10 Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About London

November already! Scary! We've now officially been living in the UK for two years, and London for one. So to celebrate, here's a list of 10 "insider" facts about London you may not have known before. Oh, and to keep you on your toes, we've made up one more. Which one? Leave us a comment if you think you've picked it - answer in the next post.

1. Riding the Tube for long enough will result in a syndrome known locally as "Black Bogies" in one's nostrils, commonly explained away as congealed dust from the train's brake pads. But this is only partly true. Yes, it's 30% brake dust (giving the black colour) but the rest is human skin particles. Ewwww.
2. One-in-three London households do not own a car. (Melbourne: one-in-ten).
3. Both of us work in the area of Soho, which used to be Henry VIII's hunting grounds. When a hunter spied a deer, he would shout "Tally-Ho!", but with a smaller prey, the cry became "So-Ho!". New York also has a SoHo, but this is an abbreviation for the area South of Houston [Street].
4. Currently playing in London: 34 musicals, 12 comedies and 53 dramas.
5. The big coffee chains in London are Starbucks (bleh), Costa Coffee (awful), Coffee Republic (never tried 'em) and Caffe Nero (passable), with an astonishing 962 stores between them in London in December 2006, and presumably many more by now. Our hot tip for a good coffee when in Central London: try AMT (often found at mainline stations), Monmouth Coffee, Flat White in Soho or Sacred in Carnaby.
6. The Tube carried over one billion passengers last year. That's more than the entire population of Australia each day.
7. One of the options at Gordon Ramsay's 3-Michelin-starred restaurant is an entrée of oven-roasted squirrel in a hazelnut and truffle oil velouté.
8. If you see someone riding around London with a clipboard attached to their scooter's handlebars, they are almost certainly an aspiring taxi driver "Doing The Knowledge". A London cabbie has to know all the streets within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. That's 25,000 streets. In addition, they have to know all the places of interest (schools, restaurants, churches etc) on those streets, including such details as the order of theatres on Shaftesbury Avenue. In the test, the examiner gives two points. The cabbie-to-be must recite the quickest and most efficient route, naming each street and turn on the way there. At any point, the examiner can ask for a description of what is "alongside". Hence the "knowledge boys" on their scooters have to drive every street to learn these features that can't be absorbed from a map.
9. In a single week, the average male Londoner drinks 13.9 units (almost 7 pints of beer) and a woman 4.9 units (2-3 glasses of wine). This is actually the lowest average intake of all UK regions.
10. The average speed of a car driving through Central London: 10.2 mph (16.3 km/h). The average speed of Johnny on his bike in the morning: 11.1 mph (17.7 km/h).
11. There are an estimated 200,000 French people living in London - making it (theoretically at least) the fourth-largest French city.