London History, Up Close

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....

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...

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...

At the northern end of the Palace of Westminster, the Elizabeth Tower rises above the Thames and the rooftops of Westminster to a height of 96 metres. Most people call it Big Ben, though technically that name belongs only to the great bell inside. Stand at its base on a clear day and you can hear the chimes carry across the river. In homes and offices across the world, those same chimes have marked the hour on BBC broadcasts for nearly a century. On 1 April 1980, the BBC announced they were...