Wiliam Abling continued

By some lucky happenstance Longitude was on Yesterday today - it's a quite astonishing film with a stellar cast - Michael Gambon, Ian Hart, Brian Cox, Bill Nighy, Jeremy Irons, Ian McNiece not to mention Tim "Lord Percy" McInnerny who I once saw as Hamlet and follows the travails of John Harrison who struggled for his entire life to construct an accurate chronometer that would be able to be used at sea and thus allow Britannia to rule the waves and also the struggle to restore this amazing pieces of engineering. It's down to John Harrison that the Greenwich meridian is the prime meridian. I guess as a adjunct I should mention by Civilization addiction - presently in abeyance and the realisation that such technical advances affect the development of nations, of civilizations of the world massively. I had no idea that Clerkenwell was a hotbed of watchmaking, we spotted the old Ingasol factory on our wanderings last week. It's also well known for brewing and distillation and printing. Now you see this is why I love blue plaque spotting - it points you to these areas of London that you really do have little or no idea of. All of a sudden your attention is brought to this realisation that the city that presently exists lives on top of / alongside of / around this astonishing history, this wealth that is under our feet. Clerkenwell has a long history, starting with a monastic settlement ironically by the Knights Hospitaliers of St. John who after our litle soujourn in Malta we know a little more of, it became a area of fashionable spas before blossoming in the Industrial Revolution before it's post-war fall into decrepitude....

William Abling

Isn't name that you should recognise. He was a watchmaker in the early 19th century in Wynyatt Road in Islington. The area was apparently well known for horologists. I guess a remnant of the old guild system from the middle ages. We'd wandered south from Angel tube after a bit of a wander round central London - Covent Garden to be specific. We were in town for Valentine's Day after flying in to Heathrow the previous evening after our week in Malta. The holiday was a bit of a disappointment actually. You'd think that an island that rich in history would treasure it's heritage but the government seem much more intent on milking the lucrative tourist trade. Don't get me wrong the history is there but it's pretty far down the list on the typical sunseeker's priority list - after sun, cheap booze, english-speaking natives, familiar food and the list goes on...We'd surveyed the Grand Master's Palace in Valletta now the home of the Maltese government and a rather impressive armoury of mediaeval pointyness and spent our few remaining Euros before surveying the mounting insanity of Carnival before rattling out to Sliema to collect our bags and return to the charabang thronged bus station and heading out to the airport. We took the tube into town from Heathrow which is always rather special to me although more so if you do it in the light of for preference as the sun goes down. We made it across town to Stratford where we collapsed for the night. The hotel was maybe not somewhere to spend vast amounts of time but for a night and a night when we were both exhausted it wasnt a problem. It was nice to sit in bed and watch the city come to life - not something that I usually get in my little backwater of a backwater. We tubed it into town clutching our Starbucks, our bank balances checked and headed first for Foyles and then the Radley and Tintin shops in Covent Garden before wandering round the market after discovering the late start for the shops. We spotted a couple of plaques before heading up to Angel for our target the aforementioned William Abling. Theres very little known about the man - a quick websearch brings up the fact that he was known to have lived at the house in Wynyatt Street according to the Clock Museum but they didn't know of the plaque. All very mysterious...actually I rather like that idea - a plaque devoted to someone that noone knows anything about. But thats the thing about a city isnt it - the interactions of millions of individuals and whos to say that William Abling didnt in his own way affect history because isnt that what chaos theory teaches us? That every action affects the world? Maybe at some point we'll return to the subject of John Harrison, chronometers and their affect on the history of the world....