London Alphabeticals Trivia Quiz

Answer: Woolwich

The club was formed in 1886 by workers at the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, and was originally called Dial Square after one of the arsenal's workshops. They took the name Royal Arsenal soon after their foundation, and became Woolwich Arsenal in 1891, retaining this name until their move over the river to Highbury.

Answer: Fish

The earliest documentary evidence of a market at Billingsgate, in the shadow of London Bridge, is found in toll regulations dating from 1016. Originally a wide range of foodstuffs seems to have been traded, but by the seventeenth century it was simply a fishmarket.

It became famous, or infamous, for the foul language of its fishwives, and "Billingsgate" came to be used as a synonym for obscene invective. In January 1982 the market in the City was closed and a new site was opened on the Isle of Dogs, a few miles to the east.

Answer: Regent Street

The Café Royal stood at 68 Regent Street, a few yards from Piccadilly Circus. As late as the 1930s it numbered literary men like J. B. Priestley, James Agate, Compton Mackenzie and A. P. Herbert among its regular customers. At the end of 2008, it was closed down, and the site is to be redeveloped as a hotel.

Answer: Popular music

Denmark Street is traditionally "London's Tin Pan Alley." It is occupied mainly by music publishers, instrument dealers, and recording studios. It was named in honour of Prince George of Denmark, the consort of Queen Anne.

Answer: Comedies

The Ealing comedies included "Whisky Galore", "The Lavender Hill Mob", "Kind Hearts and Coronets", "Passport to Pimlico" and "The Ladykillers." Alec Guinness played a leading role in many of them.

Answer: Newspapers

Until the 1980s, the offices and presses of most of Britain's national newspapers were to be found in Fleet Street and its southern tributaries like Bouverie Street and Carmelite Street. With the advent of computer technology they all moved out, often to the redeveloped docklands to the east of the City.

Answer: 1666

The fire began in a bakehouse in Pudding Lane at about 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 2, 1666. Fanned by a strong easterly wind, it spread rapidly. At 7:00 the same morning Samuel Pepys heard that 300 houses had already been destroyed, and by the afternoon the waterfront buildings had been destroyed for about a quarter of a mile to the west. On the following day it continued to spread west and north, and on September 4 St Paul's Cathedral burned down. On the night of the 4th the wind dropped and firefighters began to gain the upper hand, and the fire was finally extinguished by September 6.

Besides St Paul's, the fire destroyed 87 churches and 13,200 houses over an area of 436 acres (176 hectares). However, only nine people died in the fire.

Some earlier fires were more destructive of life: it is thought that as many as three thousand people may have died in the fire of 1212.

Answer: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey

Wolsey bought the site in 1514 from the Order of St John of Jerusalem: in the next year he became a Cardinal and Lord Chancellor of England. As he grew richer, the house he planned rapidly took on the scale of a royal palace, with rooms for 280 guests and a staff of 500.

When Wolsey fell from grace, he offered Hampton Court to the king as a gift in an attempt to regain favour. None the less in 1529 all his goods and estate were forfeited to the Crown. Henry VIII moved into Hampton Court and enlarged it still further, and subsequent monarchs played their part in making it what it is today.

Answer: The Angel

The Angel stood on what is now the corner of Islington High Street and Pentonville Road and probably dated from the early seventeenth century. In more recent times it has been a Lyons' Corner House and a bank. "The Angel" nowadays means the intersection of City Road, Pentonville Road, St John Street and Islington High Street.

Answer: A pub

Jack Straw was one of Wat Tyler's henchmen in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and is said to have taken refuge in a house on this site, where he was captured by the King's men. A coaching inn was built there in 1721, and in Victorian times it was regularly visited by Wilkie Collins, Thackeray and Dickens.

The present building dates from 1964. Like the other famous pubs on the edge of Hampstead Heath (such as the Old Bull and Bush and the Spaniards), it has long been a favourite haunt of Cockneys for Sunday and bank holiday excursions.

Answer: Peter Pan

The statue is by Sir George Frampton and dates from 1912. J. M. Barrie, the author of "Peter Pan", lived close to Kensington Gardens, and it was there that he first met the Llewellyn-Davies children, to whom he told all sorts of stories, including the tale that became "Peter Pan."

Answer: Arizona

The former bridge now stands in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. When it was opened in London in 1831, it replaced a bridge which had stood for more than six centuries.

Answer: The Lord Mayor of London

The Mansion House faces the Royal Exchange and the Bank of England across the irregularly-shaped intersection by Bank underground station. For the first few hundred years of the Mayoralty, Lord Mayors lived in their private houses, and would probably use their livery companies' halls for large-scale entertainments.

When the City was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666, there was talk of providing an official residence for the City's civic head, but nothing was done until the 1730s, when the site of the Stocks Market was chosen for the building. George Dance the Elder, the City's Clerk of Works, produced the designs, the foundation stone was laid in 1739 and the first Lord Mayor to take up residence there did so in 1752.

The Mansion House is not normally open to the public, but pre-bookable tours sometimes take place during the "Open House" weekends in September, when many of London's lesser known interiors are made accessible.

Answer: Trafalgar Square

John Julius Angerstein, a wealthy Russian-born merchant, a leading figure in Lloyd's of London and a celebrated art collector, died in 1823. King George IV and the connoisseur Sir George Beaumont persuaded the Government to pay £57,000 for thirty-eight pictures which had belonged to Angerstein. Together with works donated by Beaumont, these formed the nucleus of the national collection, which was housed temporarily in Angerstein's town house in Pall Mall until a permanent gallery was built on the north side of the new development at Trafalgar Square. During the nineteenth century many more works were acquired, though when the Tate Gallery was opened in 1897 many of the British works were sent there. Spiralling prices make it difficult for the Gallery to acquire masterpieces today, but it sometimes still manages to do so.

Answer: Selfridge's

Harrod's is in Brompton Road, off Knightsbridge; Asprey's is in New Bond Street and Fortnum & Mason is in Piccadilly.

Answer: Eros

The monument, crowned by a youthful figure holding a bow, is a memorial to Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the most famous Victorian philanthropists. He piloted a succession of laws through Parliament to improve conditions in factories and mines. Lord Shaftesbury was a strongly evangelical Christian, and would certainly not have wished to be associated with a pagan deity of sexuality.

But the image of a youth with a bow made Victorians think of mythology rather than Christianity, and for some reason they recalled the god of love by his Greek rather than his Roman name. You may ask why an angel should be shown with a bow.

The only credible explanation that I've heard is that it's a pun on his lordship's title. The bow points downwards and there is no arrow visible: so the SHAFT has been BURIED in the ground. Since the Victorians were addicted to puns, this somehow seems plausible.

Answer: A football (soccer) club

Queen's Park Rangers (often known by the initials QPR) were founded in 1885 and play their home games at Loftus Road in the Shepherd's Bush area of London.

Answer: Swiss

César Ritz was born at Niederwald in the canton of Valais in 1850. From being a waiter at Voisin's in Paris he worked his way up to managing the Savoy Hotel in London, and eventually formed his own company. The Paris Ritz was opened in 1898 and the London Ritz in 1906, by which time he had retired from active management.

Answer: Lord Nelson

After a new square with the name of Nelson's most famous victory had been laid out in the early 1830s, it was only natural that a monument to Nelson himself should be erected. The column was designed by William Railton; the statue of Nelson (17 feet high), which surmounts it, is by Edward Hodges Baily, who also produced the bas-reliefs on Marble Arch and the bust of Pallas Athene at the Athenaeum Club.

The bronze lions at the base are the work of Sir Edwin Landseer, the Victorians' first choice for depictions of animals.

They were part of the original design, but did not appear for a quarter of a century after the column and statue. It is said that the lions were adorned with wreaths on the day of Landseer's funeral (October 11, 1873).

Answer: Guy Fawkes

Fawkes was hanged, drawn and quartered in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, beside the Houses of Parliament which he had tried to destroy. Thomas More was beheaded on Tower Hill, and Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were beheaded on Tower Green.

Answer: Four and a quarter miles

The race begins about 100 yards upstream from Putney Bridge and finishes at Mortlake, a little way downstream from Chiswick Bridge. As of 2003, the record time for the course is 16 minutes 19 seconds, achieved by Cambridge in 1998.

Answer: Brighton

In 1896, after much agitation, the speed limit for "light locomotives" on the roads of the UK was raised from 4 miles per hour to 14 miles per hour, and on Saturday, November 14, 1896, thirty-three motorists celebrated by driving from London to the popular seaside resort of Brighton (a distance of about fifty miles). Fourteen of them actually reached Brighton.

Other celebratory runs took place in subsequent years. Gradually the run became an organized annual event for older cars. Today it is officially for cars built before 1905, though later models are admitted.

It is not a race: the cars are limited by the rules to a top speed of 20 miles per hour. The run takes place on the first Sunday of November and for the most part follows the A23 road from London to Brighton.

Answer: Jack the Ripper

The Ripper is generally held to be responsible for five murders, though some people add one or two more to the account. For anyone who wants to find out more about them, there are several Fun Trivia quizzes on the Ripper murders.

Answer: W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

"The Yeomen of the Guard" had its première at the Savoy Theatre on October 3, 1888. It is far less comic than most of Gilbert and Sullivan's works.

Answer: Regent's Park

The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826 and became "Royal" in 1829. In 1828 it opened its Zoological Gardens, which quickly became a great popular attraction. The abbreviation "zoo" is recorded as early as 1847: it was popularized in 1867 by "The Great Vance", a music-hall singer who proclaimed that "Walking in the Zoo/is the OK thing to do." Public attitudes towards zoos are changing, but the London Zoo remains one of the leading tourist attractions and also an important centre of research.