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…
1862 saw a new crime trend hit the streets of London. The city was terrified of alleged garrotters – strangling and stealing from victims. One thief grabbed a victim from behind, garrotting them, while the other relieved the breathless person of their belongings. This outbreak of “garrotting” horrified the great and the powerful – especially…
Theft was endemic in Victorian London. Going through court records, one encounters a constant flood of petty stealing. And it wasn’t just precious items like gold watches and jewellery but clothes, bed covers, trousers and even underwear! You have to think of a world where many people had next to nothing. Such was the miserable…
Solomon Eagle was a preacher who claimed to predict great events. Just in case nobody was paying attention, he stormed around London with a flaming brazier on his head. During the great plague of 1665, he added to the general misery by screaming at his fellow Londoners that a great fire was about to consume…
Where flappers went to dance in 1920s London – the Cecil Hotel on the Strand
The tragic story of an 18th century teenager Isabella Courtenay whose expansive dress caught on fire and soon turned her into a human fireball
