Ely Place, off Hatton Garden, was for centuries technically part of Cambridgeshire.That particular bar is reserved for Ned members, but the bars and restaurants on the ground floor are open to anyone. The vault’s massive door used to protect deposits at the Midland Bank, for whom Sir Edwin Lutyens (hence ‘The Ned’) designed the mammoth building in the 1920s. One of the bars at The Ned occupies a former bank vault that inspired the interiors of Fort Knox as portrayed in the Bond movie Goldfinger.The Old Bailey judge who sentenced the Kray twins to life in 1969 said that they’d only told the truth twice in the whole trial – once when Reggie called a barrister a ‘fat slob’, and once when Ronnie said the judge was biased.The Oliver! composer, who was born Lionel Begleiter, was passing St Bartholomew’s Hospital on a bus one day when inspiration struck. Lionel Bart took his surname from Barts hospital.Appropriately, one of the hotel’s event spaces is called Le Chiffre (from Casino Royale) – French for ‘cypher’. The episode is commemorated these days by the private rooms at the nearby South Place Hotel, all of which are named after spies. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, justifying the raid in parliament, inadvertently revealed to the Soviets that the British had cracked their codes, so the Russians stopped using them, thereby losing the British their advantage. The raid uncovered 250,000 pages of documents, as well as several crates of rifles. The Anglo-Russian Cooperative Society painted itself as a harmless trade mission, but was actually sending secrets back to Moscow. When the police raided a Soviet spy ring at 49 Moorgate in 1927, they travelled by Tube to avoid causing suspicion.After this the cage was built that protects visitors to this day. Until 1842 the viewing platform was left open, allowing six people to jump to their deaths and a further two to accidentally fall. Christopher Wren’s stone column commemorating the event stands at 202ft tall – if you tipped it over to the east, its top would reach the exact point where the fire started. Although the 1666 blaze destroyed most of the city, people had time to get out of their houses – so the death toll was only six. The Monument has killed more people than the Great Fire of London itself.you spot the only piece of curved glass in the Gherkin? Having viewed the curved pane, look out of the flat ones for some incredible views of the capital. The curved one is the horizontal one right at the top – if you want to see it up close and personal, book yourself a table at Searcys at the Gherkin, the restaurant and bar at the building’s summit. There is only one curved piece of glass in the Gherkin – all the others are completely flat, the building’s famous shape achieved by the angles at which the panes are joined.Step this way for some Square Mile trivia… Golden pineapples, hotel rooms named after spies and the only curved piece of glass in the Gherkin – yes, it’s EC, the second in our series looking at the quirky history of London postcode areas.
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