London History, Up Close

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...

On the evening of 6 October 1769, an Italian literary critic walked briskly up the Haymarket in London, was grabbed by the private parts by a woman in a doorway, struck her, was set upon by three men, stabbed one of them fatally, and was arrested. He was tried at the Old Bailey two weeks later for murder. His character witnesses were Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith. He was acquitted. The Man in the Dock Giuseppe Baretti was an Italian...

Horatio Nelson was Britain’s greatest naval hero, the man who won the Battle of Trafalgar and died doing it. He was also a man who burned with love for a woman who was not his wife, fathered a child he could not publicly acknowledge, and spent years at sea writing letters that read like nothing a naval officer was supposed to write. Nelson’s Column stands in Trafalgar Square. The letters are somewhere else. Two Marriages Horatio Nelson married Frances Nisbet in 1787....

On the night of 11 June 1735, a fire broke out in Cecil Court, a narrow alley off St Martin’s Lane. By 3am, thirteen houses were gone. The Prince of Wales had arrived to direct the firemen. William Hogarth’s mother had died of fright. And a woman named Elizabeth Calloway was on her way to Newgate, charged with setting the whole thing deliberately. Cecil Court Cecil Court runs between St Martin’s Lane and Charing Cross Road, a narrow passage of the kind that defined this...

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...