The secrets of London by postcode: SE (South East)

Our tour of the trivia behind London’s postcode areas has reached SE, where we find rock stars being embalmed, P.G. Wodehouse reporting on cricket and Westminster Bridge being painted green for a very specific reason. Oh, and Winston Churchill gets a hat-trick of mentions…

When Richard Burton played Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1953, Winston Churchill came to see him and sat in the front row. Within a few lines Burton heard a ‘dull rumble… it was Churchill speaking the lines with me. This was fairly disconcerting, so I tried to shake him off. I went fast, I went slow, but the old man caught up with me all the time’. Even in those days the play was routinely cut to make it shorter. ‘Whenever there was a cut there was an explosion in the stalls – you’d have thought I was Hitler.’ At the interval Churchill got up to leave. ‘I thought, that’s it, we’ve lost him. But a few minutes later he appeared in my dressing room. He bowed and said: “My Lord Hamlet, may I use your bathroom?” And he did.’

County Hall is famous as the former home of the Greater London Council – a few years ago Ken Livingstone attended an event in the old council hall and was heard to say: ‘I caused a lot of mischief in this room.’ But less well-known is that the site contains one of London’s very few 12-sided buildings. (According to the website Londonist there’s only one other, in Hampton Court.) The dodecagon (an office annexe) sits within County Hall’s central courtyard, so isn’t visible from the outside. If you want to see it for yourself, book yourself a stay at the Premier Inn – the area where you wait for the lifts looks into the courtyard.

One of the capital’s only dodecagons [Mark Mason]

The London Eye has 32 pods – one for each London borough.

The O2 gets in on the symbolism as well, being themed around time – it has 12 support towers, is 52 metres tall and 365 metres in diameter (months, weeks and days of the year). Its entire roof structure weighs less than the air underneath it.

When the previous building on the site of the Shard was demolished, the reduction in downward pressure caused the nearby Jubilee line tunnel to move five millimetres. When the Shard was built, the tunnel moved back.

When Bon Scott of AC/DC died in East Dulwich in 1979, his body was embalmed by the same man who’d done George VI, Field Marshal Montgomery and Winston Churchill.

To complete the Churchill mentions: before he died in 1965, the statesman ordered that if Charles de Gaulle attended his funeral, the train taking his body to its burial place in Oxfordshire should leave London not from Paddington (which would have been much easier) but from Waterloo, purely so de Gaulle would have to see the name written in huge stone letters. This is indeed what happened.

The site of Winston Churchill’s parting shot to Charles de Gaulle [iStock]

Millwall are the only top-92 English football club whose name, when written in capital letters, contains no curves…

… and Charlton Athletic are one of only four clubs whose name begins and ends with the same letter. Can you name the other three? (Answers at the end.)

Westminster Bridge is green and Lambeth Bridge is red because they sit at the Commons and Lords ends of parliament respectively.

Westminster Bridge is green for a reason [Alamy]

Belvedere Road, running along the south side of County Hall, contains one of the longest remaining stretches of wooden road surfacing in London. Large sections of the material survived in the capital as late as the 1950s. As a boy Alan Sugar gathered some of the blocks discarded when the roads in his native Clapton were resurfaced and sold them as fire-lighters.

Years after leaving Dulwich College, P.G. Wodehouse returned to write a report for the school magazine on a cricket match featuring future England player Trevor Bailey. The schoolboy had obviously already settled on the style for which he would become famous, as Wodehouse’s piece included the line: ‘Bailey awoke from an apparent coma to strike a four.’

Peer over the edges of Blackfriars Bridge and you’ll see that the stone columns supporting it feature carvings of birds, by the sculptor J.B. Philip. On the side facing east (i.e. towards the sea) they’re sea birds, while on the side facing west (inland) they’re freshwater birds.

J.B. Philip’s birds on Blackfriars Bridge [Alamy]

When Angus Deayton used to do the audience warm-up for Have I Got News For You?, recorded at LWT studios on the South Bank, he would say: ‘On behalf of the BBC, welcome to ITV.’

When Oxo constructed their building on the South Bank in the 1920s, they were refused permission for illuminated adverts on the tower. So instead they constructed the windows in the shape of two circles and a cross. When the light shone out at night, it had the same effect – and as you can see from the picture at the top of the page, it still does.