The London Daily Newsletter Wednesday 25 January

On 25 January 1915, the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, inaugurated the transcontinental telephone service in the United States with a call made between New York City and San Francisco, which was answered by Dr. Watson, his longtime assistant. The previous long distance limit was New York to Denver, and only then with some shouting. Two metallic circuits made up the line; it used 2500 tons of hard-drawn copper wire, 130 000 poles and countless loading coils. Three vacuum tube repeaters along the way boosted the signal. It was the world’s longest telephone line.

Chandler’s Cross
Chandler’s Cross is a hamlet south of Sarrat, Hertfordshire.

Its pub, the Clarendon Arms, became a restaurant in the 2000s. A nearby hotel is The Grove, set in 300 acres. This has hosted major events such as the G20 London summit and the 2013 Bilderberg Conference. As a house, it was remodelled by various architects including Surveyor of the King’s Works, Robert Taylor on the site of a medieval manor house as a home for the Earls of Clarendon, second creation, the Villiers family who downsized their estates to one they have long held at Swanmore, Hampshire following the 1914 increase of estate duty.

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.

Trafalgar Square at Christmas

Stanley Roy Badmin (1906-89)

Video: Oyster
Getting around London with Oyster