And a happy new year to one and all.
Thank you for following the blog, and for making 2023 the most successful year (in terms of page views and visitors) in the ten years that stuffaboutlondon.co.uk has been running. Although my traffic figures are hardly going to set the interweb aflame, there were well north of 2,000 visitors a month to the site on average, which I am inordinately pleased with. Here’s to even more in 2024.
As is my wont, here’s last year’s top ten list of posts, with their positions in the previous year. Cue the ‘Pick of the Pops’ countdown music!
- Henry VIII’s Wine Cellar (non-mover – the top post since for ever)
- The American Memorial Chapel, St Paul’s (up 3 from 5)
- Scientists’ Corner, Westminster Abbey (down 1 place)
- The Bomb Damage maps (new entry!)
- Westminster Abbey’s Hidden Highlights Tour (up 5 from 10)
- The Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey (down 3 places)
- Going Up to London (new entry!)
- The Opening Ceremony at the Tower of London (down 4 places from 4)
- “Commit no nuisance” (non mover)
- The Wondrous Pelicans of St James’s Park (new entry!)
And there were over thirty new posts this year (plus some reposts of old book reviews). As always, some proved very popular, others – not so much. The full list is below – dive in and see if you can spread some love on the product of my keyboard.
There’ll be more posts this year (which I’d better make a start on). A reminder that you can also find my London pics on instagram, and stuff about my guiding here.
- FREE ONLINE TALKS
- Most secret: the story of the Bletchley Park codebreakers (video of online talk)
- A History of London – free talk recording
- ROMAN LONDON
- Londinium: a new place to see the capital’s Roman wall
- Londinium: the Billingsgate Roman Bath House
- The Mithraeum: The City of London’s Roman Temple
- ARCHITECTURAL STUFF
- St George’s Bloomsbury: the triumph of “the Devil’s Architect”
- The Crypt Chapel, St Olave’s Hart Street
- St Mary’s Isn’t in the Way
- Duck Island Cottage – Westminster’s Swiss Chalet
- Whitehall Court – London on the Loire
- The London Peace Pagoda in Battersea Park
- The York House Watergate and the 1st Duke of Buckingham
- Victoria’s Campanile – the Western Pumping Station
- The Apple Store’s Victorian Mosaics
- Albert Bridge: “A temporary gangway flung across the river”
- The Blue Bridge in St James’s Park
- PLAQUES, MONUMENTS, STATUES AND MEMORIALS
- Vive l’Empereur! London’s oldest blue plaque
- The Blue and Green Plaques of St James’s Place
- GCHQ, Bletchley Park and the ‘Golf, Cheese and Chess Society’
- The Belgian Gratitude Memorial, Victoria Embankment
- Equestrian Statue of Ferdinand Foch, Grosvenor Gardens
- The Henry Fawcett Memorial, Embankment Gardens
- Prince Albert’s Mega-kitsch Memorial
- Gluttony and grave robbing – Pye Corner in Smithfield
- “Justice and Strength”: the Smithfield Lion
- The Teenage Queen Victoria
- (VERY) MISCELLANEOUS
- In Praise of Custard Tarts
- ‘Crown to Couture’ at Kensington Palace
- Murder in the Abbey
- Victoria’s Secret Garden – a hidden gem in Westminster
- The Tower of London Bombings
- Hang ‘em High: riding the East London ‘dangleway
- Henry VII, Ted Lasso, and the Richmond greyhounds
- Leake Street – London’s Street Art Tunnel