History, schmistory

London is not a city that wears its history lightly. Walk into any bookshop and you'll find a whole section of books devoted to biographies of London -- although few can top Peter Ackroyd's original (best read with an A-Z of London to hand). And the streets themselves reveal their past, clad as they are in hundreds of plaques and signs, all designed to commemorate and educate. As both an avid reader and enthusiastic walker who has discovered through painful experience that it is not possible to do both at the same time, I applaud the spirit of those who have provided me with snippets of reading material on my perambulatory commute. Here is but a short selection of the many I passed as I walked to work last week from Notting Hill to Marble Arch.

A discreet piece of royalist sucking-up on a surprisingly light and airy late Victorian building.



No surprise that this caught my eye.



A self-fulfilling prophecy or the far-sighted wisdom of a religious leader?



300 paces east is Marble Arch, one of London's busiest traffic junctions. I have therefore been unable to check the veracity of this plaque and the stone commemorating the infamous gallows.



I can't work out whether the Dutch don't feel the same need to put engrave their history on the side of buildings or that I simply don't notice because I'm a) cycling past at speed or b) not attracted to reading things that are in Dutch. I know that they put lots of pictures on their buildings -- carved doves, Moorish heads, bags of gold, boats etc -- to indicate who once lived there, but not words. Perhaps there's a visual bent to the Dutch that I've not previously appreciated? Do you think I could get a grant to study it? Beats working for a living!