This is a curious story about how Sir Walter Raleigh allegedly caught fire and was extinguished by his manservant. Raleigh – swashbuckling adventurer under Queen Elizabeth I (or Queen Bess if you prefer) – and Islington don’t exactly sit together in your mind. But Raleigh and other Elizabethans loved popping over to the village of…
As you come out of Leicester Square towards Charing Cross Road and the Leicester Square tube station, you can cross over at the traffic lights and continue down Cranbourn Street. It’s a pretty innocuous street – very unmemorable. But two hundred years ago, it was the known as Cranbourne Alley and regarded as the “great…
The Tower of London still possesses the axe and “heading block” used for executions right up to the mid-18th century. There’s also a mask that was worn by the executioner. The block is chipped and dented as a result of some considerable use. On this block, the heads of three Scottish rebels – Lords Lovat,…
Here’s a picture of the Brick Lane Mosque – which was built as a protestant church in 1743 for the French Huguenot community and then became a synagogue in the 19th century before its current incarnation as a mosque. Proof, as if it was needed, that London has always been a very mixed up and…
St Mary-le-Strand has been an unloved London church, viewed as a bit of a problem. This wasn’t helped by a terrible accident in the early nineteenth century, which I’ll detail below, caused by its shoddy construction. In 1887, The Daily Telegraph asked: “What is to be done with the internally handsome, externally cumbrous, and obstructive…
How could somebody come to be executed not once – but twice? Such is the tale of one poor, unfortunate Londoner at a time of great cruelty and savagery. Thomas Savage – appropriately named – was born in the parish of St Giles in the Fields and as a youth, became an apprentice to a…
Grim business being in debt in the old days – a debtor could expect to end up behind bars! London had its fair share of prisons located very centrally and one of them was the Fleet – where debtors were flung. The location is quite hard to imagine now but it would have been roughly…
If you’ve ever been to Wong kei in London’s Chinatown, you may have experienced the joy of being shouted at by the waiters – it had the reputation for years of being the rudest restaurant in London. I understand that as of last year, they’ve refurbished the place and decided to tone down the bad…
Londoners do some very odd things but taking a dead man’s head to the pub is probably one of the more unusual. Read on! There’s a monument that many office workers pass under every day that they’d never realise has a ghoulish past. It’s an innocuous old gateway that leads from the front of St…
The Calves Head Club comprised a group of wealthy London traders and merchants who welcomed the beheading of King Charles the first and the rule of Oliver Cromwell. Even after the Restoration of King Charles the second, the executed king’s son, to the throne – they continued to meet in secret. Wealthy people who disliked…
