It amazes me that you can stick a pin in a map and there will always be a link to someone famous. Either someone was born there, someone lived there or maybe someone died there.
I was walking around my local town centre recently and saw a building with a plaque on it that said “In this house lived Oliver Cromwell’s second in command”. Perhaps this man is not the most famous person in the world but imagine how England may have been different without him. Would Oliver Cromwell still have usurped the king?
Let me take another place to prove my point, I’ll get my pin out of my draw and stick it in my map. Last time it was Boise, but this time the pin definitely landed in London but specifically I’d say it was in the Islington, perhaps being more precise I could even narrow it down to Moorgate.
So who lived in Moorgate? Let me just check on the invaluable resource that is Wikipedia.
It looks like John Keats was born in Moorgate, in the Hoop and Swan pub that has now been renamed the “Keats at the Globe.” Perhaps he is not the most read poet, as when I was at school we read Blake, but nevertheless he is extremely well-known.
Here’s a few lines from Ode To A Nightingale just to raise your awareness:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk…
That’s just a brief section but I think it’s rather good, very sombre and worth reading. Anyway, I’ve slightly gone off topic but the point I was making is that it is amazing who might have walked the streets you now use to get to work or who may have been born in the building just around the corner.
And if your work in offices near Moorgate then it may be a good time to make the most of the location and brush up on some Keats.