The London Daily Newsletter Monday 30 January

On this day in London history

1915: Kilburn Park station was opened at the height of the First World War

1969: The Beatles’ rooftop concert took place on the rooftop of the Apple Corps building in London. It was their final public performance as a band and was unannounced, attracting a crowd of onlookers. The concert lasted for 42 minutes and included nine songs. The concert is remembered as a seminal moment in the history of rock music and remains one of the most famous rock performances of all time.

Coulsdon
Coulsdon is a town mainly within the London Borough of Croydon, approximately 13 miles from Charing Cross.

The location forms part of the North Downs. The hills contain chalk and flint. Several dry valleys with natural underground drainage merge and connect to the headwaters of the River Wandle, here named the ’River Bourne’. Although the Bourne river floods periodically, the soil is generally dry and is the watershed which has constituted a natural route way across the Downs for early populations. Fossil records exist from the Pleistocene period (4 million years ago) There is evidence of human occupation from the Neolithic period, Iron Age, Anglo-Saxon, Bronze Age, Roman and Medieval. It appears as Colesdone in the Domesday Book. Most housing in Smitham (Bottom/Valley) and the clustered settlement of Old Coulsdon, as well as the narrower valley between them, was built in the 80 years from 1890 to 1970. The area developed mixed suburban and in its centre urban housing. Old Coulsdon occupies the south-east of the district. Scattered, rather than clustered are six listed buildings, for their national heritage and architectural value, at Grade II. It is the southernmost settlement in all of Greater London. At the heart of the geographical feature Smitham Bottom (where three dry valleys merge into one) is the central part of the district. Most commerce and industry is here, set beside the Brighton Road, which is since 2006 a town centre arc of the A23 road and on Chipstead Valley Road which terminates half way along the arc, leading directly to Woodmansterne.

TUM Book Club: Old Covent Garden
The magic of the old Covent Garden Market is evoked through Clive Boursnell’s photographs, taken over the course of numerous visits to Covent Garden in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Clive Boursnell, then a young photographer, shot thousands of photographs of the old Covent Garden, documenting the end of an era before the markets moved out of central London. Boursnell captured these last days of the market over a period of six years, from 1968 until the market’s closure, in a series of beautiful portraits of the feisty life of a city institution.

Impromptu Dance, a Scene on the Chelsea Embankment (1883)

Frederick Brown (1851-1941)

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster