• On this day in 1850, a baby was baptised at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette in Paris. The baby’s full name was  Fernande Ernesta Jeanne Sabatier (she would be known just as Jeanne) and her mother was Adèle, better known as Bébé, the younger sister of the famous courtesan and muse of the poet

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  • On this day in 1526 (a Sunday) Robert Barnes, a prominent early advocate of Protestantism in England, was forced to recant his beliefs in public at Paul’s Cross. Robert Barnes was born in Bishop’s Lynn in Norfolk in about 1495 and entered the house of the Austin Friars in Cambridge while still a boy. He

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  • On this day in 1554, John Bradford, a Protestant preacher who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London after being involved in a ‘disturbance’ at Paul’s Cross, was moved into another room in the Tower, which he shared with Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, until these three were taken to Oxford in

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  • Bishop Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London under Henry VIII, and seen here in caricature, was quick to fall foul of the new regime of the young Protestant King, Edward VI. He had been called before the Privy Council and sent to the Fleet prison on 18 September 1547 for refusing to observe the Royal Injunctions

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  • On this day in 1847 the funeral of the Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis took place at the church of the Madeleine, a few hundred yards from Marie’s apartment. The mourners included Tony, the famous supplier of horses to elegant Paris, as well as several prostitutes who had been helped by Marie in the past. The

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  • The vast majority of the 100 Common Councilmen and 25 Aldermen who make up the City’s Court of Common Council declare themselves as ‘independent’, even if quite a few of them are signed-up members of political parties. And for the purposes of their role in the City Corporation, they are indeed independent – often fiercely

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  • Road safety is an issue of particular concern to me as a person with a ‘hidden disability’. You wouldn’t know to look at me that I have a sight problem – and, in this, I’m one of many, judging from my fellow outpatients in the Eye Hospital’s waiting areas. But my long-term condition of glaucoma

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  • I have a track record of achievement from my earlier period as a Councillor in the City (for the Ward of Farringdon Within from 2011 to 2017). Those achievements include: ¨      Working with fellow Common Councilman Henrika Priest (a current member for Castle Baynard) to make life better for residents in Carter Lane and its

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  • If you need to register to vote by post, here’s the link to apply to do so: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/about-the-city/voting-elections/Pages/postal-votes.aspx

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  • A congregation of cacophonous starlings chatters vivaciously in the tops of two trees only and because of the birds’ blackness against an indigo sky and because they have chosen for conversation a graveyard by an ancient priory church alongside its sister hospital their chattering seems ominous, filled with dark knowledge. Birds whose ancestors witnessed the

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