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…
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…
Queen Victoria experienced a very long reign and by 1897 had been on the throne for an astonishing sixty years. She processed through the city of London as part of her celebrations. Vast crowds assembled to see the sovereign drift past in her carriage. The Diamond Jubilee festivities saw dignitaries and soldiers come to London…
Stand at Tottenham Court Road station and let your eyes drift from the Dominion Theatre past New Oxford Street and down Charing Cross Road. Now imagine that this whole stretch of London extending down to St Martin’s Lane and back to Drury Lane was one huge enormous slum. A warren of impenetrable alleyways, wooden houses,…
