2nd September: The City of Westminster

The City of Westminster was granted arms by an official grant in 1964. Which was basically the same as the arms they had before but incorporating the symbols of former municipalities now merged with the city, Paddington and St. Marylebone. Here are 10 things you might not know about Westminster:

1. Westminster contains by far the majority of London's tourist attractions, including Westminster Abbey, formally known as the Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster. It is known as the site of coronations and burials of monarchs. It is the biggest church in Britain. As a church, it has a special status as a "Royal Peculiar" which means it is responsible to the monarch, not the diocese.
2. The first person buried at Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey was Geoffrey Chaucer, but not because of his writing. He was buried there because he was Clerk of Works.
3. "Westminster" has become a term meaning the government in Britain since the Houses of Parliament, Downing Street and Whitehall are all here. Ten Downing Street is over three hundred years old and contains approximately one hundred rooms. It was offered to Sir Robert Walpole by George II in 1732. Walpole accepted on the condition that the gift was to the office of First Lord of the Treasury rather than to him personally. However, in its early days, few Prime Ministers actually wanted to live there and it was almost demolished several times.
4. Britain's roads are chock a block with roundabouts now, but Westminster is the location of the oldest one - Parliament Square, which was made into a roundabout in 1926.
5. The name Westminster literally means "West of the City". Before the reformation there was an area referred to as "East Minster" in the vicinity of Aldgate.
6. Westminster has its own Lord Mayor who is the deputy High Steward of Westminster Abbey, and who travels to Oslo every year to help fell the tree which is destined to become that year's Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree.
7. Westminster also has Europe's busiest shopping street, the A40 - better known as Oxford Street.
8. Districts of Westminster include Mayfair, Pimlico, Marylebone, Paddington, St John's Wood, Victoria and Soho, which is thought to have got its name from a hunting cry in the 17th century.
9. In Victorian times, some of Britain's worst slums were in Westminster, in the parish of Westminster St Margaret and St John. Charles Dickens called the area The Devil's Acre, and it was even the origin of the word "slum" itself as that was what Cardinal Wiseman based at Westminster Cathedral used to call it.
10. Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster were originally built on an island. The island was called Thorney Island and was formed by rivulets of the River Tyburn, which entered the Thames nearby. According to some accounts, this might have been where King Canute famously failed to stop the tide from coming in. King Offa called it a "terrible place", all thorny vegetation but thanks to the monks in the area, by Edward the Confessor's time it was "a delightful place, surrounded by fertile land and green fields" and the site of the oldest garden in England. Thanks to rising land levels and the embanking of the Thames, Thorney Island no longer exists - the only reference to it now is a street name, Thorney Street, at the back of the MI5 Security Service building.