Timeline of London (1900s)
The following is a timeline of the history of London in the 20th century, the capital of England and the United Kingdom.
1900s–1930s
- 1900
- 9 January: Influenza outbreak in London.
- 15 January: London Hippodrome opens as a venue for circus performances.
- c. July: Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice at Postman's Park in the City unveiled.
- 5 July: Thames Ironworks F.C. relaunched as West Ham United F.C.
- 30 July: Central London Railway (the modern-day Central line Tube) opens.
- First historic building acquired by London County Council, Prince Henry's Room at 17 Fleet Street.[1]
- Passmore Edwards Museum opens in West Ham (closed 1994).
- Completion of the Arnold Cross estate, Shoreditch, Britain's first council estate to be commenced (10 years previously).[2]
- 1901
- 2 February: Funeral procession of Queen Victoria, from Victoria to Paddington stations.
- 21 February: Apollo Theatre opens in Shaftesbury Avenue.[3]
- 12 March: The Whitechapel Art Gallery, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opens.
- 1 April: United Kingdom Census 1901: Population: 26,923; county 4,509,618; Greater London 6,581,402.[4]
- 4 April: Electric trams introduced.[5]
- 18 May: Alexandra Palace opens to the public.[6]
- 20 June: Edward Elgar premières his concert overture Cockaigne (In London Town) at the Queen's Hall.
- 29 June: The Horniman Museum, designed by Charles Harrison Townsend, opens in Forest Hill.
- 5 August: Britain's first permanent cinema opens in Islington.[6]
- 20 November: Metropolitan Borough of Kensington granted royal status by charter.[7]
- Ealing Tenants begin development of Brentham Garden Suburb housing cooperative.[8]
- London County Council begins development of Norbury Estate, the first beyond its boundaries at this time.[9]
- London County Council takes over blue plaque scheme from the Society of Arts.
- Hackney Empire opens as a music hall.
- Will Barker begins making moving pictures in London.
- 1902
- 1 March: First GPO telephone exchange in London opens, Faraday Building.
- April
- Vladimir Lenin (under the alias Jacob Richter) begins a year's stay in London where he edits the newspaper Iskra at 37a Clerkenwell Green, studies in the British Museum Reading Room and in October Leon Trotsky first meets him at Lenin's rented flat, 30 Holford Square, Pentonville.
- The Roehampton Club is opened as a private members' sporting club.
- 9 April: Underground Electric Railways Company of London formed to consolidate the group of Underground lines controlled by American financier Charles Yerkes.
- 29 May: The London School of Economics is opened.
- June: A cast of Thomas Thornycroft's sculpture Boadicea and Her Daughters is erected posthumously on the Victoria Embankment in Westminster.
- 26 June: The coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, scheduled for this date, is postponed due to the King's illness.
- July: Leicester Galleries open to exhibit modern art in Leicester Square.
- 4 August: Greenwich foot tunnel opens.
- 9 August: Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in Westminster Abbey.
- 22 November: Golders Green Crematorium, the first in London, opens.
- 1 December: Metropolis Water Act creates Metropolitan Water Board to absorb existing water suppliers on 24 June 1904.
- Ealing Studios established by Will Barker.
- Original Hammersmith Hospital established.
- Rosa Lewis acquires The Cavendish Hotel.
- 1903
- 27 January: Fire at Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum kills 51.[10]
- 6 March: Tyburn Convent and Shrine of the Martyrs established by Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre.
- 20 May: New Kew Bridge is opened by King Edward VII.
- By June: Westminster Cathedral (Roman Catholic) is opened.[11]
- June–August: London's wettest summer (and year).[12]
- 18 June: Explosion at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, kills 16.[13]
- 23–27 June: Royal Agricultural Society of England holds its annual show at its Park Royal ground for the first time; although intended to be a permanent site, the RAS sells it after 3 years.
- August: 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party moves from Brussels to London.
- 2 November: Tabloid national newspaper Daily Mirror begins publication.[14]
- November: The London County Council erects its first blue plaque, to Thomas Babington Macaulay (d. 1859) at Holly Lodge, Campden Hill.[15]
- 16 December: The London County Council erects its earliest surviving blue plaque, to novelist Charles Dickens (d. 1870) on his former home in Doughty Street.
- The London County Council's Latchmere Estate in Battersea opens, the first public housing in the United Kingdom to be built using a council's own direct labour force.
- New Baltic Exchange (building) completed.
- William Foyle and his brother Gilbert establish the bookselling business of Foyles.
- Pepys Club founded.
- Clement's Inn, last of the Inns of Chancery, is dissolved and demolished to make way for the redevelopment of Aldwych.
- 1904
- 9 February: 1904 City of London by-election held.
- 25 April: Herbert Beerbohm Tree establishes an Academy of Dramatic Art, which will become RADA, at His Majesty's Theatre in the Haymarket.[16]
- 9 June: The London Symphony Orchestra performs its first concert.[17]
- 4 July: Branch railway to original Uxbridge station is opened by the Metropolitan Railway.[18]
- 15 August: Metropolitan Fire Brigade renamed as London Fire Brigade.
- 1 September: Brentford F.C. first plays at Griffin Park.
- 11 October: Loftus Road Stadium is first used by Shepherd's Bush F.C.
- Late October: The first members of what will become the Bloomsbury Group move to the Bloomsbury district.[19]
- c. November: Finchley fire brigade becomes the first to take delivery of a petrol-engined self-propelled motor fire pump.
- 24 December: The Coliseum Theatre opens.[6]
- 27 December: Première of Peter Pan.[6]
- G. K. Chesterton's novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill is published.
- 1905
- February: Lots Road Power Station begins generating electricity for the Underground Group railways and tramways. Through the year, the District Railway and Circle line convert their passenger operations from steam to electric trains.[20]
- 1 May: Anglican Diocese of Southwark created, raising the Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie to the dignity of Southwark Cathedral. Edward Talbot is consecrated as the first bishop.
- 10 March: Chelsea Football Club founded.
- 6 May: Naval, Shipping and Fisheries Exhibition opens at Earl's Court.
- 18 October: London County Council's new street at Kingsway and redevelopment of Aldwych are opened.
- 21 October: Henry Wood first conducts a performance of his Fantasia on British Sea Songs at a Trafalgar Day concert.
- 1906
- 13 January: Woolwich Town Hall opened by Labour MP Will Crooks, Woolwich Council having resisted a royal opening.[21]
- 24 February: Kingsway tramway subway opens.
- 27 February: February 1906 City of London by-election held.
- 10 March: Bakerloo line opens.[6]
- 15 May: Our Dumb Friends League opens its first animal hospital, in Victoria.[22]
- 24 May
- The Ritz Hotel opens in Piccadilly, the first significant steel-framed building in London (although regulations require the masonry external walls to be loadbearing).
- Greenwich Power Station (begun 1902) begins generating electricity for the London County Council Tramways.[23]
- 26 May: Replacement Vauxhall Bridge opens.[6]
- 28 July: Tooting Bec Lido is opened as Tooting Bathing-Lake on Tooting Commons.
- 23 October: Suffragettes disrupt the State Opening of Parliament.[5]
- 15 December: Piccadilly line opens.[6]
- Hampstead Garden Suburb established by Samuel and Henrietta Barnett and laid out by Raymond Unwin.[8]
- Brown Dog affair: Anti-vivisection Brown Dog statue erected in Battersea, provoking riots.
- 1907
- 7 February: The "Mud March", the first large procession organized by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, takes place.
- 11 February: Explosions at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, shatter windows within a large radius.
- 27 February: Old Bailey (criminal court) building opens.[24]
- 22 March: The first taxicabs with taximeters begin operating in London.
- 13 May–1 June: 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party held at the Brotherhood Church in Hackney.[25] Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Litvinov attend, the latter two staying in the Whitechapel Rowton House.
- September: A cast of G. F. Watts' sculpture Physical Energy is erected posthumously in Kensington Gardens.
- 11 September: Camden Town Murder.
- 1908
- 26 May–October: Franco-British Exhibition held at what becomes known as White City in Shepherd's Bush.
- 12 June: Rotherhithe Tunnel opens to road traffic and pedestrians.[26]
- 13 June: Women's suffrage march and rally at the Royal Albert Hall.
- June: The distinctive 'bar and circle' design of station nameboards is introduced on the London Underground.[27]
- 13–25 July: 1908 Summer Olympics held at the White City Stadium as part of the Franco-British Exhibition and of a festival of sport beginning on 14 May. The marathon is run on 24 July and the Winter Olympics are held here on 19–31 October.[6]
- 19 July: The Metropolitan Railway converts the last of its steam-hauled passenger services south of Harrow to electric operation.[18]
- October: First Ideal Home Exhibition held, at Olympia sponsored by the Daily Mail newspaper.
- November: Horace, Eustace and Oswald Short found Short Brothers, the first aircraft manufacturing company in England, in Battersea.
- Walter Sickert paints the series of problem pictures The Camden Town Murder.[28]
- First illuminated advertising sign at Piccadilly Circus, for Perrier.[29]
- 1909
- 23 January: The "Tottenham outrage", an armed robbery and the murder of a ten-year-old boy and a police constable in Tottenham, carried out by two Latvian anarchists.
- 26 February: First film shown in colour using Kinemacolor at the Palace Theatre.[6]
- 15 March: Selfridges, Oxford Street (department store) opens.
- 31 March: Port of London Authority takes over the London docks,[30] and also management of the Thames Tideway from the Thames Conservancy.
- 9 May: Metropolitan Water Board's Honor Oak covered reservoir inaugurated.[31]
- 20 May: Imperial International Exhibition opens at White City.
- 5 June: Alliott Verdon Roe begins flights in the first fixed-wing aircraft of all-British manufacture, the Roe I Triplane, from Walthamstow Marshes.
- 26 June: The Victoria and Albert Museum opens in the building designed for it by Aston Webb in South Kensington by Edward VII and Queen Alexandra;[5] the Science Museum is constituted as a fully independent institution.[32]
- 2 October: The first rugby football match at Twickenham Stadium is played.
- 1 December: The London, Brighton and South Coast Railway publicly inaugurates England's first suburban surface railway electrification system on its South London line, known as the "Elevated Electric".[33]
- 20 December: Fire at Arding & Hobbs department store in Clapham kills 9 staff.
- The owners of J. Lyons and Co. open the Strand Palace Hotel and their first Corner House restaurant (in Coventry Street).
- 1910
- 24 February: Electric Cinema, Notting Hill opens.
- 14 May–29 October: Japan–British Exhibition at White City.
- 28 June: Westminster Cathedral (Roman Catholic) is consecrated.[6]
- 26 December: London Palladium music hall opens.[5]
- Admiralty Arch completed.[5]
- Crosby Hall moved from Bishopsgate to Chelsea.
- Fine Art Trade Guild established in London.[34]
- 1911
- 3 January: Siege of Sidney Street: The Metropolitan Police and Scots Guards engage in a shootout with a criminal gang of Latvian anarchists holed up in a building in the East End following a bungled jewel robbery on 16 December 1910 in Houndsditch and the shooting of three policemen.
- 1 February: The last and largest warship built on the Thames, HMS Thunderer is launched by the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company at Blackwall.
- 11 March: Victoria Memorial dedicated outside Buckingham Palace.
- 2 April: The 1911 census is taken. Suffragette Emily Davison hides in a cupboard in the crypt of the Palace of Westminster so that she can legitimately be recorded as resident on census night at the House of Commons.[35]
- 12 May: Festival of Empire opens at The Crystal Palace to celebrate the forthcoming Coronation.
- 16 May: Victoria Memorial unveiled outside Buckingham Palace and The Mall completed as a ceremonial approach.
- 18 May: The Other Club political dining society holds its first dinner.
- 22 June: Coronation of King George V and Queen Mary in Westminster Abbey.
- 9–26 September: World's first scheduled airmail post service is flown between Hendon and Windsor, Berkshire.[36][37]
- 4 October: First escalator on the London Underground system opens to the public, at Earl's Court tube station.[5]
- 18 October
- Dr. Crippen put on trial for at the Old Bailey for uxoricide, of which he is convicted on 22 October.[6] He is hanged on 23 November in Pentonville Prison.
- First B-type double-decker bus, built and operated by the London General Omnibus Company, enters service. Designed by Frank Searle and considered the first mass-produced bus, around 2,800 are built up to 1919, displacing LGOC’s last horse buses by the end of 1911 and with examples in regular use up to 1926, about 900 seeing service on the Western Front (World War I).[38]
- November: Virginia Stephen begins to share her brother Adrian Stephen's London house at 38 Brunswick Square with other members of the Bloomsbury Group: Leonard Woolf (her future husband), John Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant.[39]
- 21 November: Suffragettes storm Parliament. All are arrested and choose prison terms.
- 26 December: Last theatre to open in Shaftesbury Avenue, the New Prince's.
- Completion of Westminster Central Hall as a Wesleyan Methodist church.
- Completion of Gidea Park as Romford Garden Suburb[8] and of Totterdown Fields, the first London County Council cottage estate.[40]
- Camden Town Group of post-Impressionist artists established.
- 1912
- 1 January: Underground Electric Railways Company of London takes over the London General Omnibus Company, leading to widespread adoption of the 'bar and circle' logo in publicity.[27]
- 1 March: Suffragettes smash shop windows in the West End, especially around Oxford Street.[5]
- 30 March: The Boat Race is abandoned after both crews sink; it is restarted on 1 April, and Oxford wins.
- April/May: Thousands of Jewish workers in the West End garment trade in the strike, followed by thousands more in the East End inspired by Rudolf Rocker.
- May: East Finchley Picturedrome (built 1910) opens as a cinema.
- 1 May: Statue of Peter Pan appears in Kensington Gardens.
- June: Cheapside Hoard of early 17th-century jewellery found in the City.[41]
- 10 August: Frank McClean flies a Short Brothers floatplane up the Thames between the upper and lower parts of Tower Bridge and underneath London Bridge.[42]
- 26 October: Woolwich foot tunnel opens.
- 1913
- 8 January: Poetry Bookshop established in Bloomsbury by Harold Monro; it serves as a literary meeting place until closure in 1926.
- 10 February: News reaches London of the failure of Capt. Scott's 1912 Polar expedition.[36]
- 15 March: King George V Reservoir in Enfield inaugurated for the Metropolitan Water Board.[43]
- 20 May: First Chelsea Flower Show.[6]
- Summer–Autumn: Sir Aston Webb remodels Buckingham Palace's main East Front.[44]
- 26 June: First woman magistrate appointed, Miss Emily Dawson.
- 19 July: London County Council Tramways operates its last horse trams, in Islington.
- 26 July
- 50,000 women take part in a pilgrimage in Hyde Park organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.[45]
- King's College Hospital opened on its new site in Camberwell.[46]
- 6 September: Arsenal F.C., previously based in Plumstead in South London, move into their new stadium at Highbury.[47]
- John Archer becomes the first black mayor of a London borough, Battersea.
- Caroline Spurgeon becomes the first woman professor at the University of London.[48]
- The London Group of artists is formed by merger of the Camden Town Group and the Vorticists.
- Twickenham Film Studios established.
- Carter's Crisps of London introduce commercial manufacture of potato crisps to the UK.[49]
- 1914
- March: The London Group hold their first art exhibition, at the Goupil Gallery.
- 10 March: Suffragette Mary Richardson damages the Velázquez painting the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, with a meat cleaver.[45]
- 4 May: Suffragette Mary Wood attacks John Singer Sargent's portrait of Henry James at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition with a meat cleaver. At the same exhibition on 12 May, Gertrude Mary Ansell attacks the recently deceased Hubert von Herkomer's portrait of the Duke of Wellington, and on 26 May 'Mary Spencer' (Maude Kate Smith) attacks George Clausen's painting Primavera.[50]
- 1 July: Isleworth Studios officially opens for film production.
- 31 July: London Stock Exchange closes until 4 January 1915.
- 4 August
- Last horsebus in London operates, in Peckham.
- Declaration of war by the United Kingdom on the German Empire at 23:00.
- September: Cover of magazine London Opinion first carries the iconic drawing by Alfred Leete of Lord Kitchener with the recruiting slogan Your Country Needs You used as poster in the London district.[51]
- 14 October: Royal Flying Corps first permanently stations aircraft at Hounslow Heath Aerodrome.
- 17 October: Anti-German riots break out in Deptford.[52]
- 6 November: Carl Hans Lody becomes the first of eleven convicted World War I German spies to be shot at dawn by firing squad in the Tower of London up to 1916.[53]
- December: Post Office sets up its Home Depot to sort mail for the military, covering 4 acres (1.6 ha) of Regent's Park.
- Geffrye Museum is opened in Shoreditch by the London County Council.
- City Livery Club founded.[54]
- 1915
- 1 January: Ilford rail crash kills ten on the Great Eastern Main Line.
- February: London County Council establishes an emergency ambulance corps, predecessor of the London Ambulance Service, under the control of the London Fire Brigade. By July 1916 it is staffed entirely by women.
- 3 May: Royal Flying Corps opens Northolt aerodrome.
- 26 May: King George V Military Hospital opens in a converted new stationery warehouse in Waterloo.
- 31 May: Bombing by German Zeppelins begins.[24][55]
- 19 July: A cast of Auguste Rodin's sculpture The Burghers of Calais is unveiled in Victoria Tower Gardens in Westminster.
- October: Stag Lane Aerodrome set up.
- 'Metro-land' first coined to promote the area served by the Metropolitan Railway.
- 1916
- 5 June: School of Oriental Studies chartered.
- 3 August: The musical comedy Chu Chin Chow, written, produced, directed and starring Oscar Asche, with music by Frederic Norton, premières at His Majesty's Theatre. It will run for five years and a total of 2,238 performances (more than twice as many as any previous musical), a record that will stand for nearly forty years.
- 28 November: First bombing of central London by a fixed-wing aircraft when a German LVG C.II biplane drops 6 bombs near Victoria station.[56]
- Underground Electric Railways Company of London adopts Johnston (typeface) as part of its corporate identity.[57][58]
- 1917
- 19 January: Silvertown explosion: a blast at a munitions factory in east London kills 73 and injures over 400. The resulting fire causes over £2M-worth of damage.[54]
- April: Leonard and Virginia Woolf take delivery of the hand printing press they require in order to establish the Hogarth Press at their home, Hogarth House in Richmond upon Thames.[59]
- 4/5 May: Bombs dropped on London by fixed-wing aircraft: Cleopatra's Needle damaged.
- 6/7 May: Bomb dropped on London by a fixed-wing aircraft: 1 killed.[60]
- 7 May: The mass explosion of mines in the Battle of Messines on the Western Front (World War I) can be felt in London.
- 13 June: Daylight bombing raid on the London area by fixed-wing aircraft: 162 killed[60] including at least 18 children in a primary school in Poplar.
- 7 July: A bomb damages Ironmongers' Hall beyond repair.
- 19 October: The worst Zeppelin bombing of London occurs: 32 people are killed, 7 in Piccadilly, 10 in Camberwell and 15 in Hither Green.[61]
- The Ivy restaurant opened by Abel Giandellini.
- London postal districts subdivided by numbers.
- 1918
- 28 January: Night of unusually heavy bombing in London and south-east England.[5]
- 30 August: Strike of 20,000 London policemen with demands of increased pay and union recognition.
- 27 October–2 November: 2,200 deaths in London over this period due to "Spanish flu".[5]
- British Antique Dealers' Association headquartered in London.[34]
- South Suburban Co-operative Society, a consumers' co-operative, is formed by merger of the Croydon Co-operative Society (established 1887) with others.
- 1919
- 27 February: Marriage of Princess Patricia of Connaught to Commander The Hon. Alexander Ramsay, the first royal wedding at Westminster Abbey since the 14th century.
- March: "Battle of Bow Street" between North American servicemen and the Metropolitan Police.
- 18 July: The Cenotaph, Whitehall, unveiled as a temporary memorial.[6]
- 31 July: Police strike in London and Liverpool for recognition of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers; over 2,000 strikers are dismissed.
- 25 August: Aircraft Transport and Travel airline begins operating its daily route to Paris–Le Bourget Airport from Hounslow Heath Aerodrome.[62]
- 12 September: First gold fixing takes place in the City of London; from later this month until 2004, it takes place in the N M Rothschild & Sons offices in New Court, St Swithin's Lane.
- 30 September: Compositors and pressmen working at the Daily Sketch newspaper refuse to print the paper until an editorial criticising an ongoing railway strike is deleted.
- September: London County Council admits first (adult) students to its literary institutes, of which the City Literary Institute will be the only survivor.
- October: Creation of the "Mobile Patrol Experiment", the forerunner of the Metropolitan Police Service's Flying Squad.
- 30 December: Lincoln's Inn admits its first woman bar student.
- Construction of Wormholt Estate in Hammersmith, a pioneering example of postwar public housing in the United Kingdom, begins.[8]
- 1920
- 17 March: Edith Cavell Memorial unveiled by Queen Alexandra in St Martin's Place.
- 29 March: Croydon Aerodrome opens.
- 9 June: Imperial War Museum opens at The Crystal Palace.
- 13 July: London County Council bans foreigners from almost all council jobs.
- 18 August: First night bus services introduced.
- September: London Co-operative Society, a consumers' co-operative, is established by merger of the Stratford and Edmonton Co-operative Societies.
- 11 November: The Cenotaph, Whitehall, designed by Edwin Lutyens, unveiled to commemorate the dead of World War I; The Unknown Warrior is buried in Westminster Abbey.
- Devonshire House in Piccadilly demolished.
- London School of Journalism founded.
- 1921
- 17 March: Dr Marie Stopes opens the UK's first birth control clinic in Holloway.[6]
- 26 April: Police patrol London on motorcycles for the first time.
- 6 June: Southwark Bridge opens.
- 8 July: Port of London Authority opens King George V Dock, the last of London's upstream enclosed docks to be constructed.[31]
- 1 September: Poplar Rates Rebellion: Led by George Lansbury, the Borough council in Poplar withholds collection of part of its rates, leading to six weeks’ imprisonment for thirty councillors (including six women) and hasty passage of The London Authorities (Financial Provision) Act through Parliament to equalise tax burdens between rich and poor boroughs.[63][64]
- 9 September: Charlie Chaplin visits London (where he was probably born in 1889) and is met by thousands.
- London County Council begins construction of a large estate of public housing at Bellingham; it is followed from 1924 by the nearby Downham Estate.[8]
- 1922
- 21 March: Rebuilt Waterloo station officially opens.
- 11 May: Radio station 2LO becomes the second to broadcast regularly in the UK, operating from Marconi House in The Strand daily.
- 19 May: 1922 City of London by-election held.
- 22 June: Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson is killed by Irish republican gunmen outside his home in Belgravia.
- 17 July: County Hall opens as the new headquarters of the London County Council.[5]
- July: HMS President (1918) is moored permanently on the Thames alongside Victoria Embankment as a drill ship for the Royal Naval Reserve.
- 14 November: Radio station 2LO transfers to the British Broadcasting Company.[65]
- Ada Salter becomes the first woman mayor of a London borough, Bermondsey.
- 1923
- 28 April: The Empire Stadium, Wembley, opens to the public for the first time and holds the FA Cup Final between Bolton Wanderers and West Ham United football clubs. Crowds are cleared from the pitch by mounted police, including one on a white horse.[65]
- September: T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922) is first published in Britain in book form complete with notes in a limited edition by the Hogarth Press of Richmond upon Thames, run by Eliot's Bloomsbury Group friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf, the type handset by Virginia (completed in July).[66][67]
- 27 November: City and South London Railway Tube tunnel under reconstruction collapses under Newington Causeway.[68]
- 1924
- 1 February: 1924 City of London by-election held.
- 2 February: A substantially rewritten version of Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter C. Hackett's 1914 farce It Pays to Advertise in a new production by actor-manager Tom Walls opens at the Aldwych Theatre. It runs until 10 July 1925, a total of 598 performances,[69] and is the first of a sequence of twelve "Aldwych farces".
- March: Leonard and Virginia Woolf move themselves and the Hogarth Press back to a house in Bloomsbury at 52 Tavistock Square.
- 31 March: The last of 1,702 new steam locomotives is built at Stratford Works, a GER Class L77[70] for suburban services from Liverpool Street station. This is the last full-size locomotive built in London.
- 20 April: Opening of a Euston–Camden Town link connects the previously-separate City & South London and Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Tube railways.[68]
- 23 April: British Empire Exhibition opens at Wembley for the first of two seasons.
- 1925
- 14 May: Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway is published by the Hogarth Press in Bloomsbury.[71] Woolf is beginning work on To the Lighthouse.
- 19 May: Jacob Epstein's Rima, the Hudson memorial, is unveiled in Hyde Park by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, who is among those disconcerted by the sculpture's modernity.[72]
- 13 June: Metropolitan Water Board's Queen Mary Reservoir opens in Middlesex.[73]
- 22 July: The first of Ben Travers' "Aldwych farces", A Cuckoo in the Nest, opens at the Aldwych Theatre.[74]
- 2 October
- John Logie Baird successfully transmits the first television pictures with a greyscale image.[75]
- London's first double-decker buses with covered top decks are introduced.[6][76]
- West African Students' Union established.[77]
- 1926
- 16 January: BBC radio play about worker's revolution causes a panic in London.
- 26 January: John Logie Baird demonstrates his television system from a room in Frith Street, Soho. In 1928, Selfridges sell the first set.
- 9 February: Flooding of London suburbs.
- 3–12 May: 1926 United Kingdom general strike.
- 13 September: An extension of the London Underground Tube line from Clapham Common to Morden and a new link under the Thames between Kennington and Charing Cross complete a through rail route between Morden and Edgware[68] of 19.32 mi. (31.94 km), known initially as the Edgware, Highgate & Morden line, later the Northern line. Station buildings for the Morden extension are the first significant designs for the network by Charles Holden.
- K2 red telephone box designed by Giles Gilbert Scott introduced, chiefly in London area.[78]
- 1927
- 14 February: Alfred Hitchcock's silent film thriller The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog released.
- 12 May: Police raid the London office of the Soviet trading company ARCOS.
- 29 May: 120,000 people welcome Charles Lindbergh to Croydon Airport.
- 7 October: Death of Anglo-Irish businessman and philanthropist Edward Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh, at Grosvenor Place; he leaves Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath to the nation as a museum for his art collection, the "Iveagh Bequest", and the surrounding estate is added to the Heath to preserve it from housing development and opens to the public in 1928.
- 3 December: Post Office Railway, a private Tube line for carrying mail, opens.
- 12 December: 1600 people hospitalised in London when they hurt themselves on the icy streets.
- Evelyn Sharp's The London Child about the plight of slum children in London is published.
- 1928
- 6–7 January: 1928 Thames flood. 14 drown. On 7 January the moat at the Tower of London (drained in 1843 and planted with grass) is completely refilled by a storm surge and the basement of the Tate Gallery floods.
- March: Science Museum opens in its own building in Exhibition Road.[79]
- 3 September: Alexander Fleming, at St Mary's Hospital, accidentally rediscovers the antibiotic Penicillin.[80]
- October: Firestone Tyre Factory on the 'Golden Mile' of the Great West Road, designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners in Art Deco style, opens.
- 20 December: Gas explosion in High Holborn.[81]
- British Home Stores opens its first department store at Brixton.
- First police boxes with telephones erected in London.
- 1929
- 5 July: Heston Air Park opens.
- 20 September: Clarence Hatry confesses to financial forgery.
- 3 October: Dominion Theatre opens in Tottenham Court Road.
- 28 October: Sharp fall on the London Stock Exchange, following a similar crash on Wall Street on 24 October.[5]
- 1 December: Underground Electric Railways Company of London officially opens its notable new headquarters building at 55 Broadway, above St. James's Park station, designed by Charles Holden, incorporating sculptures by Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Henry Moore.[82]
- Grosvenor House Hotel opens.
- Oxo Tower in Southwark completed.
- First Tesco grocery store opens, at Burnt Oak, Edgware.[83]
- Foyles bookshop moves to new larger premises in the Foyles Building in Charing Cross Road.
- Author J. M. Barrie donates the copyrights of his play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up to Great Ormond Street Hospital for sick children; by special legislation the hospital continues to benefit from royalties in perpetuity.
- 1930
- 9 March: BBC radio station 2LO becomes the London Regional Programme.
- June: Harmondsworth Aerodrome at Heathrow begins operating.
- 29 September: Whitehall Theatre opens.
- 15 October: New Victoria Cinema and variety theatre opens.[3]
- New offices for Crawford's Advertising Agency at 233 High Holborn, designed by Frederick Etchells with Herbert A. Welch, are London's earliest significant example of the International Style in architecture.[84]
- 1931
- 6 January: Sadler's Wells Theatre reopens under the management of Lilian Baylis.[6]
- 13 March: League of Coloured Peoples founded.[77]
- 18 April: The Dorchester hotel opens in Park Lane.
- 26 April: UK Census: Population: 4,397,003 county; 8,203,942 Greater London.[85]
- 5 May: The Vic-Wells Ballet, later to become The Royal Ballet, debuts.[86]
- 15 May: Shoppers in Bayswater escape with their lives when a chemical factory explodes.
- 16 May: London United Tramways introduce the first trolleybuses in London, between Twickenham and Teddington.
- 23 May: The Zoological Society of London opens Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire.[6]
- 19 July: Sudbury Town station on the London Underground Piccadilly line opens as rebuilt by Charles Holden, the first of his iconic modern designs for the network.[87]
- 7 September
- Second Round Table Conference on the constitutional future of India opens in London with Mahatma Gandhi representing the Indian National Congress.
- Gala Cinema, Tooting opens with a spectacular interior.
- October: First vehicle (a light truck) off the Ford Dagenham production line.
- 12 November: The Abbey Road Studios are opened by Sir Edward Elgar.[6]
- 21 November: The infamous Red-and-White Party, given by Arthur Jeffress in Maud Allan’s Regent’s Park townhouse in London, marks the end of the "Bright young things" subculture in Britain.[88]
- Daily Express Building in Fleet Street constructed.[24]
- 1932
- 3 February: The Windmill Theatre in Soho opens as a revue venue. "We Never Closed" – until 1964.
- 10 March: Victoria Coach Station opens.
- 15 March: First BBC radio broadcast from the new Broadcasting House;[5] all programmes transfer from Savoy Hill on 15 May.
- 19 July: Replacement Lambeth Bridge opens.
- Summer: Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park, is established as a regular venue.
- October: Courtauld Institute of Art opens.
- 7 October: The London Philharmonic Orchestra makes its debut, at the Queen's Hall.
- 27 October: Arrival of the National Hunger March in London leads to several violent clashes with police.[89]
- 10 December: Branch railway to Stanmore is opened by the Metropolitan Railway.[18]
- The Hoover Building on the Western Avenue in Perivale is designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners in Art Deco style.
- Queen Mary's Rose Garden laid out in Regent's Park in place of the Royal Botanic Society's gardens.[54]
- Honourable Company of Master Mariners (formed 25 June 1926) becomes the first City livery company granted this status since 1746.
- Jewish Museum London founded.
- 1933
- January: London Underground diagram designed by Harry Beck introduced to public.[90]
- 9 January: George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London is published.
- 10 January: Eric Coates' orchestral London Suite is premièred.
- 1 July: London Passenger Transport Board begins operation, taking over operation of all buses, trams and Underground railways in the Greater London area. Lord Ashfield is chairman and Frank Pick is vice-chairman and chief executive officer.
- 3 July: Official opening of Chiswick, Twickenham and Hampton Court Bridges over the Thames.
- 19 July: New Freemasons' Hall (Masonic Peace Memorial) opened in Great Queen Street.
- Battersea Power Station begins operation.
- New store for Derry & Toms in Kensington High Street opens.
- 1934
- 9 March: Herbert Morrison (Labour) becomes Leader of the London County Council.
- 31 May: Hendon Police College is opened for the Metropolitan Police.
- 13 September: Silvertown Way flyover is opened.[31]
- 19 September: Mitcham becomes a borough.
- Key examples of modern architecture built: Penguin Pool, London Zoo, designed by Berthold Lubetkin and Ove Arup,[91] and Isokon building, Hampstead, designed by Wells Coates; also, terraced houses in Genesta Road, Plumstead designed by Lubetkin are completed and 35 houses are built as part of a 'Modern Homes' exhibition in Gidea Park.[8]
- Harrow Garden Village is completed by Metropolitan Railway Country Estates.
- P. L. Travers' children's story Mary Poppins is first published.
- 1935
- January: London County Council launches a green belt scheme.
- 3 July: The Geological Museum opens in a new building in Exhibition Road, South Kensington.
- 13 July: Official completion of the London County Council's Becontree estate, the largest housing estate in the world, consisting of some 27,000 new council houses which are home to more than 100,000 people, is marked by opening of Parsloes Park. The first families had moved to the estate which straddles the borders of Dagenham, Barking and Ilford, in 1921.[92]
- Further notable examples of modern architecture completed: Hornsey Town Hall, by Reginald Uren; Highpoint I flats, Highgate, by Lubetkin and Arup; and houses in Kerry Avenue, Stanmore.
- 1936
- 6 June: Beehive, Gatwick Airport (terminal) opens in West Sussex.
- 7 July: Imperial War Museum opens in adapted buildings of Bethlem Royal Hospital in Geraldine Mary Harmsworth Park, Southwark.
- 4 October: Battle of Cable Street in the East End between Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists and anti-fascist demonstrators.[5]
- 31 October: Jarrow March: 207 miners from Jarrow arrive in London on a protest against unemployment and poverty.[26]
- 2 November: BBC launch the world's first regular "high definition" television service,[5] broadcast from Alexandra Palace.
- 30 November: The Crystal Palace is destroyed in a fire.[6]
- 9 December: A KLM (Netherlands airline) Douglas DC-2 airliner crashes in Purley shortly after takeoff from Croydon Airport, killing 14 (including Juan de la Cierva and Arvid Lindman) with just two survivors.
- New Peter Jones (department store) opens in Sloane Square.
- Adelphi Buildings demolished; replacement Art Deco building completed 1938.
- The Geographers' Map Co.'s first A to Z Atlas and Guide to London and the Suburbs is published.
- 1937
- 20 April: Granada Cinema, Woolwich, opens.
- 27 April: National Maritime Museum opens at Greenwich in former Royal Hospital School premises.
- 1–27 May: London's busmen go on strike.[93]
- 6 May: Replacement Chelsea Bridge opens.
- 12 May: Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in Westminster Abbey.
- 28 August: The London Underground Morden–Edgware line is renamed Northern line.
- 1 September: Earls Court Exhibition Centre opens.
- October: Formation of the Euston Road School, a private School of Drawing and Painting originally established in Fitzroy Street by William Coldstream, Claude Rogers and Victor Pasmore, and giving name to the group of naturalist artists associated with it.[94]
- October–December: Croydon typhoid outbreak of 1937: 341 cases of typhoid fever (43 fatal) result from a polluted well at Addington.
- 16 December: The musical Me and My Girl opens in the West End Victoria Palace Theatre; the dance number "The Lambeth Walk" becomes popular.[95]
- December: The Hawker Hurricane enters service with the Royal Air Force as its first monoplane fighter aircraft with No. 111 Squadron at Northolt.[96]
- Dolphin Square flats completed.
- Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove, two low-rise blocks of modernist flats for the working class commissioned by the Gas Light and Coke Company and designed by Maxwell Fry, completed as a prototype for modern urban living.[97]
- Senate House (University of London), designed by Charles Holden, completed.
- 1938
- 6 January: Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud arrives in London having fled from Vienna.[6]
- 6 April: 1938 City of London by-election held.
- June: London Green Belt placed on a statutory basis by Green Belts (London & Home Counties) Act.[30]
- 2 June: The children's zoo at London Zoo is opened by Robert and Ted Kennedy, two of the sons of new United States ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.[6]
- 30 June: London Underground 1938 Stock enters public service, on Northern line.[98]
- July: The RT type bus enters public service in London.[99]
- 20 August: Parliament Hill Lido opens.
- 30 September: Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returns to the UK from Munich, at Heston Aerodrome memorably waving the resolution signed the day earlier with Germany, and later in Downing Street giving his famous Peace for our time speech.[6][100] George VI and Queen Elizabeth appear with Chamberlain on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the agreement.
- 2 December: First Kindertransport from Berlin arrives at Liverpool Street station.
- 1939
- January/February: Poetry London: a Bi-Monthly of Modern Verse and Criticism, founded and edited by Tambimuttu (with Dylan Thomas and others), is first published.
- 3 February: The Irish Republican Army bombs two London Underground stations.
- 25 February: First Anderson shelter built in London.[6]
- 29 March: The IRA plants bombs on Hammersmith Bridge.
- 9 August: London Passenger Transport Board introduces first AEC Regent III RT bus into service.
- 27 August: Cabinet War Rooms operational.[101]
- Late August: Most paintings evacuated from the National Gallery to Wales.[102]
- 1 September: "Operation Pied Piper": 4-day evacuation of children begins;[103] central London hospitals evacuated.
- 3 September: Declaration of war by the United Kingdom on Nazi Germany, beginning World War II.[6] Shortly after 11.00, Chamberlain announces this news on BBC Radio, speaking from 10 Downing Street. Twenty minutes later, air raid sirens sound in London (a false alarm).
- September–December – The Tower of London serves as a general prisoner of war collection centre.
- Large London County Council estate of flats at White City completed.
1940s–1990s
- 1940
- 5 February: 1940 City of London by-election held.
- 24 August: First air raid of the war on London.
- 7 September: The Blitz: Bombing of city by the German air force begins, the first of 57 consecutive nights of strategic bombing.[26][104]
- 15 September: Battle of Britain Day: Climax of the Battle of Britain in which the Royal Air Force resists a mass bombing attack by the Luftwaffe in the skies over London and south east England. Pilot Officer Ray Holmes uses his Hawker Hurricane to ram a Dornier Do 17 bomber, causing it to crash on Victoria Station.
- 25 September: Replacement Wandsworth Bridge in steel opens across the Thames.
- Autumn: War Cabinet begins meeting at the disused Down Street tube station.[101]
- 13 October: 19 people (mostly Belgian refugees) are killed when a German bomb penetrates Bounds Green station on the Underground which is in use as an air-raid shelter
- 14 October: At least 64 people are killed when a German bomb penetrates Balham station on the Underground which is in use as an air-raid shelter; a double-decker bus falls into the crater.[98]
- 15 October: The Dame Alice Owen's School bombing.
- 9 November: Church of All Hallows, Twickenham, a partial reconstruction of Christopher Wren's All Hallows Lombard Street (1694–1937), is consecrated.
- November–March 1942: Tube tunnels built for Central line eastern extension converted into aircraft component factories for Plessey.[101]
- 29–30 December: Second Great Fire of London caused by bombing. More than 160 civilians and 14 firemen are killed; Guildhall and St Bride's Church are among many buildings badly damaged or destroyed. The famous photograph St Paul's Survives is taken this morning.
- First record of the area of Fitzrovia being so called.[105]
- 1941
- 11 January: At least 56 people are killed when a German bomb hits Bank Underground station, leaving a large crater in the road at Bank junction.[98]
- 8 March: At least 34 people are killed when a German bomb hits the Café de Paris nightclub.
- 16–17 April: Serious bomb damage to railway routes across the Thames, the Metropolitan line, the north transept of St Paul's Cathedral and Chelsea Old Church; Lord Stamp is among those killed.
- 18 April: Heaviest air-raid of the year on London.[5]
- 10–12 May: Bombing guts the Commons Chamber of the Houses of Parliament (causing its debates to be relocated to the Lords Chamber), the Queen's Hall (causing The Proms to be relocated to the Royal Albert Hall), the Great Synagogue of London and St Mary-le-Bow. The intensive period of The Blitz ends, leaving around 25,000 civilians dead in London.
- Spring: Noël Coward composes the song "London Pride".
- 15 August: Josef Jakobs, parachuted into England as a German spy, is shot by military firing squad at the Tower of London, the last person to be executed here.
- Patrick Hamilton's darkly comic eve-of-war novel Hangover Square: a tale of darkest Earl's Court is published.
- 1942
- 9–12 February: Gordon Cummins murders and mutilates four women in the blackout, for which he will be hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 25 June (during an air raid).
- 11 August: Traffic admitted onto the new Waterloo Bridge across the Thames.[6]
- 1943
- 17 January: Anti-aircraft shrapnel shells kill 23 people and injure 60 during a raid on London by 118 planes; six are reported losses.
- 20 January: Sandhurst Road School Disaster: A bomb kills 38 children and 6 teachers at a school in Catford.
- 3 March: Bethnal Green tube station disaster: 173 would-be shelterers crushed to death in a panic.
- August: John Christie begins his serial killings at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill.
- The County of London Plan, prepared by J. H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie to guide the London County Council in postwar reconstruction, is published.
- 1944
- 21–22 January: Start of Operation Steinbock (the "Baby Blitz"), a nocturnal Luftwaffe bombing offensive chiefly targeted at the Greater London area (continues until May). On this attack, few aircraft reach the target area.[106]
- 26 February: Last heavy air-raids by conventional aircraft on London.[5][107]
- 13 June: The first V-1 flying bomb attack on London takes place. Eight civilians are killed when one lands in Grove Road, Hackney. The bomb earns the nickname "doodlebug".[6]
- 18 June: A V-1 flying bomb hits the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks, killing 121.[108]
- July: Deep-level shelters built in 1941–2 are opened to public.[101]
- 12 August: The V-1 flying bomb campaign against London by the Germans reaches its 60th day, with more than 6,000 deaths, 17,000 injuries and damage or destruction to around 1 million buildings.
- 8 September: The first V-2 rocket attack on London takes place, striking in the Chiswick district and resulting in the deaths of three people.[6]
- October: "Cleft chin murder": U.S. Army deserter Karl Hulten and 18-year-old Welsh-born waitress Elizabeth Jones go on a 6-day crime spree including the murder of a taxi driver, for which Hulten will be hanged at Pentonville Prison.
- 25 November: A V-2 rocket destroys the Woolworths store in New Cross Road, killing 168, the highest death toll from one of these weapons. More than 100 people survive with injuries.[109]
- Town planner Patrick Abercrombie publishes the Greater London Plan.[110]
- Ministry of Works builds the first demonstration prefabs designed to provide temporary postwar housing, in Northolt;[111] another is exhibited in the summer outside the Tate Gallery on Millbank.[8]
- 1945
- 8 March: A V-2 rocket hits Smithfield Market, killing 110.[112]
- 27 March: Last day of V-2 rocket attacks on London. One hits Hughes Mansions, Stepney, killing 134[113] and the last falls in Orpington with one fatality.[114]
- April: Sybil Campbell is appointed a stipendiary magistrate in London, the first woman to become a professional judge in the UK.
- 17 July: Alexander, Crown Prince of Yugoslavia, is born in Claridge's hotel.
- 15 August: V-J Day: Crowds celebrate the end of World War II.
- 2 October: London Underground introduces fluorescent lighting of Tube platforms (Piccadilly Circus, westbound Piccadilly line).[98]
- 1946
- 1 January: First international flight from London Heathrow Airport. On 31 May it opens fully for civilian use.[115]
- 10 January: First United Nations General Assembly convenes at Methodist Central Hall, Westminster.[104] On 17 January the United Nations Security Council holds its first meeting at Church House.
- 20 February: Royal Opera House in Covent Garden re-opens after the War[5] with The Royal Ballet (relocated from Sadler's Wells Theatre) performing The Sleeping Beauty.
- 8 June: London Victory Celebrations.
- 8 September: Mass squat by homeless families of the Ivanhoe Hotel and other empty properties in London organised by the Communist Party.[116]
- 9 November: Shooting of Margaret Cook in Carnaby Street.
- 11 November: Stevenage, a village in Hertfordshire, is designated by the government as Britain's first new town to relieve overcrowding and replace bombed homes in London.
- 4 December: Central line (London Underground) extended from Liverpool Street to Stratford.
- Development of Churchill Gardens housing estate in Pimlico by Westminster City Council to the design of Powell and Moya begins.
- Garnett College opens for the training of further and higher education lecturers; it ultimately becomes a constituent of the University of Greenwich.
- 1947
- 5 May: Central line (London Underground) extended from Stratford to Leytonstone.
- 15 May: London Philharmonic Choir makes its debut, at the Royal Albert Hall.
- 5 November: Guy the Gorilla arrives at London Zoo.
- December: The tradition of a Christmas tree donated by Norway for Trafalgar Square begins.
- Last horse-drawn hackney carriage operates in London.
- 1948
- 12 January: The London Co-operative Society opens Britain's first supermarket, in Manor Park.[5] In the same month, Marks & Spencer introduce self-service in the food department of their Wood Green store.[117]
- 1 April: London Electricity Board takes up its powers as part of the nationalisation of the electricity supply industry under terms of the Electricity Act 1947.
- June
- Austin FX3 taxi launched.
- Professor Lillian Penson becomes the first woman elected to serve as Vice-Chancellor of a British university, the University of London.
- 4 July: 1948 Northwood mid-air collision: A Scandinavian Airlines Douglas DC-6 and an Avro York of No. 99 Squadron RAF collide over Northwood and crash killing all 39 people aboard both aircraft.[118]
- 29 July–14 August: 1948 Summer Olympics (originally scheduled for 1944) held, based at Wembley Stadium.[119]
- 7 November: The Metropolitan Water Board's King George VI Reservoir near Staines in Middlesex is filled and opened.[120]
- 21 November: Central line (London Underground) services extended Woodford–Woodford, via the Fairlop Loop, and Greenford–West Ruislip.
- December: Sloop HMS Wellington (1934) is moored permanently on the Thames alongside Victoria Embankment as headquarters ship of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners.
- The London County Council begins development of the Harold Hill estate[8] and Span Developments begin their first housing development, Oaklands in Whitton.
- 1949
- Early: Spa Green Estate in Clerkenwell, designed by Berthold Lubetkin of the Tecton Group as a model for postwar public housing, is completed.
- 26 April: Ealing Comedy film Passport to Pimlico is premièred in London.
- 10 May: First self-service launderette opens, in Queensway.[117]
- 6 July: London Transport Executive open the bus stand at Newbury Park tube station.
- 27 November: Brumas becomes the first polar bear born at London Zoo.
- Construction of the Woodberry Down estate by the London County Council begins.
- 1950
- 9 March: Timothy Evans is hanged at HM Prison Pentonville for the murder of his baby daughter (and, by imputation, his wife) at their residence at 10 Rillington Place in Notting Hill; 3 years later, his downstairs neighbour John Christie is found to be a serial killer of at least seven women at this address, for which he is also hanged at Pentonville; Evans is posthumously pardoned in 1966.
- 30 September: London Transport Executive begins closure of trams in London.
- 25 December: The Stone of Scone is stolen from Westminster Abbey by a group of four Scottish students.[6]
- Cities of London and Westminster (UK Parliament constituency) created, ending the separate City of London constituency which has existed since 1298.
- Metropolitan Borough of St Pancras flats in St Pancras Way completed[8] and Pimlico District Heating Undertaking begins operation.
- 1951
- 6 April: Last trams operate through Kingsway tramway subway.
- 8 April: Population: 3,348,336 county; 8,346,137 Greater London.[85]
- 3 May–30 September: Festival of Britain on the South Bank, including the Royal Festival Hall, Dome of Discovery and Skylon.[119] Pleasure Gardens and a Fun Fair are opened in Battersea Park and the Lansbury Estate in Poplar is begun this year as a housing showcase.
- 11 June: London Transport Executive introduces a Circular Tour of London using double-decker buses for the Festival.
- 15 June: Ealing Comedy film The Lavender Hill Mob released.
- 15 August: First Miss World beauty pageant as the 'Festival Bikini Contest'.[121]
- 4 September: William Girling Reservoir is opened in the Lee Valley Reservoir Chain by the Metropolitan Water Board.[31]
- 3 November: Express Dairies open Britain's first full-size supermarket in Streatham Hill.[122]
- December: John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids, opening in a post-apocalyptic London, is published.
- 1952
- April: London Transport Executive opens Stockwell Garage with Europe's largest unsupported roof span at this date.
- 21 May: Eastcastle Street robbery: a post office van is held up in the West End and £287,000 stolen, Britain's largest postwar robbery up to this date;[123][124] the robbers are never caught.
- 15 June: Polish secret agent Krystyna Skarbek is murdered at the Shelbourne Hotel in Earl's Court.
- 5 July: The last of the original trams in London runs; citizens of London turn out in force to say farewell.[99]
- 8 October: Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash: a multiple collision claims the lives of 112 people.[125]
- November: New Bankside Power Station commissioned; also this year, Brunswick Wharf Power Station in Blackwall begins to generate electricity.[126]
- 25 November: Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap starts its run at the New Ambassadors Theatre. It will still be running in London sixty years later, having transferred next door to St Martin's Theatre in 1974.[127]
- 4–9 December: Great Smog blankets London, causing transport chaos and, it is believed, around 4,000 deaths.[128]
- 30 December: Tower Bridge bascules are raised as a London Transport bus crosses.
- 1953
- 8 April: 12 people are killed in the Stratford tube crash, the first major accident on the Tube with passenger fatalities.
- 2 June: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Abbey.[104]
- c. June: Kieran Kelly begins his career as the serial killer of at least 16 men (up to 1983), mostly by pushing them under London Underground trains.[129]
- Civil Service Club founded.
- First Italian espresso coffee bar opens in the UK, The Moka in Frith Street, Soho.[130]
- 1st century Roman leather bikini briefs found in Queen Street in the City.[131]
- 1954
- September: Kidbrooke School in Greenwich opens as England's first purpose-built comprehensive school.[132]
- 18 September: Marble head of Mithras from London Mithraeum unearthed in Walbrook Square.[133]
- 10 December: Tea clipper Cutty Sark (1869) towed into permanent dry dock at Greenwich for preservation.
- The first UK Wimpy Bar opens at the Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street.[134]
- Span Developments begin development of the Cator Estate in Blackheath.[8]
- 1955
- 13 July: Ruth Ellis becomes the last woman to be hanged in the UK, at HM Prison Holloway, for shooting dead a lover, David Blakely, outside a pub in Hampstead on 10 April (Easter Sunday).[135]
- 22 September: First Independent Television franchise covering London, Associated-Rediffusion, begins broadcasting from Croydon transmitting station.
- 2 December: Barnes rail crash: collision due to signal error and consequent fire: 13 killed, 35 injured.
- 8 December: Ealing Comedy film The Ladykillers released.[136]
- 16 December: New terminal at London Airport is opened by The Queen.[137]
- 1956
- 24 January: Plans are announced for the construction of thousands of new homes in the Barbican area, devastated by the Luftwaffe during World War II.[138]
- 8 February: London Transport introduces the first (experimental) AEC Routemaster double-deck bus into public service, on route 2. At the 9 November Lord Mayor's Show it forms part of the procession, advertised as "London's Bus Of The Future".[99]
- 14 March: A memorial to Karl Marx is unveiled at the new site of his grave in Highgate Cemetery by Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain.[139]
- 28 March: Crystal Palace transmitting station brought into use.
- 22 April: The 2i's Coffee Bar opens in Old Compton Street, Soho; its basement rapidly becomes a pioneering venue for rock and roll music in Britain.
- 21 May: 24-hour fire in former Goodge Street deep-level shelter.[101]
- 5 July: Parliament passes the Clean Air Act in response to the Great Smog of 1952.[54]
- Opening of the first Jewish seminary for Liberal and Reform Judaism in England – Leo Baeck College, as the Jewish Theological College of London at West London Synagogue; its first two students are Lionel Blue and Michael Leigh.
- Pollock's Toy Museum established.
- 1957
- 13 June: Oxford Street bus accident: 8 killed when a double-decker collides with a queue.
- 4 December: Lewisham rail crash (Southern Region of British Railways): 90 killed in rear-end collision in fog and bridge collapse.
- Official opening of first stage of Golden Lane Estate in Finsbury, designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon. Great Arthur House is (briefly) the tallest residential building in Britain at the time of construction.
- Michael Young and Peter Willmott's sociological study Family and Kinship in East London is published.
- 1958
- 30 January: Dagenham East rail crash (Eastern Region of British Railways): 10 killed in rear-end collision in fog.
- 21 March: Opening of the London Planetarium, the first in Britain.[6]
- 5 May–19 June: London bus crew strike.
- 9 June: Gatwick Airport opens in West Sussex.[30]
- 10 June: City of Westminster installs first regular parking meters, in Grosvenor Square (following an experimental installation in 1956). Double yellow lines also introduced in Metropolitan Police District during year.
- 26 July: Abolition of the presentation of débutantes to the royal court.[6]
- 30 August–5 September: 1958 Notting Hill race riots.[140]
- 26 September: Austin FX4 taxi launched.
- 13 October: Michael Bond's children's story A Bear Called Paddington, introducing the character Paddington Bear, is published.
- First boutique, His Clothes, to be opened in Carnaby Street, by John Stephen.[141]
- New store for Barkers of Kensington, begun in the 1930s, is completed.
- 1959
- January: Ealing Jazz Club opens.
- 6 April: STD code 01 allocated to London.
- 23 April: London Heliport opens adjacent to the Thames in Battersea.
- 28 May: The Mermaid Theatre opens in the City of London.
- 30 September
- Chiswick flyover is opened by Jayne Mansfield.
- Last flights from Croydon Aerodrome.
- 12 October: Large-scale diamond robbery in London.
- 17 October: London County Council opens Park Lane Underpass.
- 30 October: Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club opens in Soho.
- 11 November: London Transport introduces the production AEC Routemaster double-deck bus into full public service.
- Bracken House, the Financial Times headquarters in the City of London, designed by Sir Albert Richardson, is completed.[142]
- London County Council completes first portion of Alton Estate in Roehampton, considered a model of post-war public housing.[8][142]
- London Pride (beer) first produced at Fuller's Brewery.
- Colin MacInnes' novel Absolute Beginners is published.
- 1960
- 18 April: 60,000 protestors stage a demonstration in London against nuclear weapons.[143]
- 15 September: The first traffic wardens deployed in London.[6]
- September: Metropolitan Water Board's Thames–Lea Valley Aqueduct inaugurated.[31]
- Embassy of the United States London Chancery Building, designed by Eero Saarinen, opens in Grosvenor Square on land leased from the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair.
- 1961
- 6 July: Last judicial execution at HM Prison Pentonville: Edwin Bush (21) hanged by Harry Allen for the stabbing on 3 March of Elsie Batten[144] in an antique shop in Cecil Court; he is the first British criminal caught through the Identikit facial composite system.
- 8 September: Last judicial execution in London: Henryk Niemasz hanged at HM Prison Wandsworth by Harry Allen for double murder.[144]
- 16 November: Hammersmith flyover opens.
- December: Demolition of the Euston Arch begins; much of the stone is used for repairs to the Prescott Channel.
- Empress State Building completed on the site of the Empress Hall in West Brompton.
- 1962
- May: Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell are prosecuted and jailed for defacing Islington library books.
- 8 May: Last trolleybuses in London run.[99]
- 6 June: The Beatles play their first session at Abbey Road Studios.[145]
- 1 July: A heavy smog develops over London.
- 12 July: The Rollin' Stones play their first gig, at the Marquee Club in Oxford Street. From February 1963 they get a residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond.
- 31 July: A crowd assaults a rally of the right-wing Union Movement of Sir Oswald Mosley.[146]
- 10 October: The former Anglican church of All Saints in Knightsbridge (1849) is elevated to be the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God and All Saints of the Russian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh.
- 6 November: New building for Commonwealth Institute opens in Kensington.
- 2–7 December: Severe smog in London causes numerous deaths.[5]
- Queen's Gallery opens.
- 1963
- 11 February: American-born poet Sylvia Plath (age 30) commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her London flat.
- 19 March: Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop premières the ensemble musical play Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.
- 16 May: London Tourist Board established.
- 31 July: London Government Act 1963 passed.[140]
- 22 October: The National Theatre Company, newly formed under artistic director Laurence Olivier,[147] gives its first performance, with Peter O'Toole as Hamlet, in London.[5]
- Millbank Tower completed as a headquarters for Vickers.
- Aylesbury Estate construction begins in Walworth by the London Borough of Southwark.
- Nell Dunn's short story collection Up the Junction is published (film 1968).
- 1964
- 21 January: Strand Underpass opens using part of former Kingsway tramway subway.
- 2 February: "Hammersmith nudes" murder case: First of six definite prostitute victims of an unknown serial killer, "Jack the Stripper", found.
- 5 September: Biba opens its first store, in Kensington.
- 5 December: Major fire in Bishopsgate railway goods depot.
- 23 December: "Pirate" radio station Radio London begins broadcasting from MV Galaxy anchored outside British territorial waters off Frinton, Essex.
- December: London Record Society founded as a text publication society.
- 1965
- 7 January: The Kray Twins are arrested on suspicion of running a protection racket.[148]
- 30 January: State funeral procession of Winston Churchill.
- 11 March: Goldie the Eagle is recaptured 13 days after escaping from London Zoo.[149]
- 1 April: Reorganisation of local government in London.
- The Greater London Council comes into its powers, replacing the London County Council and greatly expanding the metropolitan area of the city.[5] Labour have an elected majority. The county of Middlesex is abolished as an administrative district with most being incorporated into the GLC area (except Staines and Sunbury transferred to Surrey, and Potters Bar transferred to Hertfordshire). London Ambulance Service and Greater London Record Office established.
- Inner London boroughs created: Camden, Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Islington, Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Wandsworth, and Westminster (the latter incorporating the Metropolitan Boroughs of Paddington and St Marylebone). Inner London Education Authority takes responsibility for schools in these areas.
- Outer London boroughs created: Barking and Dagenham, Barnet, Bexley, Brent, Bromley, Croydon, Ealing, Enfield, Haringey, Harrow, Havering, Hillingdon, Hounslow, Kingston upon Thames, Merton, Newham, Redbridge, Richmond upon Thames, Sutton, and Waltham Forest. (Epsom and Ewell remains outside the Greater London area.)
- 8 July: Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs escapes from Wandsworth Prison.[150]
- 24 July: Freddie Mills, former British boxing champion, is found shot in his car in Soho, dying the next day.[6]
- 8 October: Post Office Tower officially opens as a telecommunications hub.[151]
- 4 November: 1965 Cities of London and Westminster by-election held.
- Mary Quant introduces the miniskirt from her shop Bazaar on the Kings Road in Chelsea.[152][153][154]
- 1966
- February: Granny Takes a Trip is opened in King's Road, Chelsea, by Nigel Waymouth, Sheila Cohen and John Pearse, claimed as the first psychedelic boutique in London.
- 8 March
- City University London chartered.[30]
- London Free School established.
- 9 March: Ronnie, one of the Kray twins, shoots George Cornell (an associate of rivals The Richardson Gang) dead at The Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel, a crime for which he is finally convicted in 1969.
- 27 March: Theft of the Jules Rimet Trophy: Pickles, a mongrel dog, finds the FIFA World Cup Trophy (stolen 7 days earlier from an exhibition) wrapped in newspaper in a south London garden.
- 15 April: Time magazine uses the phrase "Swinging London".[155]
- 9 June: Brunel University chartered at Uxbridge.
- July: Playboy Club and casino opens in Park Lane.
- August: Notting Hill Carnival begins.
- 12 August: Shepherd's Bush murders: Three policemen are shot dead in Braybrook Street, Shepherd's Bush.
- 22 October: British spy George Blake escapes from Wormwood Scrubs prison; he is next seen in Moscow.[156]
- 23 December: UFO Club (UK underground) opens in a Tottenham Court Road basement.
- 31 December: Thieves steal eight paintings worth millions of pounds from Dulwich Art Gallery; they are recovered locally within a week.
- Centre Point, a 32-floor office building at St Giles Circus designed by Richard Seifert for property speculator Harry Hyams, is completed. It remains empty for around a decade;[142] in 2015–18 it is converted into luxury apartments.
- Greater London Council proposes construction of Ringway 1, the inner city "Motorway Box".
- 1966 – January 1970: Introduction of all-figure dialling within the London Director telephone system ends the use of alphabetic exchange names.
- 1967
- January: The London-set film Blowup is released in the UK.
- 23 January: Milton Keynes, a village in Buckinghamshire, is formally designated as a new town by the government, intended to accommodate overspill population from London, 50 miles to the south.[157]
- 1 March: Queen Elizabeth Hall opens as a concert venue on the South Bank.
- 31 March: Royal Ordnance Factory closes at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich.[158]
- 3 April: Anguillan-born Norwell Roberts becomes the first black officer in the Metropolitan Police Service.
- 13 April: The Conservative Party wins the Greater London Council elections.
- 5 May: The Kinks' single "Waterloo Sunset" is released.
- 20 May: In the first all-London FA Cup final, Tottenham Hotspur defeat Chelsea 2–1 at Wembley Stadium.[159]
- 9 July: The Southern Region of British Railways operates the last steam locomotives into a London terminus (Waterloo) in regular service.
- 9 August: Playwright Joe Orton (age 34) is battered to death by his lover Kenneth Halliwell (who commits suicide) in their Islington home.
- October–November: Unofficial London dock workers' strike.
- 5 November: Southern Region of British Railways Hither Green rail crash: 49 killed in high-speed derailment.
- 7 November: St Pancras railway station is made a Grade I listed building, a landmark in the appreciation of Victorian architecture.[160]
- 5 December: The Beatles open the Apple Shop.
- St Christopher's Hospice, the world's first purpose-built secular hospice specialising in palliative care of the terminally ill, is established in South London by Cicely Saunders with the support of Albertine Winner.[161]
- 1968
- 3 January: Heston services fully opens on the M4 motorway.[162]
- 17 March: Police and protestors clash at an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the Embassy of the United States in Grosvenor Square with many injured and arrested.
- 18 April: The facing stones of the 1831 London Bridge are sold to American entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch who rebuilds it at Lake Havasu City, Arizona.[6]
- 16 May: Ronan Point tower block in Newham partially collapses following a gas explosion; 4 killed.
- 30 July: Thames Television takes over the weekday independent television franchise for the London area.
- 2 August: London Weekend Television takes over the weekend independent television franchise for the London area.
- 1 September: London Transport Board opens first section of Victoria line Tube railway.
- 30 September: St Katharine Docks closed to shipping.[163]
- 14 October: Euston railway station officially reopens after rebuilding.
- 27 October: Police and protestors clash after an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the Embassy of the United States in Grosvenor Square.[164]
- First residence at Thamesmead occupied and Balfron Tower (GLC social housing in Poplar designed by Ernő Goldfinger) completed.
- Original office block at 20 Fenchurch Street, designed by William H. Rogers, built by Land Securities and occupied by Dresdner Kleinwort; at 91 m (299 ft) tall with 25 storeys it is one of the first tall buildings in the City.[165]
- Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in Exile consecrated in former King's Weigh House Congregational church of 1891 in Mayfair.
- 1969
- 24 January: Violent protests by students close the London School of Economics, which does not re-open for three weeks.[166]
- 30 January: The Beatles' rooftop concert: The Beatles gave their last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records.[6]
- 7 March: The London Underground Victoria line is officially opened throughout by The Queen.[6]
- 7 May: Christopher Wren's church of St Mary Aldermanbury (1677) is rededicated at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri.[167]
- 5 July: The Rolling Stones perform at the free festival The Stones in the Park outdoors in Hyde Park, in front of at least a quarter of a million fans, two days after the death of founder Brian Jones.
- 21 September: Police evict squatters from the London Street Commune.[168]
- Scratchwood services opens on the M1 motorway.
- 1970
- 1 January: Control of London Transport passes from the London Transport Board to the Greater London Council as its London Transport Executive; London Country Bus Services pass to the National Bus Company.
- March: Babes in the Wood murders (Epping Forest).
- July: Westway opens.
- 18 September: American rock star Jimi Hendrix, 27, dies at St Mary Abbot's Hospital, Kensington, from a suspected drug-induced heart attack.[169]
- 6 October: BBC Radio London begins broadcasting.
- 27 November: The Gay Liberation Front organises its first march in London.
- c. 23 December: Last ship leaves Surrey Commercial Docks.
- City of London Polytechnic, North East London Polytechnic and Thames Polytechnic formed by mergers.
- Whitgift Centre shopping centre and office complex completed in Croydon.
- 1971
- 1 May: A bomb planted by The Angry Brigade explodes in the Biba Kensington store.[116]
- 21 May: Polytechnic of Central London formed by merger of previous institutions, a successor to the 1838 Polytechnic. Also this year, the Polytechnic of North London is founded by merger of the Northern and North-Western polytechnics.
- 6 June: The London Underground operates its last steam locomotives (used for maintenance trains).
- 14 June: The first Hard Rock Cafe opens near Hyde Park Corner.
- 23 July: The Victoria line's extension to Brixton is officially opened by Princess Alexandra.
- 21 October: HMS Belfast (C35) (1939) opens as a museum ship on the Thames.
- 31 October: A terrorist bomb explodes at the top of the Post Office Tower.[170]
- 1972
- 30 May: Five children are killed in an accident on the Big Dipper (Battersea Park).[171]
- 1 July: First official national Gay Pride march, origin of Pride London.
- 8 November: Stock Exchange Tower opens.
- Brunswick Centre completed in Bloomsbury.
- Robin Hood Gardens council housing complex completed in Tower Hamlets.
- 1973
- 26 February: Poet Laureate John Betjeman's documentary about the London suburbs, Metro-Land, is broadcast.
- 3 March: Two Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombs explode in London, killing one person and injuring 250 others.
- 8 March: IRA bombs explode in Whitehall and the Old Bailey, killing one person.
- 17 March: Rebuilt London Bridge opens.[172]
- 26 March: Women admitted to the London Stock Exchange for the first time.[173]
- 23 August: IRA bomb found at Baker Street station and defused, the first postwar terrorist targeting of the London Underground.
- 8 September: The IRA detonates bombs at Victoria Station and in Manchester.[174]
- 10 September
- IRA bombs at King's Cross and Euston railway stations injure 13 people.[174]
- The fashion retailer Biba re-opens in the former Derry & Toms store in Kensington High Street.[175]
- 12 September: Further IRA bombs explode in Oxford Street and Sloane Square.[174]
- 8 October: LBC begins broadcasting, the first independent local radio station.
- 16 October: Capital Radio begins broadcasting.
- 20 December: Ealing Broadway rail crash: 10 killed in high-speed derailment.
- Cromwell Tower, the first tower block on the Barbican Estate in the City and at this date London's tallest residential tower at 42 storeys and 123 metres (404 ft) high, is completed.
- Trellick Tower, GLC social housing in North Kensington designed by Ernő Goldfinger, is completed.
- Windsor House built.
- The Bishop of London moves his official residence from Fulham Palace to The Old Deanery, Dean's Court in the City of London.
- GSM London established as Greenwich School of Management.
- 1974
- 20 March: Ian Ball fails in his attempt to kidnap Princess Anne and her husband Capt. Mark Phillips in The Mall outside Buckingham Palace.
- 1 April: Thames Water, set up under the terms of the Water Act 1973, takes over the Metropolitan Water Board and other water suppliers in the Thames catchment, as well as management of the Thames above Teddington Lock from the Thames Conservancy; piers below Staines pass from the Port of London Authority to the Greater London Council.
- 27 May: London Transport's first woman bus driver, Jill Viner, begins shifts.
- 15 June: The Red Lion Square disorders see members of the fascist National Front clash with counter-protesters in the West End; 21-year-old Kevin Gateley, a university student, is killed.[176]
- 17 June: A Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb explodes at the Palace of Westminster, damaging Westminster Hall.[6]
- 17 July: An IRA bomb explodes at the White Tower in the Tower of London, killing one person and injuring 41; another bomb explodes outside a government building in south London.[177]
- 12 October: The first UK McDonald's opens in Woolwich.[178]
- 22 October: An IRA bomb explodes at Brooks's club.[179]
- 7 November: An IRA bomb explodes at the Kings Arms, Woolwich, killing two persons and injuring 28.
- 11 November: New Covent Garden Market opens at Nine Elms.
- 22 December: A suspected IRA bomb explodes at the home of Conservative Party leader and former Prime Minister Edward Heath.[180]
- Sex (boutique) is opened by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in the King's Road.[181]
- 1975
- 28 February: Moorgate tube crash: 43 are killed when a Northern line (Highbury Branch) train accelerates into a dead end tunnel.
- June: Snow falls at Lord's.
- 14 August: Heaviest rainfall recorded in London, 17.8 cm (7 in.) in 2 hours at Hampstead.
- 5 September: A Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb explodes at The London Hilton on Park Lane killing two people and injuring 63.[182]
- 28 September–3 October: Spaghetti House siege; 9 hostages are taken.[183]
- 9 October: An IRA bomb explodes outside Green Park tube station killing one person and injuring 20.[184]
- 23 October: Oncologist Gordon Hamilton Fairley is killed by an IRA bomb intended for Sir Hugh Fraser.
- November: The last coin, a gold sovereign, is minted at the Royal Mint's original London location.
- 18 November: Walton's Restaurant bombing.
- 6–12 December: Balcombe Street siege: 4 members of the IRA take hostages before surrendering to police.
- Southwark Towers built.
- 1976
- 29 January: Twelve Provisional Irish Republican Army bombs explode in the West End.[185]
- 2 March: Brent Cross shopping centre opens.[54]
- 13 April: Whitbread cease brewing at Chiswell Street.[186]
- 20 August–14 July 1978: Grunwick dispute: An industrial dispute involving trade union recognition at the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories in Willesden.
- 25 October: Official opening of the National Theatre on the South Bank.[187]
- First purpose-built (Thai style) Buddhist temple built in Britain, the Wat Buddhapadipa in Wimbledon.[188]
- 1977
- 24 February: 1977 City of London and Westminster South by-election held.
- 11 April: London Transport's Silver Jubilee AEC Routemaster buses are launched.
- 5 May: 1977 Greater London Council election: Conservatives secure a substantial majority over Labour.
- 13 August: Battle of Lewisham: An attempt by the far-right National Front to march from New Cross to Lewisham leads to counter-demonstrations and violent clashes.[189]
- 16 September: Glam rock star Marc Bolan is killed in a car crash in Barnes, two weeks before his 30th birthday.
- 31 October: "Frestonia" attempts to secede from the UK.
- 23 November: New premises for the Public Record Office, later The National Archives, open at Kew.
- 16 December: Piccadilly line extended to Heathrow Central tube station.
- London Hydraulic Power Company closes its last pumping station, in Wapping Wall.
- Garden Museum established at former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth.
- J. Lyons and Co. closes its last Corner House restaurant.
- 1978
- 4 May: Altab Ali is murdered in Whitechapel in a racially motivated attack which mobilises the British Bangladeshi community to protest.
- 20 August: Gunmen open fire on an Israeli El Al airline bus in London.
- 7 September: Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov is stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella as he walks across Waterloo Bridge, probably on orders of his country's intelligence service; he dies 4 days later.[190]
- 1 December–13 November 1979: The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers suspend publication over a dispute by journalists.[191]
- 30 December: First of at least 12 murders committed by Dennis Nilsen in north London.
- London Borough of Camden low-rise high-density social housing schemes completed on Alexandra Road Estate (by Neave Brown) and Branch Hill (by Gordon Benson and Alan Forsyth).[8]
- Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper begins publication.
- 1979
- 30 March: Airey Neave, World War II veteran and Conservative Northern Ireland spokesman, is killed by an Irish National Liberation Army bomb in the House of Commons car park.[192]
- 7 April: The last RT type bus runs in London.[193]
- 1 May: The London Underground Jubilee line is inaugurated.[194]
- 14 September: The government announces plans to regenerate the London Docklands with housing and commercial developments.
- 18 October: The new Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith opens. The first play is George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell.[54]
- Stepney City Farm founded.
- 1980
- 28 March: London Transport Museum opens in the former Covent Garden flower market.
- 30 April–5 May: Iranian Embassy siege, ended by intervention of the Special Air Service.
- 10 July: Alexandra Palace gutted by fire for the second time in its history.[54]
- 16 August: Two nightclubs in Denmark Street gutted by fire, killing 37.[195]
- St George's Hospital moves from Hyde Park Corner to Tooting.
- London Chinatown Community Centre established.
- Royal Society of Chemistry, with headquarters at Burlington House, formed by merger.
- 1981
- 18 January: Ten people are killed in the New Cross house fire. On 25 January, another victim dies in hospital.
- 29 March: London Marathon first run.[30]
- 11 April: 1981 Brixton riot.[119]
- 20 April: More than 100 people are arrested and 15 police officers are injured in clashes with black youths in the Finsbury Park, Forest Green and Ealing areas.
- 7 May: Ken Livingstone becomes leader of the Greater London Council after Labour wins the GLC elections.[5]
- 11 June: National Westminster Tower opens.
- 21 June: Fire at Goodge Street tube station.[98]
- 2 July: London Docklands Development Corporation set up.[196]
- 29 July: The Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Lady Diana Spencer takes place in St Paul's Cathedral.[104]
- 4 October: London Transport Executive (GLC) introduces 'Fares Fair' average 32% reduction of public transport fares, declared unlawful 17 December following legal challenge by London Borough of Bexley.
- 10 October: Chelsea Barracks is bombed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, killing two.[5]
- November: Port of London Authority closes the Royal Docks, the last functioning upstream docks, to general trade.
- Greater London Council public housing stock passed to boroughs.[8]
- Whiteleys department store in Bayswater closes.
- 1982
- 19 January: Billingsgate Fish Market opens on a new site in the Isle of Dogs, having closed at its old site in the City 3 days earlier.
- 3 March: Barbican Centre opens as an arts and conference venue.[30]
- 28 May: Pope John Paul II's visit to the United Kingdom begins. Following arrival from Gatwick Airport at Victoria station he attends Mass at Westminster Cathedral. On 29 May there is an open-air Mass at Wembley Stadium and on 30 May a meeting at Crystal Palace Stadium with the Polish Catholic community.
- 3 June: Israeli ambassador to the UK Shlomo Argov is shot outside the Dorchester Hotel.[197]
- 17 June: The body of Italian banker Roberto Calvi is found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge.
- 20 July: Hyde Park and Regent's Park bombings.
- 12 October: London Victory Parade of 1982.
- October: Thames Barrier begins operating (official opening 8 May 1984).
- Broadgate development in the City begins.
- Black Audio Film Collective active.
- 1983
- 14 January: Shooting of Stephen Waldorf: Armed police shoot and severely injure an innocent car passenger in Earl's Court, believing him to be an escaped prisoner.
- 4 April: Gunmen escape with £7 million from a Security Express van, the biggest cash haul in British history.
- 16 May: Wheel clamps are first used to combat illegal parking in London.[5]
- July–August: London temperatures reach and exceed 30 °C.
- 22 September: Docklands redevelopment begins with the opening of an Enterprise Zone on the Isle of Dogs.[5]
- 7 October: A plan to abolish the Greater London Council is announced.
- 4 November: Dennis Nilsen is sentenced at the Old Bailey to life imprisonment for the murder of at least 12 young men in a series of killings committed since 1978 in north London.
- 26 November: Brink's-Mat robbery: £26M-worth of gold bullion and other valuables are stolen from a warehouse at Heathrow International Trading Estate.
- 17 December: Harrods bombings: A Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) car bomb kills six, three police and three members of the public, and injures 90 outside Harrods.[198] A second bomb on Christmas Day in Oxford Street explodes without injuries.
- Mary Donaldson becomes first woman Lord Mayor of London and Sam Beaver King becomes first black mayor of the London Borough of Southwark.
- Thames Water shuts down the reciprocating stationary steam engines at its Waddon pumping station, the last in Britain to pump drinking water by steam.[199]
- Chelsea Physic Garden opens to the general public as a heritage attraction for the first time.
- Sankofa Film and Video Collective founded.
- 1984
- 4 April: Churchill War Rooms open as a museum.
- 17 April: Murder of Yvonne Fletcher: a police officer is shot from the Embassy of Libya in St. James's Square.
- 29 June: London Transport passes from control of the Greater London Council to London Regional Transport (reporting to the Department of Transport).
- 23 November: Serious fire in Victoria line tunnel at Oxford Circus tube station.[98]
- Regent's College established in Regent's Park, moving to the premises vacated by Bedford College in 1985.
- London Fashion Week begins.
- 1985
- 6 January: Introduction of Capitalcard, predecessor of the Travelcard, the first season ticket valid on both London Transport and British Rail services.
- 16 January: The Dorchester Hotel is bought by the Sultan of Brunei.
- 19 February: Soap opera EastEnders debuts on BBC television.
- 11 March: Harrods is bought by Mohammed Al Fayed.
- 6 October: Death of Keith Blakelock: A police constable is brutally murdered in the Broadwater Farm riot on the Broadwater Farm estate of 1967–71 in Tottenham.
- Bedford College merges with Royal Holloway College, moving to the latter's Egham campus.
- 1986
- 24 January–5 February 1987: Wapping dispute: Employees of News International strike over the transfer of the company's newspaper production to Wapping with the adoption of new technology. Within a year of the strike's collapse most national newspapers will follow News International's lead in moving from Fleet Street to Docklands.
- 31 March
- Greater London Council abolished. Responsibility for the blue plaque scheme passes to English Heritage.[200]
- A fire damages Hampton Court Palace.
- 12 April: Heathrow Terminal 4 opens.
- 27 June: Last train from Broad Street station.
- 27 October: "Big Bang": Deregulation of the London Stock Exchange, leading to substantial changes in the City financial markets.
- 29 October: M25 motorway (London orbital) completed, creating a new de facto definition of the Greater London area.
- 18 November: Lloyd's building, designed by Richard Rogers, opens.[24]
- 1987
- January: Westminster cemeteries scandal begins.
- 24 February–23 July: London Daily News published.
- 10 May: The City church of St Mary-at-Hill is gutted by fire.[201]
- 30 July: Docklands Light Railway begins operation.[202]
- 15–16 October: Great Storm of 1987: many trees in London are felled.
- 26 October: London City Airport begins commercial operation.
- 18 November: 31 people are killed in the King's Cross fire.
- Richmond Riverside, London, designed by Quinlan Terry, completed.
- 1988
- 16 May: Thameslink north-south cross-London suburban rail services introduced.
- July: Surrey Quays Shopping Centre opens on the site of the Surrey Commercial Docks in Rotherhithe, leading to a de facto renaming of the surrounding residential area as Surrey Quays.
- 1 August: A soldier is killed and Inglis Barracks is damaged in a bombing.
- 12 December: 35 people are killed in the Clapham Junction rail crash.
- Approximate date: Al-Hayat newspaper headquartered in London.[203]
- 1989
- 4 March: Purley station rail crash: five killed in collision following driver's error.
- 29 June: A replacement sundial column is unveiled at Seven Dials.[204]
- 20 August: Marchioness disaster: 51 killed when dredger Bowbelle collides with chartered pleasure boat Marchioness on the Thames near Cannon Street Railway Bridge in the early hours.
- c. October–December: Gates erected across Downing Street.
- 25 December: First mass of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church parish in London celebrated.[205]
- Design Museum opens in Shad Thames.
- Hampstead Heath management taken over by Corporation of London.
- North East London Polytechnic renamed Polytechnic of East London.
- Truman's Brewery closes.
- 1990
- 26 January: Last trains use Holborn Viaduct station.
- 4 March: Launch of first legal terrestrial London specialist independent radio station, Jazz FM.
- 31 March: Poll Tax Riot.[119]
- 1 April: Inner London Education Authority abolished.
- 2 May: City bonds robbery.
- 3 May: 1990 London local elections. In Westminster these give rise to the homes for votes scandal.
- 6 May: STD code 01 divided between 071 (exchanges in the Central sector) and 081.
- 10 July: Princess Anne opens the first Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.
- 20 July: A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at Stock Exchange Tower.
- 1 September: Former "Pirate" radio station Kiss FM relaunches as a licensed broadcaster.
- Telehouse Europe begins operation of Europe’s first purpose-built carrier-neutral colocation centre, in London Docklands; it becomes the UK’s main Internet hub.
- 1991
- 7 February: Downing Street mortar attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
- 18 February: a man is killed in the Victoria station and Paddington station bombings.
- 2 April: HM Prison Belmarsh becomes operational on part of the Woolwich Arsenal site.
- 26 August: One Canada Square (the "Canary Wharf tower") opens.
- Embankment Place office and commercial complex designed by Terry Farrell and Partners above Cannon Street railway station opens.
- 1992
- 10 April: Three people are killed in the Baltic Exchange bombing.[5]
- September: First Open House London event.
- 9 October: Two suspected IRA bombs explode in London, but there are no injuries.
- November: University of East London formed from the Polytechnic of East London.
- 1 December: University of Westminster formed from the Polytechnic of Central London, a successor to the 1838 Polytechnic.
- 10 December: Eleven people are injured by IRA bombs in Wood Green.
- 16 December: Four people are injured by IRA bombs in Oxford Street.
- London Guildhall University formed from the City of London Polytechnic, University of Greenwich formed from Thames Polytechnic and University of North London formed from the Polytechnic of North London.
- The Ark office block in Hammersmith, designed by Ralph Erskine, completed.[206]
- Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum opens, originally at Butler's Wharf.
- 1993
- 28 January: Harrods bombings: A bomb planted by English IRA sympathisers injures four outside Harrods.
- 22 April: Murder of Stephen Lawrence in Eltham.
- 24 April: 1993 Bishopsgate bombing: An IRA truck bomb explodes in the City, killing one person and causing £350 million worth of damage.
- 4 August: Millwall F.C.'s New Den stadium opens in Bermondsey.[207]
- Traffic and Environmental Zone around the City of London established.[208]
- Thames Water Ring Main completed.
- 1994
- 26 February: Clerkenwell cinema fire: 11 die as the result of arson at the Dream City adult cinema.
- 5 April: The isolated Waterloo & City line passes from control of British Rail Network SouthEast to the London Underground.
- 14 July: SIS Building, headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service designed by Terry Farrell, opens on the Albert Embankment in Vauxhall.
- 30 September: London Underground ceases shuttle services on the Aldwych branch, and from Epping to Ongar in Essex.
- 21 October: Heathrow tunnel collapse: rail tunnel under construction for Heathrow Express fails.
- 30 October: London Docklands Development Corporation powers in Bermondsey revert to the London Borough of Southwark, the LDDC's first dedesignation.[196]
- 14 November: Eurostar train service to Paris Gare du Nord via the Channel Tunnel begins operating, from Waterloo International railway station.
- November: South East London Combined Heat and Power plant is opened in South Bermondsey.
- Finsbury Park Mosque opens.
- 1995
- 20 August: BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir London, Europe's first traditional-style purpose-built Hindu temple (and England's largest), is inaugurated in Neasden.[209]
- 8 December: Head teacher Philip Lawrence dies after being stabbed while protecting a pupil from a teenage gang outside his school in Maida Vale.
- 13 December: A riot takes place in Brixton.
- 31 December: London Docklands Development Corporation powers in Beckton revert to the London Borough of Newham.[196]
- Blackwell's of Oxford open a bookshop in Charing Cross Road.
- 1996
- 9 February: 1996 Docklands bombing: A Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) truck bomb explodes at Canary Wharf, killing two.
- 18 February: An IRA bomb explodes on a bus in central London, killing the transporter, Edward O'Brien, and injuring eight other people, including the driver.[210]
- 20 December: London Docklands Development Corporation powers in Surrey Docks revert to the London Borough of Southwark.[196]
- 1997
- 31 January: London Docklands Development Corporation powers in Limehouse and Wapping revert to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
- March: The London Aquarium opens in the former County Hall on the South Bank.
- 27 May: Shakespeare's Globe, a reconstruction of the Elizabethan Globe Theatre on the South Bank, opens with its first public performance.
- 6 September: Funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in Westminster Abbey.[119]
- 19 September: Southall rail crash: 7 killed in collision on Great Western Main Line.
- 7 October: Royal Victoria Dock Bridge, designed by Lifschutz Davidson, officially opens as a footbridge in Docklands; the option to add a transporter bridge gondola is never adopted.
- 24 October: Death of Nina Mackay: A 25-year-old WPC is stabbed to death in Stratford, when entering a flat to arrest a man with paranoid schizophrenia.
- 10 October: London Docklands Development Corporation powers in the Isle of Dogs and Poplar revert to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
- 24 November: New British Library building in St Pancras opens to readers.[30]
- 18 December: London River Services incorporated as a subsidiary of London Regional Transport to take over responsibilities of the Thames Pier Agency.
- Greater London Record Office renamed London Metropolitan Archives.
- 1998
- 3 March: Millennium Dome construction begins.
- 31 March: London Docklands Development Corporation wound up; its remaining powers in the Royal Docks revert to the London Borough of Newham.
- 7 May: 1998 Greater London Authority referendum.
- 19 June: Heathrow Express dedicated rail service begins full operation between Paddington station and the airport.
- 1999
- February: The "Macpherson report", produced in response to the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence, finds that the Metropolitan Police is institutionally racist.
- 16 March: Metro launches as a weekday tabloid free newspaper in London.
- 14 April: Edgar Pearce, the "Mardi Gra bomber", is convicted for a series of bombings targeted at banks and supermarkets around London and sentenced to 21 years in jail.[211]
- 17–30 April: 1999 London nail bombings: David Copeland plants nail bombs targeting black, Bengali and gay communities, killing 3 and injuring more than 100.
- May: London IMAX cinema opens on South Bank.
- 21 May: Film Notting Hill released.
- July
- Fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square, first occupied, by Mark Wallinger's Ecce Homo.
- Green Bridge carries Mile End Park over the Mile End Road.
- 5 October: Ladbroke Grove rail crash: 31 killed in collision on Great Western Main Line.
- 31 December: Official opening of the Millennium Dome on Greenwich Peninsula, the London Eye on the South Bank, and the Jubilee Line Extension serving Canary Wharf tube station.
- University of Greenwich occupies portions of Old Royal Naval College.
- Antony Gormley's sculpture Quantum Cloud is erected on the Greenwich Peninsula.
- Cathedral of the Dormition of the Most Holy Mother of God (Russian Orthodox Diocese of Great Britain and Ireland) opens in Chiswick.[212]
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See also
References
- "Prince Henry's Room". City of London. Archived from the original on 2016-04-01. Retrieved 2016-06-22. Ownership subsequently passes to the City of London Corporation.
- "Boundary Estate, Arnold Circus, Shoreditch, London, E2". London: Base. 2013-02-05. Archived from the original on 2012-10-30. Retrieved 2016-07-01.
- "Theatres Database". London: Theatres Trust. Retrieved 2014-01-11.
- Britannica 1910, p. 945: London: Population
- Palmer, Alan; Veronica (1992). The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. ISBN 0-7126-5616-2.
- Penguin Pocket On This Day. Penguin Reference Library. 2006. ISBN 0-14-102715-0.
- "Coat of Arms". Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Retrieved 2017-09-02.
- London Suburbs. London: Merrell Holberton. 1999. ISBN 978-1-85894-077-9.
- "Norbury Estate Conservation Area Appraisal And Management Plan" (PDF). London Borough of Croydon. 2013. Retrieved 2016-06-26.
- "London Fire Journal". 2010. Retrieved 2010-06-30.
- Britannica 1910, p. 549: Westminster
- Recorded at Kew Gardens. Mayes, Julian C. (2004). "London's wettest summer and wettest year – 1903". Weather. London: Royal Meteorological Society. 59 (10): 274–8. doi:10.1256/wea.110.04.
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Bibliography
See also lists of works about London by period: Tudor London, Stuart London, 18th century, 19th century, 1900–1939, 1960s
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- Elmes, James (1831). Topographical Dictionary of London and Its Environs. London: Whittaker, Treacher and Arnot.
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- "Westminster", Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.), New York, 1910, OCLC 14782424
- Benjamin Vincent (1910), "London", Haydn's Dictionary of Dates (25th ed.), London: Ward, Lock & Co., pp. 839–848
- Walter H. Godfrey (1911), "List of Buildings on ... Map 1: The City of London and Southwark", History of Architecture in London, London: B.T. Batsford
- Cook's Handbook to London. London: Thos. Cook & Son. 1921.
- George F.E. Rudé (1971). Hanoverian London, 1714–1808. History of London. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-01778-8.
- Nicholson, Louise (1998). "London Chronology". London. Abbeville Press. ISBN 978-0-7112-1187-2.
- published in the 21st century
- John Richardson (2000). The Annals of London: A Year-by-year Record of a Thousand Years of History. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-22795-8.
- Leonard Schwarz (2000). "London, 1700–1840". In Peter Clark (ed.). Cambridge Urban History of Britain. 2. Cambridge University Press. p. 641+. ISBN 978-0-521-43141-5.
- Ackroyd, Peter (2001), "Chronology", London: the Biography, Nan A. Talese, ISBN 9780385497701
- Erika Diane Rappaport (2001). Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-04476-7.
- A.N. Wilson (2004). "Chronology of London History". London: A History. Modern Library. p. 193+. ISBN 978-0-307-42665-9.
- Ben Weinreb; et al. (2008). The London Encyclopaedia (3rd ed.). Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-73878-2.
- Michelin; Lifestyle, Michelin Travel (2012). "20C to Today (timeline)". London. Michelin Green Guide. ISBN 978-2-06-718238-7.
- Jonathan Conlin (2013). Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City. Counterpoint LLC. ISBN 978-1-61902-225-6.
- Marc Matera (2015). Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-95990-3.
External links
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to History of London. |
- British History Online. London
- "London and its Hinterlands: Life in London, 1674–1913". Old Bailey Proceedings Online. University of Sheffield.
- "Timeline". Exploring 20th Century London. Renaissance London.
- "London", Historical Directories, UK: University of Leicester.
- Europeana. Items related to London, various dates.
- Digital Public Library of America. Items related to London, various dates
- "Dates and Events – Chronology". Dictionary of Victorian London. Stoke Newington: Lee Jackson.
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