The name was eventually rejected because the board of London Transport felt it sounded ‘too bullying’. The Londoner was the title of the double-decker bus unveiled in 1970 as the Routemaster’s initial successor.

15. b

Levy was a printer with premises on Shoe Lane off Fleet Street and the proprietor of the Sunday Times. In 1855 he founded the Daily Telegraph, pricing it at just a penny – the Times at that point cost seven pence – putting ‘a first class newspaper’, as he stated, ‘within the reach of Everyman’. The paper was launched under the slogan, ‘the largest, best, and cheapest newspaper in the world’ and was outselling the Times within just a few months.

16. a

Built by J. R. Whitley on the site of what is now Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre, the giant wheel had a diameter of 300 feet and was opened to the public in July 1895. It was closed and demolished in 1907.

17. a

A buttress from the old prison can still be seen by the river opposite Tate Britain. An inscription on it reminds passers-by that it once stood at the head of the steps from which many prisoners sentenced to transportation to the colonies embarked on their journey to Australia.

18. c

Ben Pimlico was supposedly a publican famous for his ‘nut-brown ale’.

19. a

He is supposed to have told the Dean of Westminster that ‘six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me: two feet by two feet will do for all I want’.

20. a

When Charles II was restored to the English throne in 1660, Cromwell’s body was disinterred from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and was given a posthumous execution at Tyburn. His head was then placed on a long spike on the roof of Westminster Hall. There it remained for more than four decades until the violent winds of the Great Storm dislodged it.

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