Marble Arch

MARBLE ARCH

The Marble Arch stands at the northeasterly corner of Hyde Park in central London. It is positioned at an ancient crossroads, where two Roman highways once crossed paths. Today, the arch is stranded within a huge traffic island, at the meeting point of Oxford Street, Park Lane, Bayswater Road and the Edgware Road. Being surrounded by busy lanes of fast moving vehicles, means that it is safest to gain access to the arch through the subterranean walkways, with entrances at four compass points. Once in the central reservation, the many benches, fountains and a grassed rose garden provide a popular resting point for local office workers and tourists alike, albeit with the incessant roar of the surrounding traffic.

The arch was designed by John Nash in 1828 and it is loosely based on the Arch Of Constantine in Rome. At one time Marble Arch stood outside of Buckingham Palace, as a gateway, but it was too narrow for the royal carriages to comfortably pass through. When the east front of Buckingham Palace was remodeled in 1851, the arch was brought to the present location to replace the Cumberland Gate as the north-easterly entry into Hyde Park. Only senior members of the Royal Family and 'The King's Troop', Royal Horse Artillery, can pass through the arch on ceremonial occasions. The King's Troop will cease to go through the arch when they are relocated from St John's Wood to Woolwich in 2012, some fifteen miles distant from where they carry out their ceremonial duties.

The arch has given its name to much of the surrounding residential and business locality. For those exploring the area, to the east is Oxford Street, offering a mile of shops and department stores, with many of the larger ones at the Marble Arch end. To the south, just inside Hyde Park is Speakers Corner, where many gather to rant and rave, perched on the proverbial soapbox, whilst others prefer to heckle. Park Lane, flanked with some of London's largest hotels, leads down to Hyde Park Corner. To the north is the cosmopolitan Edgware Road, with many noted Lebanese restaurants and shisha cafes. To the west is the Bayswater Road, where at number 10, can be seen the narrowest property in London. A few doors away is the Oranhaven, which was a famous refuge for Dutch soldiers during the second world war.

An important part of London's history took place very close to Marble Arch, although nowadays it is marked solely with a plaque set into a small traffic island.  The plaque marks the site where the public hangings took place for seven hundred years. The first recorded hangings took place in 1196 and here they continued until 1783. The prisoners were hanged on the Tyburn Tree. Not a real tree, it was a three armed wooden construction and on each arm eight people could be hanged, twenty-foyr at any one time. On the nearby Bayswater Road is to be found the Shrine Of The Sacred Hearts And Tyburn Martyrs, where nuns pray for the souls of the victims of the Tyburn Tree to this very day.

Marble Arch is very occasionally open for the public to climb its interior, sometimes during 'Open House' weekend when many buildings not ordinarily accessible by the general public throw open their doors. Marble Arch is nearest the London Underground station of the same name. Many bus routes converge at this busy junction.

Where to view video clips of Marble Arch  and video clips of London

London in motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Marble Arch’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months.

Lord Mayor's Show

LORD MAYOR’S SHOW

The Lord Mayor’s Show is always held on the second Saturday of November of each year. In 2009, Nick Anstee became the six hundred and eighty second Lord Mayor. The procession  was hit by strong gales and driving rain, an occasional hazard for the time of year.

The Lord Mayor’s Show has been a part of London life for seven hundred and eighty-four years. It is a great day out for half a million people, with many millions more watching on television across the globe. Below is a brief history and description of the event, with details and timings given at the end. The first recorded Lord Mayor of The City Of London Henry Fitz-Ailwyn, in 1189. The seeds of The Lord Mayor’s Show were sown in 1191, during the prolonged absence of King Richard I, when a procession took place as he fought at the crusades. Over twenty years later in 1215, King John granted the people of The City Of London the right to choose their own Lord Mayor. There was an important condition attached, that every year the new Lord Mayor should swear loyalty to the crown. To this day, it is the procession from The City Of London to the City Of Westminster to swear allegiance and the return journey, that forms the centrepiece of The Lord Mayor’s Show.

The Lord Mayor’s Show has approximately 6,500 participants with around seventy colourful floats and music from over twenty bands. There are hundreds of eye-catching costumes and more troops than are on parade for the Trooping Of The Colour.  Usually there is a thrilling fly past of military aircraft. The day ends with a splendid fireworks display from a barge on the Thames between Waterloo and Southwark Bridges.

The Lord Mayor’s Show has never been cancelled, with the procession marching on unscathed throughout the years of the Black Death, even during The Blitz of The Second World War and right through to the present day. With the advent of television in the twentieth century, The Lord Mayor’s Show was the first event ever to be broadcast live.

To this day Dick Whittington is, in the eyes of many, the most famous Lord Mayor of all, he held the office three times. His popularity is undiminished down the centuries, he was Lord Mayor in 1397, 1406 and 1419 and many Londoners would be hard pressed to name another Lord Mayor between then and now.

Originally, the journey was from The Mansion House to The Great Hall, inside The Palace Of Westminster where the oath of allegiance was sworn. Since 1883 the venue was changed to The Royal Courts Of Justice, still just inside the boundaries of The City Of Westminster. Over the years the occasion became more resplendent until the procession became known as ‘The Lord Mayor’s Show’.

The Lord Mayor always chooses the overall theme of the procession. The ‘great twelve livery companies’ participate in the procession by right, other livery companies participate by invitation and The Lord Mayor’s own livery company is always amongst them. The Lord Mayor usually invites pupils from his old school to participate and also any businesses he has been associated with through his earlier career. Certain army regiments attend by privilege and also have the right to march through The City Of London with fixed bayonets.

Certain streets of the route are unchanged over the centuries. If attending the spectacle, it is worth pausing to think that where you are standing, someone stood four hundred and fifty years ago, watching the novel and exotic sight of a camel on its way to parade beneath Queen Elizabeth The First.

In 1711, The Lord Mayor was knocked from his horse and broke his leg, all caused by a drunken flower girl and he gained the distinction of being last mayor to ride the route by horse. Thereafter they travelled by coach and in 1757 The State Coach was built in 1757. It is pulled by six horses, which, as a mark of respect, is two horses fewer than the eight horses that draw the monarch in The Gold Sate Coach. For most of the year it can be seen in The Museum Of London.

The term ‘float’, used when referring to carnivals and parades, derives from The Lord Mayor’s Show. The quickest route was often by boat and from 1422 until the mid nineteenth century, The Lord Mayor often travelled part of the journey in gilded barges. The decorative floats kept their name even when the occupants travelled on dry land and were transported by wheels.

The City Of London has had over eight hundred years of experience of civic government. The Lord Mayor is supported by aldermen, sheriffs, guildsmen and deputies. There are now one hundred and eight livery companies, which were established mostly between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries. Today, The Lord Mayor is the head of The Corporation Of London, which is broadly speaking The City Of London’s local authority. Uniquely, it is a non-party political authority, whose responsibilities extend far beyond The City.

One of the main activities of The Corporation Of London is to support The City within the fields of international business and finance. The Lord Mayor’s job is crucial, travelling to the four compass points of the globe in an ambassadorial role, continually promoting the city along the way. Besides this, there is a year round daily schedule of civic and ceremonial duties. The City Of London is a vital contributor to the country’s coffers and The Lord Mayor is seen as both a symbol of stability and strength, representing and promoting its interests.

The Mansion House is the official residence of the Lord Mayor Of The City Of London. Built by George Dance The Senior in 1739, it is a Renaissance style edifice with an imposing Corinthian portico. Contained within the building is the vast Egyptian Hall, where banquets and feasts take place throughout the year, including the annual dinner at which the Chancellor Of The Exchequer makes a speech. The building contains a dungeon, with ten cells for men and one cell for women, called the ‘Birdcage’ where suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was held. On the roof of the Mansion House flies The City Of London flag, consisting of the red cross of St George on a white background, with a dagger positioned in the top left hand corner. The Mansion House is occasionally open to the public.

The Lord Mayor’s Show usually begins with a Royal Air Force flypast at 11am, to mark the start of the Lord Mayor’s procession and the Lord Mayor begins his slow journey to The Royal Courts Of Justice. Grandstand seats can be booked for the spectacle. The return procession sets off from The Victoria Embankment to The Mansion House at around 1.10pm, arriving at 2.30pm. A fireworks display usually takes place at 5pm, but it is sometimes cancelled in extreme weather conditions.  The display is lit from barges on the river Thames, situated between Waterloo and Southwark bridges.

Further details can be found at: www.lordmayorsshow.org

Where to view video clips of Lord Mayor's Show  and video clips of London

London in motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Lord Mayor's Show’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months.

Big Ben

BIG BEN

One can never see Big Ben, one can only ever hear it. Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the clock tower at the northerly end of The Palace Of Westminster. The entire tower is commonly referred to as Big Ben and it is an iconic symbol of London recognizable the world over. Visitors to London often assume Big Ben to be considerably older than it is. At the other end of the Palace Of Westminster stands the immense Victoria Tower and the Houses Of Parliament and the Westminster Hall lie between the two. 

The previous Palace Of Westminster burned down in 1834 and it was rebuilt in the 1840's and 1850's by Sir Charles Barry in the mock Gothic style that was fashionable in part of the Victorian era. Big Ben itself was built between 1854 and 1859 by Augustus Pugin, a masterful champion of medieval shapes, to whom Sir Charles Barry entrusted the project. When Pugin had watched the fire at the Palace Of Westminster in 1834 he uttered, “There is nothing much to regret and a great deal to rejoice in.” Little did he realise that he himself would play such a significant role in its rebuilding. Pugin was a great genius who ended up as an inmate of Bedlam lunatic asylum. Ironically, he despised beer and tobacco, both of which are copiously imbibed inside the Palace Of Westminster. 

There are two schools of thought regarding the origins of the name Big Ben. The first is from Sir Benjamin Hall, who was the chief engineer of the project, who oversaw the positioning of the bell. Others suggest that it was from the workers in the foundry where the bell was cast who coined the name. They were said to be supporters of Benjamin Caunt, who was a popular prize fighter of the day, either way, the name quickly took on.

Big Ben weighs thirteen and a half Imperial tons. Big Ben is the world’s third tallest clock tower and has the world’s largest four faced chiming clock. The clock face has a diameter of seven metres. The minute hand is over two and a half metres long. The pendulum beats once every two seconds. Big Ben is still wound by hand and it takes two men thirty-two hours to wind the mechanism.

At the turn of the millennium, Big Ben started to lean, by a significant twenty-two millimetres, after new tunnelling for the Jubilee Line extension of the London Underground railway was completed. The only major breakdown suffered by Big Ben was in August of 1976, during what is recorded as the hottest summer on record in the United Kingdom, when the original speed regulator finally gave in. Again, during extremely hot weather in 2005, the rare occurrence of failing parts stopped the clock. Big Ben works fine in the cold, although on New Year’s Eve of 1962, settled snow on the hands meant that the chimes saw in the new year a full ten minutes late.

During the Second World War, the clock faces were darkened at night to prevent the possibility of guiding Blitz pilots towards The Palace Of Westminster. In the same war, the chimes of Big Ben were nightly broadcast out to the four compass points of the world at nine o’ clock. It naturally became a symbol to countless millions of people in occupied countries that there was still hope of deliverance. The clock is accurate to within a second and it is checked against Greenwich meantime on a daily basis. With such accuracy, its chimes continue to be broadcast on the World Service and other radio and television stations, usually to mark the start of news bulletins. Should you live one mile away from Big Ben, the sound of the chimes take four a half seconds to reach your ears, which is a fraction longer than hearing them on the radio news bulletin, meaning listeners have the peculiarity of hearing thirteen chimes.

Big Ben has a distinctively odd sounding twang because the bell is cracked. The first bell was badly broken when it fell during positioning.  A second bell was cast and it was soon cracked when a hammer of twice the recommended weight was used to strike it. Rather than suffer the expenditure of casting a third bell, it was instead repaired and the striking position was altered, leading to its curious sound.

If looking up at Big Ben in darkness, check to see whether the signal light in the lantern towards the very top is lit.  Whenever the House Of Commons is sitting at night, this distinctive light, known as The  Ayrton Light, burns bright. As we see, Big Ben does far more than to simply show the time. Its worldwide familiarity is testament to Pugin’s mastery and the Palace Of Westminster’s historical importance. Splendid views of Big Ben are to be had from Westminster Bridge, Parliament Square and from The London Eye on the South Bank. Frequent Thames river tours take passengers directly past Big Ben. The nearest tube station (London Underground) is Westminster. 

Where to view video clips of Big Ben  and video clips of London

London in motion has some of the best London Stock Footage and London Library Footage with moving clips of many of the above mentioned places to see, are available to browse through by simply visiting the ‘Big Ben’ category of this website.  New additions of London video clips are being frequently uploaded and further categories will be appearing over the coming months.