100 London things: 30
This was the first place I worked in London after graduating:
The College of Arms.
This is based in an attractive building in a location which would have been more attractive at that time (river frontage, close to St Pauls) if there had not been some major road works concurrently going on in Queen Victoria St.
I note that it has since then apparently dragged itself, kicking and screaming, into at least the final decades of the C20th, and has a website. (OMG there is currently a vacancy for Rouge Dragon Pursuivant... £13.95 a year from the Crown, plus any fees you can drum up from private practice in heraldry and genealogy. But I think you may have to purchase your own ceremonial garb and regalia.)
However, I still get a definite sense that in many ways it's the same old weird place it was, with areas you couldn't go into unless one of the officers of arms was with you, what with the complete lack of any information as to how anybody might actually access the archives and other collections they hold. (Gosh, I hope they no longer use that subterranean store with its delicate scent of the mustiness of ages.)
It was actually - though I was only there for a summer, working under Richmond Herald's researcher - a useful intro to genealogy and the sources thereof, in the days before the internet, indeed, the days when doing a post-1837 birth, marriage or death search involved going to Somerset House and heaving around the massive index volumes on a narrow gallery with no air-conditioning. The days when the Public Record Office, and Consistory Court of Canterbury Probate Records, were still in Chancery Lane.
I wasn't there long enough to get any of the perks that researchers sometimes got, like seats for investitures and other ceremonies (I'm not sure I cared much even then).
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