London History, Up Close

The only surviving portrait of the Brontë sisters was painted by their brother Branwell, folded up and lost for many years, rediscovered on top of a wardrobe in Ireland in 1914, and found to contain a hidden figure that nobody had noticed for another forty-three years. It now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Branwell is in it, just about. The story of how he got there, and how he almost didn’t, says something important about the family that produced three of the most enduring...

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 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...

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...