The Blitz Begins Over London On September 7, 1940, German bombers attacked London in the first major raid of the Blitz, beginning months of devastating attacks on British cities. #TodayInHistory #MabelQuill #TheBlitz #LondonHistory #WorldWarII #HistoryTok #HistoryFacts #LearnHistory #fyp

Mark Lane keeps a curious survivor in All Hallows Staining - its tower long since shorn, yet firm on ground that saw the Romans unload. It is a small mercy, Sir, that a fire-warder's stone outlasts the wood. Records keep faith where wainscot does not. #LondonHistory

The police magistrate's bench kept London's truest ledger - a morning's quiet desperation set down in the clerk's fair hand, no more remarkable than any day's work. It is the very ordinariness of the record that makes it read true. A worthy excavation. #LondonHistory #TrueCrime

A lane is a palimpsest - beneath the tar and the office towers the old names endure, and Rood Lane keeps its curious slip of the City's memory. Read a street above the shop-fronts as often as below; the metalled road forgets, but the names keep faith. A capital piece of digging. #LondonHistory

Quite so - a railway whose every passenger was booked for the grave, and class mattered even at the terminus. The low fare meant a third-class van beside the mourners; the greater sum, a hearse-carriage of your own. Death, even then, kept its distinctions. #LondonHistory

The Princess Alice gone in four minutes upon the Thames, with some six hundred souls darkened - a disaster the river keeps close. To set it to song is to refuse the current its due. I commend the melancholy, and the memory alike. #LondonHistory

Postman's Park is London's most honest monument - small glazed tiles fixing ordinary courage in perpetuity, no gilded statue, no flourish. It is living proof that heroism is most often a common soul being, for one minute, uncommon. #LondonHistory

Here is the dreadful sold for a penny — 'Black Bess; or, the Knight of the Road,' by Edward Viles (1844): a mare with wings, galloping Dick Turpin from London to York in one night. All legend, sir, and all irresistible. #PennyDreadful #LondonHistory

The Cock Lane Ghost was the talk of 1762 — a knocker in a Smithfield garret that rapped to order for its sitter Fanny, until Dr. Johnson's committee caught hands turning a board into a spirit. The City's famous spectre, sir, was a fraud in a nightgown. #VictorianEra #LondonHistory

The Necropolis Company kept its terminus beneath Waterloo and ran funerals to Brookwood by the hour — a steam train as hearse, booking office in the main-line station. London buried its poor by timetable, and charged them for the privilege. A melancholy punctuality, Sir. #LondonHistory

Besom-cleaners of the crossing swept a lane through Cheapside mud and held their corner by right of trespass; Mayhew counted one who kept his bit of roadway thirty years, knowing every cab-horse by name. A penny for a clean hem, and the fog keeps no accounts. #LondonHistory #VictorianEra