London History, Up Close

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:...

On the night of 29 December 1940, a German bomb fell on the Tower of London. The blast knocked the Chief Yeoman Warder clean off his feet. He got up, dusted himself off, and completed the Ceremony of the Keys. The ceremony had not been interrupted since Edward III invented it in 1340 after walking into his own fortress unchallenged one December night and deciding something ought to be done about it. The Tower’s traditions are like that: specific in origin, peculiar in detail, and...

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...

Buckingham Palace, which stands at the end of The Mall, is one of the most recognisable buildings in the world. From the 1660s until it became a royal palace, the site belonged to the Earls of Arlington. Arlington House was home to Isabella van Nassau, Countess of Arlington, a Groom of the Stool to Queen Catherine of Braganza. Why was this noblewoman attending to the monarch’s bowels, and why did it help her become one of the most influential women at the court of Charles II? The role...

In 1748, a man sitting in a debtors’ prison wrote Britain’s first pornographic novel as a dare. He published it, got arrested, formally renounced it, and spent the rest of his life in poverty insisting it was a hymn to virtue. The novel outsold almost everything else published that century. John Cleland never saw the money. The novel was Fanny Hill. The setting was Covent Garden. Long before Soho claimed the title, Covent Garden was London’s original pleasure district, the...

William Gladstone was Prime Minister four times, a towering Victorian moralist, and a man who spent his evenings walking the streets of Soho and Covent Garden persuading prostitutes to come home with him. His wife Catherine would give them a meal, some advice, and a bed for the night. The bed, it should be clarified, was not to be shared. Gladstone kept meticulous records of every encounter in his diary, using a small symbol of a whip to mark the occasions when he felt he had become...