Although it was Edward the Confessor who is most associated with Westminster abbey, the first king of England to be buried there was Harold I ‘Harefoot’, the son of King Cnut. He didn’t rest there for long…

The Church of St Olave on Hart Street is one of London’s oldest medieval churches. Known to Dickens as ‘Saint Ghastly Grim’ and dedicated to a notorious Norwegian king, its likely origins lie in the Viking Age.

London’s walls may have been built by the Romans, but when the Vikings encountered them in the tenth and eleventh centuries ‘they suffered’, as the anonymous Anglo-Saxon chronicler put it, ‘more harm and injury than they ever imagined that any town-dwellers would do to them’.

The Wren church where William Blake, radical English poet, painter and engraver, was Christened on Sunday 11th December 1757.