London History, Up Close

A Quaker who founded a colony as a “holy experiment” in religious tolerance was baptised here in 1644. A future American president married here in 1797, writing home two days later to introduce his new wife to his parents. All Hallows by the Tower, the oldest church in the City of London, has an unlikely thread running through the founding of America – and the story of that thread is stranger, and more complicated, than the blue plaques suggest. The Boy Baptised by the...

The oldest church in the City of London has survived a medieval gunpowder explosion, the Great Fire of London, the Blitz, and several centuries of knife fights in its churchyard. It has sheltered sanctuary seekers and Knights Templar awaiting heresy trials, and gave Samuel Pepys a vantage point from which to survey the ruins of his city. All Hallows by the Tower is still standing. Everything around it, at various points, has not been. Older Than You Think All Hallows by the...

3 Queen Victoria street seems the site for skyscrapers. Nowadays you are glancing up at the ten-storey Bloomberg HQ peeking into the sky (fun fact, it is made of Derbyshire sandstone, not a local stone). Before 2010, you would have glanced up at fifteen-storey Bucklersbury house, London’s first tall slab after restrictions had been lifted on buildings above 30 metres in height after World War two. Both have made you look up, but the real treasure is below your feet.  Where you are...

Bury Street runs off Jermyn Street in St James’s, a short walk from Piccadilly and a world away from the tourist London of the nearby parks and palaces. Number 16 looks discreet from the outside, and it always has. Since 1929, Quaglino’s has operated here as one of the most glamorous restaurants in Britain: a place where royalty, aristocracy, scandal, and heartbreak have all pulled up a chair. Twentieth-century London was not short of addresses where the rich and famous can mingle...

In 1660, Charles II returned from exile at the French court and brought with him several things: a restored monarchy, an enthusiasm for mistresses, and the periwig. Within a decade, every self-respecting courtier in London was wearing one. Within two decades, Samuel Pepys had discovered his was full of nits. Fashion, as ever, demanded sacrifice. The King’s Wig The Banqueting House on Whitehall is the last surviving fragment of Whitehall Palace, where Charles...

In December 1689, King William III ordered a road built through Hyde Park because his asthma couldn’t tolerate London’s smoke. He had it lit with three hundred oil lamps, making it England’s first illuminated highway. He called it La Route du Roi. Londoners called it Rotten Row. For the next two centuries, it was where the city went to be seen, to be judged, to fall off horses into the Serpentine, and occasionally to ride blind at full gallop. The King’s Asthma In...

In May 1940, Winston Churchill became prime minister and wrote his first letter to Franklin Roosevelt. They had met once before, at a banquet in 1918, but Roosevelt remembered the occasion and Churchill did not. It was not the most auspicious beginning for what would become the most consequential alliance of the twentieth century. Churchill spent the next five years trying to convince Roosevelt to save Britain. Roosevelt spent them trying to decide how far he was willing to go. Former Naval...

Winston Churchill spent most of the Second World War at 10 Downing Street, and he ran it on a schedule that no one else in Whitehall would have chosen. He worked in bed until noon, drank champagne at lunch, slept in the afternoon, and summoned his exhausted advisers to meetings at midnight. He wore a dressing gown emblazoned with dragons, flourished a cigar he never actually lit, and ran the war on his own clock. Whitehall had no choice but to keep up. The Dragon Dressing Gown Winston...

In March 1938, with war looking increasingly inevitable, a group of basement offices beneath a Whitehall building close to Parliament began their transformation into a secret underground headquarters. By August 1939, a week before Hitler invaded Poland, they were operational. For the next six years, the Cabinet War Rooms were where Britain’s war was run – by candlelight, under concrete, with chemical toilets and no flushing, mice in the walls, and staff who stripped to their...

In October 1911, Winston Churchill arrived at the Old Admiralty Building on Whitehall as the new First Lord of the Admiralty. Thirty-six years old, never having commanded a ship, he immediately replaced three of the four sea lords. What followed included 150 flying lessons, the modernisation of the Royal Navy for the First World War, and the Gallipoli campaign, one of the worst military disasters in British history. The quote about rum, sodomy, and the lash? He never said it. He wished he...