London History, Up Close

Bolton House sits on Windmill Hill in Hampstead. It is a comfortable Georgian property, bought in 1926 by a wealthy tobacco-and-catering family for their daughter. She spent the next two decades there, turning it into a studio, a salon, and a stage for one of the more pointed acts of self-invention in twentieth-century British art. The neighbours complained about the architecture. History eventually agreed that was the least of what they had to complain about. Gluck Bolton House Hampstead:...

Joe Orton was thirty-four, one of the most celebrated comic playwrights in Britain, and making regular trips from his Islington flat to the public toilet under the railway bridge at Holloway Road. Cottaging in London’s public lavatories was not unusual behaviour for a gay man in 1967, but writing it all down was. His diaries, published in 1986, remain one of the most candid account of gay urban life in 1960s London: the social geography of a city that criminalised homosexuality until July...

In November 1958, the Reverend G.W. Sterry of Heath Street Baptist Church in Hampstead received a letter from a Mrs Edna Welthorpe – a fictional Joe Orton creation – requesting the church hall for three performances of a play called “The Pansy“, described as one which “pleads for greater tolerance on the subject of homosexuality.” Mrs Welthorpe did not exist. She was a persona invented by Orton, the most subversive playwright of his generation, who was then...

In 1954, the British government appointed a committee to examine the law on homosexuality. For the sake of the ladies present at proceedings, homosexual men were referred to throughout as “Huntleys” and prostitutes as “Palmers“, after the biscuit manufacturer Huntley and Palmer. The resulting Wolfenden Report London would eventually recommend decriminalising homosexuality, but this wouldn’t occur for another decade. The chair of the committee was Sir John...

The School of Oriental and African Studies has always had a reputation for producing remarkable people. Some explored territories no European had mapped; some taught the world’s languages to codebreakers working in secret; some turned out to be Soviet intelligence officers living under borrowed names. The reputation for harbouring SOAS spies and adventurers was not entirely unearned, and the staff were, if anything, even more interesting than the students. Lao She and the Immigrant...

The Warburg Institute on Woburn Square in Bloomsbury In December 1933, two small steamships called the Hermia and the Jessica sailed from Hamburg to London carrying an unusual cargo. 60,000 books, 10,000 photographs, most of the furniture, and the entire staff of a research institute devoted to the study of images, memory, and the survival of the ancient world in modern life. The Nazis had come to power that year. Aby Warburg, the institute’s late founder, was Jewish and so were...

UCL’s Wilkins building At the north end of Gower Street in Bloomsbury, you’ll find University College London’s iconic neoclassical portico. With its ten Corinthian columns supporting an elegant dome, its been a local landmark since it first rose above the surrounding streets in the late 1820s. The building has a conventionality to it now – it smacks of university or institution – but in its early days its neoclassical style actually communicated something pretty...

The London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women The building that stands on the corner of Hunter Street and Handel Street, just off Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury, carries a stone inscription above its door: “London Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women.” It was built between 1897 and 1900 by J.M. Brydon, on the site of earlier, more modest premises. That earlier building, a spacious, old-fashioned house with long rooms on the ground floor and a walled...

Gordon Square, the heart of Bloomsbury and UCL. Gordon Square, at the heart of Bloomsbury, is built around gardens. The grassy enclosure’s benches, flowers and old trees make for a charming spot for students and passersby to enjoy London’s rare sunny days. Ringed by elegant Georgian houses, a church, and many of University College London’s buildings, it’s a tightly enclosed oasis. Yet it’s hard to imagine that this neighbourhood was barely built when UCL opened its doors...

Statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury Tavistock Square sits at the heart of Bloomsbury, enclosed by tall London brick terraces. In the middle of its central gardens, a bronze figure looks down from a stone plinth. It’s the nonviolent anti-colonialist Mahatma Gandhi. The ‘father of modern India’ was perhaps the most celebrated Indian student ever to attend the nearby University College London. When founded in 1826, UCL became the first English university...