LONDON'S BIG BEN WILL BE SILENT UNTIL 2021

The iconic bell will only ring for special occasions over the next four years, such as New Year's Eve and Remembrance Sunday.  Read here and here.

LONDON AT A GLANCE - 1^C LINGUISTICO

DISCOVERING BUCKINGHAM PALACE

Buckingham Palace has served as the official London residence of Britain's sovereigns since 1837 and today it is the administrative headquarters of Queen Elizabeth II.  
Read here.

DISCOVERING LONDON

WILLIAM BLAKE ~ LONDON

Published in Songs of Experience in 1794, it is one of the few poems in Songs of Experience which does not have a corresponding poem in Songs of Innocence.

The poem has a total of sixteen lines which are split into 4 stanzas with a rhyming ABAB pattern throughout the poem. Repetition is the most striking formal feature of the poem, and it serves to emphasize the prevalence of the horrors the speaker describes.

I wandered through each chartered street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

A mark in every face I meet,

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,

In every infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg'd manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry

Every black'ning church appals,

And the hapless soldier's sigh

Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear

How the youthful harlot's curse

Blasts the new-born infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.