London History, Up Close

Above the entrance to Quo Vadis – one of Soho’s smarter private members’ clubs, draped in Union flags – a blue plaque marks the years that Karl Marx spent in the two-room attic flat directly above where people now pay handsomely for dinner. The building has improved considerably. The Spy at the Kitchen Table One afternoon in the early 1850s, a man called Schmidt arrived at the attic flat at 28 Dean Street. He introduced himself as a journalist. The Marx family...

George William MacArthur Reynolds was, by most measures, the most widely read author in Victorian England. He outsold Dickens. His newspaper reached 350,000 readers a week. His novel sold a million copies in ten years. He is almost entirely forgotten. This erasure is partly because Dickens called him a pander to the lowest passions of the lowest natures. As well as this, it’s down to Reynolds spending his career agreeing with Karl Marx about the ruling classes, which tends to affect...

The Gargoyle Club Soho occupied the upper floors of 69 Dean Street from 1925 until 1952. Its interiors were designed by Henri Matisse. Its members included Virginia Woolf, Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, Fred Astaire and Noël Coward.  And its entrance was a rickety external elevator that once left a future leader of the Scottish National Party dangling in mid-air for half an hour. As private members’ clubs go, it had range. What David Tennant Wanted The corner of Dean Street and...

Napoleon III spent more time in London than any French emperor really should have. He arrived as a runaway, lived like a monarch, patrolled the streets with a truncheon, got his debts paid by a mistress, and left in such a hurry that his landlord found his bath still full of water and his bed unmade. He would later rebuild Paris. First, he had to sort out the bath. Carlton House Terrace Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte – nephew of Napoleon I, future Emperor of France –...

In November 1762, a twenty-two-year-old Scotsman took lodgings in Downing Street and began writing everything down. His name was James Boswell. He wrote down the haggling over rent, the gonorrhoea, the illegitimate child, the landlord who called the watch on him for making noise, and the woman he accused of infecting him, while congratulating himself on his polite dignity throughout. The journal was thought lost for over a century. It turned out to be one of the great literary discoveries of...

On the evening of 5 April 1895, Oscar Wilde sat in Room 118 of the Cadogan Hotel and waited. He had time to catch the boat train to France. He could have lived there comfortably and safely, beyond the reach of English law. Instead he stayed. The police arrived at half past six. He asked if he could have bail. The inspector told him he didn’t think he could. The Decision The Cadogan Hotel sits on the corner of Sloane Street and Pont Street in Chelsea, its red brick facade curving...

Sarah Forbes Bonetta was born Omoba Aina in a Yoruba village in what is now Nigeria, captured as a child after a raid that killed both her parents, gifted to a British naval officer along with a keg of rum and ten heads of cowries, presented to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle, sent to Sierra Leone, returned to England, introduced into Victorian society, married at St Nicholas’ Church in Brighton, and arrived in Burton Crescent – now Cartwright Gardens – for her honeymoon. One...

Ivor Novello lived in a top-floor flat above the Strand Theatre for nearly forty years. He wrote some of the most beloved musicals in British history. He was, as his biographer put it, a consummate flirt who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs. And he may or may not have slept with Winston Churchill. When he died in 1951, 7,000 people attended his funeral. Women outnumbered men fifty to one. The Flat The Novello Theatre on the Aldwych was opened in 1905 as the Strand Theatre...

In 1875, a police inspector founded a museum of crime in a cellar beneath Scotland Yard. It housed weapons, clothing, preserved body parts, a poisoner’s capsule of wolf’s bane, a piece of tanned human skin, and a wizened apple with human teeth marks from an unsolved murder. A reporter visited in 1887 and described it as not a large place, and not a particularly sweet one. He was understating things considerably. The Cellar The Black Museum came into being in 1875, when...

Someone once wrote to the police to warn them about Kate Meyrick. She was, the letter said, “the wickedest woman in London.” She had been to prison four times, was openly laughing at the law, and was paying off a sergeant by the name of Goddard at a rate of several hundred pounds a week. The letter was not wrong on any of these points. Fifty Pounds for a Partnership In 1919, Kate Meyrick was sitting at home nursing her daughter through influenza when she saw an advertisement...