Which weird London laws are actually still law?

On 26 May 2015 Parliament deleted four small offences from the law of England and Wales, and forgot the London ones.

Carrying a plank along a pavement. Beating a carpet in the street. Flying a kite to the annoyance of passers-by. Making a slide on ice to the common danger of passers-by. Until 2015 all four were offences everywhere, twice over: once in the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 for London, and once in the Town Police Clauses Act 1847 for anywhere that had adopted it. Schedule 23 to the Deregulation Act 2015 — headed, without irony, Legislation no longer of practical use — struck 22 paragraphs out of that 1847 section in a single day. It did not touch the 1839 Act. Fact

So the joke every list tells about London turns out to be true, and true in a way none of them noticed: these really are London’s, and they are London’s because of a tidying exercise eleven years ago.

I read twelve of these claims against the statute book on 13 September 2026. Six have a provision still standing behind them. Three never existed at all. One I could not settle, and the reason I could not settle it is the most interesting thing on this page.

Of the eight claims with a provision to draw, six run unbroken to today — three of them from the Metropolitan Police Act 1839 — while the pigsty offence ends in 2015 and gambling in a library ends in 2007.

Show the numbers

The claim	Verdict	Provision	From	Until
It is illegal to beat or shake a carpet in a London street, and the only time you may do it is before eight in the morning.	The provision is live, and the telling distorts it.	Metropolitan Police Act 1839, s. 60, paragraph 3	1839	still
It is illegal to carry a plank of wood along a pavement in London.	The provision is live, and the telling distorts it.	Metropolitan Police Act 1839, s. 54, paragraph 8	1839	still
It is illegal to fly a kite, or to slide on ice or snow, in a London street.	The provision is live, and the telling distorts it.	Metropolitan Police Act 1839, s. 54, paragraph 17	1839	still
It is illegal to drive cattle through the streets of London without the permission of the police.	Live, and confined to a boundary the telling ignores.	Metropolitan Streets Act 1867, s. 7	1867	still
It is illegal to gamble or play cards in a public library, under an Act of 1898 that is still in force.	Gone, with the repealing instrument and date named.	Libraries Offences Act 1898, s. 2(3), repealed; and s. 3, which sets the Act's reach	1898	2007
It is illegal to keep a pigsty in front of your house in London.	Gone, with the repealing instrument and date named.	Town Police Clauses Act 1847, s. 28	1847	2015
A London taxi must by law carry a bale of hay and a sack of oats.	No provision says this.	London Hackney Carriage Act 1831, s. 51 — and it says the opposite	—	never
A London cab driver must by law ask each passenger whether they have smallpox or the plague.	No provision says this.	Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, ss. 33 and 34 — the nearest provisions ever enacted, both repealed	—	never
It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament.	No provision says this.	Coroners and Justice Act 2009, s. 46 — the provision that abolished the office the myth hangs on	—	never
It is illegal to enter the Houses of Parliament wearing a suit of armour, under a statute of 1313 that has never been repealed.	The authority cannot settle it, and the piece says why.	A Statute forbidding Bearing of Armour (1313), the single unnumbered provision	1313	still
It is an offence to jump the queue in a London Underground ticket hall.	The provision is live, and the telling distorts it.	Greater London Authority Act 1999, Sch. 11 para. 26 — the power under which TfL's byelaw is made	2011	still
It is illegal to handle a salmon in suspicious circumstances.	The provision is live, and the telling distorts it.	Salmon Act 1986, s. 32	1986	still

Sources: legislation.gov.uk revised statute book (OGL-3.0) · Changes to Legislation dataset (OGL-3.0) — full attribution

The four that are London’s

The Metropolitan Police Act 1839 is still doing work. Section 54 lists, in one Victorian breath, the things you may not do in a thoroughfare, and two of its paragraphs are the source of two claims on this page. Section 60 supplies a third. None of the three carries a single textual amendment note against the words in question: nobody has legislated on them since they were written.

They bind the Metropolitan Police District — Greater London excluding the City of London, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple (London Government Act 1963 s. 76(1), as substituted on 1 April 2000 by the Greater London Authority Act 1999 s. 323). That is not Greater London, and the difference is the kind of thing this site exists for: the Square Mile and the two Inns are outside it, so a carpet beaten on Fleet Street and a carpet beaten fifty metres east are not the same act in law.

After 2015, this particular offence — in these words — exists nowhere else in England and Wales.

Interpretation

That needs a caveat immediately, and it is the caveat the lists never print. It does not mean you may do these things elsewhere. Obstructing a highway, causing a nuisance and behaving in a way likely to alarm somebody are all offences under modern statutes that apply everywhere. What went in 2015 was one Victorian wording, not the idea behind it. What survives in London is that wording, with its odd exceptions intact.

For each of four offences, the London provision of 1839 runs unbroken to 2026, while the provision covering the rest of England and Wales runs from 1847 and stops in 2015.

Show the numbers

Offence	Where	From	Until
beating a carpet	London	1839	still
beating a carpet	The rest of England and Wales	1847	2015
carrying a plank	London	1839	still
carrying a plank	The rest of England and Wales	1847	2015
flying a kite	London	1839	still
flying a kite	The rest of England and Wales	1847	2015
making an ice slide	London	1839	still
making an ice slide	The rest of England and Wales	1847	2015

Sources: legislation.gov.uk revised statute book (OGL-3.0) · Changes to Legislation dataset (OGL-3.0) — full attribution

The fourth London one is older in spirit and narrower in reach. Metropolitan Streets Act 1867, s. 7, still says that no person shall drive cattle through any street “between the hours of ten in the morning and seven in the evening, except with the permission of the Commissioner of the Police”. It applies to the City of London, plus a circle of six miles' radius centred on Charing Cross (Metropolitan Streets Act 1867 s. 3, as amended in 1993). Six miles from Charing Cross takes in the whole of the West End and stops short of Croydon, and the Act defines cattle to include sheep, goats, swine, and horses, mules and asses when led in a string or loose. The penalty is stated per animal.

What the tellings get wrong

Five of the twelve rest on a provision that exists and says something other than what is claimed. The pattern is always the same: a condition gets amputated, or an exception gets widened into a permission.

The carpet is the best of them. The statute forbids beating or shaking any carpet, rug or mat in a thoroughfare — and then excepts “door mats before the hour of eight in the morning”. Every telling I found reads that as a general dawn window: set your alarm and beat what you like. It is not. The exception attaches to door mats alone. A carpet may not be beaten in a thoroughfare at any hour of any day, eight in the morning included. Fact

The kite is the same shape. The offence is flying a kite “to the annoyance of the inhabitants or passengers”, and making a slide “to the common danger of the passengers”. Strip the conditions and you get a ban on kites; keep them and you get an ordinary nuisance provision that happens to mention kites. A kite over an empty heath breaks nothing.

And the plank has two exceptions, not one. Loading or unloading is the famous one. The other is simply crossing the footway, which is broader than the taking it into a building that circulates, and which makes the offence roughly: do not walk down the pavement with a ladder.

The ones that are dead

Two of the twelve are repealed, and both are instructive about how a dead provision goes on being quoted.

The library one is wrong twice. Gambling in a library was an offence under the Libraries Offences Act 1898 — until subsection 3 was repealed on 1 September 2007 by the Gambling Act 2005. That is the only limb anybody ever cites. And the Act never reached a public library in the first place: what survives of section 3 leaves it applying to libraries kept by a registered society, a friendly society or a trade union. The offence people name was repealed nineteen years ago, in a building the Act does not cover. Fact

The pigsty is wrong differently, and the way it is wrong is worth a paragraph. It was never a London law: the 1847 Act is a kit of clauses with no application of its own, taking effect only where a local Act adopted it, and the metropolis was policed under the Metropolitan Police Acts instead. It was omitted for England and Wales in 2015 along with the twenty-one other paragraphs beside it. One published telling cites it as part F45 of the Act — and there is no part F45. F-numbers are legislation.gov.uk’s own annotation machinery, and the F-number on that paragraph is the record of its repeal. The teller read the note saying the law was gone, and cited it as the law.

The ones that never existed

Three claims have no provision behind them at all, and proving that is harder than checking a section number, so here is how far I got in each case.

A cab must carry a bale of hay and a sack of oats. The nearest thing ever enacted is the London Hackney Carriage Act 1831, section 51, and it points the other way: it regulated how a cabman might feed a horse in the street — corn out of a bag, hay held in his own hands — and obliged nobody to carry anything. The word in the Act is corn, not oats. Those words were repealed by the Statute Law (Repeals) Act 1976, and the surviving marginal note now carries a dagger, which the Act’s own editorial note says means the note is no longer accurate. A myth built on a footnote to a repeal.

A cabbie must ask whether you have the plague. There was a real duty, and it ran the other way: an infected passenger had to tell the driver. It lived in Part II of the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984 and was repealed on 6 April 2010. No provision has ever required a driver to ask anybody anything about their health.

It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament. No statute, no byelaw, no rule of common law. What is worth knowing is that the standard debunking is now out of date too: it explains, in the present tense, that such a death would fall to the coroner of the Queen’s Household. That office was abolished on 25 July 2013 by section 46 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. Fact The myth has outlived its own correction.

The one I cannot settle

A statute of 1313 forbids coming to Parliament in armour. Every list on the internet says it is still in force. I cannot tell you whether it is, and the reason is the most useful thing I learned doing this.

The page for it says There are currently no known outstanding effects. That sentence means no recorded amendment is waiting to be applied. It does not mean the provision is in force, and for a document of 1313 there is no commencement record to read, because commencement records did not exist. The revised statute book begins on 1 February 1991; before that the site is silent rather than reassuring. The provision carries zero textual amendments — twelve annotations sit on it and every one is a variant reading noted in The Statutes of the Realm, which is a scholarly note about the wording rather than an Act of Parliament touching it.

The 1313 statute is neither in force nor repealed in any sense a modern reader would recognise, and the question is malformed rather than open.

Hypothesis Test: A commencement or repeal record for the statute, or a court treating it as live or dead. Either would settle it; neither is on legislation.gov.uk.

It is also not about armour in a building. It binds every Parliament and assembly in the Realm of England, it says every Man rather than every member, it forbids force and armour rather than fancy dress, and it creates no offence and names no penalty at all.

The ones London borrowed

Two of the claims here are in force, are not London’s, and are printed on London lists anyway.

Handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances is real, and the joke has expired: since 12 January 2010 the section heading has read Handling fish in suspicious circumstances, the two-year prison sentence every telling quotes has been deleted, and there is a statutory defence nobody mentions. It is a handling-stolen-goods provision for fish, and it applies to England and Wales.

Jumping the queue on the Underground is not a law at all. It is a byelaw made under a power in the Greater London Authority Act 1999, and it bites only where a notice or a member of staff has told you to queue. With neither, pushing to the front of an informal huddle breaches nothing. The escalator half of the claim is invented: the escalator byelaw is about which direction you face and which side you stand on.

The same pages carry these beside the genuine Metropolitan Police Act ones, undifferentiated. That mixing is why the London versions have gone unnoticed: if every entry on a list is labelled a weird British law, the four that are specifically London’s look like more of the same. Interpretation

A note on what this is

This is not legal advice, and none of it is an official version of anything. Every quotation is an excerpt from the revised statute book as it stood on 13 September 2026, and the revised text is maintained with a known lag — its own limitations page says not all recent effects are reflected. If you are contemplating beating a carpet in a thoroughfare, the law is not the binding constraint.

Behind the data

Method. Twelve claims, each traced to a provision on legislation.gov.uk and read in its revised text with the amendment annotations attached. A committed table holds the verdicts; the pipeline holds the evidence. On every rebuild it re-checks that each provision still resolves, that the words quoted here are still in it character for character, that the annotation a verdict leans on is still recorded, and that nothing is pending against that section — and it refuses to write if any of that fails. Extent is read from the operative words of each section and never from the file’s extent attribute, which records jurisdiction rather than geography: the 1839 Act is tagged as extending to the whole United Kingdom while its own words confine it to the Metropolitan Police District — Greater London excluding the City of London, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple (London Government Act 1963 s. 76(1), as substituted on 1 April 2000 by the Greater London Authority Act 1999 s. 323).

Caveats. A verdict is true as at a date, and this one is 13 September 2026. The revised statute book begins on 1 February 1991, so for the 1313 statute it is authority for “unamended since 1991” and nothing earlier; the collection it sits in is labelled a partial dataset covering 1267 to 1706. Proving that no provision anywhere says a thing is not the same as failing to find one, and the three “never existed” verdicts are the weaker kind of finding for that reason — what I can show is what I searched, and I have said so in each case. These are summary offences with small maximum fines, not crimes in the sense the word “illegal” suggests to a modern reader; the Victorian sums that circulate were replaced long ago by the standard scale.

Claims are refused here because the statute book cannot settle them, not because they are false. The Welshman and the longbow, compulsory archery practice, the swans, the pregnant woman and the policeman’s helmet: the Law Commission’s own list is better on all of them, it is cited above, and it is worth knowing that its publisher took it off its website in 2015 and that it carries a disclaimer telling readers not to rely on it.

How this was checked, and what that found. Every verdict was written once and then attacked by a second reading told to refute it. Six of the twenty-one claims examined came back refuted — and in all six the verdict itself held while a supporting detail failed: an extent stated as “London” that was really the Metropolitan Police District, a section number off by one, a repeal chain with four stages rather than the one that had been found. That is the ratio worth knowing about this subject. The verdicts are the easy part; the details under them are where this goes wrong, which is exactly how forty listicles came to repeat each other.

What would change my mind. A commencement or repeal record for the 1313 statute, which would turn the one unresolved claim here into a resolved one. Or any pre-1948 statutory instrument — the London Cab Order 1934 is the candidate, and it is not carried on the site — turning out to have said something about cab feed or infectious passengers after all. Either would move a verdict on this page, and the changelog at the foot would say so.

Sources

• legislation.gov.uk revised statute book — The National Archives. OGL-3.0. Retrieved 13 September 2026. Every verdict in this piece is read from a provision's own revised text at `.../data.xml`, which carries the operative words, the `<Commentary>` annotations recording each applied amendment and repeal, and `<ukm:UnappliedEffect>` for effects enacted but not yet commenced. Four properties of this source shape the piece rather than footnote it. First, the revised database begins on 1 February 1991. For a medieval statute the site is authority for "unrepealed since 1991", not for seven centuries, and the Acts of the English Parliament collection is labelled on its own page a "Partial dataset 1267-1706". That is why one claim here is published as *cannot determine* rather than resolved. Second, "There are currently no known outstanding effects" means no recorded effect is awaiting application. It is not a statement that a provision is in force, and for a pre-1991 Act with no commencement record there may be nothing behind it at all. Third, `RestrictExtent` in the XML is jurisdiction, not geography. Metropolitan Police Act 1839 s. 54 is tagged `E+W+S+N.I.` while its own words confine the offence to the Metropolitan Police District. Every extent in this piece is read from the operative words of the section and recorded by hand in claims.yaml; none is read off the attribute. Fourth, a repealed provision keeps its title. The body renders as an ellipsis with a pointer to the repeal while the heading still reads as though the offence were there, which is exactly how a repealed provision comes to be quoted as live law in published lists. The site's own limitations page says the revised text "is somewhat out of date... not all effects from recent years are reflected". The piece prints the date it read and does not pretend otherwise. Reuse terms are the site footer's: "All content is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated." The OGL forbids suggesting official status, so the excerpts here are quoted as excerpts and the piece says plainly that it is not an official version and is not legal advice. Rate discipline observed: `Crawl-delay: 5` from robots.txt, against a published cap of 1,500 requests in any five-minute period; anonymous user agents are refused, so fetch.py identifies itself.
• Changes to Legislation dataset — The National Archives. OGL-3.0. Retrieved 13 September 2026. The per-Act table of every recorded effect on a piece of legislation, at `/changes/affected/<type>/<year>/<chapter>/data.csv`, with columns for the affected provision, the type of effect, the affecting legislation and whether the amendment has been applied to the database. It is what makes a repeal checkable rather than assertable. One trap, verified in both directions: this endpoint takes the CALENDAR year and never the regnal year the document URIs use. `/changes/affected/ukpga/1839/47/data.csv` answers 200; `/changes/affected/ukpga/Vict/2-3/47/data.csv` is a 404. There is no per-section path, and an `affected-provisions` query parameter is silently ignored, so the whole Act is fetched and filtered offline.
• Legal Curiosities - Fact or Fable? — Law Commission, Statute Law Repeals team. OGL-3.0. Retrieved 13 September 2026. The canonical treatment of this subject, published March 2013: roughly forty alleged laws in a three-column table, verdicts Yes / No / No evidence / Not quite. It is cited rather than processed, and it is cited because it is genuinely good on the claims this piece refuses to take — the Welshman and the longbow, the naked mannequin, the pregnant woman and the policeman's helmet. Two facts about it that belong in the piece rather than in a footnote. It is no longer published by the Law Commission: a site search of lawcom.gov.uk returns nothing, and the UK Government Web Archive's last snapshot of the original address is 3 June 2015, so the copy every list now cites is a third party's mirror. And it carries its own disclaimer - "This list does not purport to be definitive, and readers should not rely on it without conducting their own research." It quotes statutory text once in nine pages and cites no legislation.gov.uk page anywhere. That is not a criticism of an informal document; it is the gap this piece fills, thirteen years later. Not downloaded by fetch.py: nothing in the pipeline reads it.

Attribution

• OGL-3.0 legislation.gov.uk revised statute book, Changes to Legislation dataset, Legal Curiosities - Fact or Fable? Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Data as of 13 September 2026. Last fetched 13 September 2026. Pipeline code is available on request.