Pimlico

Friday, 14 December 2012

Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral - 1938 Match Race (Pimlico Special)

LONDON VICTORIA AND PIMLICO ARCHITECTURE.wmv

Official End Of Year Video for Pimlico 2002-2007

Pimlico - David Devant and his Spirit Wife

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Aldwych
Aldwych ( /ˈɔːldwɪtʃ/) is a place and road in the City of Westminster in London, England.
Aldwych, the road, is a crescent, connected to the Strand at both ends. At its centre, it meets the Kingsway. Buildings along its length are:
Nearby, in the Strand, is the now-disused Aldwych tube station.
Its official name is "Aldwych" but the road is sometimes colloquially referred to as "The Aldwych", rather in the same manner that "Strand" is often referred to as "The Strand".
The name, "Aldwych", derives from the Old English eald and wic meaning 'old trading town' or 'old marketplace'; the name was later applied to the street and district. It was recorded as Aldewich in 1211. In the seventh century, an Anglo-Saxon village and trading centre named Lundenwic ("London trading town") was established approximately one mile to the west of Londinium (named Lundenburh or "London Fort" by the Saxons) in what is now Aldwych. Lundenwic probably used the mouth of the River Fleet as a harbour or anchorage for trading ships and fishing boats.

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Battersea
Coordinates: 51°27′50″N 0°10′04″W / 51.46377°N 0.16771°W / 51.46377; -0.16771
Battersea is an area of the London Borough of Wandsworth, England. It is an inner-city district of South London in fare zone 2, situated on the south side of the River Thames, 2.9 miles (4.8 km) south-west of Charing Cross. Battersea spans from Fairfield in the west to Queenstown in the east. Although in modern times it is known mostly for its wealth, Battersea remains characterised by spates of inequality, with infamous and deprived council estates such as the Winstanley estate surrounding more prosperous areas. In 2001, Battersea had a population of 75,651 people.
Historically a part of Surrey, the area takes its name from the old village of Battersea, an island settlement established in the river delta of the Falconbrook; a river that rises in Tooting Bec Common and flows underground through south London to the River Thames. The site of the original settlement is marked by St. Mary's Church. William Blake was married, and Benedict Arnold and his wife and daughter are buried in the crypt of the church. Battersea is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon time as Badrices īeg = "Badric's Island" and later "Patrisey". As with many former Thames island settlements, Battersea was reclaimed by draining marshland and building culverts for streams.

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Bayswater
Coordinates: 51°30′34″N 0°11′35″W / 51.50950°N 0.19298°W / 51.50950; -0.19298
Bayswater is an area of west London in the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to the west . It is a built-up district located 3 miles (4.8 km) west-north-west of Charing Cross, bordering the north of Hyde Park over Kensington Gardens and having a population density of 17,500 per square kilometre.
Bayswater is one of London's most cosmopolitan areas wherein a diverse local population is augmented by a high concentration of hotels. In addition to the native English, there is a significant Arab population towards Edgware Road, a large Greek community attracted by London's Greek Orthodox Cathedral, many Americans and London's main Brazilian community.
The area has attractive streets and garden squares lined with Victorian stucco terraces, mostly now subdivided into flats and boarding houses. The property ranges from very expensive apartments to small studio flats. There are also purpose-built apartment blocks dating from the inter-war period as well as more recent developments, and a large council estate, the 650-flat Hallfield Estate, designed by Sir Denys Lasdun and now largely sold off.

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Belgravia
Coordinates: 51°29′53″N 0°09′16″W / 51.49795°N 0.15453°W / 51.49795; -0.15453
Belgravia is a district of Central London in the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Noted for its immensely expensive residential properties, it is one of the wealthiest districts in the world. Much of it, known as the Grosvenor Estate is still owned by a family property company the Grosvenor Group, owned by the Duke of Westminster, although the estate has recently been forced to sell many of its freeholds to their tenants at much below market value due to the Leasehold Reform Act 1967. The district lies mostly to the south-west of Buckingham Palace, and is approximately bounded by Knightsbridge to the north (the street of that name, not the district), Grosvenor Place and Buckingham Palace Road to the east, Pimlico Road to the south, and Sloane Street to the west.
The area takes its name from one of the Duke of Westminster's subsidiary titles, Viscount Belgrave. The village of Belgrave, Cheshire is two miles (3 km) from the Grosvenor family's main country seat of Eaton Hall.

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Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace is the official London residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a focus for the British people at times of national rejoicing and crisis.
Originally known as Buckingham House, the building which forms the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1705 on a site which had been in private ownership for at least 150 years. It was subsequently acquired by George III in 1761 as a private residence for Queen Charlotte, and known as "The Queen's House". During the 19th century it was enlarged, principally by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, forming three wings around a central courtyard. Buckingham Palace finally became the official royal palace of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the East front which contains the well-known balcony on which the Royal Family traditionally congregate to greet crowds outside. However, the palace chapel was destroyed by a German bomb in World War II; the Queen's Gallery was built on the site and opened to the public in 1962 to exhibit works of art from the Royal Collection.

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Chelsea, London
Coordinates: 51°29′15″N 0°10′06″W / 51.4875°N 0.1684°W / 51.4875; -0.1684
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above Sloane Square tube station. The modern eastern boundary is Chelsea Bridge Road and the lower half of Sloane Street, including Sloane Square, along with parts of Belgravia. To the north and northwest, the area fades into Knightsbridge and South Kensington, but it is safe to say that the area north of King's Road as far northwest as Fulham Road is part of Chelsea.
The district is part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. From 1900, and until the creation of Greater London in 1965, it formed the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea in the County of London. Chelsea Football Club, the current champions of European football has its grounds at Stamford Bridge, on the border between Chelsea and neighbouring Fulham.

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Cheshire
Cheshire ( /ˈtʃɛʃər/ or /ˈtʃɛʃɪər/; also known as the County Palatine of Chester, and archaically, as the County of Chester; abbreviated Ches.) is a ceremonial county in North West England. Cheshire's county town is the city of Chester, although the largest town since county boundary changes in 1974 is Warrington (moved from Lancashire for administrative purposes in 1974). Other major towns include Widnes (also moved from Lancashire in 1974), Congleton, Crewe, Ellesmere Port, Runcorn, Macclesfield, Winsford, Northwich, and Wilmslow. Historically the county contained the Wirral, Stockport, Altrincham and other towns. The county is bordered by Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south, and Flintshire and Wrexham in Wales to the west. The county is a part of the Welsh Marches.
Cheshire's area is 2,343 square kilometres (905 sq mi) and its population is around 700,000. Apart from the large towns along the River Mersey and the historic city of Chester, it is mostly rural, with a number of small towns and villages that support an agricultural industry. It is historically famous as a former principality and for the production of Cheshire cheese, salt, bulk chemicals, and woven silk.

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Chinatown, London
The name Chinatown has been used at different times to describe different places in London. The present Chinatown is part of the Soho area of the City of Westminster, occupying the area in and around Gerrard Street. It contains a number of Chinese restaurants, bakeries, supermarkets, souvenir shops, and other Chinese-run businesses.
The first area in London known as Chinatown was located in the Limehouse area of the East End of London. At the start of the 20th century, the Chinese population of London was concentrated in that area, setting up businesses which catered to the Chinese sailors who frequented in Docklands. The area began to become known through exaggerated reports and tales of (legal) opium dens and slum housing, rather than the Chinese restaurants and supermarkets in the current Chinatown. However, much of the area was damaged by aerial bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War, although a number of elderly Chinese still choose to live in this area.
After the Second World War, however, the growing popularity of Chinese cuisine and an influx of immigrants from Hong Kong led to an increasing number of Chinese restaurants being opened elsewhere.

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City of Westminster
The City of Westminster ⁱ/ˈwɛstmɪnstə/ is a London borough occupying much of the central area of London, England, including most of the West End. It is located to the west of and adjoining the ancient City of London, directly to the east of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and its southern boundary is the River Thames. It is an Inner London borough and was created in 1965 when Greater London was established. At its creation Westminster was awarded city status, which had been previously held by the smaller Metropolitan Borough of Westminster. Aside from a number of large parks and open spaces, the population density of the district is high. Many sites commonly associated with London are located in the borough, including Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, and 10 Downing Street. The borough is divided into a number of localities including the ancient political district of Westminster around the Palace of Westminster; the shopping areas around Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly and Bond Street; and the night time entertainment district of Soho. Much of the borough is residential, and in 2008 it was estimated to have a population of 236,000. The local authority is Westminster City Council.

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England
England ⁱ/ˈɪŋɡlənd/ is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, while the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separate it from continental Europe. Most of England comprises the central and southern part of the island of Great Britain in the North Atlantic. The country also includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.
The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but it takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in AD 927, and since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world. The English language, the Anglican Church, and English law—the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world—developed in England, and the country's parliamentary system of government has been widely adopted by other nations. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's Royal Society laid the foundations of modern experimental science.

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Fitzrovia
Coordinates: 51°31′05″N 0°08′10″W / 51.518°N 0.136°W / 51.518; -0.136
Fitzrovia is a neighbourhood in central London, near London's West End lying partly in the London Borough of Camden (in the east) and partly in the City of Westminster (in the west); and situated between Marylebone and Bloomsbury and north of Soho. It is characterised by its mixed-use of residential, business, retail, education and healthcare, with no single activity dominating. The historically bohemian area was once home to such writers as Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Rimbaud.
Although often described as upmarket and home to some celebrities, like much of inner London Fitzrovia has wide disparities of wealth and contains a mix of affluent property owners as well as many private, council and housing association tenants. The neighbourhood is classified as above-averagely deprived.
Fitzrovia is probably named after the Fitzroy Tavern, a public house situated on the corner of Charlotte Street and Windmill Street within the district. The name was adopted during the inter-war years initially by and later in recognition of the artistic and bohemian community habitually found at the public house. (The name Fitzroy derives from the Norman-French for "son of the king", although it usually implies the original holder was the bastard son of a king)

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Great Fire of London
The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through the central parts of the English city of London, from Sunday, 2 September to Wednesday, 5 September 1666. The fire gutted the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. It threatened, but did not reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster, Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the suburban slums. It consumed 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated to have destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City's 80,000 inhabitants. The death toll is unknown but traditionally thought to have been small, as only six verified deaths were recorded. This reasoning has recently been challenged on the grounds that the deaths of poor and middle-class people were not recorded, while the heat of the fire may have cremated many victims leaving no recognisable remains.

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Greater London
Greater London is the top-level administrative division of England covering London. It was created in 1965 and spans the City of London and the 32 London boroughs. This territory has the same boundaries as the London Government Office Region and the London European Parliament constituency. The region has by far the highest GVA per capita in the United Kingdom. It covers 1,572 km² (607 sq mi) and had a 2009 mid-year estimated population of 7,753,600. The term Greater London was in use before 1965 to refer to a variously defined area, larger than the County of London and often similar to the Metropolitan Police District.
In addition to its administrative and statistical functions, Greater London (excluding the City of London) is one of the 48 ceremonial counties of England, and is under the Greater London Lieutenancy.
Instead of forming a single political unit, London is divided into the small, interior City of London and the much wider Greater London. This arrangement has come about because as the area of London grew and absorbed neighbouring settlements, a series of administrative reforms did not fully amalgamate the City of London with the metropolitan area, and its unique political structure was retained. Outside the limited boundaries of the old city, a variety of arrangements governed the wider area since 1855, culminating with the creation of the Greater London administrative area in 1965.

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Grosvenor Bridge
Coordinates: 51°29′05″N 0°08′51″W / 51.48472°N 0.1475°W / 51.48472; -0.1475
Grosvenor Bridge, often alternatively called Victoria Railway Bridge, is a railway bridge over the River Thames in London, between Vauxhall Bridge and Chelsea Bridge. It actually consists of two bridges, both built in the mid-19th century. The eastern side was built by the Victoria Station and Pimlico Railway, (a consortium of the London Brighton and South Coast Railway, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway, the Great Western Railway and the London and North Western Railway) in 1858 to 60 to carry trains into Victoria station; it was the first railway bridge across the Thames in central London. The western side was built by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway in 1865 to 66 to provide their own independent line to the station. The designers were Sir John Fowler and Sir Charles Fox for the two bridges respectively.
Both bridges were rebuilt in steel in 1963–67, the original piers now being encased in concrete. The designer for this work was Freeman Fox & Partners, and the project engineer was A. H. Cantrell, chief civil engineer of the Southern Region of British Rail. To avoid disrupting traffic, the bridges were re-built as 8 separate parallel bridges.

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Grosvenor Canal
Grosvenor Canal was a canal in the Pimlico area of London, opened in 1825. It was progressively shortened, as first the railways to Victoria Station and then the Ebury Bridge housing estate were built over it. It remained in use until 1995, enabling barges to be loaded with refuse for removal from the city, making it the last canal in London to operate commercially. A small part of it remains among the Grosvenor Waterside development.
In the early eighteenth century, there were marshes and a tidal creek on the north bank of the Thames near Pimlico. The Chelsea Waterworks Company obtained an Act of Parliament in 1722; they were authorised to take water from the Thames via one of more "Cutt or Cutts". These fed the water into the marshes, and a tide mill was used to pump the water to reservoirs at Hyde Park and St James's Park as the tide ebbed. The reservoirs supplied west London with drinking water. The land between the river and the later site of Victoria Station was owned by Sir Richard Grosvenor, who leased it to the company in 1724. They enlarged the existing creek and built the tide mill, which continued to work until 1775, after which the pumping was performed by a steam engine.

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Holborn
Coordinates: 51°31′02″N 0°07′06″W / 51.5172°N 0.1182°W / 51.5172; -0.1182
Holborn ( /ˈhoʊbərn/ HOH-bərn) is an area of central London and also the name of the area's principal street, known as High Holborn between St. Giles's High Street and Gray's Inn Road (the junction being roughly where Holborn Bar — the entrance to the City of London — once was) and then Holborn Viaduct between Holborn Circus and Newgate Street. The street since boundary changes in 1994 runs along the boundary between the London Borough of Camden and the City of London; previously the boundary was less obvious in the area and crossed the street at Holborn Bar.
The area's first mention is in a charter of Westminster Abbey, by King Edgar, dated to 959. This mentions "the old wooden church of St Andrew" (St Andrew, Holborn). The name Holborn may be derived from the Middle English "hol" for hollow, and bourne, a brook, referring to the River Fleet as it ran through a steep valley to the east. Historical cartographer William Shepherd in his Plan of London about 1300 labels the Fleet as "Hole Bourn" where it passes to the east of St Andrew's church. However, the 16th century historian John Stow attributes the name to the Old Bourne ("old brook"), a small stream which he believed ran into the Fleet at Holborn Bridge, a structure lost when the river was culverted in 1732. The exact course of the stream is uncertain, but according to Stow it started in one of the many small springs near Holborn Bar, the old City toll gate on the summit of Holborn Hill. This is supported by a map of London and Westminster created during the reign of Henry VIII that clearly marks the street as 'Oldbourne' and 'High Oldbourne'. Other historians, however, find the theory implausible, in view of the slope of the land.

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Houses of Parliament
The Palace of Westminster, also known as the Houses of Parliament or Westminster Palace, is the meeting place of the two houses of the Parliament of the United Kingdom—the House of Lords and the House of Commons. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames in the heart of the London borough of the City of Westminster, close to the historic Westminster Abbey and the government buildings of Whitehall and Downing Street. The name may refer to either of two structures: the Old Palace, a medieval building complex, most of which burned in 1834, and its replacement New Palace that stands today. For ceremonial purposes, the palace retains its original style and status as a royal residence.
The first royal palace was built on the site in the eleventh century, and Westminster was the primary London residence of the Kings of England until a fire destroyed much of the complex in 1512. After that, it served as the home of Parliament, which had been meeting there since the thirteenth century, and the seat of the Royal Courts of Justice, based in and around Westminster Hall. In 1834, an even greater fire ravaged the heavily rebuilt Houses of Parliament, and the only structures of significance to survive were Westminster Hall, the Cloisters of St Stephen's, the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft and the Jewel Tower.

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Hoxton
Coordinates: 51°32′04″N 0°04′27″W / 51.534557°N 0.074279°W / 51.534557; -0.074279
Hoxton is an area in the London Borough of Hackney, immediately north of the financial district of the City of London. The area of Hoxton is bordered by Regent's Canal on the north side, Wharf Road and City Road to the west, Old Street to the south, and Kingsland Road to the east.
Hoxton is also a ward, electing three councillors to the borough council. It forms part of the Hackney South and Shoreditch constituency.
"Hogesdon" is first recorded in the Domesday Book, meaning an Anglo-Saxon farm (or "fortified enclosure") belonging to Hoch, or Hocq. Little is recorded of the origins of the settlement, though there was Roman activity around Ermine Street, which ran to the east of the area from the 1st century. In medieval times, Hoxton formed a rural part of Shoreditch parish. It achieved independent ecclesiastical status in 1826 with the founding of its own parish church dedicated to St John the Baptist, though civil jurisdiction was still invested in the Shoreditch vestry. The Worshipful Company of Haberdashers remains patron of the advowson of the parish of St John's Hoxton.

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Hungerford Bridge
Coordinates: 51°30′22″N 0°07′12″W / 51.50611°N 0.12°W / 51.50611; -0.12
The Hungerford Bridge crosses the River Thames in London, and lies between Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge. It is a steel truss railway bridge—sometimes known as the Charing Cross Bridge—flanked by two more recent, cable-stayed, pedestrian bridges that share the railway bridge's foundation piers, and which are properly named the Golden Jubilee Bridges.^{[clarification needed]}
The north end of the bridge is Charing Cross railway station, and is near Embankment Pier and the Victoria Embankment. The south end is near Waterloo station, County Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, and the London Eye. Each pedestrian bridge has steps and lift access.
The first Hungerford Bridge, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, opened in 1845 as a suspension footbridge. It was named after the then Hungerford Market, because it went from the South Bank to Hungerford Market on the north side of the Thames.
In 1859 the original bridge was bought by the railway company extending the South Eastern Railway into the newly opened Charing Cross railway station. The railway company replaced the suspension bridge with a structure designed by Sir John Hawkshaw, comprising nine spans made of wrought iron lattice girders, which opened in 1864. The chains from the old bridge were re-used in Bristol's Clifton Suspension Bridge. The original brick pile buttresses of Brunel's footbridge are still in use, though the one on the Charing Cross side is now much closer to the river bank than it was originally, due to the building of the Victoria Embankment, completed in 1870. The buttress on the South Bank side still has the entrances and steps from the original steamer pier Brunel built on to the footbridge.

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Kensington Gardens
Kensington Gardens, once the private gardens of Kensington Palace, is one of the Royal Parks of London, lying immediately to the west of Hyde Park. It is shared between the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The park covers an area of 111 hectares (275 acres). The open spaces of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park and St. James's Park together form an almost continuous "green lung" in the heart of London between Kensington and Westminster.
Kensington Gardens was carved out of the western section of Hyde Park and designed c.1728-1738 by Henry Wise and Charles Bridgeman, with fashionable features including the Round Pond, formal avenues and a sunken Dutch garden.
Charles Bridgeman created the Serpentine in the 1730s by damming the eastern outflow of the River Westbourne from Hyde Park for Queen Caroline. The part of the Serpentine that lies within Kensington Gardens is known as "The Long Water". At its north-western end (originally the inflow of the River Westbourne) in an area known as "The Italian Garden", there are four fountains and a number of classical sculptures. At the foot of the Italian Gardens is a parish boundary marker, delineating the boundary between Paddington and St George Hanover Square parishes, on the exact centre of the Westbourne river.

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Knightsbridge
Coordinates: 51°30′06″N 0°09′44″W / 51.5017°N 0.1621°W / 51.5017; -0.1621
Knightsbridge is a road which gives its name to an exclusive district in central London. The road runs along the south side of Hyde Park, west from Hyde Park Corner, spanning the City of Westminster and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Up to Brompton Road, it is a part of the A4 arterial road, while the remainder is part of the A315 road.
The eponymous district comprises the area south of Hyde Park, east of Exhibition Road and west of Sloane Street. Beauchamp Place and the western section of Pont Street serve roughly as its southern border though adjacent gardens and squares such as Lennox Gardens and Cadogan Square can be considered parts of Knightsbridge. South of this area, the district fades into Brompton and Chelsea while Belgravia lies to the East.
Knightsbridge is notable as an ultra-expensive residential area, and for the density of its upmarket retail outlets. It is identified in the London Plan as one of two "international centres" in London, alongside the West End.

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Lambeth Bridge
Coordinates: 51°29′40″N 0°07′23″W / 51.49444°N 0.12306°W / 51.49444; -0.12306
Lambeth Bridge is a road traffic and footbridge crossing the River Thames in an east-west direction in central London, England; the river flows north at the crossing point. Downstream, the next bridge is Westminster Bridge; upstream the next is Vauxhall Bridge.
The most conspicuous colour in the bridge's paint scheme is red, the same colour as the leather benches in the House of Lords which is at the southern end of the Palace of Westminster nearest the bridge. This is in contrast to Westminster Bridge which is predominantly green, the same colour as the benches in the House of Commons at the northern end of the Houses of Parliament.
On the east side, in Lambeth are Lambeth Palace, the Albert Embankment, St. Thomas' Hospital, and the International Maritime Organization. On the west side, in Westminster, are Thames House (the headquarters of MI5), behind which is Horseferry House (the National Probation Service headquarters), and Clelland House and Abell House (the headquarters of HM Prison Service), and the Millbank Tower and Tate Britain. The Palace of Westminster is a short walk downstream to the north through the Victoria Tower Garden.

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Lillington Gardens
Lillington Gardens is an estate in the Pimlico area of Westminster, London, constructed between 1961 and 1971 to a plan by Darbourne & Darke.
The estate was among the last of the high-density public housing schemes built in London during the postwar period, and is referred to as one of the most distinguished. Notably, seven years before the Ronan Point disaster ended the dominance of the tower block, Lillington Gardens looked ahead to a new standard that achieved high housing density within a medium rather than high-rise structure. It emphasised individuality in the grouping of dwellings, and provided for private gardens at ground and roof levels.
The estate's high build quality, and particularly the planted gardens of its wide "roof streets", blend sympathetically with the surrounding Victorian terraces.
The estate's high quality design was acknowledged by a Housing Design Award (1961), Ministry of Housing and Local Government Award for Good Design (1970), RIBA Award (1970) and RIBA Commendation (1973). Nikolaus Pevsner described it in 1973 as "the most interesting recent housing scheme in London".

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Lisson Grove
Lisson Grove is a district and also a street of the City of Westminster, London, England located just to the north of the city ring road. There are many landmarks surrounding the area. To the north is Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood. To the west are Paddington and Watling Street. To the east and south east is Marylebone, which includes the railway station and Dorset Square, the original home of the Marylebone Cricket Club. To the east are the London Planetarium, Madame Tussaud's, Baker Street and Regent's Park.
The postal districts are NW1 and NW8.
Nowadays Lisson Grove is much improved section of West London, but for over a hundred years it was one of the capital's worst slums. The area was notorious for drinking, crime and prostitution, as well as the extreme poverty of the people and the squalor and dilapidation of the homes they lived in. Local police officers only patrolled the district in pairs, and they described the women of the area as the most drunken, violent and foul-mouthed in all London.

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London
London ⁱ/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
London is a leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transport all contributing to its prominence. It is the world's leading financial centre alongside New York City and has the fifth-largest city GDP in the world (and the largest in Europe). London has been described as a world cultural capital. It was the world's most visited city during 2011 and London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport by number of international passengers. London's 43 universities form the largest concentration of higher education in Europe. In 2012 London will become the first city to host the modern Summer Olympic Games three times.

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London Fire Brigade
The London Fire Brigade (LFB) is the statutory fire and rescue service for London.
Founded in 1865, it is the largest of the fire services in the United Kingdom and the fourth-largest in the world (after the Tokyo Fire Department, New York City Fire Department and Paris Fire Brigade) with nearly 7,000 staff, including 5,800 operational firefighters based in 112 fire stations.
Ron Dobson is the Commissioner for Fire and Emergency Planning, which includes the position of Chief Fire Officer. Dobson replaced Sir Ken Knight in 2007; Knight had been Commissioner since 2003. Statutory responsibility for the running of the LFB lies with the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.
In 2008/09 the LFB received 229,308 999 calls, of which it mobilised to 138,385. These included 29,215 fires, of which 13,841 were of a serious nature, making it one of the busiest fire services in the world. In the same period, it received 6,022 hoax calls, the highest number of any UK fire service, but only mobilised to 2,653 of them.

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Maida Vale
Coordinates: 51°31′39″N 0°11′24″W / 51.5274°N 0.1899°W / 51.5274; -0.1899
Maida Vale is a residential district comprising the northern part of Paddington in west London, between St John's Wood and Kilburn. It is part of the City of Westminster. The area is mostly residential, and mainly affluent, consisting of many large late Victorian and Edwardian blocks of mansion flats. It is also home to the BBC Maida Vale Studios.
The Maida Vale area is usually regarded as being bounded by Maida Avenue and the Regent’s Canal in the South, Maida Vale road to the north east, Kilburn Park Road to the north west, and Shirland Road and Blomfield Road to the south west. The southern part of Maida Vale around Paddington Basin, a junction of two canals with many houseboats, is known as Little Venice. The area to the south-west of Maida Vale, at the southern end of Elgin Avenue, was historically known as "Maida Hill", and was a recognised postal district bounded by the Avenues on the west, the Grand Union Canal on the south, Maida Vale to the east and Kilburn Lane to the north. Parts of Maida Vale were also included within this. The name of "Maida Hill" has since fallen out of use, although has recently been resurrected through the new 414 bus route (which terminates on Shirland road and states its destination as Maida Hill), and a new street market on the Piazza at the junction of Elgin Avenue and Harrow Road.

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Marylebone
Coordinates: 51°31′04″N 0°08′49″W / 51.5177°N 0.1470°W / 51.5177; -0.1470
Marylebone (ⁱ/ˈmɑrlɨbən/ MAR-li-bən)^{[citation needed]} is an affluent inner-city area of central London, located within the City of Westminster. It is sometimes written as St. Marylebone or Mary-le-bone.
Marylebone is in an area of London that can be roughly defined as bounded by Oxford Street to the south, Marylebone Road to the north, Edgware Road to the west and Great Portland Street to the east. A broader definition designates the historic area as Marylebone Village and encompasses neighbouring Regent's Park, Baker Street and the area immediately north of Marylebone Road, containing Marylebone Station, the original site of the Marylebone Cricket Club at Dorset Square, and the neighbourhood known as Lisson Grove to the border with St John's Wood. The west side of the Fitzrovia area up to Cleveland Street was also previously considered to be part of Marylebone.
Today the area is host to many medical and dental offices, traditionally concentrated in Harley Street. Since the opening of the Jubilee Line at Baker Street station (with its direct links to Canary Wharf), Marylebone – particularly Marylebone Village – has become an even more sought-after area in central London.

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Mayfair
Coordinates: 51°30′32″N 0°08′51″W / 51.508755°N 0.14743°W / 51.508755; -0.14743
Mayfair (originally called The May Fair) is an area of central London, located within the City of Westminster.
Mayfair is named after the annual fortnight-long May Fair that took place on the site that is Shepherd Market today (from 1686 until it was banned in that location in 1764). Until 1686, the May Fair was held in Haymarket, and after 1764, it moved to Fair Field in Bow because the well-to-do residents of the area felt the fair lowered the tone of the neighbourhood.
Mayfair was anciently part of the parish of St Martin in the Fields, and became part of St George Hanover Square in 1724. The new parish stretched to Bond Street in the southern part of Mayfair and almost to Regent Street north of Conduit Street. The northern boundary was Oxford Street and the southern boundary fell short of Piccadilly. The parish continued west of Mayfair into Hyde Park and then south to include Belgravia and other areas.
The old telephone district of MAYfair (later 629) changed east of Bond Street to REGent (later 734). Most of the area was first developed between the mid 17th century and the mid 18th century as a fashionable residential district, by a number of landlords, the most important of them being the Dukes of Westminster, the Grosvenor family. The Rothschild family bought up large areas of Mayfair in the 19th century. The freehold of a large section of Mayfair also belongs to the Crown Estate.

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Millbank
Coordinates: 51°29′58″N 0°08′00″W / 51.4995°N 0.1333°W / 51.4995; -0.1333
Millbank is an area of central London in the City of Westminster. Millbank is located by the River Thames, east of Pimlico and south of Westminster. The area derives its name from a mill house belonging to nearby Westminster Abbey.
Millbank's general appearance dates from the 1930s, when the area was extensively rebuilt to repair damage caused by the 1928 Thames flood disaster, following the collapse of a 25 metre-long section of the Thames Embankment.
Millbank shares the name of the main road (A3212) along the north bank of the River Thames, extending northwards from Vauxhall Bridge to Abingdon Street, just south from Parliament Square. There are parliamentary offices situated across this road, notably No.7, built as the headquarters of British American Tobacco. The road was created as part of the Thames Embankment in the mid 19th century and lies above a large interceptor sewer.
The former Royal Army Medical College, situated at Millbank, is the site where the vaccine for typhoid was first developed, and in the late 19th century, was where the world’s first modern prison was established. The listed site has since been renovated as a purpose built arts college for the Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2005. The Tate Britain art gallery is situated directly opposite near the end of Vauxhall Bridge, providing a distinct arts presence in the area.

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Millbank, London
Coordinates: 51°29′58″N 0°08′00″W / 51.4995°N 0.1333°W / 51.4995; -0.1333
Millbank is an area of central London in the City of Westminster. Millbank is located by the River Thames, east of Pimlico and south of Westminster. The area derives its name from a mill house belonging to nearby Westminster Abbey.
Millbank's general appearance dates from the 1930s, when the area was extensively rebuilt to repair damage caused by the 1928 Thames flood disaster, following the collapse of a 25 metre-long section of the Thames Embankment.
Millbank shares the name of the main road (A3212) along the north bank of the River Thames, extending northwards from Vauxhall Bridge to Abingdon Street, just south from Parliament Square. There are parliamentary offices situated across this road, notably No.7, built as the headquarters of British American Tobacco. The road was created as part of the Thames Embankment in the mid 19th century and lies above a large interceptor sewer.
The former Royal Army Medical College, situated at Millbank, is the site where the vaccine for typhoid was first developed, and in the late 19th century, was where the world’s first modern prison was established. The listed site has since been renovated as a purpose built arts college for the Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2005. The Tate Britain art gallery is situated directly opposite near the end of Vauxhall Bridge, providing a distinct arts presence in the area.

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National Gallery
Coordinates: 51°30′31″N 0°07′42″W / 51.5086°N 0.1283°W / 51.5086; -0.1283
The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection (though not some special exhibitions) is free of charge.
Unlike comparable art museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein, an insurance broker and patron of the arts, in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two thirds of the collection. The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" are represented with important works. It used to be claimed that this was one of the few national galleries that had all its works on permanent exhibition, but this is no longer the case.

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Notting Hill
Coordinates: 51°30′35″N 0°12′15″W / 51.5096°N 0.2043°W / 51.5096; -0.2043
Notting Hill is an area in London, England, close to the north-western corner of Kensington Gardens, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is a cosmopolitan district known as the location for the annual Notting Hill Carnival, and for being home to the Portobello Road Market.
Notting Hill has a contemporary reputation as an affluent and fashionable area; known for attractive terraces of large Victorian townhouses, and high-end shopping and restaurants (particularly around Westbourne Grove and Clarendon Cross). A Daily Telegraph article in 2004 used the phrase the 'Notting Hill Set' to refer to a group of emerging Conservative politicians, such as David Cameron and George Osborne, now respectively Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer. However, the large houses have also provided multi-occupancy rentals for much of the 20th century. Caribbean immigrants were drawn to the area in the 1950s, partly because of the dubious practices followed by the landlord Peter Rachman, and became the target of white Teddy Boys in the 1958 Notting Hill race riots.

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Paddington
Coordinates: 51°31′02″N 0°10′23″W / 51.5172°N 0.1730°W / 51.5172; -0.1730
Paddington is a district within the City of Westminster, in central London, England. Formerly a metropolitan borough, it was integrated with Westminster and Greater London in 1965. Three important landmarks of the district are Paddington station, designed by the celebrated engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and opened in 1847; St Mary's Hospital and Paddington Green Police Station (the most important high-security police station in the United Kingdom).
A major project called Paddington Waterside aims to regenerate former railway and canal land between 1998 and 2018, and the area is seeing many new developments.
The earliest extant reference to Padington, historically a part of Middlesex, was made in 1056.^{[citation needed]}
In the later Elizabethan and early Stuart era, the rectory and associated estate houses were occupied by the Small (or Smale) family. Nicholas Small was a clothworker sufficiently well connected to have his new wife's (Jane Small) portrait painted by Holbein. Nicholas died in 1565 and his wife married again, to Nicholas Parkinson, who also resided in Paddington. Parkinson went on to be the Master of the Clothworker's company. Jane Small continued to live in Paddington after her second husband's death, and her manor house was big enough to have been let to Sir John Popham, the attorney general, in the 1580s. At this time there was an inn attached to the estate, named Blowers.

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Pimlico
Coordinates: 51°29′19″N 0°08′22″W / 51.4887°N 0.1395°W / 51.4887; -0.1395
Pimlico /ˈpɪmlɨkoʊ/ is a small area of central London in the City of Westminster. Like Belgravia, to which it was built as a southern extension, Pimlico is known for its grand garden squares and impressive Regency architecture.
The area is separated from Belgravia to the north by Victoria Railway Station, and bounded by the River Thames to the south, Vauxhall Bridge Road to the east and the former Grosvenor Canal to the west.
At Pimlico's heart is a highly disciplined grid of residential streets laid down by the planner Thomas Cubitt beginning in 1825 and now protected as the Pimlico Conservation Area. Pimlico is also home to the pre-World War II Dolphin Square development and the pioneering Churchill Gardens and Lillington Gardens estates, now designated conservation areas in their own right. The area has over 350 Grade II listed buildings and several Grade II* listed Churches.
Notable residents have included politician Winston Churchill, designer Laura Ashley, philosopher Swami Vivekananda, actor Laurence Olivier, illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley, Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta and inventor of lawn tennis Major Walter Wingfield.

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Pimlico tube station
Pimlico is a London Underground station in Pimlico, City of Westminster. It is on the Victoria line between Victoria and Vauxhall in Zone 1. The station opened on 14 September 1972 more than a year after the rest of the line had become fully operational.
Pimlico station was a late addition to the final section of the Victoria line between Victoria and Brixton and is the only station on the line which does not have an interchange with another Underground and/or National Rail line. It was the last Underground station to open until the first section of the Piccadilly line's Heathrow extension was opened to Hatton Cross in 1975.
The main entrance is on the corner of Bessborough Street and Rampayne Street. It is part of an office block that until 2006 was entirely occupied by the Office for National Statistics apart from the station and a newsagents shop. There are two other entrances, in Lupus Street and on the other side of Bessborough Street. These others have ramps as well as stairs, facilitating wheelchair access. However, there are still a few steps to walk down to enter the ticket hall.

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Queen's Park, London
Coordinates: 51°32′02″N 0°12′09″W / 51.5338°N 0.2026°W / 51.5338; -0.2026
Queen's Park is an area of northwest London, England, located on the boundary between the London Borough of Brent and the City of Westminster.
The neighbourhood near Kensal Green was developed from 1875 and was named to honour Queen Victoria. The open space opened in 1887, located to the north, also shares the name.
Queen's Park formed a detached part of the parish of Chelsea. In 1900 it was united with the parish of Paddington.
The northern half of Queen's Park was developed by developer Solomon Barnett, who developed much of Kilburn. The two-story terraced houses east of the park, developed between 1895 and 1900, typically have clean, classical lines. Those west of the park, developed between 1900 and 1905, tend to be more Gothic in style. Barnett's wife was from the West Country, and many of the roads he developed are named either for places she knew (e.g. Torbay, Tiverton. Honiton) or popular poets of the time (e.g. Tennyson). The first occupants of the area in late Victorian times were typically lower middle class clerical workers, school-teachers, insurance company employees and bank clerks.

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Seven Dials, London
Seven Dials is a small but well-known road junction in the West End of London in Covent Garden where seven streets converge. At the centre of the roughly-circular space is a pillar bearing six (not seven) sundials, a result of the pillar being commissioned before a late stage alteration of the plans from an original six roads.
The term also refers informally to the immediate surrounding area.
The landed estate belongs to the Worshipful Company of Mercers which allowed building licences on what was open farmland to maximise their income in what was the burgeoning West End of the developing metropolitan area. The original layout of the Seven Dials area was designed by Thomas Neale in the early 1690s. The original plan had six roads converging, although this was later increased to seven. The sundial pillar was built with only six faces, however, probably because of the original design. This number of roads was chosen in order to maximise the number of houses that could be built on the site.
Following the successful development of the fashionable Covent Garden Piazza area nearby, Neale aimed for the Seven Dials site to be popular with well-off residents. This was not to be, however, and the area gradually deteriorated. At one stage, each of the seven apexes facing the column housed a pub. By the nineteenth century, Seven Dials had become one of the most notorious slums in London, being part of the rookery of St Giles. The area was described colourfully by Charles Dickens in his collection Sketches by Boz, which includes the quote:

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Soho
Coordinates: 51°30′47″N 0°07′52″W / 51.513°N 0.131°W / 51.513; -0.131
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable transformation. It now is predominantly a fashionable district of upmarket restaurants and media offices, with only a small remnant of sex industry venues.
The area of Soho was grazing farmland until 1536, when it was taken by Henry VIII as a royal park for the Palace of Whitehall. The name "Soho" first appears in the 17th century. Most authorities believe that the name derives from a former hunting cry. The Duke of Monmouth used "soho" as a rallying call for his men at the Battle of Sedgemoor, half a century after the name was first used for this area of London.
In the 1660s the Crown granted Soho Fields to Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans. He leased 19 of its 22 acres (89,000 m²) to Joseph Girle, who gained permission to build and promptly passed his lease and licence to bricklayer Richard Frith in 1677. Frith began the development. In 1698 William III granted the Crown freehold of most of this area to William, Earl of Portland. Meanwhile the southern part of what became the parish of St. Anne, Soho, was sold by the Crown in parcels in the 16th and 17th centuries, with part going to Robert Sidney, Earl of Leicester.

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Southampton
Southampton ⁱ/saʊθˈhæmptən/ is the largest city in the county of Hampshire on the south coast of England, and is situated 120 kilometres (75 mi) south-west of London and 30 kilometres (19 mi) north-west of Portsmouth. Southampton is a major port and the closest city to the New Forest. It lies at the northernmost point of Southampton Water at the confluence of the River Test and River Itchen, with the River Hamble joining to the south of the urban area. The local authority is Southampton City Council, which is a unitary authority.
The city represents the core of the Greater Southampton region, and the city itself has an estimated population of 239,700 Southampton combines with Portsmouth to form a single metropolitan area; with a population of over a million this makes the region one of the United Kingdom's most populous metropolitan areas. The city's name is sometimes abbreviated in writing to "So'ton" or "Soton", and a resident of Southampton is called a Sotonian.
Significant employers in Southampton include the University of Southampton, Southampton Airport, the Ford Transit factory, Ordnance Survey, BBC South, the NHS, ABP and Carnival. Southampton is noted for its association with the RMS Titanic, the Spitfire and more recently a number of the largest cruise ships in the world.

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Southwark
Coordinates: 51°29′56″N 0°05′24″W / 51.4988°N 0.0901°W / 51.4988; -0.0901
Southwark (pronounced /ˈsʌðərk/ SUDH-ərk) is a district of south London, England, and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Southwark. Situated 1.5 miles (2.4 km) east of Charing Cross, it forms one of the oldest parts of London and fronts the River Thames to the north. It historically formed an ancient borough in the county of Surrey, made up of a number of parishes, which increasingly came under the influence and jurisdiction of the City of London. As an inner district of London, Southwark experienced rapid depopulation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is now at an advanced stage of regeneration and is the location of the City Hall offices of the Greater London Authority.
The name Suthriganaweorc or Suthringa geweorche is recorded for the area in the 10th century Anglo-Saxon document known as the Burghal Hidage and means "fort of the men of Surrey" or "the defensive work of the men of Surrey". Southwark is recorded in the 1086 Domesday Book as Sudweca. The name means "southern defensive work" and is formed from the Old English sūth and weorc. The southern location is in reference to the City of London to the north, Southwark being at the southern end of London Bridge. The name has been used for various areas of civil administration, including the ancient Borough of Southwark, the Metropolitan Borough of Southwark and the current London Borough of Southwark. The ancient borough of Southwark was also known simply as The Borough —or Borough— and this name, in distinction from 'The City', has persisted as an alternative name for the area. Southwark was also simultaneously referred to as the Ward of Bridge Without when administered by the City (from 1550 to 1900 and as an Aldermanry until 1978.

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St James's
Coordinates: 51°30′31″N 0°07′59″W / 51.5085°N 0.1330°W / 51.5085; -0.1330
St James's is an area of central London in the City of Westminster. It is bounded to the north by Piccadilly, to the west by Green Park, to the south by The Mall and St. James's Park and to the east by Haymarket.
St James's was once part of the same royal park as Green Park and St. James's Park. In the 1660s, Charles II gave the right to develop the area to Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans, who proceeded to develop it as a predominantly aristocratic residential area with a grid of streets centred on St James's Square.
Until the Second World War, St James's remained one of the most exclusive residential enclaves in London. Famous residences in St James's include St James's Palace, Clarence House, Marlborough House, Lancaster House, Spencer House, Schomberg House and Bridgewater House. It is now a predominantly commercial area with some of the highest rents in London and, consequently, the world. Corporate offices in St James's include the global headquarters of BP. The auction house Christie's is based in King Street, and the surrounding streets contain a great many upmarket art and antique dealers.

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St John's Wood
Coordinates: 51°32′10″N 0°10′30″W / 51.5361°N 0.1751°W / 51.5361; -0.1751
St John's Wood is a district of north-west London, England, in the City of Westminster, and at the north-west end of Regent's Park. It is approximately 2.5 miles north-west of Charing Cross. Once part of the Great Middlesex Forest, it was later owned by the Knights of St John of Jerusalem.
The postcode NW8 (St. John's Wood) was ranked by Forbes magazine as the 5th most expensive postcode in London and the United Kingdom, with an average home sale price of nearly £2 million ($3.5 million). It is home to some of the most expensive properties in the world.
St John's Wood was developed from the early 19th century onwards. It was one of the first London suburbs to be developed with a large amount of low density "villa" housing, as opposed to the terraced housing which was the norm in London up to the 19th century, even in expensive districts. Parts of St John's Wood have been rebuilt at a higher density, but it remains a highly desirable residential district, and one of the most expensive areas of London.

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St Katharine Docks
St Katharine Docks, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, were one of the commercial docks serving London, on the north side of the river Thames just east (downstream) of the Tower of London and Tower Bridge. They were part of the Port of London, in the area now known as the Docklands, and are now a popular housing and leisure complex.
St Katharine Docks took their name from the former hospital of St Katharine's by the Tower, built in the 12th century, which stood on the site. An intensely built-up 23 acre (9.5 hectares) site was earmarked for redevelopment by an Act of Parliament in 1825, with construction commencing in May 1827. Some 1250 houses were demolished, together with the medieval hospital of St. Katharine. Around 11,300 inhabitants, mostly port workers crammed into insanitary slums, lost their homes; only property owners received compensation. The scheme was designed by engineer Thomas Telford and was his only major project in London. To create as much quayside as possible, the docks were designed in the form of two linked basins (East and West), both accessed via an entrance lock from the Thames. Steam engines designed by James Watt and Matthew Boulton kept the water level in the basins about four feet above that of the tidal river.

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St. James's Park
St. James's Park is a 23 hectare (58 acre) park in the City of Westminster, central London - the oldest of the Royal Parks of London. The park lies at the southernmost tip of the St James's area, which was named after a leper hospital dedicated to St. James the Less.
St. James's Park is bounded by Buckingham Palace to the west, The Mall and St. James's Palace to the North, Horse Guards to the east, and Birdcage Walk to the south. The park has a small lake, St. James's Park Lake, with two islands, West Island, and Duck Island, which is named for the lake's collection of waterfowl. This includes a resident colony of pelicans, which has been a feature of the park since the first gift of the birds from a Russian ambassador in 1664. A bridge across the lake affords a view of Buckingham Palace framed by trees and fountains, and a view of the main building of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, similarly framed, to the east.
The park is the most easterly of a near-continuous chain of parks that also comprise (moving westward) Green Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. The closest London Underground stations are St. James's Park, Victoria, and Westminster.

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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.

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Vauxhall
Coordinates: 51°29′25″N 0°07′09″W / 51.4903°N 0.1193°W / 51.4903; -0.1193
Vauxhall ( /ˈvɒks.ɔːl/) is an inner city area of Central London in the London Borough of Lambeth. It was once in the historic county of Surrey.
It has also given its name to the Vauxhall Parliamentary Constituency, which also includes parts of Brixton and Clapham, and to the Vauxhall Motors car manufacturer, which originated in the area, as well as to the Russian word for a large railroad station (see below).
In 1998, Vauxhall became part of the borough's North Lambeth town centre, for local government administrative purposes.
It is generally accepted that the etymology of Vauxhall is from the name of Falkes de Breauté, the head of King John's mercenaries, who owned a large house in the area which was referred to as Faulke's Hall, later Foxhall, and eventually Vauxhall. The area only became generally known by this name when the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens opened as a public attraction. Initially most visitors would have approached by river, but crowds of Londoners of all classes came to know the area after the construction of Westminster Bridge in the 1740s.

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Victoria, London
Victoria is a district within central London, lying wholly within the City of Westminster, and named after Queen Victoria.
The area is vaguely defined as the streets around Victoria Station, including Victoria Street (see below), Buckingham Palace Road, Wilton Road, Grosvenor Gardens, and Vauxhall Bridge Road. Victoria consists predominantly of commercial property and private and social housing, with retail uses along the main streets.
Victoria contains one of the busiest transport interchanges in London, including the listed railway station and the underground station, as well as Terminus Place, which is a major hub for bus and taxi services. Victoria Coach Station, 800m southwest of the railway station, provides road-coach services to long-distance UK and continental destinations.
Victoria Street runs on an east-west axis from Victoria station to Broad Sanctuary at Westminster Abbey. Cardinal Place, across the street from Westminster Cathedral, opened in 2006 and contains a selection of restaurants, banks and shops, including a Marks and Spencer store. Further along the street, there is a large House of Fraser department store (formerly the Army & Navy) opposite Westminster City Hall. At the Broad Sanctuary end is the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills building, the headquarters of Transport for London at Windsor House, and New Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service.

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Waterloo Bridge
Waterloo Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge crossing the River Thames in London, England between Blackfriars Bridge and Hungerford Bridge. The name of the bridge is in memory of the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian victory at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Thanks to its location at a strategic bend in the river, the views of London (Westminster, the South Bank and London Eye to the west, the City of London and Canary Wharf to the east) from the bridge are widely held to be the finest from any spot at ground level.
The first bridge on the site was designed in 1809-10 by John Rennie for the Strand Bridge Company and opened in 1817 as a toll bridge. The granite bridge had nine arches, each of 120 feet (36.6 m) span, separated by double Grecian-Doric stone columns and was 2,456 feet (748.6 m) long, including approaches. Before its opening it was known as 'Strand Bridge'. During the 1840s the bridge gained a reputation as a popular place for suicide attempts. In 1841 the American daredevil Samuel Gilbert Scott was killed while performing an act in which he hung by a rope from a scaffold on the bridge. In 1844 Thomas Hood wrote the poem The Bridge of Sighs about the suicide of a prostitute there. Paintings of the bridge were created by the French Impressionist Claude Monet and the English Romantic, John Constable. The bridge was nationalised in 1878 and given to the Metropolitan Board of Works, who removed the toll from it.

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West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London.
Total attendances first surpassed 12 million in 2002 and 13 million in 2007, setting a new record for the West End. Since the late 1990s there has been an increase in the number of famous screen actors on the London stage.
The Theatre in London flourished after the English Reformation. The first permanent public playhouse, known simply as The Theatre, was constructed in 1576 in Shoreditch by James Burbage. It was soon joined by The Curtain. Both are known to have been used by William Shakespeare's company. In 1599, the timber from The Theatre was moved to Southwark, where it was used in building the Globe Theatre in a new theatre district formed, beyond the controls of the City corporation. These theatres were closed in 1642 during the interregnum.

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Westbourne Green
Coordinates: 51°31′13″N 0°11′19″W / 51.52028°N 0.18861°W / 51.52028; -0.18861 Westbourne Green is an area of London on the western edge of the City of Westminster.
The nearest London Underground stations are Westbourne Park and Royal Oak on the Hammersmith & City Line.

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Westminster
Coordinates: 51°29′58″N 0°08′00″W / 51.4995°N 0.1333°W / 51.4995; -0.1333
Westminster /ˈwɛsᵗmɪnstə/ is an area of central London, within the City of Westminster, England. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, southwest of the City of London and 0.5 miles (0.8 km) southwest of Charing Cross. It has a large concentration of London's historic and prestigious landmarks and visitor attractions, including the Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and Westminster Cathedral.
Historically a part of Middlesex, the name Westminster was the ancient description for the area around Westminster Abbey – the West Minster, or monastery church, that gave the area its name – which has been the seat of the government of England (and later the British government) for almost a thousand years. Westminster is the location of the Palace of Westminster, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which houses the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
The name Westminster describes the area around Westminster Abbey and Palace of Westminster. Its name derives from the West Minster, or monastery church, west of the City of London's St Paul's. The area has been the seat of the government of England for almost a thousand years. The name is also used for the larger City of Westminster which covers a wider geographical area; and, since 1965, has included the former boroughs of Marylebone and Paddington.

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Westminster Abbey
The Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster, popularly known as Westminster Abbey, is a large, mainly Gothic church, in the City of Westminster, London, United Kingdom, located just to the west of the Palace of Westminster. It is the traditional place of coronation and burial site for English, later British and later still (and currently) monarchs of the Commonwealth realms. The abbey is a Royal Peculiar and briefly held the status of a cathedral from 1540 to 1550.
Westminster Abbey is a collegiate church governed by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, as established by Royal charter of Queen Elizabeth I in 1560, which created it as the Collegiate Church of St Peter Westminster and a Royal Peculiar under the personal jurisdiction of the Sovereign. The members of the Chapter are the Dean and four residentiary canons, assisted by the Receiver General and Chapter Clerk. One of the canons is also Rector of St Margaret's Church, Westminster, and often holds also the post of Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons. In addition to the Dean and canons, there are at present two full-time minor canons, one precentor, the other succentor. The office of Priest Vicar was created in the 1970s for those who assist the minor canons. Together with the clergy and Receiver General and Chapter Clerk, various lay officers constitute the college, including the Organist and Master of the Choristers, the Registrar, the Auditor, the Legal Secretary, the Surveyor of the Fabric, the Head Master of the Choir School, the Keeper of the Muniments and the Clerk of the Works, as well as 12 lay vicars, 10 choristers and the High Steward and High Bailiff. There are also 40 Queen's Scholars who are pupils at Westminster School (the School has its own Governing Body). Those who are most directly concerned with liturgical and ceremonial matters are the two minor canons and the organist and Master of the Choristers.

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Westminster Bridge
Coordinates: 51°30′03″N 0°07′19″W / 51.50083°N 0.12194°W / 51.50083; -0.12194
Westminster Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge over the River Thames between Westminster on the north side and Lambeth on the south side, in London, England.
The bridge is painted predominantly green, the same colour as the leather seats in the House of Commons which is on the side of the Palace of Westminster nearest the bridge. This is in contrast to Lambeth Bridge which is red, the same colour as the seats in the House of Lords and is on the opposite side of the Houses of Parliament.
In 2005-2007 it underwent a complete refurbishment, including replacing the iron fascias and repainting the whole bridge. It links the Palace of Westminster on the west side of the river with County Hall and the London Eye on the east and was the finishing point during the early years of the London Marathon.
The next bridge downstream is Hungerford footbridge and upstream is Lambeth Bridge. The bridge was designated a Grade II* listed structure in 1981.

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Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Vincent Beardsley (21 August 1872 – 16 March 1898) was an English illustrator and author. His drawings in black ink, and influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts, emphasized the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic. He was a leading figure in the Aesthetic movement which also included Oscar Wilde and James A. McNeill Whistler. Beardsley's contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau and poster styles was significant, despite the brevity of his career before his early death from tuberculosis.
Beardsley was born in Brighton, England, on 21 August 1872, and christened on 24 Oct 1872. His father, Vincent Paul Beardsley (1839–1909), was the son of a tradesman; Vincent had no trade himself, however, and instead relied on a private income from an inheritance that he received from his maternal grandfather when he was twenty-one years of age. Vincent's wife, Ellen Agnus Pitt (1846–1932), was the daughter of Surgeon-Major William Pitt of the Indian Army. The Pitts were a well-established and respected family in Brighton, and Beardsley's mother married a man of lesser social status than might have been expected. Soon after their wedding, Vincent was obliged to sell some of his property in order to settle a claim for his "breach of promise" from another woman who claimed that he had promised to marry her. At the time of his birth, Beardsley's family, which included his sister Mabel who was one year older, were living in Ellen's familial home at 12 Buckingham Road.

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Barbara Pym
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym (2 June 1913 – 11 January 1980) was an English novelist. In the 1950s she wrote a series of social comedies, of which the best known are Excellent Women (1952) and A Glass of Blessings (1958). In 1977 her career was revived when the biographerDavid Cecil and the poet Philip Larkin both nominated her as the most underrated writer of the century. Her novel Quartet in Autumn (1977) was nominated for the Booker Prize that year, and she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Barbara Mary Crampton Pym was born on 2 June 1913 in Oswestry, Shropshire. She was privately educated at Queen’s Park School, a girls' school in Oswestry. From the age of twelve, she attended Huyton College, near Liverpool. She went on to study English at the University of Oxford (St Hilda's College).
During World War II she served in the Women's Royal Naval Service.
Pym worked at the International African Institute in London for some years, and contributed to editing its scholarly journal, Africa. This inspired her use of anthropologists as characters in her novels.

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Basil Harwood
Basil Harwood (11 April 1859 – 3 April 1949) was an English organist and composer.
Basil Harwood was born in Woodhouse, Gloucestershire (the second youngest of 12 children) on 11 April 1859. His mother died in 1867 when Basil was eight. His parents were Quakers but his elder sister Ada, on reaching 21 in 1867, converted to the Anglican Church. Basil was allowed to attend the ceremony at the Church of England in Almondsbury and this is where he was first drawn to organ music and choral singing. His father, Edward, remarried two years later in 1869 to a lady from an Anglican family. Basil was now sent to the Montpellier School in Weston-super-Mare for a year. In 1871, at 12 he was enrolled in Clevedon, the preparatory school for Charterhouse where he was first to formally study music.
He went up to Charterhouse in 1874 and left in 1876 having won a leaving Exhibition to Trinity College, Oxford where he initially studied Classics (1879) and Modern History (1880). He then studied for a further two years, 1881–1882, at the Leipzig Conservatory under Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn. It was here in 1882, Basil composed his first anthem for chorus and organ O Saving Grace. He returned from Leipzig to realise that he had now passed the age limit to study music formally.

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Billy Hughes
William Morris "Billy" Hughes, CH, KC, (25 September 1862 – 28 October 1952), Australian politician, was the seventh Prime Minister of Australia from 1915 to 1923.
Over the course of his 51-year federal parliamentary career (and an additional seven years prior to that in a colonial parliament), Hughes changed parties five times: from Labor (1901–16) to National Labor (1916–17) to Nationalist (1917–30) to Australian (1930–31) to United Australia (1931–44) to Liberal (1944–52). He was expelled from three parties, and represented four different electorates in two states.
Originally Prime Minister as leader of the Labor Party, his support of conscription lead him, along with 24 other pro-conscription members, to form National Labor. National Labor merged with the Commonwealth Liberal Party to form the Nationalist Party. His prime ministership came to an end when the Nationalist party was forced to form a coalition with the Country Party, who refused to serve under Hughes. He was the longest serving prime minister up to that point, and the fifth longest serving over all. He would later lead the United Australia Party to the 1943 election, though Arthur Fadden served as Coalition leader.

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Bram Stoker
Abraham "Bram" Stoker (8 November 1847 – 20 April 1912) was an Irish novelist and short story writer, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, which Irving owned.
Stoker was born on 8 November 1847 at 15 Marino Crescent, Clontarf, on the northside of Dublin, Ireland. His parents were Abraham Stoker (1799–1876), from Dublin, and Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (1818–1901), who came from Ballyshannon, County Donegal. Stoker was the third of seven children. Abraham and Charlotte were members of the Church of Ireland Parish of Clontarf and attended the parish church with their children, who were baptised there.
Stoker was bed-ridden until he started school at the age of seven, when he made a complete recovery. Of this time, Stoker wrote, "I was naturally thoughtful, and the leisure of long illness gave opportunity for many thoughts which were fruitful according to their kind in later years." He was educated in a private school run by the Rev. William Woods.

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Catherine Johnson
Catherine Johnson (born 14 October 1957) is a British playwright, producing works for stage and television. She is best known for her script for the musical Mamma Mia! and screenplay for the film of the same name, which became the highest grossing UK film of all time and the biggest selling UK DVD of all time in January 2009.
Johnson grew up in Wickwar near Wotton-under-Edge and attended Katharine Lady Berkeley's School in Wotton. She was expelled from school at 16, married at 18 and divorced by the age of 24. She moved to Bristol and finding herself unemployed and with one child to support and another on the way she spotted a notice in the local paper for the Bristol Old Vic/HTV West playwrighting competition. She wrote Rag Doll, using the pseudonym Maxwell Smart, a play about incest and child abuse, which won the competition and was staged by the Bristol Old Vic. Further plays for the Bush Theatre in London, Bristol Old Vic and Show of Strength followed along with work on television series including Casualty, Love Hurts and Byker Grove. Johnson lives in Bristol and also owns a house in Pimlico, London.

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Charles De Gaulle
Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle (/ˈtʃɑrlz/ or /ˈʃɑrl dəˈɡɔːl/; French: [ʃaʁl də ɡol] ( listen); 22 November 1890 – 9 November 1970) was a French general and statesman who led the Free French Forces during World War II. He later founded the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and served as its first President from 1959 to 1969.
A veteran of World War I, in the 1920s and 1930s de Gaulle came to the fore as a proponent of mobile armoured divisions, which he considered would become central in modern warfare. During World War II, he earned the rank of brigadier general (retained throughout his life), leading one of the few successful armoured counter-attacks during the 1940 Battle of France in May in Montcornet, and then briefly served in the French government as France was falling. De Gaulle was the most senior French military officer to reject the June 1940 armistice to Nazi Germany right from the outset.
He escaped to Britain and gave a famous radio address, broadcast by the BBC on 18 June 1940, exhorting the French people to resist Nazi Germany and organised the Free French Forces with exiled French officers in Britain. As the war progressed de Gaulle gradually gained control of all French colonies except Indochina most of which had at first been controlled by the pro-German Vichy regime. Despite earning a reputation for being a difficult man to do business with, by the time of the Allied invasion of France in 1944 he was heading what amounted to a French government in exile, but although he insisted that France be treated as a great independent power by the other Allies, the Americans in particular remained deeply suspicious of his motives. De Gaulle became prime minister in the French Provisional Government, resigning in 1946 because of political conflicts.

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Douglas Macmillan
Douglas Macmillan MBE (born 10 August 1884, in Castle Cary, Somerset, England - died 1969) was a civil servant and charity founder. He was the seventh of eight children of William Macmillan (1844-1911) and his wife Emily (1843-1937). He was educated at [1]Sexey's School, Bruton (1894-7), the Quaker Sidcot School, Winscombe (1897-1901), and then at the Birkbeck Literary and Scientific Institute, London (1901). Macmillan entered the civil service in London in 1902 and worked in the Board of Agriculture and, later, the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, retiring as a staff officer in 1945.
The death of his father from cancer, in 1911, left a deep impression on Macmillan, and the following year he founded the Society for the Prevention and Relief of Cancer against a background of resistance. The National Health Service had yet to be established, and registration of nurses was not introduced until 1919. At the time no Health and Safety acts had been passed by Parliament and public health had yet to become a priority by the state. In setting up the society Macmillan "wanted to see homes for cancer patients throughout the land, where attention will be provided freely or at low cost, as circumstances dictate... [and]... panels of voluntary nurses who can be detailed off to attend to necessitous patients in their own homes." This organisation has since flourished and is today known as Macmillan Cancer Support.

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Francis Urquhart
Francis Ewan Urquhart (1937 –– 29 July 2003) is a fictional character, known by his initials FU, created by Michael Dobbs. A Conservative politician, he appeared in a trilogy of novels: House of Cards in 1989, To Play the King in 1992 and The Final Cut in 1995. He was portrayed in television versions by Ian Richardson.
The "epitome of elegant evil", in the series Urquhart addressed the audience in asides, often quoting Shakespeare, or giving a knowing look to the camera. He used the catchphrase, "You might very well think that; I couldn't possibly comment", or a variation thereon, as a deniable way of agreeing with people. The term has often been used in the real life British politics, and in the media, since the BBC airing of House of Cards in 1990. The first series, which opens with the battle within the Conservative Party to succeed Margaret Thatcher as its leader and as Prime Minister, gained instant popularity when she actually fell from power during its run.
Urquhart has served for many years as Chief Whip of the Conservative Party. He is believed by most people to be an honest and decent man; as Lord 'Teddy' Billsborough remarks to Michael Samuels in House of Cards, "Dull dog, but sound as a bell. The odd thing about Francis Urquhart is that he'd never stab you in the back, however much he disliked you. Not many left like Urquhart. Dying breed, more's the pity." Prior to events of the novel, the characterisation seems accurate, but when the new Prime Minister rejects a number of original ideas suggested by Urquhart, including a new memorandum for a Cabinet reshuffle in which he would hold a senior Cabinet post, Urquhart is revealed as an ambitious, vengeful and manipulative man who lusts after power and is willing to commit murder and blackmail to get it. (Dobbs chose his initials very deliberately ). He is encouraged by his equally amoral wife, Elizabeth.

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G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer. He published works on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox".Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out." For example, Chesterton wrote "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it."
Chesterton is well known for his reasoned apologetics and even some of those who disagree with him have recognized the universal appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both progressivism and conservatism, saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify such a position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, Chesterton's "friendly enemy" according to Time, said of him, "He was a man of colossal genius". Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and John Ruskin.

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George Peabody
George Peabody (/ˈpiːbədi/ PEE-bə-dee; February 18, 1795 – November 4, 1869) was an American-British entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the Peabody Trust in Britain and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and was responsible for many other charitable initiatives.
Peabody was born in what was then South Danvers (now Peabody), Massachusetts. His family had Puritan antecedents in the state, but was poor, and as one of eight children George suffered some deprivations during his upbringing: these factors influenced his later philanthropic tendencies. His birthplace at 205 Washington Street in Peabody is now the George Peabody House Museum, a museum dedicated to preserving his life and legacy. In 1816, he moved to Baltimore, where he would live for the next 20 years.
Peabody first visited the UK in 1827 for business reasons, and over the next decade made four more trans-Atlantic trips, establishing a branch office in Liverpool, and later the banking firm of George Peabody & Co. in London. In 1837 he took up permanent residence in London, remaining there for the rest of his life.

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Gianluca Vialli
Gianluca Vialli (born 9 July 1964 in Cremona) is an Italian football manager and former player. Since retiring, he has gone into management and punditry and is a commentator for Sky Sport Italia.
Vialli started his career at Cremonese in 1980 in his native Italy where he made 105 league appearances scoring 23 goals. His performances impressed Sampdoria who signed him in 1984. During which time he scored 85 league goals, won 3 Italian cups, the Serie A and the European Cup Winners Cup. Vialli transferred to Juventus for a World record £12.5 million in 1992. During this time he won the Italian Cup, the Serie A, Italian Supercup, UEFA Champions League and the UEFA Cup. In 1996 Vialli joined Chelsea and became Chelsea player manager the following season. In England he won the FA Cup, League Cup, UEFA Cup Winners Cup and UEFA Super Cup. He is one of nine footballers to have won the three main European club competitions and is the only player in European footballing history to have winner's and runner's up medals in all three main European club competitions. During his twenty years long career as a professional footballer he has scored 259 goals at club level, 16 goals with the national team, 11 goals with the under 21 national team for a total of 286 goals in more than 500 appearances.

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Henry Weekes
Henry Weekes, RA (14 January 1807 – 1877) was an English sculptor, best known for his portraiture. He was among the most successful British sculptors of the mid-Victorian period.
Born in Canterbury, he spent most of his career in London, where he worked for William Behnes and Sir Francis Chantrey, before taking over the latter's studio on his death in 1841. His works include the first bust of Queen Victoria after her accession, a monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley, statues for the Martyrs' Memorial in Oxford, and the Manufactures group of the Albert Memorial in London.
He was also the professor of sculpture of the Royal Academy (1868–76). His lectures, published posthumously, were described by art historian Benedict Read as "the most consistent and intelligent exposition of sculptural thinking" of his era.
Weekes was born at Canterbury, Kent, to Capon Weekes, a banker's clerk, and his wife, Mary Pearson. He attended the King's School of his home town.
His younger brother was the artist, William Weekes (1856–1909). Of his own five children, Henry Weekes (fl. 1850–1884) and Herbert William Weekes (fl. 1864–1904) were both genre painters known for their animal studies, and Frederick Weekes (1833–1920) was an artist and expert on medieval costume and design. A further son was John Ernest Weekes.

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Ian Nairn
Ian Nairn (1930 – 15 August 1983) was a British architectural critic and topographer.
He had no formal architecture qualifications; he was a mathematics graduate (University of Birmingham) and a Royal Air Force pilot. In 1955 he made his name with a special issue of the Architectural Review called "Outrage" (later a book, 1959) in which he coined the term Subtopia for the areas around cities that had in his view been failed by urban planning, losing their individuality and spirit of place. The book was based around a nightmarish road trip that Nairn took from the south to the north of the country - the trip gave propulsion to his fears that we were heading for a drab new world where the whole of Britain would look like the fringes of a town, every view exactly the same. He also praised modernist urban developments such as the Bull Ring shopping centre in Birmingham, which eventually became one of the most unpopular buildings in the UK and was demolished in the early 21st century.
He became a well known journalist, writing for several newspapers and producing a series called Nairn's Travels for the BBC in 1970. He was a contributor to Nikolaus Pevsner's Buildings of England series, co-authoring Surrey and Sussex. His involvement in the project ended prematurely as he felt unable to work under the objective constraints the series required, and ceased work on the latter volume before it was completed.

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James Crump
James Crump is a curator and writer. He is the author or co-author of numerous books and has published widely in the fields of contemporary art and history of photography.
Crump is known internationally for his work with contemporary artists and photographers. Throughout his career he has collaborated with several museums and galleries, including the International Center of Photography, The Grey Art Gallery and The Drawing Center in New York, Princeton University Art Museum and Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne, Germany. In addition to publishing the first monographs of Adam Fuss, Vik Muniz, Nadav Kander, and Robert Maxwell, he has worked with such established artists as Doug Aitken, Richard Misrach, Nan Goldin, Ross Bleckner, Lynn Davis, and the estates of Berenice Abbott, Robert Mapplethorpe, Carlo Mollino, Willem De Kooning, Garry Winogrand, and Walker Evans.

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James I of England
James VI and I (19 June 1566 – 27 March 1625) was King of Scots as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the English and Scottish crowns on 24 March 1603 until his death. The kingdoms of England and Scotland were individual sovereign states, with their own parliaments, judiciary, and laws, though both were ruled by James in personal union.
He became King of Scotland at the age of thirteen months, succeeding his mother Mary, Queen of Scots, who had been compelled to abdicate in his favour. Four different regents governed during his minority, which ended officially in 1578, though he did not gain full control of his government until 1583. In 1603, he succeeded the last Tudor monarch of England and Ireland, Elizabeth I, who died without issue. He continued to reign in all three kingdoms for 22 years, a period known as the Jacobean era after him, until his death in 1625 at the age of 58. After the Union of the Crowns, he based himself in England (the largest of the three realms) from 1603, only returning to Scotland once in 1617, and styled himself "King of Great Britain and Ireland". In his reign, the Plantation of Ulster and British colonization of the Americas began.

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James Lennox Kerr
James Lennox Kerr (1 July 1899 – 11 March 1963, aged 63) was a Scottish socialist author noted for his children's stories written under the pseudonym of "Peter Dawlish". He lived in Paisley until 1915, joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve by claiming to be 18, then served on merchant ships until 1929. After spending some time in Australia and America (his first book, for adults, Back Door Guest, described life as a hobo in USA and Canada, and is full of social comment which was then controversial) he settled in Pimlico in 1930, marrying Elizabeth "Mornie" Birch of Penwith, Cornwall (daughter of John "Lamorna" Birch the RA painter) in 1932. These details are in his autobiography (Kerr 1940). He wrote 32 books for children, most with a nautical theme and 23 books for adults, many commenting on working class life in Scotland, America and Australia. He served on minesweepers in World War II, assisted at Omaha beach, and was Mentioned In Despatches. As an author he used, in addition to his own name, the pseudonyms "Douglas Gavin" for adult books and "Peter Dawlish" for children's books after 1938 (Bigger, 2007). Kerr was a self proclaimed socialist, but he was never a member of the Communist Party. He joined and then left the Labour Party. He is survived by a son whose reminiscences are used by Wormleighton (1995) and Bigger (2007).

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Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 Berdichev, Ukraine – 3 August 1924) was a Polish novelist who wrote in English, after settling in England.
Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and then always with a marked Polish accent). He wrote stories and novels, predominantly with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit by the demands of duty and honour. Conrad was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors.
Films have been adapted from or inspired by Conrad's Victory, Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, An Outcast of the Islands, The Rover, The Shadow Line, The Duel, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, and Almayer's Folly.

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Laura Ashley
Laura Ashley (7 September 1925 – 17 September 1985) was a Welsh fashion designer and businesswoman. She originally made furnishing materials in the 1950s.She later expanded into clothing design and manufacture in the 1960s. The Laura Ashley style is characterized by Romantic English designs—often with a 19th-century rural feel—and the use of natural fabrics.
Although her Welsh parents lived in London, just before her birth, her mother returned home to allow Laura Mountney to be born Welsh at her grandmother's home, 31 Station Terrace, in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil. She was raised in a civil service family as a strict Baptist. The chapel she attended in Dowlais (Hebron) was Welsh language and although she could not understand the language, she loved it, especially the singing. Educated at Marshall's School in Merthyr Tydfil until 1932, she was then sent to the Elmwood School, Croydon. She was evacuated back to Wales aged 13, with so many World War II evacuees there were no school places left, and she attended the Aberdare Secretarial School. In 1942, she left school at 16, and served in the Women's Royal Naval Service. During this period she met engineer Bernard Ashley at a youth club in Wallington. After the war, Bernard was posted to India with the Gurkhas, and the pair corresponded by letter. From 1945 to 1952 she worked as a secretary for the National Federation of Women's Institutes in London, and married Bernard in 1949.

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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM ( /ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.

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Michael Dobbs
Michael Dobbs, Baron Dobbs (born 14 November 1948) is a British Conservative politician and best-selling author.
Michael Dobbs was born on 14 November 1948 in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, the son of nurseryman Eric and Eileen Dobbs. He was educated at Hertford Grammar School and Christ Church, Oxford University. After graduating in 1971 he moved to the United States. He attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, funded by a job as feature writer for the Boston Globe, and graduated in 1975 with an M.A., M.A.L.D., and PhD in nuclear defence studies. His doctoral thesis was published as SALT on the Dragon's Tail. He worked on The Boston Globe as an editorial assistant and political feature writer from 1971 to 1975. In 2007, Dobbs gave the Alumni Salutation at Tufts.
After getting his PhD in 1975, Dobbs returned to England and began working in London for the Conservative Party. He was an advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who was then leader of the Opposition, from 1977 to 1979. From 1979 to 1981 he was a Conservative MP speechwriter. He served as a Government Special Advisor from 1981 to 1986. He was the Conservative Party Chief of Staff from 1986 to 1987. He survived the Brighton Bombing in 1984 at the Conservative Party Conference. Considered a masterful political operator, he was called "Westminster’s baby-faced hit man", by The Guardian in 1987. In the John Major government, he served as Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party from 1994 to 1995.

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Oswald Mosley
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, of Ancoats, (16 November 1896 – 3 December 1980) was an English politician, known principally as the founder of the British Union of Fascists. He was a Member of Parliament for Harrow from 1918 to 1924 and for Smethwick from 1926 to 1931, as well as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–1931.
Mosley was the eldest of three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, of Ancoats (29 December 1873 - 21 September 1928), and wife Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote (1874–1950), the second child of Captain Justinian Edwards-Heathcote of Market Drayton, Shropshire. Mosley's family were Anglo-Irish. His branch were prosperous landowners in Staffordshire, seated at Rolleston Hall, near Burton-on-Trent. Through the intermarriage common among the British upper classes, the 5th Baronet was the third cousin of the Earl of Strathmore, which would eventually make Oswald Mosley, the 6th baronet, fourth cousin to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, who was the Earl of Strathmore's daughter, and fourth cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II.

wn.com/Oswald_Mosley
Rhys Ifans
Rhys Ifans (Welsh pronunciation: [r̥ɨːs ˈivans]; born Rhys Owain Evans; 22 July 1967) is a Welsh actor and musician. He is known for his portrayal of characters such as Spike in Notting Hill and Jed Parry in Enduring Love and as a member of the Welsh rock groups Super Furry Animals and The Peth. Ifans also appeared as Xenophilius Lovegood in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 1, and will appear as Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard in the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man. He played Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, in Anonymous. Ifans gained fame in the United States as the gambling footballer turned American football player Nigel Gruff in the 2000 film The Replacements.
Ifans was born in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, Wales, in 1967, the son of Beti Wyn (née Davies), a nursery school teacher, and Eirwyn Evans, a primary school teacher. His first language is Welsh. Ifans grew up in Ruthin, North Wales, and received his primary education at Ysgol Pentrecelyn, where his mother worked, before attending Ysgol Maes Garmon, a Welsh language secondary school in Mold, Flintshire, where he sat his O levels and A levels. He also attended youth acting schools at Theatr Clwyd, Mold and trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

wn.com/Rhys_Ifans
Swami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda (pronounced: IPA: [ʂāmiː biːbeːkānoːnɗoː] listen (help·info)) (12 January 1863 – 4 July 1902), born Narendra Nath Datta (IPA: [nôreːnd̪roː naːt̪ʰ d̪ôttoː] was the chief disciple of the 19th century saint Ramakrishna and the founder of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission. He is considered a key figure in the introduction of Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the western world, mainly in America and Europe and is also credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion during the end of the 19th century CE. Vivekananda is considered to be a major force in the revival of Hinduism in modern India. He is perhaps best known for his inspiring speech which began: "Sisters and Brothers of America," through which he introduced Hinduism at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893.
Swami Vivekananda was born in an aristocratic Bengali Kayastha family of Calcutta on 12 January 1863. Vivekananda's parents influenced his thinking—his father by his rationality and his mother by her religious temperament. From his childhood, he showed an inclination towards spirituality and God realisation. His guru, Ramakrishna, taught him Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism); that all religions are true and that service to man was the most effective worship of God. After the Mahasamadhi of his guru, Vivekananda became a wandering monk, touring the Indian subcontinent and acquiring first-hand knowledge of conditions in India. He later travelled to Chicago and represented India as a delegate in the 1893 Parliament of World Religions. He conducted hundreds of public and private lectures and classes, disseminating Vedanta and Yoga in America, England and Europe. He also established the Vedanta societies in America and England.

wn.com/Swami_Vivekananda
Thomas Cubitt
Thomas Cubitt (1788–1855), born Buxton, Norfolk, was the leading master builder in London in the second quarter of the 19th century, and also carried out several projects in other parts of England.
The son of a Norfolk carpenter, he journeyed to India as ship's carpenter from which he earned sufficient funds to start his own building firm in 1810 on Gray's Inn Road, London where he was one of the first builders to have a 'modern' system of employing all the trades under his own management.
Cubitt's first major building was the London Institution in Finsbury Circus, built in 1815. After this he worked primarily on speculative housing at Camden Town, Islington, and especially at Highbury Park, Stoke Newington (now part of Islington).
His development of areas of Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square and Tavistock Square, began in 1820, for a group of landowners including the Duke of Bedford.
He was commissioned in 1824 by Richard Grosvenor, 2nd Marquess of Westminster, to create a great swathe of building in Belgravia centred around Belgrave Square and Pimlico, in what was to become his greatest achievement in London. Notable amongst this development are the north and west sides of Eaton Square, which exemplify Cubitt's style of building and design. His work in Belgrave Square was helped by the architect Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) who designed Sefton House.

wn.com/Thomas_Cubitt
Wilfrid Brambell
Henry Wilfrid Brambell (22 March 1912 – 18 January 1985) was an Irish film and television actor best known for his role in the British television series Steptoe and Son. He also performed alongside The Beatles in their film A Hard Day's Night, playing Paul McCartney's fictional grandfather.
Brambell was born in Dublin. His father worked at a Guinness Brewery and his mother was an opera singer. His first appearance was as a child, entertaining the wounded troops during the First World War. On leaving school he worked part-time as a reporter for The Irish Times and part-time as an actor at the Abbey Theatre before becoming a professional actor for the Gate Theatre. He also did repertory at Swansea, Bristol and Chesterfield. In World War II he joined the British military forces entertainment organisation ENSA.
His television career began during the 1950s, when he was cast in small roles in three Nigel Kneale/Rudolph Cartier productions for BBC Television: as a drunk in The Quatermass Experiment (1953), as both an old man in a pub and later a prisoner in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1954) and as a tramp in Quatermass II (1955). All of these roles earned him a reputation for playing old men, though he was only in his forties at the time. Brambell hardly ever stopped working in his 36-year career.

wn.com/Wilfrid_Brambell
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States.
Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jenny Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns.

wn.com/Winston_Churchill

Pimlico Lupus street Police Raid #1

.....

published: 11 Aug 2011

author: half31337

Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral - 1938 Match Race (Pimlico Special)

The historic 1938 match race between west coast star Seabiscuit, and Triple Crown winner W...

published: 25 Feb 2007

author: cf1970

LONDON VICTORIA AND PIMLICO ARCHITECTURE.wmv

ABDS www.abds.com / info@abds.com ARCHITECTURE OF THE HOUSES IN THE AREA OF VICTORIA AND P...

published: 14 Sep 2011

author: bassiamadeo08

Passport to Pimlico (1949) Trailer

Movie trailer of "Passport to Pimlico"...

published: 13 Feb 2008

author: micarone

Official End Of Year Video for Pimlico 2002-2007

www.facebook.com Official End Of Year Video for Pimlico 2002-2007 by Henry Simpson-Gray --...

published: 23 Jun 2007

author: DarkXAce

Pimlico - David Devant and his Spirit Wife

Pimlico Video....

published: 16 Oct 2009

author: fiddlefaddle

Pimlico Fair. London. 1984

June 1984. Outside the Devonshire Pub in Moreton Street, now a Pizza Express. Gough Brothe...

published: 03 Jun 2011

author: millbankboy

Pimlico School 1971 - 2010

A short film in memory of the former Pimlico school. Commissioned by the GLC (Greater Lond...

published: 21 Jan 2011

author: replicantplanet

Pimlico Plumbers

This guy is 101 and he's fantastic - this is what makes Britain great!...

published: 13 Nov 2007

author: Leigh Geary

Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral...

The Race of the Century Now you can relive this race like never before! Go to www.freehors...

published: 25 Feb 2007

author: carlykaiser

Passport to Pimlico Clip

...

published: 22 May 2012

author: OptimumReleasing

Shepherds Bookbinders Pimlico

Passport to Pimlico, the remake, film showing traditional skills in bookbinding by Dan Wra...

published: 11 Mar 2008

author: bazthesnap

I'll Have Another Gallops At Pimlico

O'Neill took a red-eye flight from California to watch I'll Have Another on the track at P...

published: 10 May 2012

author: wbalam

Victoria line Brixton to Pimlico

Victoria line Brixton to Pimlico...

published: 17 Jul 2010

author: justinfox955

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photo: AP / Nick Ut

File - Demonstrators are arrested by police after protesting outside a Walmart store Friday Nov. 23, 2012, in Paramount, Calif.

Walmart's horrific treatment of workers is too big to ignore

Al Jazeera

14 Dec 2012

Former President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, meet 55-year-old Martha Sellers. For the past nine years, Sellers has worked as a Walmart cashier in Paramount, California ... More than 10,000 community members joined more than 30 striking employees who walked off the job to demand better working conditions. . "It was wonderful ... That's not too much to ask for." ... 1698 ... ....(size: 23.6Kb)

photo: AP / Manu Brabo

A Free Syrian Army fighter takes position close to a military base, near Azaz, Syria, Monday, Dec. 10, 2012.

Syria Rebels Holding Reporter Threaten Attacks on Russians

Novosti

13 Dec 2012

MOSCOW, December 13 (RIA Novosti) – Syrian rebels behind the kidnapping of Ukrainian journalist Ankhar Kochneva have released a video threatening more attacks on Russians and Ukrainians, as a deadline for her execution approaches on Thursday. Kochneva, a 40-year-old Ukrainian citizen, was abducted in October by Syrian rebels as she traveled to the city of Homs, and has been held there by them since, they claim ... ....(size: 2.1Kb)

photo: AP / Bullit Marquez

Soldiers unload another victim of typhoon Bopha as retrieval operations continue at the hardest hit New Bataan township, Compostela Valley in southern Philippines Sunday Dec. 9, 2012. The number of missing in the wake of a typhoon that devastated parts of the southern Philippines has jumped to nearly 900 after families and fishing companies reported losing contact with more than 300 fishermen in the South China Sea and Pacific Ocean, officials said Sunday.

Typhoon ‘Pablo’ toll: 714 confirmed dead, 890 missing

The Daily Tribune

11 Dec 2012

The death toll brought about by typhoon “Pablo” continued to rise with 714 persons confirmed dead by the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) yesterday while those missing ballooned to 890 as massive search, retrieval and relief operations continue in the typhoon-ravaged areas in Mindanao ... 4 ... They were subsequently brought to Caraga Regional Hospital ... (NHMFC) (P100,000) ... With AFP ....(size: 5.4Kb)

photo: AP / KCNA

In this Dec. 12, 2012 photo released by Korean Central News Agency, North Korea's Unha-3 rocket lifts off from the Sohae launch pad in Tongchang-ri, North Korea. The satellite that North Korea launched on board the long-range rocket is orbiting normally, South Korea said on Thursday.

North Koreans mark rocket success as South finds debris

BBC News

14 Dec 2012

North Koreans have gathered in Pyongyang for a mass rally to celebrate Wednesday's long-range rocket launch. State television showed huge crowds cheering to mark the launch, which has been condemned by many nations as a banned test of missile technology. South Korea, meanwhile, says it has retrieved debris from the rocket and will study it to assess its technology. The first stage of the rocket fell west of the Korean peninsula ... ....(size: 2.7Kb)

photo: AP / Manu Brabo

In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012 photo, a Free Syrian Army fighter poses as he carries his weapon in the northern province of Aleppo, Syria. Syria's civil war has killed more than 40,000 people.

Russia says Syrian rebels might win

CNTV

14 Dec 2012

One of Syria's key allies has admitted for the first time the Assad regime is losing the 20-month ground war. Russia’s deputy foreign minister’s comments are significant because Russia has blocked action to stem the violence, supplied weapons to the Assad regime, and vetoed three UN resolutions -- even as other countries called for Assad to step down. The comments are expected to put new pressure on the Syrian leader ... Reporter ...   ... ....(size: 6.6Kb)

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Md. horse racing industry makes 10-year agreement

San Francisco Chronicle

14 Dec 2012

The 10-year agreement for racing at Baltimore's Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park has been brokered between the Maryland Jockey Club, the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association, the Maryland Horse Breeders Association and the Maryland Racing Commission. Pimlico is home to the Preakness Stakes, the second leg of the Triple Crown ... The 146 days of live racing at Pimlico and Laurel is the same number as in 2010, 2011 and this year....(size: 3.3Kb)

Maryland gains 10-year racing agreement

The Miami Herald

14 Dec 2012

The organizations involved are the Maryland Jockey Club, which operates Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park, the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association and Maryland Horse Breeders Association ... Year-round racing at the two tracks is an important part of the agreement along with continued training and stabling with a minimum of 1,900 stalls at Pimlico and Laurel Park....(size: 1.8Kb)

Governor O'Malley Applauds Agreement Supporting Maryland's Racing Industry (State of Maryland)

noodls

14 Dec 2012

ANNAPOLIS, MD - Governor Martin O'Malley today thanked the Maryland Jockey Club (MJC), the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association (MTHA), the Maryland Horse Breeders Association (MHBA), and the Maryland Racing Commission for their work to reach a 10-year agreement for sustained racing at Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park....(size: 5.4Kb)

Maryland horse racing industry reaches 10-year deal

The Business Review

14 Dec 2012

Baltimore Business Journal by Jack Lambert, Digital Producer. Date ... Nicholas Griner ... Maryland’s horse racing industry reached a 10-year agreement on Friday to continue racing at Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park ... Under the deal, Pimlico and Laurel Park will maintain a minimum of 1,900 stalls year-round for racing, training and stabling of horses ... The 2013 racing season is set to include 146 days of live racing days Pimlico and Laure ... ... ....(size: 8.2Kb)

Maryland governor announces 10-year horse racing agreement to bring stability to sport

The Washington Post

14 Dec 2012

Martin O’Malley announced Friday the agreement for racing at Pimlico Race Course and Laurel Park ... The agreement also calls for Pimlico, home of the Preakness Stakes, and Laurel to remain open for year-round racing, training and stabling for the balance of the ......(size: 1.5Kb)

Royal visit to London school helped by Prince's charity

BBC News

11 Dec 2012

The Pimlico Academy was a failing secondary but is now rated as outstanding by Ofsted ......(size: 0.6Kb)

Prince Charles tells schoolchildren that mad King George III is monarch he most respects

The Daily Mail

11 Dec 2012

Prince Charles, pictured, ......(size: 0.1Kb)

Grosvenor launches guide to find gifts for women in Mayfair and Belgravia this Christmas

Yahoo Daily News

11 Dec 2012

Shops in Mayfair and Belgravia are full of gifts for women this Christmas. Grosvenor is encouraging shoppers to visit the area, and has produced a special online gift guide to help London shoppers find great presents for women this Christmas ... Grosvenor manages property in Belgravia and Mayfair, where some of the UK’s most stylish shops are based ... They include. ... Six Christmas crackers, from Daylesford Organic in Pimlico Road, for £39 ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)

Prince Charles names King George III as his most respected monarch

The Daily Telegraph

11 Dec 2012

As the monarch predominately remembered for losing both the American colonies and his sanity, King George III may seem an unusual role model for the heir to the throne. King George III . 10.31PM GMT 11 Dec 2012 ... Marilyn Goncalves and Joshua Ashworth, both 14, took the opportunity to pick his brains as they entered a history lesson whilst showing him around Pimlico Academy. Marilyn said. "We asked him the question ... Related Articles ... ....(size: 12.3Kb)

Former footy greats helping indigenous kids stay in school (Australian Government)

noodls

10 Dec 2012

(Source. Australian Government). 10 December 2012 Former footy greats helping indigenous kids stay in school. Joint media release with. The Hon Peter Garrett MP. Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth ... The ARTIE academy will now be funded for a further four years in 21 schools in South-East and Central QLD, including expansions to Kirwan State High School and Pimlico State High School, both in Townsville ... distributed by....(size: 4.5Kb)

Horse racing

MSNBC

10 Dec 2012

INGLEWOOD, Calif. (AP) - Doinghardtimeagain rallied to win the $196,000 Soviet Problem Stakes by 21/4 lengths on Sunday at Betfair Hollywood Park, giving Hall of Fame trainer Jerry Hollendorfer and jockey Martin Garcia their second stakes win in as many days ... "I just let her pick it up on her own. The only thing I didn't want to do was move too soon ... Fans party on the infield ahead of the 137th Preakness Stakes at Pimlico in Baltimore ... ‘....(size: 5.3Kb)

Bargain Hunter: Chic Christmas decorations and cute cushions

The Daily Telegraph

04 Dec 2012

PREVIOUS. 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08. Add a little sparkle to your Christmas. Get ready for the festive season with a 15 per cent discount on decorations and gifts from Joanna Wood ... The interiors specialist has Christmas covered ... Go to joannawood.co.uk or call 020 7730 5064 using the code TTJW12 before December 17, or visit the store at 48a Pimlico Road, London, SW1W 8LP until December 24.   ... telegraphuk ... ....(size: 7.5Kb)

DoubleTree by Hilton Opens Fourth Hotel in Baltimore Area (Hilton Hotels Corporation)

noodls

04 Dec 2012

DoubleTree by Hilton Opens Fourth Hotel in Baltimore AreaDoubleTree by Hilton Celebrates New Name and Look with Multi-Million Dollar Renovation ... Credit ... MCLEAN, Va ... Located adjacent to the Plaza Shoppes, DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Baltimore North - Pikesville is the closest full-service hotel to Pimlico Racetrack, home of the Preakness, the second jewel in the triple crown, and just minutes from the Baltimore Ravens training camp and T....(size: 8.9Kb)

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This article is about the area in London. For other uses, see Pimlico (disambiguation).

Coordinates: 51°29′19″N 0°08′22″W / 51.4887°N 0.1395°W / 51.4887; -0.1395

Pimlico
Belgrave Road from St. George's Square
Pimlico Pimlico shown within Greater London
OS grid reference	TQ295785
London borough	Westminster
Ceremonial county	Greater London
Region	London
Country	England
Sovereign state	United Kingdom
Post town	LONDON
Postcode district	SW1V
Dialling code	020
Police	Metropolitan
Fire	London
Ambulance	London
EU Parliament	London
UK Parliament	Cities of London and Westminster
London Assembly	West Central
List of places: UK • England • London

Pimlico /ˈpɪmlɨkoʊ/ is a small area of central London in the City of Westminster. Like Belgravia, to which it was built as a southern extension, Pimlico is known for its grand garden squares and impressive Regency architecture.

The area is separated from Belgravia to the north by Victoria Railway Station, and bounded by the River Thames to the south, Vauxhall Bridge Road to the east and the former Grosvenor Canal to the west.

At Pimlico's heart is a highly disciplined grid of residential streets laid down by the planner Thomas Cubitt beginning in 1825 and now protected as the Pimlico Conservation Area. Pimlico is also home to the pre-World War II Dolphin Square development and the pioneering Churchill Gardens and Lillington Gardens estates, now designated conservation areas in their own right. The area has over 350 Grade II listed buildings and several Grade II* listed Churches.

Notable residents have included politician Winston Churchill, designer Laura Ashley, philosopher Swami Vivekananda, actor Laurence Olivier, illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley, Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta and inventor of lawn tennis Major Walter Wingfield.

1 History
2 Notable buildings
3 Notable residents
- 3.1 Blue plaques
- 3.2 Others
4 In the arts
5 Education
6 Transport
7 Location in context
8 Notes
9 External links
10 Sources

History [link]

Early history and origin of name [link]

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Manor of Ebury was divided up and leased by the Crown to servants or favourites. In 1623, James I sold the freehold of Ebury for £1,151 and 15 shillings. The land was sold on several more times, until it came into the hands of heiress Mary Davies in 1666.

File:Greenwood 1827 cropped.jpg

Greenwood's 1827 map showing parts of Pimlico and Millbank prior to development

Mary's dowry not only included "The Five Fields" of modern-day Pimlico and Belgravia, but also most of what is now Mayfair and Knightsbridge. Understandably, she was much pursued but in 1677, at the age of twelve, married Sir Thomas Grosvenor. The Grosvenors were a family of Norman descent long seated at Eaton Hall in Cheshire who until this auspicious marriage were but of local consequence in their native county of Cheshire. Through the development and good management of this land the Grosvenors acquired enormous wealth.

At some point in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, the area ceased to be known as Ebury or "The Five Fields" and gained the name by which it is now known. While its origins are disputed, it is "clearly of foreign derivation.... Gifford, in a note in his edition of Ben Jonson, tells us that 'Pimlico is sometimes spoken of as a person, and may not improbably have been the master of a house once famous for ale of a particular description."^[1] Supporting this etymology, Rev. Brewer describes the area as "a district of public gardens much frequented on holidays. According to tradition, it received its name from Ben Pimlico, famous for his nut-brown ale. His tea-gardens, however, were near Hoxton, and the road to them was termed Pimlico Path, so that what is now called Pimlico was so named from the popularity of the Hoxton resort".^[2]

File:Belgrave district.jpg

Belgravia and Pimlico in 1903

Development and decline [link]

By the nineteenth century, and as a result of an increase in demand for property in the previously unfashionable West End of London following the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London, Pimlico had become ripe for development. In 1825, Thomas Cubitt was contracted by Lord Grosvenor to develop Pimlico. The land up to this time had been marshy but was reclaimed using soil excavated during the construction of St. Katherine's Dock.^[3]

Cubitt developed Pimlico as a grid of handsome white stucco terraces. The largest and most opulent houses were built along St George's Drive and Belgrave Road, the two principal streets, and Eccleston, Warwick and St George's Squares. Lupus Street contained similarly grand houses, as well as shops and, until the early twentieth century, a hospital for women and children.^[4] Smaller-scale propertes, typically of three storeys, line the side streets. An 1877 newspaper article described Pimlico as "genteel, sacred to professional men… not rich enough to luxuriate in Belgravia proper, but rich enough to live in private houses." Its inhabitants were "more lively than in Kensington… and yet a cut above Chelsea, which is only commercial."^[5]

Although the area was dominated by the well-to-do middle and upper-middle classes as late as Booth's 1889 Map of London Poverty,^[6] parts of Pimlico are said to have declined significantly by the 1890s. When Rev Gerald Olivier moved to the neighbourhood in 1912 with his family, including the young Laurence Olivier, to minister to the parishioners of St Saviour, it was part of a venture to west London "slums" that had previously taken the family to the depths of Notting Hill.^[7]

Through the late nineteenth century, Pimlico saw the construction of several Peabody Estates, charitable housing projects designed to provide affordable, quality homes.

Twentieth Century resurgence [link]

File:TUC eccleston.jpg

Dispatch riders wait for instructions outside TUC headquarters in Eccleston Square during the 1926 general strike

Proximity to the Houses of Parliament made Pimlico a centre of political activity. Prior to 1928, the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress shared offices on Eccleston Square, and it was here in 1926 that the general strike was organised.

In the mid 1930s Pimlico saw a second wave of development with the construction of Dolphin Square, a self-contained "city" of 1,250 upmarket flats built on the site formerly occupied by Cubitt's building works. Completed in 1937, it quickly became popular with MPs and public servants. It was home to fascist Oswald Mosley until his arrest in 1940, and the headquarters of the Free French for much of the Second World War.

Pimlico survived the war with its essential character intact, although parts sustained significant bomb damage. Through the 1950s these areas were the focus of large-scale redevelopment as the Churchill Gardens and Lillington Gardens estates, and many of the larger Victorian houses were converted to hotels and other uses.

In order to provide affordable and efficient heating to the residents of the new post-war developments, Pimlico became one of the few places in the UK to have a district heating system installed. District heating became popular after World War II to heat the large residential estates that replaced areas devastated by the Blitz. The Pimlico District Heating Undertaking (PDHU) is just north of the River Thames. The PDHU first became operational in 1950 and continues to expand to this day. The PDHU once relied on waste heat from the now-disused Battersea Power Station on the South side of the River Thames. It is still in operation, the water now being heated locally by a new energy centre which incorporates 3.1 MWe /4.0 MWTh of gas-fired CHP engines and 3 x 8 MW gas-fired boilers.

In 1953, the Second Duke of Westminster sold the part of the Grosvenor estate on which Pimlico is built.^[8]

Pimlico was connected to the underground in 1972 as a late addition to the Victoria Line. Following the designation of a conservation area in 1968 (extended in 1973 and again in 1990), the area has seen extensive regeneration. Successive waves of development have given Pimlico an interesting social mix, combining exclusive restaurants and residences with Westminster City Council run facilities.

Notable buildings [link]

St Gabriel's Church in Warwick Square

Dolphin Square is a block of private apartments built between 1935 and 1937. At the time of their construction the development was billed as the largest self-contained block of flats in Europe. It is home to many Members of Parliament.

Churchill Gardens is a large housing estate covering the south-west corner of Pimlico. It was developed between 1946 and 1962 to a design by the architects Powell and Moya, replacing docks, industrial works, and several Cubitt terraces damaged in the Blitz.

On Buckingham Palace Road is the former "Empire Terminal" of Imperial Airways, a striking Art Moderne building designed in 1938 by architect Albert Lakeman.^[9] Mail, freight and passengers were transported from the terminal to Southampton via rail before transferring to flying boats. The building now serves as the headquarters of the National Audit Office.

The area contains a number of attractive Anglican churches, most constructed at the time the neighbourhood was laid down. Among them are St Gabriel's, St Saviour and St James the Less. The area's Catholic church, Holy Apostles, was destroyed in the Blitz and rebuilt in 1957. The headquarters of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales are located in Eccleston Square.

The Tate Britain is located within the ward of Millbank, but is a short walk from Pimlico underground station and is regarded as a Pimlico landmark. The district's association with fine art has been reinforced by the Chelsea College of Art and Design's recent move to the former Royal Army Medical College next to the Tate.

Pimlico School, a comprehensive school built between 1967 and 1970, was a notable example of Brutalist architecture. It was demolished in 2010.

Notable residents [link]

Blue plaques [link]

Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator – lived at 114 Cambridge Street
Sir Winston Churchill, politician – lived at 33 Eccleston Square
Joseph Conrad, Polish-born British novelist – lived at 17 Gillingham Street
Sir Michael Costa, conductor and orchestra reformer – lived at 59 Eccleston Square
William Morris 'Billy' Hughes, 7th Prime Minister of Australia – born at 7 Moreton Place
Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya – lived at 95 Cambridge Street^[10]
Douglas Macmillan, founder of Cancer Relief – lived at 15 Ranelagh Road^[11]
Swami Vivekananda, Hindu philosopher – lived briefly at 63 St George's Drive
Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, father of lawn tennis – lived at 33 St George's Square

Statue of Thomas Cubitt by William Fawke in Denbigh Street

Others [link]

Laura Ashley, designer – 83 Cambridge Street
Wilfrid Brambell, actor, star of Steptoe and Son – Denbigh Street^[12]
James Crump, founder of St. Aubyn's School, Woodford Green – 86 Cambridge Street
Anthony Davis, comedian and broadcaster
Charles De Gaulle, Free French leader and French president – Dolphin Square
Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, 14th Duke of Hamilton, First man to fly over Mount Everest – born 71 Eccleston Square^[13]
Steve Hackett, former Genesis guitarist
William Hague, British Foreign Minister
Basil Harwood, organist and composer
Michael Howard, former Conservative Party leader
Catherine Johnson, creator of the musical Mamma Mia!
James Lennox Kerr, Scottish socialist author
Oswald Mosley, British Union of Fascists leader – Dolphin Square
Ian Nairn, architectural critic – 14 Warwick Square
Laurence Olivier, actor – 22 Lupus Street
Barbara Pym, writer – 108 Cambridge Street
Bram Stoker, author of Dracula – died at 26 St. George's Square^[14]
Gianluca Vialli, Italian football striker and manager
Herbert William Weekes, genre and animal painter – born in Pimlico ca. 1842
Henry Weekes, RA, Victorian era sculptor – worked at No. 2, lived at No. 96, Eccleston Street^[15]
Rhys Ifans, Welsh actor
Numerous Members of Parliament

The Small Faces-60's Band - 22 Westmoreland Terrace

In the arts [link]

File:Passport to Pimlico film.jpg

150px

Post-World War II Pimlico was the setting of the Ealing comedy Passport To Pimlico.

In G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy, Pimlico is used as an example of "a desperate thing." Arguing that things are not loved because they are great but become great because they are loved, he asserts that if merely approved of, Pimlico "will remain Pimlico, which would be awful," but if "loved with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason" it "in a year or two might be fairer than Florence."^[16]

Barbara Pym used St. Gabriel's Church as her inspiration for St. Mary's in Excellent Women.

The area is the home of Francis Urquhart in Michael Dobbs's 1989 novel, House of Cards.

Alexander McCall Smith's on-line Daily Telegraph serial novel Corduroy Mansions is set in Pimlico.

Education [link]

For education in Pimlico, see List of schools in the City of Westminster.

Transport [link]

Riverboat services run from Millbank Millennium Pier

Pimlico is served by Pimlico station on the Victoria Line and Victoria station on the Victoria, District and Circle Lines. It is also served by National Rail services to London Victoria Station. Bus routes that run centrally through Pimlico are the 24, 360, and the C10. Many more buses run along Vauxhall Bridge Road to the East of Pimlico. Riverboat services to Waterloo and Southwark run from Millbank Millennium Pier.

The area has a dozen docking stations for the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme.

Pimlico would be connected at Victoria to the proposed Chelsea-Hackney line (Crossrail 2). Plans under consideration for the redevelopment of Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station include a pedestrian bridge stretching across the river from St. George's Square.^[17]

Location in context [link]

**Neighbouring areas of London**
Belgravia	Victoria	Westminster and St James's
Chelsea		Millbank
	Pimlico East

Battersea (across river)	Nine Elms (across river)	Vauxhall (across river)

Notes [link]

^ From: 'Pimlico', Old and New London: Volume 5 (1878), pp. 39-49. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45221
^ Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898 edn.
^ I never knew that about London: Christopher Winn. ISBN 9480091918576
^ The Fascination of London: Mayfair, Belgravia and Bayswater, 1903
^ Pimlico design guide
^ Map of London Poverty
^ p. 10, Coleman, Terry in Olivier. Macmillan 2006
^ The Grosvenor Estate
^ http://taylorempireairways.com/2009/11/imperial-airways-building-sw1/
^ http://www3.westminster.gov.uk/docstores/publications_store/bhm_booklet.pdf
^ Hunt, Timothy (2004). "Macmillan, Douglas (1884–1969)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
^ http://www.leonardrossiter.com/risingdamp/BiogsSupp.html
^ http://www.thepeerage.com/p10949.htm#i109486
^ [Short biography of Bram Stoker http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/stoker/bio.html]
^ Wheatley, Henry B.; Peter Cunningham (1891). London, Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions. Albemarle Street, London: John Murray. pp. 152. http://books.google.com/books?id=zcoPAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA152&lpg=PA152&dq=Henry+Weekes,+Eccleston+Street,+Pimlico,&source=bl&ots=kwSRw7Q8Fd&sig=y2Kob5fZLrmjxtOfWoOaQjzUVtI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA152,M1.
^ http://www.gutenberg.org/files/130/130.txt
^ http://www.london.gov.uk/archive/mayor/planning/oapf-nine-elms/docs/oapf-nine-elms-framework-draft-nov-09-main.pdf

External links [link]

Sources [link]

Secret London by Andrew Duncan (New Holland Publishers, London, 2001)
The Face of London by Harold P Clunn (Spring Books, London, 1970)

v t e City of Westminster

Districts	Aldwych Bayswater Belgravia Covent Garden (including Seven Dials) Fitzrovia Holborn Hyde Park Knightsbridge Lisson Grove Maida Vale (including Little Venice) Mayfair Marylebone Millbank Paddington Pimlico Queen's Park St James's St John's Wood Soho (including Chinatown) Victoria Westbourne Green Westminster

Attractions	West End theatre Westminster Abbey Buckingham Palace National Gallery Tate Britain Trafalgar Square Horse Guards more

Parks and open spaces	Green Park Hyde Park Kensington Gardens Regent's Park St James's Park

Constituencies	Westminster North Cities of London and Westminster

Bridges	Chelsea Bridge Grosvenor Bridge Hungerford Bridge Lambeth Bridge Vauxhall Bridge Waterloo Bridge Westminster Bridge

Tube and railway stations	Baker Street Bayswater Bond Street Charing Cross Charing Cross railway station Covent Garden Edgware Road(Bakerloo line) Edgware Road (Circle, District and Hammersmith & City Lines) Embankment Great Portland Street Green Park Hyde Park Corner Lancaster Gate Leicester Square London Victoria station London Paddington station Maida Vale Marble Arch Marylebone station Oxford Circus Piccadilly Circus Pimlico Queensway Regent's Park Royal Oak St James's Park St John's Wood Temple Tottenham Court Road Warwick Avenue Westbourne Park Westminster

Other topics	People from Westminster (district) Public art (architectural sculpture) Schools

Category Commons

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For the band, see David Devant & His Spirit Wife.

David Devant (22 February 1868 – 13 October 1941) was an English magician, shadowgraphist and film exhibitor. He was born David Wighton in Holloway, London.^[1] He is regarded by magicians as the consummate exponent of suave and witty presentation of stage illusion.

1 Magic career
2 Legacy
3 Selected filmography
4 Notes
5 External links

Magic career [link]

Devant was a member of the famous Maskelyne & Cooke company and performed regularly at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London. In 1905 he became a partner with John Nevil Maskelyne. He was succeeded by Oswald Williams. Devant is revered by magicians as an inventor and performer whose stature led to him being invited three times to participate in Royal Command Performances. He was droll, engaging and a master of grand illusion and platform magic. The wit of his patter marked a departure from the pseudo scientific style of earlier conjurors. This humour can still delight, as evidenced by stage lines he includes in the treatise he wrote with Nevil Maskelyne, Our Magic. It has been claimed that Queen Alexandra laughed aloud during Devant's "A Boy, Girl and Eggs" routine at the first of his Royal Command Performances, where an assistant from the audience was given the (losing) task of keeping track of a bewildering number of eggs plucked from an empty hat by the magician.

Among Devant's signature routines was his "Magic Kettle", which produced, on demand, any alcoholic beverage called for by the audience, and "Mascot Moth", an instantaneous vanish of a winged assistant. Critics of Devant claim many of the items in his repertoire were elaborated sketches in which the magical element was insufficient to justify the staging. In its day, however, Devant's magic was the talk of London. He was already a top-of-the-bill music hall star when he began sharing the stage with John Neville Maskelyne in 1893. In 1904, the two moved to St George's Hall, and their official business and professional partnership was established soon afterwards. It was to prosper for ten years.

Maskelyne and Devant's House of Magic became famous all over the world, and was the showcase for the premier magicians of the day, including Paul Valadon, Charles Bertram and Bautier de Kolta. In "My Magic Life", Devant says that their theatre was "the veritable headquarters of the conjurer's art".

Milbourne Christopher in his textbook on conjuring history, Panorama of Magic, says that: "David Devant, most British magicians agree, was the master performer of his time". Devant was a fixture in British entertainment and it was he who was selected to represent "the world of wizardry" at King George V's command performance at the Palace Theatre in London on 1 July 1912. Devant made headlines not long after when an escaped mental patient cornered him in London and insisted that the conjurer pull coins from the air as he had been seen to do on stage. Devant did so until attendants arrived from the hospital to take the disturbed spectator away.

Devant was a pioneer of early cinema in London and introduced the theatrograph into the Egyptian Hall show, acquiring one of the first projectors ever made out of his own pocket. The theatrograph was invented by R.W. Paul.

Devant was still at the peak of his profession when his health began to fail during the war years, until the consequences of "paralysis agitans," as he identifies it in his autobiography, forced him to retire in 1920.

Legacy [link]

Devant is remembered as the consummate exponent of entertaining magical theatre. He was the first President of The Magic Circle and the Society celebrates Devant by using his name for their function room in the Headquarters in London. His words about his own priorities in magic have often been quoted to budding young magicians - when confronted by a boastful magician who claimed he knew hundreds of tricks, Devant gently replied that he knew only a few dozen, but he was able to perform them very well. One of his trade mark phrases was that his magic was done "All by kindness".

Devant was the author of several manuals on conjuring, including Our Magic: The Art in Magic, the Theory of Magic, the Practice of Magic with Nevil Maskelyne.

Mentored Scottish-American magician Max Holden

He lived in Hampstead, London, where a blue plaque commemorating his residence was affixed to the house in 2005.

The indie band David Devant & His Spirit Wife are named after him.

He is buried in Highgate Cemetery, North London

Selected filmography [link]

The Great London Mystery (1920)

Notes [link]

^ Adventures in CyberSound: Maskelyne, John Nevil at www.acmi.net.au

External links [link]

David Devant at the Internet Movie Database
Brief biography

Persondata
Name	Devant, David
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	22 February 1868
Place of birth
Date of death	13 October 1941
Place of death

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For the West End actor, see Dave Willetts.

The Right Honourable David Willetts MP

Minister of State for Universities and Science
Incumbent
Assumed office 11 May 2010
Prime Minister	David Cameron
Preceded by	Lord Drayson (Science and Innovation)
Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills (Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills)
In office 6 December 2005 – 11 May 2010
Leader	David Cameron
Preceded by	David Cameron
Succeeded by	Andy Burnham (as Shadow Secretary of State for Education) John Denham (as Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills)
Member of Parliament for Havant
Incumbent
Assumed office 9 April 1992
Preceded by	Ian Lloyd
Majority	12,160 (27.7%)
Personal details
Born	(1956-03-09) 9 March 1956 (age 56) Birmingham, Warwickshire, England
Political party	Conservative
Spouse(s)	Sarah Butterfield
Children	2
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford

David Linsay Willetts (born 9 March 1956) is a British Conservative Party politician and the Minister of State for Universities and Science. He is the Member of Parliament (MP) representing the constituency of Havant in Hampshire.

1 Education
2 Policy researcher
3 First period in government
4 Shadow Cabinet
5 Second period in government
- 5.1 Feminism claim
6 Free votes record
7 "Two brains"
8 Civic conservatism
9 Personal life and member's interests
10 References
11 Bibliography
12 External links

Education [link]

Willetts was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Willets graduated with a first class degree.

Policy researcher [link]

Having served as Nigel Lawson's private researcher,^{[citation needed]} Willetts took charge of the Treasury monetary policy division at 26 before moving over to Margaret Thatcher's Policy Unit at 28. Aged 31, he subsequently took over the Centre for Policy Studies.^[1]

First period in government [link]

Aged 36, Willetts entered Parliament in 1992 as the MP for Havant. He quickly established himself in Parliament, becoming a Whip, a Cabinet Office Minister, and then Paymaster General in his first term (when that role was split between the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury as a policy co-ordination role). During this period Willetts' gained "Two Brains" as a nickname, a monicker reportedly coined by The Guardian's former political editor Michael White.^[2] However, Willetts was forced to resign from the latter post by the Standards and Privileges Committee over an investigation into Neil Hamilton in 1996, when it found that he had "dissembled" in his evidence to the Committee over whether pressure was put onto an earlier investigation into Hamilton.

Shadow Cabinet [link]

Despite the resignation, Willetts was able to return to the shadow front bench a few years later while William Hague was Leader of the Opposition, initially serving in the Shadow Cabinet as Shadow Education Secretary before becoming Shadow Social Security (later Shadow Work and Pensions) Secretary. He carved out a reputation as an expert on pensions and benefits. Since leaving the DWP post, he has been recruited as an external consultant by the actuaries Punter Southall.

After the 2005 election, he served as Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry in the Shadow Cabinet under Michael Howard. In August 2005, after ruling out running for leader owing to a lack of support, commentators speculated that he was gunning for the post Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer position and would cut a deal with either David Davis or David Cameron. On 15 September he confirmed his support for Davis, at that time the bookies' favourite. Willetts, a centrist moderniser, went to ground following the announcement of the Davis tax plan since it was widely speculated that he disagreed with the seemingly uncosted and widely derided^[3] tax plan and found it impossible to defend. Davis then lost the candidacy race to Cameron. Following Cameron's win, Willetts was appointed Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills in Cameron's first Shadow Cabinet in December 2005, the role Cameron had vacated, and later becoming Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. His title became Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills since Gordon Brown's merger of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in June 2009.

On 19 May 2007, Willetts made a controversial speech on grammar schools in which he defended the existing Conservative Party policy of not reintroducing grammar schools. The speech received a mixed reception. The analysis was applauded by The Guardian and The Times.^[2]^[4]^[5]^[6] However, the more right-wing Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail were both strongly critical of the speech, which was unpopular with some Conservative Party activists.^[7]^[8] The speech was made more controversial when David Cameron weighed into the argument, backing Willetts' speech and describing his critics as "delusional", accusing them of "splashing around in the shallow end of the educational debate" and of "clinging on to outdated mantras that bear no relation to the reality of life".^[9]

The Department for Education and Skills was abolished by the new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who established two new departments. On 2 July 2007, Cameron reshuffled Willetts down to the junior of the two departments: the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills.

Second period in government [link]

Following the 2010 general election, Prime Minister David Cameron appointed Willetts as the Minister of State for Universities and Science. In this capacity, he attends the meetings of the Cabinet, although he is not a full member.

Willetts is in the unusual position of being a junior Conservative minister in a department headed by a Liberal Democrat minister. This has created some tension over which bits of his speeches are recognised as statements of BIS policy and which are not.^[10]

Feminism claim [link]

In June 2011 Willetts said during the launch of the Government’s social mobility strategy that movement between the classes had “stagnated”. Willetts attributed this partly the entry of women into the workplace and universities for the lack of progress for men. “Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” he said, adding that women who would otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men. He went on to say that “One of the things that happened over that period was that the entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that with a lot of the expansion of education in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the first beneficiaries were the daughters of middle-class families who had previously been excluded from educational opportunities,” he said. He said that “And if you put that with what is called 'assortative mating’ — that well-educated women marry well-educated men — this transformation of opportunities for women ended up magnifying social divides. It is delicate territory because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities, but it widened the gap in household incomes because you suddenly had two-earner couples, both of whom were well-educated, compared with often workless households where nobody was educated.”^[11]

Free votes record [link]

According to the Public Whip analyses,^[12] Willetts was strongly in favour of an elected House of Lords and was strongly against the ban on fox-hunting. TheyWorkForYou additionally records that, amongst other things, Willetts was strongly in favour of the Iraq War, strongly in favour of an investigation into it, moderately against equal gay rights, and very strongly for replacing Trident.^[13]

"Two brains"[link]

Due to his careful intellectual approach, ties to academia, his unusually policy-heavy background and his high hairline,^{[citation needed]} he has acquired the nickname "Two Brains".^[14] He is currently a visiting professor at the Cass Business School, a board member of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (part of the University of Oxford), Willetts is the author of several books on conservatism, including "Why Vote Conservative" (1996) and "Modern Conservatism" (1992), as well as numerous articles. He was a founding signatory in 2005 of the Henry Jackson Society principles, advocating a proactive approach to the spread of liberal democracy across the world, including when necessary by military intervention.^[15]^[16] He is an honorary member of Conservative Friends of Poland.^[17]

Civic conservatism [link]

Willetts has pioneered the idea of "civic conservatism" [D. Willetts, "Civic Conservatism", SMF (1994)]. This is the idea of focusing on the institutions between the state and individuals as a policy concern (rather than merely thinking of individuals and the state as the only agencies) and is one of the principles behind the increasing support in the Conservative Party's localist agenda and its emphasis on voluntary organisations. During an interview with The Spectator, he was referred to as 'the real father of Cameronism'.^[18]

Fourteen years after the publication of "Civic Conservatism" Willetts gave the inaugural Oakeshott Memorial Lecture to the London School of Economics in which he made an attempt to explain how game theory can be used to help think about how to improve social capital. The lecture^[19] was described by the Times as "an audacious attempt by the Conservative Party's leading intellectual to relate a new Tory narrative".^[20]

"Civic conservatism, like free market economics, proceeds from deep-seated individual self-interest towards a stable cooperation. It sets the Tories the task not of changing humanity but of designing institutions and arrangements that encourage our natural reciprocal altruism."^[21]

Personal life and member's interests [link]

Willetts is married to the artist Sarah Butterfield. The couple have one daughter and one son. His wealth is estimated at £1.9m,^[22]^[23] and his declarations for the Register of Members' Financial Interests may viewed here.

References [link]

^ Alice Thomson (13 March 2004). "Willetts takes 'two pensions' Blair to task". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1456725/Willetts-takes-two-pensions-Blair-to-task.html. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ ^a ^b Michael White (22 May 2007). "It's over". The Guardian. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_white/2007/05/a_levelheaded_tory_mp_of.html. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Daniel Finkelstein (2 November 2005). "A David Davis guide to fiscal strategy: two and two make... um, er ...". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article585454.ece. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Anatole Kaletsky (24 May 2007). "Lesson one: get the yobs out of the classroom". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/anatole_kaletsky/article1832196.ece. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Daniel Finkelstein (21 May 2007). "Fisking Janet Daley". Comment Central (The Times). http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2007/05/fisking_janet_d_1.html. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ Daniel Finkelstein (22 May 2007). "Do Cameron's critics really want grammar schools?". Comment Central. The Times. http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2007/05/are_david_camer.html. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ Janet Daley (21 May 2007). "When did wanting the best for your children become a crime?". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3640014/When-did-wanting-the-best-for-your-children-become-a-crime.html. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ Stephen Pollard (17 May 2007). "Scandal of the Tory grammar school u-turn". The Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-455414/Scandal-Tory-grammar-school-u-turn.html. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ "Cameron steps up grammars attack". BBC News. 22 May 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6679005.stm. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ "Tracking David Willetts & Vince Cable". Exquisite Life. 11 June 2010. http://exquisitelife.researchresearch.com/exquisite_life/2010/06/tracking-david-willetts.html. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Feminsim has held back working men
^ "Voting Record — David Willetts MP, Havant". Public Whip. http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/mp.php?mpn=David_Willetts&mpc=Havant. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ "David Willetts MP, voting record". TheyWorkForYou.com. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/david_willetts/havant#votingrecord. Retrieved 2011-06-05.
^ Michael White (5 February 2008). "Willetts scores points in this ball game". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/feb/05/politics.uk. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ "Signatories to the Statement of Principles". The Henry Jackson Society. 27 July 2010. http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/signatories.asp?pageid=36. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ "Statement of Principles". The Henry Jackson Society. 27 July 2010. http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org/content.asp?pageid=35. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Conservative Friends of Poland website
^ Fraser Nelson (24 June 2006). "The real father of Cameronism". The Spectator. http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/23081/the-real-father-of-cameronism.thtml. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ "The Ideas that are Changing Politics". London School of Economics. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/events/2008/20071128t1633z001.htm. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Daniel Finkelstein (20 February 2008). "Blood, bats and bonding: a new way". The Times. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/daniel_finkelstein/article3399671.ece. Retrieved 19 August 2010.
^ Daniel Finkelstein (20 February 2008). "Civic conservatism replies to compassionate conservatism". Comment Central. The Times. http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/2008/02/civic-conservat.html. Retrieved 4 October 2010.
^ Samira Shackle; Stephanie Hegarty; George Eaton (1 October 2009). "The new ruling class". New Statesman. http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2009/10/oxford-universitywealth-school. Retrieved 5 June 2011.
^ Glen Owen (23 May 2010). "The coalition of millionaires: 23 of the 29 member of the new cabinet are worth more than £1m... and the Lib Dems are just as wealthy as the Tories". The Mail on Sunday. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/election/article-1280554/The-coalition-millionaires-23-29-member-new-cabinet-worth-1m--Lib-Dems-just-wealthy-Tories.html. Retrieved 5 June 2011.

For Willetts' roles in the 1980s–1990s as a welfare specialist:

Timmins, Nicholas (2001). The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State. ISBN 0-00-710264-X.

Bibliography [link]

Willetts, David (1991). Happy Families? Four Points to a Conservative Family Policy. ISBN 1-870265-62-9.
Willetts, David (1992). Modern Conservatism. ISBN 0-14-015477-9.
Willetts, David (1992). Welfare to Work. ISBN 1-874097-18-6.
Willetts, David (1996). Blair's Gurus. ISBN 0-14-026304-7.
Willetts, David (1997). Why Vote Conservative?. ISBN 0-14-026304-7.
Willetts, David (1997). Blair's Gurus. ISBN 1-897969-47-3.
Willetts, David (1998). Who do we think we are?. ISBN 1-897969-81-3.
Willetts, David (2003). Left Out, Left Behind. ISBN 0-9545611-0-4.
Willetts, David (2003). Old Europe? Demographic Change and Pension Reform. ISBN 1-901229-47-5.
Willetts, David (2010). The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future – And Why They Should Give It Back. ISBN 1-84887-231-3.

External links [link]

David Willetts MP official constituency website
Profile at the Conservative Party
Profile at Parliament of the United Kingdom
Contributions in Parliament at Hansard 1803–2005
Current session contributions in Parliament at Hansard
Electoral history and profile at The Guardian
Voting record at PublicWhip.org
Record in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou.com
Profile at Westminster Parliamentary Record
Profile at BBC News Democracy Live
Articles authored at Journalisted
Article archive at The Guardian
The Tories don't have to make a false choice between roots or freedom, David Willetts, The Times, 2 June 2005
Works by or about David Willetts in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
David Willetts collected news and commentary at The Guardian
Profile: David Willetts BBC News, 22 October 2002

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Ian Lloyd	Member of Parliament for Havant 1992–present	Incumbent
Political offices
Preceded by David Heathcoat-Amory	Paymaster General 1996	Succeeded by Michael Bates
Preceded by David Cameron	Shadow Secretary of State for Education and Skills 2005–2007	Position abolished
New office	Shadow Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills 2007–2010	Succeeded by The Lord Mandelson
Preceded by The Lord Drayson as Minister of State for Science and Innovation	Minister of State for Universities and Science 2010–present	Incumbent

v t e Cameron cabinet (list)

Cameron · Clegg

Alexander · Cable · Clarke · Davey · Duncan Smith · Gillan · Gove · Greening · Hague · Hammond · Hunt · Lansley · May · Mitchell · Moore · Osborne · Paterson · Pickles · Spelman · Strathclyde · Warsi

Also attending: Letwin · Maude · McLoughlin · Willetts · Young When on agenda: Grieve Conservative – Liberal Democrat Coalition Agreement · Coalition government

v t e Paymasters General

Parnell · Stanley · Knatchbull · Baring · Macaulay · Granville · Stanley · Colchester · Stanley · Pleydell-Bouverie · Lowe · Donoughmore · Lovaine · Wilson · Cowper · Hutt · Goschen · Monsell · Cave · Dufferin · Childers · Adam · Cave · Plunket · Wolverton · Beauchamp · Thurlow · Beauchamp · Brownlow · Jersey · Windsor · Seale-Hayne · Hopetoun · Marlborough · Crossley · Causton · Ashby · Strachie · Newton · Henderson · Compton-Rickett · Walters · Vacant · Chamberlain · Joynson-Hicks · Boyd-Carpenter · Gosling · Vacant · Sutherland · Onslow · Arnold · Vacant · Walters · Rochester · Hutchison · Munster · Winterton · Vacant · Cranborne · Vacant · Hankey · Jowitt · Cherwell · Vacant · Greenwood · Marquand · Addison · Macdonald · Cherwell · Selkirk · Vacant · Monckton · Maulding · Mills · Brooke · Boyd-Carpenter · Wigg · Vacant · Shackleton · Hart · Lever · Eccles · Macmillan · Dell · Williams · A. Maude · Pym · Parkinson · Gummer · Clarke · Brooke · Caithness · Ryder · Belstead · Cope · Heathcoat-Amory · Willetts · Bates · Robinson · Primarolo · Jowell · F. Maude

Persondata
Name	Willetts, David
Alternative names
Short description	British politician
Date of birth	9 March 1956
Place of birth	Birmingham, United Kingdom
Date of death
Place of death

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