After our storming victory in the Moorgins Pub Quiz last night (the second in a row for the team, but I was in Manchester last time), I was wondering what we need to do to make it a hat-trick for next week. We know that our quizmaster has a penchant for questions about Erasure, Deal or No Deal, horseracing and Monopoly. Apart from latter, I don’t really fancy my chances at any of these topics, but last night’s question about the number of £20 notes handed out at the start of the game was highly controversial — we said that players just got one, but the so-called correct answer was six.
It turns out that in the British version of the game, played to just get one £20 note, but in other get versions of the game, they get six. So what other monopoly questions might we anticipate? As Lewis and I are already ardent players of the game, we should do reasonably well on any subsequent questions, but one thing I was wondering about is just how many monopoly properties are actually within the boundaries of the city of London?
This question is not as easy to answer as it looks, as the boundaries of the city of London follow so many random twists and turns as they negotiate various different backstreets. Motorway map.co.uk has attempted to show all of the London monopoly properties superimposed on a map of London, and combining this with the official City of London authority map suggests that Whitechapel Road (brown) and Strand (red) are just on the edges of the City of London, but they don’t really go inside the boundaries. Fleet Street (also red) and the two stations of Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street are certainly within the boundaries of the city of London, so I would guess that the correct answer is three.
However, to be fully accurate, I’d have to go out and look for those City of London black bollards at the end of Fleet Street and Whitechapel Road — and however infinitely curious I might be, that would be taking my geekery just a little bit too far. I think a far more interesting question would be to explain why the hell Fenchurch Street, which has to be the most irrelevant station* in London, made it onto the Monopoly board in the first place (again, Motorway map has a go at explaining) – as with last week, answers on a postcard please.
*Just to keep the good people of Essex happy, I mean irrelevant in the sense of number of passengers served, and the fact that Fenchurch Street has neither long-distance train services, nor its own underground station. I have nothing against Essex people, and in fact, many of my friends come from Essex, blah blah blah.
