4th November 2020 12:00

Yes, 12:00 – this is the first one out of British Summer Time, so back an hour we go. The Earth’s orbit doesn’t care for such things, and GMT is the real time – the Sun’s highest at actual midday.

With a second lockdown freshly in place and a month of inactivity looming, I decided to run to this one. “Run” is probably too strong a word for the wheezing hobble that carried me down Fenchurch Street, but I got there in half the time I would have done walking, so it saved some time in the middle of yet another day working from home.

This part of the year will see it very much in the heart of the City. Views of the top of the Shard are rare enough between the buildings, let alone ones that happen to line up with the midday Sun. And so it proved – there was no clear shot of the Sun in the tip.

Fortunately my run had bought me some time so I walked (yes yes) around the streets trying to line it up. The Sun was too far left looking down Pudding Lane and too far right looking down Fish Street Hill, although the latter was closer, so the mark on the map attempts to guess where it would have been seen from.

Fish Street Hill leads down to the Monument, and at midday give or take a minute the Sun shines between the exceedingly narrow gap between the Monument itself and the building to the east. This was the closest I could photograph it, but a way to the west of where the alignment would have been.

Properly cut the head off that huh.

According to the excellent Know Your London blog, Fish Street Hill used to be the road leading north from the old London Bridge, and was busy with traffic, shops and shoppers. And fishmongers of course. The new London Bridge in 1831 robbed it of this prominence and the author now describes it as “Another boring street”. Well, if nothing else it’s got a good narrow midday Sun alignment. The Monument is to the Great Fire of London, in 1666, which started in the adjacent Pudding Lane. Between 2^nd-6^th September it burned more than 13,000 houses and displaced 70,000 people. No-one knows how many people died, but it was surely more than the six recorded. Apparently rumours of arson led to the lynchings of Dutch and French in the area. Thank god they didn’t have Twitter back then.