The signs of a truly great city (London has thousands of them)

On the wall of London’s Hotel Saint is a blue plaque. “On this site in September 1773, A. Bell Booksellers published a volume of poems by Phillis Wheatley, 1753 – 1784,” it reads. “The first work of an African-American female writer published in English.”

Obviously, this is not what I’ve come to London to see, and I’ve only stumbled across it because I happen to be staying at the hotel. But it’s a moderately interesting titbit of information to which I’d otherwise be completely oblivious.

Just opposite, a double line of square tiles slices through Aldgate Square. Inscribed into the floor is an explanation – they mark the path of the London Wall from the Roman era. The Roman road from Londinium to Camulodunum (now London to Colchester) passed through here from the now-destroyed Aldgate. A sign marking the site of Aldgate is on the wall of Boots the Chemist.

Read the small print.Credit: Jamie Brown

Truly great cities are liberally sprinkled with such signs, inscriptions and carvings. London has thousands of them, each telling a snippet of a story that forms a tiny part of the city’s lore. They are all little stitches in a great tapestry, created over the centuries, and more importantly – preserved.

Every blue plaque on a wall, every engraving on a monument, every word cut into a pavement comes down to somebody deciding that a story should not be forgotten. There’s an inescapable charm in this spirited desire to keep flames alight, and to share with the casual passer-by tales that would otherwise disappear into dusty books.

For the traveller, there’s a lot to be said for taking the time out to meander, reading these signs. Hurtle between conventional attractions, without pausing to look and read, means you miss out on so much.

London has thousands of blue plaques marking sites of historical significance.Credit: iStock

It’s not necessarily about being beside the house in Soho where John Logie Baird first demonstrated television. Or the Marylebone lodging house of Simon Bolivar, “liberator of Latin America”. It’s that there’s a constant peppering of these oddities, commemorated with dutiful restraint, yet forming a part of a glorious, elaborate weave.

Giving yourself licence to get lost among that weave is one of travel’s underrated joys. It doesn’t really matter whether you’re reading about noblemen executed at Tower Hill in London, how hawker food took off at Singapore’s Maxwell Food Centre or the New South Wales timber industry along the Richmond River in Ballina.

Don’t take this as a “put down your phone and look around you” admonishment, though. Sometimes your phone can help you down a most engrossing rabbit hole.

By the River Thames in Greenwich, there’s a curious obelisk. The engraving on it reads: “To the intrepid young Bellot of the French Navy, who in the endeavour to rescue Franklin, shared the fate and the glory of that illustrious navigator. From his British admirers.”

Keep an eye out for a sign of the times.Credit: iStock

Nothing is said about who Bellot and Franklin are, but a quick search on the phone shows that Joseph Rene-Bellot died falling through an Arctic ice sheet while looking for missing explorer Sir John Franklin. Franklin, it turns out, was a former lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land – Tasmania’s Franklin River and Hobart’s Franklin Square are named after him.

His expedition aboard the HMS Erebrus and HMS Terror to find a Northwest Passage through the Arctic ice disappeared in 1845. And a little further ferreting stumbles towards The Terror, a superb supernatural horror series based on the events and watchable on Stan.

Despite such serendipitous trails of discovery, the greatest of all such commemorative signs is the one by the dunes at the back of Cabarita Beach, NSW. “At this precise spot on the morning of December 12, 1927,” it reads, “nothing of significance is known to have occurred.”