This month our trivia-inspired tour of London’s postcode areas reaches NW, where Tim Burton snored, Madness caused an earthquake and Desmond Tutu asked policemen for directions even though he knew where he was going…
- The Renaissance hotel at St Pancras station had the first revolving door in Britain. It was installed at the Midland Grand (as the hotel was then called) in 1899, by the device’s inventor Theophilus Van Kannel. (The door itself – or rather a modern replacement – is still in the same spot, at the entrance nearest the road, rather than the main one set further back.) Another innovation was the Ladies’ Smoking Room, the first in Europe where women could light up. And there was more girl power a century later, when the Spice Girls shot the video for Wannabe at the hotel. (Although, as they filmed it at night during a spell when the hotel was closed, the group were freezing cold – the resulting reaction from Mel B’s nipples meant the video was banned in some parts of Asia.) These days you can enjoy a meal in the Booking Office restaurant, so named because it used to be where the station sold you your train tickets. Rooms from £231.
- The second most famous resident of 221B Baker Street had a war wound that moved around his body. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Dr Watson mentions that while serving in Afghanistan he was shot in the shoulder. But in the second story, The Sign of Four, he talks of ‘my wounded leg’. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to write The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor, he covered his mistake by having Watson describe the bullet ‘which I had brought back in one of my limbs’.
- St John’s Wood is the only London Underground station to share no letters with the word ‘mackerel’. (It’s spelled ‘St’ rather than ‘Saint’.)
- When Archbishop Desmond Tutu moved to Golders Green from his native South Africa in the 1960s, he would ask policemen for directions even though he knew where he was going, simply to hear them call him ‘sir’.
- Peter Cook and his third wife Lin lived in different houses 100 yards apart in Hampstead. Cook said that if more couples could afford to do the same, they would. As if to prove the point, Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter did the same thing in Belsize Park, though their houses were actually next to each other. Bonham Carter said the arrangement worked because Burton snored and she was ‘outrageously bossy’. When they separated in 2014, she kept both houses, praising him as ‘generous’ for letting her do so.
- That’s Belsize Park, incidentally, from the French bel assis, meaning ‘well situated’.
- And that’s Peter Cook, incidentally, who kept his name despite the actors’ union Equity asking him to change it (they already had a Peter Cook). The satirist responded by suggesting increasingly absurd alternatives. When he reached ‘Sting Thundercock’, Equity admitted defeat.
- Adam Ant’s mother was Paul McCartney’s cleaner. The schoolboy (then plain Stuart Goddard) would accompany her to the house on Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, and sometimes took Macca’s sheepdog for a walk. The dog was called Martha, hence the Beatles song Martha My Dear.
- T.E. Lawrence’s pseudonym when he wrote for The Spectator was ‘Colin Dale’ – a reference to Colindale tube station, used by Lawrence when he was stationed at RAF Hendon.
- Further down the Northern line, the pub opposite Mornington Crescent station is called the Lyttelton Arms in tribute to the late Humphrey Lyttelton, host of Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. According to Humph, the famous game was made up to confuse a producer who the panellists disliked. While they were drinking one day, they heard him approaching. ‘Quick,’ said one, ‘let’s invent a game with rules he’ll never understand.’
- The media centre at Lord’s Cricket Ground was built in a shipyard in Falmouth. Look at it from behind and you’ll see how its curved shape resembles the bottom of a boat – so boatbuilding technology was the best way to construct it. Meanwhile, round at the front, the glass wall slopes back at an angle to prevent the sun’s glare distracting the players.
- Gospel Oak takes its name from a tree under which Bible readings used to be given. The oak was removed in the 1800s. Local resident Michael Palin planted a replacement in 1998, but it didn’t survive.
- Winfield House, the US ambassador’s official residence in Regent’s Park, was built as a home for the Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton (Winfield being the middle name of her grandfather Frank, founder of the famous store). She later sold it to the US government for a dollar.
- Camden legends Madness featured in the 1992 British Geological Survey. Their first ‘Madstock’ reunion concert, held in August of that year in Finsbury Park, attracted 35,000 fans. ‘When we started “One Step Beyond”,’ explained lead singer Suggs, ‘they started jumping up and down in unison.’ This registered 4.2 on the Richter scale, causing cracked balconies and windows, with residents of three local tower blocks having to be evacuated. ‘So yeah, Madness caused an earthquake. Which is something to go on the CV.’
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