The London Daily Newsletter Tuesday 24 January

On 24 January 41AD, Gaius Caesar (Caligula) who had been Roman Emperor from 37AD, was murdered. Caligula, whose name means “Little Boots”, succeeded Tiberius and became so unpopular he was assassinated by Cassius Chaerea at the Palatine Games.

Whiteley Village
Whiteley Village is a retirement village, much of it designed by the Arts and Crafts movement-influenced architect Reginald Blomfield.

Whiteley Village was created as the result of a bequest of £1 000 000 realised in 1907 upon the death of William Whiteley. A major feature of Whiteley Village is that it consists of more than a hundred listed Arts and Crafts buildings. The surrounding land on which the community is for the most part wooded and until the 19th century was wholly part of Walton Firs and Walton Heath in Walton on Thames. Hersham, of which Whiteley Village is nominally part was created in 1851 from the southern part of Walton-on Thames. The village is owned and administered by the Whiteley Homes Trust and provides over 250 almshouses for older people of limited financial means who are capable of independent living. Much of the design work was by architect Reginald Blomfield. This movement had been prevalent in the neighbouring area to the west – St George’s Hill – where W.G. Tarrant was a major designer-builder. Arts and Crafts remains a Whiteley Village style occasionally used where building costs allow it to be implemented without forsaking its original decorative and traditional core principles.

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.

Westminster Abbey with a procession of Knights of the Bath (1749)

Canaletto

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster