London has been a smokeless zone for over sixty years. The city used to be famous for its ‘London fogs.’ They were described by the novelist Charles Dickens and even led to the creation of a type of American rainwear called London Fog. Then the Clean Air Acts were passed in the late 1950s and 1960s, largely as a reaction to the ‘great smog’ of 1952 and London Fogs gradually became a thing of the past that will hopefully never be seen again.

One of the most striking and admired structures throughout the history of the City of London is its medieval inhabited stone bridge. Bridges with houses were relatively common in medieval Europe; examples include Bath’s Pulteney Bridge, which is still open for business. However, the old London Bridge, aka the Bridge, as it was commonly known, was the most populous of them all. It is calculated that its 140 houses housed 800 people in the fourteenth century, and the Bridge’s population averaged 500.

I recently visited The National Portrait Gallery, which re-opened in June 2023 to much fanfare - and it is duly deserved. It was apparent whilst viewing the rooms that more women across the centuries were featured. Before the gallery's closing in 2020 for refurbishment, exhibits and images of women were approximately 20% of the collection; now, it is 48%!