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"Hello, and welcome to YourHistoryHere, the place where you can share your knowledge about those unusual places, buildings or things that make places interesting to live. This site is on limited circulation at the moment, and is only supposed to be a mySociety demo, not a big posh project like PledgeBank. It may not be obvious, but the most important feature of YourHistoryHere is the construction of an underlying system for collecting and sharing geographic annotations in an open syndicated format, so you can use the yummy local data people leave for your own purposes. We're building two sites that show how this can be useful, this one and Placeopedia.com, and we'd love to share the code for other ideas. Anyone want to build WhereIHadMyFirstKiss.com? Tom Steinberg, mySociety Director - 23/08/2005"

About This Place...

Hobson's Choice

Now Catherine's college, this area was once Hobson's stable, and contributed a phrase to the English language. Here travellers could rest and get new horses. In most stables at the time, you could choose which horse you wanted. But Hobson, the Stelios of his day, offered a no-frills service, and forced people to take the horse at the front of the queue, the one that had rested longest. However unpleasant a horse it otherwise was.Travellers called this "Hobson's choice", or no choice at all.As a footnote, the Don's of Catherine College won the land from one of Hobson's descendents. At gambling.

Long. 0.11734, Lat. 52.20300 | written on 12th Sep 2005 by Francis Irving | Email this to a friend | abusive?

Responses

Chris Lightfoot replies: St Catherine's College, I think you mean.

written 13th Sep 2005 | abusive?

Helen Bright replies: There is also a small stream running down the gutter alongside the road which is known as Hobson's Conduit.

written 15th Sep 2005 | abusive?

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