Royal London by Karen Pierce Goulding

Author:Karen Pierce Goulding
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780591254
Publisher: Crimson Publishing
Published: 2012-04-30T16:00:00+00:00

Have the cooked breakfast. To hang with your doctor.

INTERREGNUM THREE

Royals around the Monopoly board

The London Monopoly board takes Whitechapel in London’s East End as its opening square.

Here’s a handy ready-reckoner with which to impress your fellow kitchen-table capitalists when playing the famous board game – one Royal London fact for every square…

■ Old Kent Road: Kent has been a royal dukedom since 1934 (although it had previously been one in the 18th Century), when it was created thus for the fourth son of King George V. (NB: The Old Kent Road is the road to Kent, rather than a road in Kent.)

■ Community Chest: ‘It’s your birthday. Collect £10 from each player’: on the Prince of Wales’s 21st birthday, the Queen gave him an Aston Martin.

■ Whitechapel Road: A statue of King Edward VII can be found opposite the Royal London Hospital.

■ Income Tax: HM The Queen has paid income tax and capital gains tax since 1992. How much? She’s not telling, and neither is HMRC.

■ King’s Cross Station: King’s Cross is named after a monument built in the 1830s (now gone) to King George IV.

■ The Angel Islington: King Henry VIII was fond of hunting in what is now Islington.

■ Chance: ‘Pay school fees of £150’: fees for Eton, where Princes William and Harry studied, are around £10,000 a term.

■ Euston Road: In one of his forays into architectural criticism, Prince Charles once described the Reading Room at the British Library on Euston Road as being like ‘the assembly hall of an academy for secret police’.

■ Pentonville Road: Going back to ancient royalty, the Iceni Queen Boudicca is rumoured to be buried beneath nearby King’s Cross station. Rumoured, but not actually true.

■ In Jail: Queen Mary had her half-sister Elizabeth (I) imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1553.

■ Pall Mall: In the late 18th Century, the Prince Regent’s Carlton House mansion stood on Pall Mall.

■ Electric Company: Electricity was first installed in Buckingham Palace in 1883.

■ Whitehall: The last Duke of Cambridge before Prince William can be found in statue form on Whitehall. He lived from 1819 to 1904 and was Commander-in-Chief of the British armed forces.

■ Northumberland Avenue: Just off Northumberland Avenue, on Craven Passage, stood the Turkish bath where Holmes and Watson once discussed the affair of the Illustrious Client (see Chapter 8).

■ Marylebone Station: King Henry VIII once had (guess what?) hunting grounds near this spot.

■ Bow Street: Not the happiest of hunting grounds for royal associations here: Oliver Cromwell moved to Bow Street in 1645.

■ Community Chest: ‘Pay your insurance premium – £20’: the Crown Jewels are uninsurable.

■ Marlborough Street: The timbers of Liberty’s store on this street are, in part, taken from HMS Impregnable, once the flagship of the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV.

■ Vine Street: Once the home to the West End Central police station. Since its foundation in 1829, the Metropolitan Police has never had recourse to arrest a member of the Royal Family. Yet.

■ Free Parking: King Edward VIII is the first monarch for whom we have evidence of an ability to drive.

■ Strand: Richard II’s uncle, John of Gaunt, once lived at Savoy Palace.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.