It is the sort of discovery that would have had Inspector Morse grumpily downing his pint and climbing into the red Jaguar.

Industrial decline and cleaner energy production have led to pollution erosion at St Paul's Cathedral being at a 300-year low.

The Bard's glorious, grisly, world springs to life. Verily, it's a triumph!

Demonstrators who have been camped outside St Paul's Cathedral in London since October last year were finally evicted on last night as riot police and bailiffs moved in after dark, dragging both tents and protesters away.

London's history has been told by countless authors. Its biography has been written and rewritten. Its criminal underbelly has been scoured, its subterranean landscape crawled through and its transport systems charted. Its mad have been placed on the couch, its poor pored over and its rich laid bare. So, even for a history fan with a taste for the place, it takes a clever theme or a neat gimmick to make yet another account of the capital's past seem appealing. Leo Hollis's is to explore London's history through 12 buildings.

One of Britain's most famous cathedrals is to celebrate its first day without scaffolding for 15 years when a £40 million restoration project draws to a close.

My parents were... and are fantastic role models. They met at St Mary's medical school. After they married, my mother gave up nursing to be a mum, dad went on to be a surgeon. Now, in their eighties, they show no signs of slowing down; they have a busier social life than I do and they always put the needs of others before their own. They are truly remarkable people.

Come up to the roof of the erstwhile pub I bought and renovated with my husband, Olly Hoeben, 11 years ago, and you will see his dream of 50 years made real. Around the flat, decked roof with its expansive views of London, and a sky that seems so close you could touch it, are three timber, glass and lead units, precisely designed to look and feel like ships' cabins. But why cabins at the top of an urban building? The reason is found in Olly's formative teenage years. Aged 15, he went to sea as a trainee able seaman. It was what many working-class lads, growing up in Amsterdam in the poverty-stricken years immediately after the war, did to earn a living.

The Shard skyscraper now being constructed looms over St Paul's Cathedral, seemingly dwarfing the traditional view of London's skyline that St Paul's has dominated since it was built by Sir Christopher Wren in 1710.

Before the TV shows, the bestselling books, the school-food campaigns and the browbeating of obese Americans, Jamie Oliver's approach to cooking was that of an experienced brickie – grab this brick, mix this cement, trowel the cement on here, plonk the mixture down there and bish, bosh, zing, zing, hey presto it's done. He convinced the nation that simplicity, rather than complexity, could deliver big flavours. Through the unveiling of his 15 restaurant, and his immensely popular Jamie's Italian chain, he has kept faith with the basic, the tasty, the honest-to-God. Devotees will be relieved to hear that his newest incarnation mostly maintains the tradition, at least when it comes to food. If only everything else about it were so simple.

Try finding Runnymede on a road atlas of Britain and you may well be thwarted. The seminal place where the Magna Carta was sealed fails to appear on many maps – including mine. Which seems odd, given that this was the birthplace of civil rights and modern democracy. All the more reason, then, to pay a visit.