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...

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 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...

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...

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 March 1938, with war looking increasingly inevitable, a group of basement offices beneath a Whitehall building close to Parliament began their transformation into a secret underground headquarters. By August 1939, a week before Hitler invaded Poland, they were operational. For the next six years, the Cabinet War Rooms were where Britain’s war was run – by candlelight, under concrete, with chemical toilets and no flushing, mice in the walls, and staff who stripped to their...

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...

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...