About London

20/09/2026

In 1938, a 29-year-old London stockbroker named Nicholas Winton cancelled a skiing holiday, travelled to Prague, and set about rescuing children from the coming N**i occupation.

Working from a hotel room, he arranged trains, visas and British foster homes for 669 mostly Jewish children, getting them out before the borders closed.

Then he said nothing about it — for nearly fifty years. His own wife only learned the truth in 1988, when she found a scrapbook of names and photographs in the attic.

Not long after, the BBC programme That's Life! sat him in the studio audience and, without warning, asked everyone who owed their life to him to stand.

Row after row of grown men and women rose to their feet around him.

Winton, unaware until that moment, turned and wept. He never thought himself a hero. He simply said it had needed doing, and he was the one who did it.

19/09/2026

Violette Szabo was a 23-year-old widow and mother when the N**is executed her for espionage — and it was her small daughter who later collected her medal from the King.

Born in Paris to an English father and French mother, she was working in London when she married a French Foreign Legion officer, Etienne, after a whirlwind five weeks.

He was killed in North Africa months after their daughter Tania was born, never having met her. Grieving and fluent in French, Violette volunteered for the Special Operations Executive — Churchill's secret army — and was parachuted into occupied France.

On her second mission, shortly after D-Day, she was captured after a fierce firefight in which she held off German troops to let her comrades escape.

She was interrogated, tortured, and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was shot in early 1945.

She was 23.

In 1946, four-year-old Tania stepped forward at Buckingham Palace to receive her mother's George Cross.

18/09/2026

In February 1958, a plane carrying Manchester United's brilliant young side crashed on a snowbound German runway, and eight of the players were killed. The team — famous as the "Busby Babes" for their youth — were flying home from a European Cup tie in Belgrade when their plane stopped at Munich to refuel.

In freezing, slush-covered conditions, the third attempt to take off failed; the aircraft ran off the runway and struck a house.

Twenty-three of the forty-four on board died, among them Duncan Edwards, thought by many the finest English player of his generation, who fought for his life for fifteen days before dying. Manager Matt Busby was so badly injured that a priest read him the last rites — twice. He survived.

Wracked with guilt, he nearly walked away from the game forever. Instead he rebuilt, and ten years later, in 1968, his new team won the European Cup — survivor Bobby Charlton scoring twice. From the wreckage, they rose again.

18/09/2026

In December 1952, a fog descended on London so thick that people could not see their own feet, and it turned out to be one of the deadliest events in the city's peacetime history. For five days, from the 5th to the 9th, a mass of freezing air trapped the coal smoke of millions of chimneys over the capital.

Buses were abandoned or led at walking pace by men carrying flares; theatres closed because audiences could not see the stage; the smog crept indoors, under doors and through cracks.

At the time the government called it a mere inconvenience. Only later did the scale emerge — an estimated 4,000 dead within days, and modern research puts the true toll closer to 12,000.

It was invisible, silent, and it killed more Londoners than any single weather event on record. It also forced the country to act, leading to Britain's first Clean Air Act in 1956.

12/09/2026

Arrival of black death in London

11/09/2026

11/09/2026

The Proclamation of King Charles III took place at St James’s Palace on 10th September 2022 following the death of Queen Elizabeth II

11/09/2026

Lodnon during victorian era

11/09/2026

Victorian London

06/09/2026

Street with Houses