London History, Up Close

Methodist Central Hall on Storey’s Gate opened in 1912, funded by a million Methodists each donating exactly one guinea, no more, regardless of wealth. The building has since hosted the inaugural United Nations General Assembly and addresses by Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Winston Churchill. It witnessed the first CND meeting and the premiere of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s first musical. In 1966, it also lost the World Cup Trophy. And a dog found it. The Building The Hall...

On 14 January 1559, Elizabeth I climbed into a litter of cloth of gold carried by two mules and left the Tower of London for Westminster. The Elizabeth I coronation procession through London was not merely ceremonial. It was the new queen’s first and most important act of government. Her sister Mary had imprisoned her in the Tower five years earlier on suspicion of treason. Now she was queen, and the same walls that had held her were the starting point for one of the most elaborate public...

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...

St Marylebone Parish Church has stood on the New Road – now Marylebone Road – since 1817. Before that, three earlier versions occupied other spots around the neighbourhood, each one slightly more decrepit than the last. Over nine centuries of parish life, several things happened inside these buildings that the church website does not especially dwell on. Among them: a thirteen-year-old bride in cloth of silver, a painter’s satirical vision of organised religion’s...

At 9.38am on 2 May 1990, a 58-year-old messenger named John Goddard walked down Nicholas Lane in the City of London, was stopped by a man with a knife, and surrendered his briefcase. Inside it were 301 bearer bonds worth £292 million. Goddard had no idea what he was carrying. The mugger jogged off into the rush-hour crowd. It was the largest street robbery in the history of the world, and it remains a Guinness World Record. Only one man ever went to jail for it. Bearer Bonds To...

In July 1822, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the Italian coast. He was twenty-nine. His wife Mary – author of Frankenstein, daughter of two of the most radical thinkers of the age – was twenty-four, a widow with one surviving child, and her dead husband’s heart wrapped in silk in her writing case. She brought all three back to England. She would live for another twenty-nine years – exactly as long as Percy had lived altogether – writing, grieving, and...

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...