The London Daily Newsletter Wednesday 15 February

Great Missenden
Great Missenden once had its own Metropolitan Line station.

Great Missenden is a large village in the valley of the River Misbourne in the Chiltern Hills lying between Amersham and Wendover. It is a few kilometres to the south of the prime minister’s country residence at Chequers and the village is now best known as home to the late Roald Dahl. In 2019 the local postcode of HP16 was noted as the most affluent place in England. Great Missenden station was opened on 1 September 1892 by the Metropolitan Railway when the railway was extended from Chalfont Road (now Chalfont and Latimer) to Aylesbury Town. The Great Central Railway also served the station from 1899 onwards, linking the station with Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield. After the Metropolitan Railway became Metropolitan line of the London Underground, the line was fully electrified in the early 1960s only as far as Amersham. This meant that Great Missenden would now only be served by main line services. Responsibility for the railway north of Amersham to Aylesbury was transferred from London Transport to British Railways on 11 September 1961. Many prime ministers have used the station when travelling to Chequers.

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.

St Paul’s Cathedral from Ludgate Circus, London c 1885 John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836 – 1893) was a Victorian-era painter, notable for his landscapes. In 1861, at the age of 24, to the dismay of his parents, he departed from his first job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to pursue a career in art. He began exhibiting in 1862, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society.

John Atkinson Grimshaw

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster