Top of the World
Inside the Dolphin Tavern on Red Lion Street it is always 10.40pm. Or, at least, its is if you use the pub's old clock as your time piece.
On the 8th September, 1915, German Army Airship L13, commanded by Kptlt Heinrich Mathy, drifted across the night sky 8500 feet above London.
As the ship drifted high over the streets of Bloomsbury, Mathy gave the order to begin releasing its deadly cargo of High Explosive Bombs, which plummeted earthwards and left a trial of death and destruction that can still be followed today. As the airship passed over Red Lion Street, the crew dropped another High Explosive which hit the Dolphin Tavern, and all but razed the pub to the ground.
Three customers were killed in the explosion, and, by the end of that night, the pub was nothing more than a heap of rubble. The pub was rebuilt after the war, and it still caters to the needs of the locals and office workers alike, despite the passage of more than a hundred years since that long ago night when death and destruction rained down from above.
Prior to the commencement of the rebuilding, however, the rubble of the previous building was combed through and the pub's old clock was discovered, somewhat battered and scarred, but, otherwise, reasonably intact.
The clock's hands were frozen at 10.40pm, the exact moment when the bomb hit the pub with such devastating consequences. You can still see the old clock; still battered, still scarred and with its hands still frozen at 10.40pm.
