Who is the best-selling writer in history after Shakespeare and the Bible? The answer is Agatha Christie who was born in Devon in 1890 but whose stories often feature London and who wrote what is the capital’s (and the world’s) longest-running play The Mousetrap, which is still playing at Saint Martin’s theatre sixty-five years after it opened. One of the original cast was the late Sir Richard Attenborough, who was paid partly with a share of rights from the play. These were never expected to be worth much but later in his career he was able to sell them to help finance his film about the life of Mahatma Gandhi starring Sir Ben Kingsley.

London saw in 2022 to the traditional sound of the bells of Big Ben at Westminster. Although the annual fireworks display which is a part of the New Year festivities was cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, Londoners and visitors to the capital were able to see as well as hear Big Ben for the first time in four years since it was covered with scaffolding and silenced as a result of the restoration programme at the Palace of Westminster, better known as the Houses of Parliament.