Yet Adams and McGuinness are still feted in some parts of America! Richard Outhwaite Military bands no longer entertain the public from the Regent’s Park bandstand. Downing Street is now gated off from the public. Rubbish bins were removed from the streets. Remember the Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombs of 1982 which killed 11 men and slaughtered seven horses? Remember the mortar attack on Downing Street and other atrocities - the Hilton Hotel bomb, the Chelsea barracks blast, the Harrods atrocity and so many more? London lost some of its carefree openness. These two Irish Republican leaders may claim not to have been involved in Irish terrorist murders, but they were the public face of a movement which brought ruthless violence to London for three decades from the 1960s. But did East London not deserve something better than the ersatz, stick-on-cornice, sub-Gotham skyscapers erected by greedy Reichmann (who, as it happens, lost a fortune on the project)? Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams Granted, the Isle of Dogs was rundown when Reichmann alighted on it - watch the 1980 film “ The Long Good Friday” to see what it was like. Comrade Serota wanted more control! He turned an old power station on the south bank of the Thames into Tate Modern, a mass-tourism trap filled with amoral conceptual rubbish which has tarnished ideas of beauty and intellectual excellence.Ĭanadian property ace Reichmann turned the London Docklands into Canary Wharf, as characterless a business area as you will find anywhere in the world. He took the Tate gallery, a charmingly dusty repository of fine art, and jazzed it up no end. ![]() Snooty Serota, a child of privilege, has ruthlessly asserted himself as London’s state-subsidized art supremo. Yet still they keep going on strike, causing repeated misery to commuters and tourists. Piloting a train is hardly the most difficult job in the world, but thanks to Crow’s confrontational manner - he was almost a cartoon Leftie, full of agitprop vocabulary while tweaking his neck - Tube drivers are now paid more than teachers. The late Bob Crow was a semi-communist agitator who became leader of the union representing London’s Tube drivers (the Tube being the city’s underground railway). You think Margaret Thatcher sorted out the trouble-making British trade union? Think again. The blaze started in a baker’s premises in Pudding Lane and might have been contained had Bloodworth ordered soldiers to make fire breaks by pulling down buildings. Alas, he hesitated, saying he needed authorization from the King. Anyway, he said, the fire was minor - “a woman might piss it out.” Diarist Samuel Pepys witheringly describes meeting Bloodworth later that day, crying “like a fainting woman.” The Great Fire destroyed London’s medieval center. ![]() ![]() Göring did less damage to London than an idiot called Thomas Bloodworth, who was the city’s Lord Mayor in 1666 when the Great Fire of London occurred.
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