A mouldy dish. A sharp eye. A discovery in Paddington that changed medicine forever.

Albany Street: a perfectly ordinary London street with an extraordinary amount of history packed into it. Scratch the surface and out tumble grand terraces, soldiers, workhouses, artists, rogues and the great restless churn of London life.

Four men cross a London road. The camera clicks. And one ordinary zebra crossing walks straight into history.

How do you save a dying patient when medicine’s answer is to take blood out? James Blundell did something revolutionary. He put blood back in.

Thomas Moore wrote one of the immortal lines about London. The delicious twist? He was in Venice when he wrote it.

W. G. Grace was a giant of Victorian cricket, a legend in his own lifetime. Then I came across his grave and read the names above his own, and suddenly the great cricketer became something else: a father.

A palace of glass. Victorian dinosaurs. Six million visitors. And a fire that lit up the London sky. The extraordinary story of Crystal Palace, where the monsters survived but the palace didn’t.

There were 175 people in that room in the Royal Academy. 174 of them - including me – were standing. You were stretched out on the floor, your camera two inches off the floor. What had you seen that nobody else had clocked? What were you photographing?"

On September 20, 1912, a handful of poets sat down to dinner. By the time the evening was over, they had the beginnings of a literary movement, a new generation of poets and a name: Georgian Poetry.

A skinny, clothes-mad schoolgirl from Neasden became the face of Swinging London. On her birthday – Happy Birthday, Twiggy! – this is how Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, and Twiggy became an icon.