Viewpoints – Placecloud: Recent Episodes
Placecloud
Fortaleza Brazil O estado brasileiro do Ceará é uma das regiões mais pobres do Brasil. O PIB per capita é apenas um terço do das pessoas no estado de São Paulo, e nem mesmo um quinto do que se vê na região do Distrito Federal, ao redor da capital Brasília.
Fortaleza Brazil De Braziliaanse deelstaat Ceará is een van de armere regio’s van het land. Het BBP per hoofd van de bevolking bedraagt slechts een derde van dat van de inwoners van de deelstaat São Paulo, en nog niet eens een vijfde van dat van de regio rond de hoofdstad Brasília.
Fortaleza Brazil The Brazilian state of Ceará is one of the poorer regions of Brazil. The GDP per capita is just a third of that of the people in the state of Sao Paulo, and not even a fifth of those in the district around the capital of Brasilia.
Vera Cruz Brazil Hoje, de pé na Ilha de Itaparica, com a brisa do mar acariciando as muralhas do antigo Forte de São Lourenço, é fácil se deixar embalar pelo ritmo lento da Bahia. Mas sob essas águas e pedras corre uma corrente mais profunda e sombria, uma que remonta a um império fugaz, construído sobre comércio, ambição e sangue.
Vera Cruz Brazil Staand op het eiland Itaparica, met de zeebries die langs de wallen van het oude fort São Lourenço waait, is het gemakkelijk om mee te deinen op het trage ritme van Bahia. Maar onder deze wateren en stenen schuilt een diepere, donkerdere stroom; een die teruggaat naar een vluchtig imperium gebouwd op handel, ambitie en bloed.
Vera Cruz Brazil Standing on Itaparica Island today, with the sea breeze brushing past the ramparts of the old fort of São Lourenço, it’s easy to be lulled by the slow rhythms of Bahia. But beneath these waters and stones lies a deeper, darker current; one that stretches back to a fleeting empire built on commerce, ambition, and blood.
The Hague The Netherlands Você está no Binnenhof, o coração da República Holandesa. Imagine: é o inverno de 1642; janelas estreitas filtram a pálida luz do norte nas salas abobadadas. Pisos de pedra ecoam passos suaves. As portas pesadas de carvalho estão fechadas, mas atrás delas está reunida a Assembleia dos Estados Gerais, um grupo de burgueses, regentes e enviados que têm nas mãos o destino de um império.
The Hague The Netherlands Je bevindt je op het Binnenhof, het hart van de Nederlandse Republiek. Stel je voor: het is de winter van 1642; smalle ramen filteren het bleke noorderlicht in de gewelfde zalen. Stenen vloeren weerklinken met zachte voetstappen. De zware eiken deuren zijn gesloten, maar daarachter is de Staten-Generaal in zitting, een gezelschap van burgers, regenten en gezanten die het lot van een rijk in handen hebben.
The Hague The Netherlands You are standing in the Binnenhof, the heart of the Dutch Republic. Imagine this is the winter of 1642; narrow windows filter the pale northern light into the vaulted chambers. Stone floors echo with quiet footsteps. The thick oak doors are shut, but beyond them, the States-General is in session, a body of burghers, regents, and envoys who hold the fate of an empire in their hands.
Amsterdam The Netherlands Era a primavera de 1642, e os corredores da sede da Companhia Holandesa das Índias Ocidentais estavam silenciosos, fracamente iluminados pela luz do dia que entrava inclinada por pequenas janelas. O ar estava impregnado do cheiro de pergaminho e fumaça de cachimbo. Atrás de portas fechadas, um punhado de diretores, comerciantes, não monarcas, examinava livros-caixa e cartas vindas dos trópicos. Entre eles, uma decisão começava a tomar forma. Não seria anunciada com trombetas. Não haveria confronto aberto. Mas faria ruir uma corte do outro lado do oceano.
Amsterdam The Netherlands In de lente van 1642 waren de gangen van het hoofdkwartier van de West-Indische Compagnie in Amsterdam stil, zwak verlicht door het daglicht dat schuin door kleine ramen naar binnen viel. De lucht was zwaar van perkament en pijptabak. Achter gesloten deuren bladerde een handvol directeuren, kooplieden, geen koningen, door boeken en brieven uit de tropen. Onder hen begon zich één besluit te vormen. Geen poehah. Geen confrontatie. Maar dit besluit zou een hof aan de overzijde van de oceaan doen instorten.
Amsterdam The Netherlands It was the spring of 1642, and the corridors of the Dutch West India Company headquarters were quiet, dimly lit by daylight slanting through small windows, the air heavy with the scent of parchment and pipe smoke. Behind closed doors, a handful of directors, merchants, not monarchs, reviewed ledgers and letters from the tropics. Among them, one decision had begun to crystallize. It would not be announced with trumpets. There would be no open confrontation. But it would collapse a court across the ocean.
Los Alamos, United States. The Bradbury Science Museum, located in the town of Los Alamos, is the information center and science museum operated by Los Alamos National Lab, and contains many interesting exhibits and displays, including much related to the nuclear testing program.
Bellingham, United States. The international boundary between the US and Canada comes to Point Roberts from the east, across the bay from Blaine, and hits the last of the range towers marking the boundary across the waters of the bay, known as Range Tower C.
Bellingham, United States. Roosevelt Road ends at a small park, built around Monument 1, the last boundary monument on the 49th Parallel (or the first, headed in the other direction), marking the westernmsost point of land on the border between Canada and the USA.
Little Dalles (historical), United States. The Boundary Dam is operated by Seattle City Light, the electrical utility for that city, and provides up to 40% of the power for Seattle, nearly 250 miles away. The powerhouse was built inside the cliff, and generates more than 1,000 Megawatts. This dam is on the Pend Oreille River in western Washington, just a few miles south of the international border with Canada. The river it floods forms a long lake through the river valley, 17 miles upstream to the next dam, at Box Canyon. Downstream, the swollen Pend Oreille River crosses the boundary line northward, and arcs through Canada for 12 miles. The river passes through the Seven Mile Dam in Canada, and then another at Waneta, just before joining the main channel of the Columbia, and crosses the boundary for the last time, back into the USA, where it meets its next empoundment, the Grand Coulee Dam, 100 miles downstream.
West Corners (historical), United States. A movie set depicting the residential street in Watertown where the police hunted for and found the surviving Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, remains, decaying, on the edge of the old runways of the former Air Station at South Weymouth.
Fort Winthrop (historical), United States. In 1971, the Boston Gas Company commissioned the artist (and nun) Corita Kent to turn what many considered to be an industrial eyesore into a popular landmark.
West Baker (historical), United States. The town of Boron is unusual as it is located between the world's largest Borax mine, visible to the north, and one of the nation's largest rocket test areas, visible on the hill to the south.
West Baker (historical), United States. At a remote desert site six miles north of Kramer Junction is a former military base and Federal Prison Camp, with an active FAA radar facility.
Bellingham, United States. In 2005 a drug-smuggling tunnel was discovered by border officials, just a hundred yards east of the Lynden/Aldergrove Port of Entry. It connected a Quonset hut on 0 Avenue, on the Canadian side, to a house in the trees on the south side of Boundary Avenue, on the US side.
Cupheag (historical), United States. Some may call it a compound of follies, this is indeed a curious collection of unusual architecture amassed and built by the Boothe brothers, who lived at the site from the early 1900s to 1949.
Dublin, Ireland. My mother Cherry had a penchant for lying down beneath trees in our garden and in wild Wicklow.
Buell (historical), United States. Numerous land speed records have been achieved at Bonneville, on the vast and flat natural pavement of salt: the 300, 400, 500, and 600 mile per hour land speed barrier were all broken here over the years.
Stevenson, United States. Bonneville was the first of eight federal lock and dam structures built on the Columbia and Snake rivers, which are now the largest source of electricity on the continent.
Diocese of London, United Kingdom. Contemplating a wall plaque in Walthamstow, north-east London, to commemorate victims of a fatal bomb raid by the Luftwaffe in 1940 during the London Blitz.
Chester, United Kingdom. The original Chester Canal runs deep below the city centre in North West England, next to the Roman city walls. The canal was one of the first to be built in England in the 1770s and has had a chequered history whilst leaving its mark on the landscape.
Squeaky Springs (historical), United States. A partially-flooded trailer community with a few hundred homes, on the east shore of the Salton Sea, Bombay Beach is one of the lowest communities below sea level in the U.S.
Black Lake (historical), United States. A huge Gilded Age summer house on an island in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River.
Murphy, United States. The selection of this volcanic butte 20 miles from Boise City as the Initial Point for a survey of the Idaho Territory in 1867 was due to the isolation of its prominence, and that it was far enough west that the meridian would extend northward through the narrow panhandle of the territory all the way to the Canadian border.
Fivebough Wetlands is more than a swamp, it’s a jewel in the Riverina’s crown. In a comparison of 360 wetlands as part of the Murray-Darling Basin Waterbird Project, Fivebough recorded the highest number of waterbird species and it ranked second for the total number of species recorded in a single survey.
Everett, United States. Often cited as the “largest building in the world,” Boeing’s aircraft assembly building in Everett, Washington, where commercial airliners including the 747 were built.
Grand Rapids, United States. Though privately owned and occupied, the existence of the childhood home of Bob "Dylan" Zimmerman emits a strong interpretive presence in Hibbing.
Port Huron, United States. The only bridge over the St. Clair River is the Blue Water Bridge, which connects the communities of Port Huron, Michigan, and Sarnia, Ontario.
Broadway (historical), United States. A natural, spring-fed lake, a few hundred feet across. The water stays at a comfortable 75 degrees year round.
Oberg (historical), United States. This is an independently owned movie ranch in southern California, surrounded by hundreds of acres of open space, north of the tract homes of Valencia.
Copper Camp (historical), United States. Blackfoot Pathways is a contemporary art sculpture park in the woods on the edge of Lincoln, Montana.
Desert Relief (historical), United States. Static display at the gate of Air Force Plant 42, featuring an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, a rarer A-12 precursor, a D-21 drone, and a U-2 D model.
Hualipi (historical), United States. The region is dominated by a lengthy playa, known as the "largest flat place on earth."
Cuates (historical), United States. Oklahoma’s highest point of land is on Black Mesa, on the western end of the Panhandle.
Great Falls Montana gets its name from five nearby waterfalls along the Missouri River, all of which have been drowned or altered by dams and power plants, including the one closest to town, at Black Eagle Falls.
A three-story, hand made, medieval-style castle under construction since 1969. The castle is being built entirely by one man, Jim Bishop, who calls his structure "a poor man's Disneyland."
Bungonia Community Hall, Australia. A description of Little Forest in the Moreton National Park on the South Coast of New South Wales Australia.
Whitton is the oldest town in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and offers a glimpse at a timeless Riverina landscape. It also has ghosts.
The man behind the name of Dubbo’s low-level bridge was a Frenchman from Bordeaux, France. Jean Emile Serisier was an enterprising man considered a founding father of Dubbo, storekeeper, winemaker, magistrate and wannabe politician. Unfortunately, the bridge named after him has a habit of going under in big floods.
When the LH Ford Bridge was opened in Dubbo in 1969, replacing the old timber ‘White Bridge’ that had provided an east-west crossing since 1866, it was one of the first pre-stressed bridges in NSW and the fourth longest highway bridge in New South Wales. But shortly after its opening, the middle section of the bridge began to sag.
The bridges crossing the Wambuul Macquarie River near the City of Dubbo are built structures that tell a story of the colonial and settler history of the region, through their construction and namesakes. They were built across water and land that has a much older story to tell. This is Wiradjuri Country, the traditional, unceded lands of a culture tens of thousands of years old.
Archidiocese of Canterbury, United Kingdom. Dover Esplanade, by Tonkin Liu, consists of three bespoke, site-specific sculptural waves that bring a new interactive dynamism to the Esplanade, taking inspiration from Dover’s identity; the gentle nature of waves on the sheltered beach, the rhythmical sweep of the Georgian seafront terrace and the undulating topography of the white cliffs of Dover.
Burnley, United Kingdom. The Singing Ringing Tree is a musical sculpture standing in the wind on a hill overlooking Burnley, designed by Tonkin Liu.
SalehYemen, United Kingdom. The award-winning Swing Bridge, inspired by a bony fish, provides access to the Crystal Palace Dinosaur Islands.
Tucson, United States. A large experimental complex built in the late 1980s to explore the possibility of living outside of the Earth ("Biosphere 1") should the Earth become uninhabitable.
Lark (historical), United States. This active mine is the likely the second biggest open pit copper mine in the world, slightly smaller than the Chuquicamata pit in Chile.
Asheville, United States. Biltmore Estate, built by George Washington Vanderbilt in the late 1800s, is the largest historic, private home in America, at 179,000 square feet.
Little Rock, United States. President Clinton chose the city of Little Rock for his presidential library and museum, which also contains the offices of the Clinton Foundation.
Scotland Yard has been in horror films since Sherlock Holmes and the "Quatermass" trilogy, but were any actually filmed at the Yard? And what is the Yard's famous Black Museum? Listen to hear about the three locations of Scotland Yard in London's film history, the horror films inspired by the Yard's Black Museum, and about the strange shift away from Scotland Yard in recent horror history. Includes a highlight of Edgar Wright's 2006 "Hot Fuzz"
In the 1950s Battersea Park opened it's own Funfair, and once it did the horror filmmakers came running. Horror films - including "The Mutations" starring Donald Pleasance and "Gorgo" London's 1969 answer to Godzilla - used the bright lights of the funfair to contrast with dark stories, that is until the Battersea funfair had a real-life horror of its own.
London Zoo is a place of fun and wonder with animals from all over the world gathered for us to enjoy, but you may not know that one particular animal has been the star of three horror movies. Listen to hear about the role they played in "Werewolf of London" (1935), "American Werewolf in London" (1981), and "Braham Stoker's Dracula" (1992)
The Eros Fountain in Piccadilly Circus has appeared in more than a dozen horror films, mostly to set the scene in London. But it plays a more important symbolic role in three horror films - Edgar Wright's 2021 "Last Night in Soho", Lindsay Shonteff's "Night After Night After Night", and Danny Boyle's "28 Days Later". Listen to find out what this fountain meant for these three, very different, horror films
This viewpoint discusses the controversial marriage of James Hamilton, 1st Marquess of Abercorn and his third wife, Lady Anne Hatton, which took place in 1800.
The 1870s witnessed a fashion for Winter Gardens at the British seaside and Great Yarmouth's example is a unique survivor of that Victorian trend. As an iron and glass structure it took its cue from the 1851 Crystal Palace but failed to make a profit when it was first erected in the Devon resort of Torquay. This viewpoint uncovers the background to its creation and tells the story of its remarkable move to Norfolk in 1903.
Margate's 1926 train station was one of architect Edwin Maxwell Fry's first jobs. Fry went on to become a leading figure in International Modernism so this viewpoint explores the background to the station's design, its importance for Margate and its place in the wider context of 1920s seaside architecture.
Learn more about two German Americans, George Ehret and William Steinway, who built a coastal amusement park in northern Queens in the late 19th century. Originally called Bowery Bay Beach, North Beach was one of a number of resort destinations in the outer boroughs of New York City at the turn of the 20th century.
Orchard Beach is one of the great 1930s public works projects in New York City. It's early history as a campsite is a window into leisure patterns in New York City's coastal hinterlands in the 19th century, while the beach's redevelopment in the 1930s speaks to the career of the city's infamous power broker and master builder, Robert Moses.
Learn about how and why the famous manufacturer built a factory here, in northwestern Queens, in the late 19th century. Steinway's investments in this corner of what was once the independent municipality of Long Island City proved a key contribution to the growth of greater New York City.
Learn more about Hart Island's history as New York City's largest potter's field--as well as the surprising, often-overlooked history of Solomon Riley's attempt to build an amusement park on the island's southern tip.
Learn about New York City's "King of Beer Corners" George Ehret, his German American community in Yorkville, on the Upper East Side, and his role in New York City's flourishing brewery industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Recounts the story of Amelia Kennedy who, in 1871, died in a fire at her home in Edwards Lane, Stoke Newington, while trying to save other members of her family.
In 909 the bones of Oswald of Northumbria were brought to Gloucester from Bardney in Lincolnshire by Æthelred and Æthelflæd, rulers of Mercia. In time the minster they had founded in Gloucester came to be named after this northern king. Find out why a northern king was an attractive patron to Merican rulers and how the northern connection was later reactivated by the Archbishops of York.
The St Giles ruins are Maldon's only ancient scheduled monument. While in popular imagination medieval leper hospitals are thought of as places of exclusion, the truth is more complex and the community at St Giles was embedded in networks that stretched from the town centre out into the surrounding countryside.
One of the most precious possessions of the monks of Peterborough was the incorrupt right arm of King Oswald. What was this relic? And how did it come to be installed in a chapel in Peterborough Abbey?
Recounts the story of Dr Alexander Stewart Brown from Brockley who lost his life following a series of unfortunate events.
Recounts the story of Constable Percy Edwin Cook, who died in 1927 trying to save some workmen from a High Tension Chamber in Kensington.
Recounts the controversy around the death of Fireman Joseph Ford who died in 1871 while helping to rescue people from a burning house on the Grays Inn Road.
Norfolk is undoubtedly Boleyn heartland, where the family first established themselves as important members of the county, and Salle village and Church in Norfolk remain a vital part of the Boleyn story.
Brooke House has one of the saddest stories of any of Henry VIII's lost palaces, since it was only demolished in the 1950s. Now nothing remains of the palace in which Henry VIII was reconciled to his eldest daughter, Princess Mary.
Henry VIII's main London residence from 1523 to 1530 served as a backdrop for some of the drama of the King's Great Matter: Henry's attempt to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn.
This place fulfilled the promise of its name in 634 when Oswald of Northumbria won his famous victory over Cadwallon.
The Yorkshire seaside resort of Withernsea came into being as a result of Victorian railway expansion, with a pier being built as one of the first visitor attractions. The sorry tale of that North Sea pier is a short and disastrous one. But its story is not over yet.
The seafront Hippodrome at Great Yarmouth has been in continuous use as a circus since 1903. Its first owner made his name as a performer and knew how to please the crowds of Edwardian holidaymakers with daring shows and a venue that embraced the latest Art Nouveau style of design.
Only the gatehouse of the once lavish Esher Place remains, but step back in time to imagine the palace in its prime. It was a house of exile for Cardinal Wolsey and a place of mourning for Henry VIII, before serving as a private residence for the remainder of the sixteenth century. It even witnessed an early seventeenth century exorcism.
Take a trip to Suffolk Place, the shortest occupied palace of the Tudor era. This lavish mansion was grand enough to host the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, when he visited England in 1522, while it also played host to a princely Christening.
As the fountainhead of maritime insurance Lloyd's is the most famous coffeehouse. Its story is emblematic of the rise and fall of London’s coffeehouses: part of their meteoric rise was the appeal of auctions; their fall came when these public spaces turned private. Exploring Lloyd’s also reveals the coffeehouse's deep links to the slave trade, from auctions and escaped enslaved Africans to the insuring of slave ships and their human cargo.
In 1911, when Vaslav Nijinsky returned from Paris to dance at the Mariinsky, his revealing costume raised eyebrows in the Tsar's box...
Pause on the Anichkov bridge to take in the distinctive architecture of Petersburg, and consider how the city itself could thematise looking.
How did the square behind the Paris Opera Garnier come to be named for a Russian aristocrat?
Jonathan's Coffee House was at the heart of what has been dubbed ‘the financial revolution’ in late seventeenth-century London. It was home to the stock-jobbers, the scene of the 1720 South Sea Bubble, and the beginning of London's Stock Exchange.
Paris is well-known as a centre of fashion and luxury. The elegant stores on the Rue de la Paix offer a glimpse into the sensations of the early twentieth century, and the class distinctions which structured women's spaces.
Visit the old palace at Hatfield, childhood home to the future Elizabeth I. It was the place where she learned of her accession to the throne, in 1558, while sitting reading under an oak tree in the palace's park.
Journey to the site of Henry VIII's most spectacular building project, a palace that was intended to rival to great Chateau de Chambord in France.
Explore the remains of Henry VIII's childhood home, a palace that also served as a Byzantine Emperor's holiday home and housed a medieval king's personal library. You can even take a walk through Henry VIII's sewer system.
Bethlem Royal Hospital, or Bedlam, is probably the most infamous 'madhouse' in England. Many people think of it as a place where the mentally ill were locked up against their will. But for many patients, this was far from the case. Learn about those who wanted to be in this institution.
In 1849, Clare College (then Clare Hall) was rocked by a great tragedy. One of its student's, Edward Hayman, had taken his own life. Learn of Edward's story, and of his struggles with 'religious melancholy'.
In 1849, the reverend of Cottenham, and the Cambridgeshire coroner, had a fierce argument about whether a man of the parish could be given a proper Christian burial. Why? Because he had taken his own life. Learn about beliefs surrounding the burial of suicides in Victorian England.
In 1793, a young woman in this village, Dinah Harryman, asked for help with her suicidal feelings. Her aunt's response indicates how difficult it could be for friends and family to understand the suicidal. Learn about Dinah's story.
In 1826, there were large-scale riots at Helmshore. Half-starving handloom weavers attacked the machines which threatened their livelihoods. Mary Hindle, a local woman, got caught up in this rioting. Learn about her story, and about what eventually drove her to suicide.
In 1780, this pub, The Green Man, was a hubbub of noise and debate. Learn about how pubs could be sites for investigating issues of suicide and sanity.
In 1839, Charles William Bond died on this street. At the inquest into his death, it was suggested that novel-reading had contributed to his suicidal feelings. Learn about how contemporaries could interpret and rationalise suicidal behaviour.
Take a tour of the remains of Oatlands Palace, a favourite later residence of Henry VIII, which was demolished in 1650. We will explore the history of this once great palace, which witnessed one of the king's six weddings.
In 1798, a letter was left at the bank of Hyde Park Basin. Why had it been left there? And why did its author want it to be published? Find out about the struggles of John Cook, the butler to the Marquis of Titchfield, who died here.
In 1945, the German town of Haren was evacuated to make room for a sizeable population of Polish displaced persons (DPs). Many of them ex-/army members who had fought alongside the British. The entire town was requisitioned and turned into a microcosm of Polish society in the heart of Germany for 3 years before the whole process was reversed.
As the New Atlantic Charter was recently signed to reaffirm Anglo-American commitment to democracy and strengthen trade deals, how was the original Atlantic Charter received and who did it benefit? Held up as a blueprint for the post-war order, the original charter signed in 1941, signalled new international cooperation - but for some, it signalled betrayal as the principles were applied haphazardly. Anglo-Polish relationships soon soured after the Polish government-in-exile asked why Britain was not adhering to the much celebrated principles of the Charter.
The United Nations started with the UNRRA. Created in 1943, driven my Anglo-American interests, UNRRA was a champion of post-war peace, stability, and safety. Although largely forgotten today, UNRRA was a revolutionary organisation that aimed to not only relieve hunger and prevent disease, but to rehabiltate people and land to prevent conditions similar to post-1918 from recurring. The first state-driven international humanitarian organisation, and the blueprint for future world peace.
On the West Coast of France in 1945, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) requisitioned buildings in Granville and Jullouville to set up training centres for those who were tasked with helping Europe's Displaced Persons. Becoming an UNRRA worker was, for some, much more than a job but a second chance at a different life. These centres, with a high turnover, created thousands of workers to help repatriate, resettle, and rehabilitate the war's displaced persons.
Little is known about the medieval Welsh poet Gwerful Mechain, but she wrote some absolute bangers, including ‘Cywydd y cedor’, or, to non-Welsh speakers, ‘Poem to the vagina’. In the opening, she says that men have written some great praise poetry about women, but they are incomplete, because they don’t include detailed praise of genitalia. She then gives us a further thirty lines dedicated to WAP.
Further Reading: Katie Gramich, The Works of Gwerful Mechain (Peterborough, ON, 2018)
In 1497, Joan Rokker called Joan Sebar a whore on her front doorstep then threw bread at her. How, where, and why did medieval women publicly sexually defame other women?
It's winter in Suffolk, and you and your friends are bored of sewing. What next? Why, a round of ‘Have Your Desire’, of course! In this quick fire dice game, you roll to reveal your fortune. Spoiler alert: you're probably going to have sex.
Further Reading: Nicola McDonald, 'Fragments of Have Your Desire: Brome Women at Play', Medieval Domesticity, ed. Kowaleski & Goldberg (Cambridge, 2008)
If you were sure you had married someone but they didn’t agree, the London consistory court was the place to be. Here, ecclesiastical judges heard contested marriage cases. Disgruntled non-couple couples brought all kinds of evidence: gifts, exchanges of vows, sexual relationships. But for one woman, denying marriage was as simple as admitting that they had made out a couple of times but she had never intended to marry him.
Further Reading: Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia, 2006)
Impotence was sufficient grounds for annulment, but how to prove that a man experienced erectile disfunction? In 1433, one court asked ‘seven honest women’ to ascertain whether or not the defendant was capable of an erection with that timeless method, a lapdance.
Further Reading: Bronach Kane, “Impotence and Virginity in the Late Medieval Ecclesiastical Court of York,” Borthwick Paper 114 (2008)
In 1394, a sex worker and a Yorkshireman are arrested in a stable for public sex, and specifically for ‘committing that detestable unmentionable and ignominious vice’, sodomy. The ensuing deposition reveals that Eleanor has been known as John at various times in their life, and has had sex with both men and women. This episode places Eleanor in conversation with other cases of queer public sex, in particular that of Simeon Solomon in 1873.
Further Reading: For Kadin Henningsen’s article on Eleanor Rykener: https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2189&context=mff For the work of Simeon Solomon: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O126681/the-bride-bridegroom-and-sad-drawing-solomon-simeon/ For Neil Bartlett’s A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep: https://www.simeonsolomon.com/documents-online.html
In an obscure early printed song book that survives only by chance, a woman sings about seeing her lover out with a ‘mistress bastard’. Her reaction? She calls him a fuckboy and goes dancing.
In c.1340, a professional scribe of Shropshire copied down a fun fireside tale. Three women are off on a pilgrimage. On the road, one of them finds ‘a great huge penis, draped about with just its muzzle peeking out’ from behind a hawthorn bush. This episode considers a variety of stories of wandering genitalia, and the problems with picking up a disembodied penis off the road.
Joan was forced to enter a nunnery by her parents. In 1318, she faked her own death and ran away to live a life of ‘carnal lust’ in Beverley. We’ve all been there.
Further Reading: The Northern Way Research Project: https://thenorthernway151149306.wordpress.com/joan-of-leeds-her-own-story/
Recounts the story of Fireman George Lee who, in 1876, lost his life while attempting to save people from a fire in St John Street, Clerkenwell.
Recounts the story of Charles Edward Emery who tried to save a boy from drowning in the River Thames and lost his own life in the attempt.
Recounts the story of Ellen Donovan, who lost her life in a house fire near Covent Garden while trying to save some children.
On 1st October 1815, John Keats enrolled at Guy's Hospital to undertake his medical training. Though he did well at Guy's, Keats eventually gave up his studies to become a poet. Listen to find out more about Keats's time spent training in the medical profession, including details about some of his more grisly duties.
In December 1818, Tom Keats, the youngest of the three Keats brothers, died at number 1 Well Walk. In the final stages of his consumption, Tom was nursed by his elder brother, the poet John Keats. Listen to find out more about how Keats undertook his responsibilities as Tom's sole carer.
Home to London's wits, Button's Coffee House held a vision for a new way to socialise and the improvement of society via the ideal coffeehouse. To achieve it, they enlisted the help of a lion to root out the city's misdemeanours.
Bartholomew Fair was held in Smithfield annually from the 1133 to 1855 at the end of August on the days around St Bartholomew's Day. Originally a cloth fair, the event expanded to include a variety of other wares and a number of entertainments and sights. Listen to this recording of a 17th Century broadside ballad to hear a description of the fair: All those that have money and want any ware let them walk to Smithfield and Bartholomew Fair, All sorts of moveables there may be had, you may venture your lot 'mongst the good and the bad Gloves, ribbands, knives, scissors, with Jack-in-a-box Fine ladies with patches and powdered with pox With a cock and a gelding, with whistle and rattle All which serve to please the young kids that can prattle. Their children must with them if that they have any Tis Forty to one that they have a great many The climate is fruitful, the soil fat and good All things to be said for to nourish the blood. There's no fear of increase which if they can go They must to the fair for to see a great show, Being dressed very fine like young lords and young ladies The boys must have bows and the girls must have babies. The sprightly young prentice must not be forgot, One day in the fortnight must fall to his lot. The servant maid with him so trim doth he take And briskly doth treat her with a pot and a cake. If his purse will be strong he will venture to see The monkeys to dance and the goose with legs three, All this having seen, he home doth repair Being enough to talk of until the next fair. The finnikin shopkeeper once in the year To eat a boar's head takes his wife to the fair. There is no denial, he with her must go And takes in his pocket an angel or two Then merry they make while the music doth play But if I be not mistaken, full dear they must pay - A crown for the head of a pig three week's old All this must be had or my mistress will scold Then away, bonny lads, and fine lasses make haste And some of these Bartholomew rarities taste No question but all of you will be content And that of your money you will not repent: Make use of your time whilst time you have here, Who knows who shall be at the fair the next year Merry Andrew doth call you, the music invites To partake of their pleasures and taste their delights.
New coffeehouses brought not just a new drink to drink, but a new social space away from courts and universities. If you had visited in the late seventeenth century you would have heard financial deals and the latest news from across the globe. If you went to Garraway’s Coffee House in Change Alley, you may have also seen the latest scientific experiments, from tests on gases to animal dissections.
Wentworth Place (now Keats House) was home to the Romantic Poet John Keats from December 1818 - September 1820. Listen to discover more about the history of the house and Keats's time spent living there.
Recounts the story of Constable George Funnell who died in 1899 while attempting to rescue people from a fire at a Hackney pub.
Recounts the story of Solomon Gellman, aged eleven, who was run down and killed on Commercial Street in 1901 while trying to save his little brother from being injured.
Recounts the story of three men who lost their lives in 1901 while trying to rescue their workmate at the Three Mills Distillery in Bow.
Recounts the story of Samuel Rabbeth, a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in Barnet, who, in 1884, lost his life while attempting to save a child in his care.
Recounts the story of Thomas Griffin who, in 1899, was scalded to death at a Battersea sugar refinery while trying to rescue his mate.
Recounts the story of Richard Farris, who lost his life in the Grand Surrey Canal in Peckham in 1878 while trying to save the life of a woman.
Recounts the story of Alice Ayres who, in 1885, perished in a fire in Southwark while attempting to rescue three children.
Brothel madams mediated between the police and women who sold sex, so they were essential for the functioning of the state regulation of prostitution. This viewpoint explores some of the responsibilities given to brothel madams working under the state regulation system.
The construction of the Trans-Siberian railway increased the visibility of prostitution in Siberia. This viewpoint explores the impact of transportation development and war on efforts to police prostitution in the Siberian region.
Understandings of prostitution, and methods of policing it, hinged upon the social, economic, and environmental characteristics of a particular place. This viewpoint looks at how policing prostitution was influenced by the landscape and environment of Arkhangel'sk, a city just outside the Arctic Circle.
What was a secret prostitute and why did the tsarist police deem them so concerning? This viewpoint answers these questions by examining an anonymous denunciation of a woman living at 25 Bol'shoi Prospekt in St Petersburg that was sent to the city police in 1905.
Brothels were everywhere in urban centres of the Russian Empire, and reactions to them were complicated and varied. This viewpoint focuses on one street in Vilnius in the early 1900s to examine the complex relationships between landlords, brothel madams, and the tsarist police.
The Russian imperial authorities struggled to regulate the bodies of its populace in the chaos, dislocation, and destruction of the First World War. This viewpoint explores this challenge using the case study of Evgeniia Trifonova, a woman who snuck into the military barracks at Krāslava disguised as a military nurse in order to sell sex.
Venereal diseases in the military were extremely concerning for the Russian imperial authorities. This viewpoint examines responses to epidemic rates of venereal infection in one port of the Empire, the Port of Emperor Alexander III in Libava (now Karosta, near Liepāja in Latvia)
This viewpoint explores the forced registration of women onto the Russian Empire's police lists of prostitutes in the early 1900s. In Riga, forced registration commonly occurred in the city's hotels, and can be read as official attempts to kick back against perceived moral decline amidst urbanisation, industrialisation, and modernisation.
The concept of feminist marxist architectural history is explored through Jane Rendell’s writing on Burlington Arcade.
Jagonari Educational Resource Centre was a hub for East End women designed by the groundbreaking feminist design co-operative Matrix.
East End Women’s Museum is the only museum dedicated to women’s history in England. It was founded in 2015 as a positive protest against the ‘Jack the Ripper Museum’ in Cable Street. A permanent building is set to open in Barking in 2021 - 2022.
The story of the Focus E15 campaign and their occupation of an empty building in Carpenters Estate to provide a social centre in 2014.
Kensal House is a pioneering modern public housing project devised for working class families and designed by architect Maxwell Fry and housing consultant Elizabeth Denby.
muf architecture/art designed a play street for people of all ages near Clissold Park, as part of the wider estate regeneration project.
Park Street (Parkway) ladies’ toilets, Camden - public facilities which tell the story of women’s campaign for inclusive toilets.
Vanbrugh Park Estate by Chamberlin Powell & Bon is a modernist development by the architects of the Barbican and Golden Lane, which prioritises communal external spaces, complete with outdoor laundry drying infrastructure.
From the 1840s until 1917, prostitution was legally tolerated in the Russian Empire under a system known as regulation. This viewpoint examines how registered prostitutes resisted the regulation of prostitution and sought interaction with the authorities to achieve specific objectives. It focuses on a letter penned by 16 registered prostitutes living in Brest (now Belarus) in 1908 to examine everyday experiences of state regulation.
Waterloo Bridge, also known as ‘The Ladies’ Bridge,’ tells the recently uncovered story of women construction workers who built it during the WWII labour shortages.
South East London’s beacon on a hill overlooking the city, the project is a triumph of council housing designed by Kate Mackintosh when she was only 26 and employed by Southwark Council.
The nineteenth-century history of this now-famous medical institution includes stories of cancers cured with "animal magnetism"
In this Placecloud essay, I take listeners to Battersea Park, a name synonymous with the rescue of cats and dogs. Between the Old English Garden and the bank of the River Thames, there is a statue of a dog. This statue was erected in the park in 1985, commissioned by British anti-vivisection groups, but to meet the dog it depicts, we have to look back over a century. This essay, and the dog it is about, explore Britain as a nation of animal lovers and shows how urban space can become a landscape where we fight for others, including other animals.
Built in 1925, the crematory at Alto de São João Cemetery represented a new, secular way of disposing of the dead.
Established in 1717, the British Cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Lisbon, preceding other cemeteries in the city by over 100 years.
The Victorian designer, writer, and Socialist William Morris didn't love London, but he did love his home here on the Hammersmith Embankment.
St Patrick's Hall was home to the first Legislative Assembly in Victoria, but it also has an important role in the story of Irish community life in Melbourne.
The Middlesex Hospital was home to one of the world's first dedicated cancer wards and hosted the nineteenth-century surgeon Charles Bell.
Elephants, big cats, monkeys and everything in between all packed into a first-floor petting zoo. What could go wrong? Lots, it turned out, but not before Exeter Change became one of Georgian London’s most famous attractions introducing thousands of people to exotic beasts from around the world for the very first time.
Before The National Gallery, a gigantic Georgian stable complex stood here, tending to the needs of over 200 royal horses and housing dozens of workers. The King’s Mews was at the heart of one of the biggest urban horse populations in the world and an equestrian craze that gripped an entire nation.
Two strips of land running either side of the Turnmill Brook between Farringdon and Clerkenwell provided an ideal spot to fatten pigs in the 18th century. Some considered them a filthy nuisance, others valuable recycling machines. This place takes us to the heart of that conflict. Wellies recommended.
Too often overlooked as an industrial pilgrimage site, it was here that muscle power, horse and human, combined with steam to propel beer into the modern age.
It was this building that gave its name to the charity set up in the 1915 to provide rehabilitation, training and lifelong support to those who lost their sight in war.
After the First World War, the blinded veterans charity St Dunstan's opened a shop on Regent Street to sell the craft items the men had been trained to make in their workshops.
This viewpoint looks at the historic Marshall Street Baths and its role in hosting international swimming galas during the Second World War.
This viewpoint explores the history of Thames FC, a professional football club that existed for just four years.
New Cross Stadium hosted speedway and greyhound racing and stood at the heart of sporting life south of the Thames for many years.
This viewpoint explores the role of the Freemasons' Tavern in the foundation of the Football Association and the so-called 'birth' of association football.
This viewpoint examines the history of one of London's best known sporting venues during the Second World War through eye-witness accounts.
A dance from Playford's Dancing Master (1698) thought to have been named after the Red Bull Playhouse, an inn-yard theatre, built in 1605 in what is now Haywood's Place. During the early part of the 17th Century, the theatre was used by the Queen's Men, and their performances rivalled those at the Globe and the Fortune. During the Civil War and Interregnum, when other theatres were closed or destroyed, the Red Bull remained open, offering illicit performances of jigs, drolls, rope-dancing and much more. It was demolished during the early years of the Restoration, but its location, Red Bull Yard could still be seen on Ogilby’s map a few years later.
The Red Bull dance doesn’t appear in the Dancing Master until 1698, but the melody is thought to date from c1619.
Maiden Lane - a "country dance" from John Playford's English Dancing Master, 1651.
The dance and its melody is thought to be named after Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, and it is just one of a great number of dances called for London places.
Situated between the Covent Garden Market and the Strand, Maiden Lane was originally a path running from Drury Lane to St Martin's Lane along the southern edge of the ‘Covent Garden’: that is, the Convent Garden, belonging to the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey, and providing produce for their table. The street was first called Maiden Lane in 1636.
A statue of the Virgin stood at the Eastern end of the lane, and this may be the origin of the name Maiden Lane. Another explanation is that it is a corruption of the Middle-English word ‘Midden'.
Famous residents over the centuries include Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli, Voltaire and the artist J.M.W. Turner. Edward VII and Lily Langtry dined in Maiden Lane and William Terriss, a celebrated actor of his day was murdered here by a crazed understudy in 1897.
Eleanor Cramer: bass viol Christopher Goodwin: cittern Peter Kenny: drum Tamsin Lewis: violin
Brick Lane, in the heart of the East End of London, is often considered one of the most famous locations in the UK for graffiti and street art. Whilst international street artists aspire to paint on Brick Lane, it is kept fresh by local artists who change the graffiti on a weekly basis. Works can be found by famous street artists from around the world, including Phlegm, Ben Eine, Banksy, Noriaki, C215, ROA, Vhils and Shepard Fairey, to name just a few. One of the most popular works of street art in the area is that of ‘A Couple Hold Hands in the Street’ on Princelet Street by local artist Stik. The piece, created in 2010, shows a woman in a niqab holding hands with a second stick figure and was voted the nation’s 17th favourite artwork in a poll in 2017. One of the other long-standing pieces in the area is The Crane on Hanbury street which was created by Belgian street artist, ROA. The work was originally intended to be a heron but was changed to a crane after ROA learnt that they were sacred to the Bengali community, who make up a significant portion of the local population.
A variety of graffiti marks can be found across Hampton Court Palace, the Grade I listed royal palace located in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames. Historical graffiti at the site includes marks left on the King’s Staircase including dates, names, initials and even an engraving of a shoe! Further graffiti marks can also be found in the Cumberland Suits (including marks from the 1730s, 1880s and 1980s), in the Tudor Kitchens and in the Processional Gallery (also known as the ‘Haunted Gallery). The marks left behind on the royal palace give a further glimpse into the lives of those that worked and lived in the palace across centuries of its history.
For about twenty years, not a single pint was been pulled in The Lord Napier pub, located near to the Hackney Wick overground station. The pub was licensed in 1868 under the name The White’s Arms and was then advertised for sale, whereupon its news owners changed its name to The Lord Napier. During the twentieth century, the pub appeared in the local and national news as the site of numerous robberies and assaults. After its closure in 1995, the former pub attracted squat parties, became known as a destination for illegal raves in the early 2000s and began to be covered in graffiti. In 2016, artist Aida Wilde commissioned 29 local street artists as part of a 48-hour takeover of the building as a ‘symbol of protest against [the] gentrification’ which was happening in the local area. The pub has been attracting tourists to its ever changing exterior ever since it was reimagined with its iconic graffiti makeover. After attracting new ownership, the pub is expected to go through an extensive programme of refurbishment.
Leake Street Graffiti Tunnel, found underneath the platforms and tracks of Waterloo Station, is London’s largest legal graffiti wall at 300-metres in length. The site gained fame after famed British street artist, Banksy, held a street art festival called Cans Festival (a play on The Cannes Film Festival) in the tunnel. Banksy had recognised the potential of the tunnel which had formerly been used as an access road for taxis to pick up passengers from the Eurostar. From the 3rd-5th May 2008, forty street artists from around the world - including Blek le Rat, Ben Eine, Sten & Lex and Vexta - transformed the grimy tunnel into a street art haven. Graffiti and street art are legally permitted in the tunnel meaning that artists can create works without fear of getting arrested by police. This ever-changing gallery now attracts street art tourists and graffiti enthusiasts from around the world and arches adjacent to the tunnel were recently transformed into bars and restaurants. The site was even home to a temporary cinema, The Lambeth Palace, to celebrate the release of Banksy’s documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop in 2010.
The Southbank Undercroft is a space under the Queen Elizabeth Hall of the Southbank Centre that has been a very popular with skateboarders and graffiti artists for over four decades. The Undercroft was completed in the 1960s and became popular with skateboarders in the 1970s. Over the years it has been covered and re-covered in graffiti and contains work created by thousands of artists over the years. The history of the Undercroft was made famous by Winston Whitter’s documentary Rollin Through the Decades (2005) which focused on the history of UK skateboarding from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. In 2013, the planned redevelopment of the area endangered the Undercroft but skaters and local enthusiasts campaigned and fought to safeguard the site, through the non-profit organisation Long Live Southbank (LLSB), and won.
Trellick Tower is a Grade II* listed tower block on Cheltenham Estate in Kensal Green which was designed in a Brutalist style by architect Ernö Goldfinger and opened in 1972. The base of the tower is renowned as a centre for urban arts and is another example of one of London’s legal ‘Graffiti Halls of Fame’, where graffiti artists can paint without the risk of arrest and, consequently, have a safe space to hone their skills. In the Autumn of 2020, it was revealed that the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea council were taking steps to implement a new development onto the grounds of the Trellick Tower which would leave the graffiti hall of fame at risk of destruction. In response to the plans, Anna Gudbrands created a documentary film, ‘Trellick: The Writing is on The Wall’ highlighting the importance of both the tower and the Graffiti Hall of Fame.
The Tower of London is home to some of the most well-known historic graffiti in the city, and many of the marks are located in the Beauchamp Tower. The Beauchamp Tower was built between 1275-1281 during the reign of King Edward I and was later used as a state prison, housing high-ranking prisoners including Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley. This former prison contains over three-hundred graffiti inscriptions which were created over four centuries by the imprisoned inhabitants to help alleviate their boredom during their confinement and so that they could make sure that they would be remembered.
IWA Southall had been running a pioneering welfare service from Southall Community Centre before they opened their welfare centre here in 1962.
The arch still standing here marks the site of the first housing estate of the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, a pioneering social housing project set up by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in the 1880s.
In 1864, the first families moved in to these Peabody Buildings, the first of the housing projects funded by the American banker George Peabody.
This Grade II listed arts and crafts building is still home to Toynbee Hall, one of the world's first university settlements.
From October 1739 until June 2020 there was a statue of the philanthropist after whom the hospital is named at the centre of this Georgian courtyard. So why did it become a point of controversy?
Where today we find Chanel, between 1964 and 1970 we would have found the first Christian Aid shop. This was not, however, quite like the charity shops so familiar to us now.
Between 1870 and the end of the 1930s, this was the site of the first known fundraising shop in London's history. It was, however, rather different from the charity shops we know today.
Originally one of the main Roman roads of Londinium this main city street was inhabited during the medieval period by many immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy and in time hosted many early coffee houses, the Post Office and eventually became famous as a centre for banking.
In medieval times, Eastcheap was the main meat market in the City of London, with butchers' stalls lining both sides. It was also the location of Falstaff's Boar's Head Inn, featured in Shakespeare's plays and the home to Nehemiah Wallington, the woodturner whose notebooks reveal a great deal about life in the seventeenth-century city.
This battle took place in November 1642 near the village of Turnham Green in the first few months of the English Civil War. The Parliamentary army, along with many ordinary Londoners rallied to prevent the forces of King Charles I take the city in an important strategic victory.
Cheapside takes its name from ‘chepe’, a Saxon word for a market and was a main thoroughfare of London for much of the city’s history possibly from the time of Alfred the Great. In this street was seen trade of all kinds. Eventually it became an avenue for royal processions, such was its importance.
This tavern in Lothbury was once a headquarters of the Levellers, radicals who during the English civil who proposed changes to the political and legal systems in what are today seen as early calls for democracy.
From the early sixteenth centuries the area around St Pauls Cathedral including the famous Paternoster Row, were the centre of publishing trade in England. Printers and booksellers working from shops here spread ideas and information across the country.
The north-east corner of St Paul’s Churchyard was from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries a space where people came to gather and hear sermons preached from an open-air pulpit. During the fierce debates of the Reformation it was on the frontline of a vicious war of words.
Coleman Street during the civil wars of the seventeenth century became home to religious and political firebrands, a hotbed of radical ideas during a period when the world was turned upside down.
From the early sixteenth centuries the area around St Pauls Cathedral including the famous Paternoster Row, were the centre of publishing trade in England. Printers and booksellers working from shops here spread ideas and information across the country.
The Stockwell Park Graffiti Pen, known as ‘The Pen’ and the ‘Stockwell Hall of Fame’, is another legal graffiti site in London. It was originally built in the 1950s to be used by children from the estate to play sports but attracted graffiti and later became known as a legal graffiti site. It has been used as a graffiti pen for over forty years and can be found in the sunken basketball courts of Stockwell Park Estate on Aytoun Road. Over the years it became a space for graffiti writers and artists to create pieces, eventually becoming a destination site for some of the best graffiti and street art in the capital. The site was transformed in 2019 as part of a £200 million refurbishment of the Stockwell Park Estate by Network Homes and it was designed in consultation with local residents, graffiti artists and architects to provide a space to showcase the ever-changing graffiti artwork and to create interior wall spaces which would allow artists to continue working.
Stockwell War Memorial Mural can be found near to the First World War memorial and just outside the entrance to Stockwell tube station. The work was created as part of a community art project led by muralist Brian Barnes and artist Myra Harris, and was painted between 1999 and 2001. Many of the images depicted in the mural link to the history of Stockwell and stories from the local area.
Wellclose Prison, also known as Neptune Street Prison, was located off Wellclose Square near to the Tower of London. The 18th-century small prison was run on a commercial basis and the majority of inmates were insolvent debtors who were either imprisoned until they could repay their debts or were awaiting transfer to Newgate Prison. The prison was below a public tavern which was connected to a courthouse, where the tavern’s landlord acted as gaoler. By the 1790s, the prison was empty and in a state of disrepair. The prison was finally closed in the 19th century and the building it was housed within was turned into a lodging house. When the building was demolished in 1911, two cells from the prison were dismantled and transferred to the London Museum at Kensington Palace and elements of both cells can now be found on display in the Museum of London. Prisoners in the cells were known to scratch and carve their names and initials or write messages or draw pictures onto the walls of the cells and many of these marks can still be seen today.
St Augustine’s Tower is the oldest building in Hackney and can be found in the gardens of St John’s Church. This Grade I listed tower is managed by the Hackney Historic Buildings Trust and is usually open on the last Sunday of each month. A church was built on the site in the 12th century and then rebuilt in the 16th century. The church became redundant following the completion of the Church of St-John-at-Hackney in 1792 and the tower is all that remains of the 16th-century church following the demolition of the rest of the building in 1798. Although the tower was also due to be demolished it was kept in order to house the church bells until they could be moved to their new location. It is also reported that the tower stayed after the contractor employed to demolish it found it to be too difficult of a job. After climbing the narrow staircase to the top of the tower, visitors are treated to a view of the City of London whilst a variety of graffiti can be found throughout, including marks left by those visiting the tower in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and drawings of houses.
The Dulwich Outdoor Gallery is a unique London street art project which was started by the late Ingrid Beazley, art museum curator and art educator, in collaboration with the street artist Stik. In 2011, Beazley invited Stik to the Dulwich Picture Gallery, where she worked in the education department, and they decided to create a project that would try to break the barriers between urban art and street art. Stik subsequently created six murals at various locations in Dulwich re-imagining the art from the permanent collection of Baroque Old Masters in the gallery. Beazley and Stik later organised the Baroque Streets festival in 2013 where street artists from around the world were invited to choose a painting from the gallery collection and interpret it in their own style on one of the chosen walls near the gallery, recreating the Old Masters on the streets. Beazley and Stik hoped that the project would bring the collection of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest art museum in England, to a wider audience whilst also introducing those unfamiliar with urban art to the street art genre.
During the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the peasants gathered on Blackheath to hear sermons from John Ball, before attacking London.
The Dominican monks, colloquially called the Blackfriars because of their black habits, had an impressive monastery after which this area of London is named. After intense involvement in Henry VIII's love life, they were dissolved along with all of England's other orders.
The oldest extant guildhall London belongs to the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. Originally a part of the Grocers' Guild they split off to form their own society as ideas about medicine changed.
41 Cloth Fair is the oldest extant house in the city of London. Find out how it managed to survive the great fire of London because of its location, and tells us a lot about home life in early modern and medieval London.
Following a rise of piracy from the fifteenth century, those pirates captured were hung at the Execution Dock, and then had their bodies displayed as a warning at Blackwall Point.
No one knows exactly where the London Stone came from, but in the medieval and early modern periods it was an important symbolic place, as well as a way of marking out addresses in the city.
After the bubonic plague became endemic in Europe, Londoners came up with ways to protect their community against infection, such as the Pesthouse.
When London Bridge was the only available way of crossing the river, a thriving trade of ferrymen existed, to take revellers back and forth across the Thames to the red light district of Southwark.
The oldest extant church in the City of London, St Helen's Bishopsgate was part of a dense network of parishes aimed at serving the medieval Christian community.
Once built into the site of the original London Bridge, St Magnus the Martyr has had more than one St Magnus as it's patron saint because of changing interests in history.
The George is a seventeenth-century coaching inn that stands near the site of the old Tabard Inn, where the Canterbury Tales begins. Travel back and forth between London and Canterbury happened for religious reason as well as pleasure.
The Old Jewry was the centre of Jewish life in medieval London. Almost all trace of the Great Synagogue and the buildings here was lost after the Edict of Expulsion in 1290.
Under a railway bridge on Salmon Lane in the Limehouse area of East London is an inconspicuous piece of graffiti left in large white letters, ‘G. DAVIES IS INNOCENT’. The graffiti is one of the few remaining pieces painted in the 1970s as part of a grassroots public campaign to have George Davis freed from prison. In 1974, Davis was sentenced to twenty years in prison for the robbery of the London Electricity Board in Ilford. After family and friends raised questions about the evidence used to convict Davis, the phrase ‘George Davis Is Innocent OK’ began appearing all over East London and the rest of the country. The campaign paid off and in May 1976 Davis was released under the royal prerogative on the advice of the then home secretary, Roy Jenkins. However, only 18-months later, Davis was caught robbing the bank of Cyprus in Holloway and pleaded guilty to his involvement in this armed bank raid.
On New Inn Broadway in Shoreditch you can find a mural paying homage to two of Shakespeare’s most famous characters, Romeo and Juliet, located near to the site where it is believed that the play was first performed. In 2018, a team of archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) excavated the site of Shakespeare’s playhouse, 'The Theatre', building on evidence uncovered in their 2008 excavations. The street art piece on the outside of the building depicts the tragic romance of Romeo and Juliet in a fresco-style mural and was created by the Global Street Art Agency.
Charles Holden’s mini masterpiece, a marriage of Scandinavian modernism and British Arts and Crafts.
Factories of the Great West Road, Brentford. The “Golden Mile”, featuring fantastical art deco factories by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners and others.
The Warren Estate, Stanmore. A well preserved group of modernist houses at the end of the Jubilee line in Stanmore, the definition of modernism in metro-land.
Lady Bankes School, Ruislip. The best work of the pioneering Middlesex County Council architect department, using Dutch-inspired modernist design.
Walthamstow Town Hall. A grandiose civic centre, proclaiming the confidence of the new Municipal Boroughs and District Councils of the 1930s.
Stockwell Bus Garage. The cathedral of bus garages, designed by Adie, Button and Partners in 1952 to accommodate 200 buses under soaring concrete.
The Isokon Building, Belsize Park. A machine for living in, designed by Wells Coates and home to a host of artists, designers and writers.
St Pauls, Bow Common. East end, brutalist-style church by Maguire and Murray, voted by Britain's best modern church in 2013.
Balfron Tower, Poplar. The centerpiece of the Brownfield Estate, designed by Erno Goldfinger, and lightning rod in the debate over social housing and gentrification.
Crystal Palace National Recreation Centre. Sports complex featuring an athletics stadium, swimming pools, squash courts and an outdoor music venue.
Daily Express Building, Fleet Street. Owen Williams sleek 1932 headquarters for the Daily Express, the future straight from the past.
Former home of notorious black magician, Aleister Crowley, the "wickedest man in the world".
Live music has been played at this location since 1942, and as the 100 Club since 1964. This viewpoint jumps into one of the venue’s most iconic periods and explores its association with punk music and fashion in the 1970s.
Trafalgar Square has long been a site of marching and protest. This viewpoint takes us to one such moment in the square’s history: the Freedom to Party campaign rally on January 27th 1990.
This viewpoint outlines the gambling culture of White's Coffeehouse and details some of the men you'd expect to find in an establishment like White's
This viewpoint details the history of Lloyds Coffeehouse and it's connections to eighteenth-century maritime trade and global expansion
This viewpoint is going to introduce you to Long-Acre's coach making industries and the famous eighteenth-century coachmaker John Hatchett
Learn about the history of Jewish people in Mile End from the seventeenth to twentieth century
This viewpoint guides you through the architectural history of Trafalgar Square and of the National Gallery - and its criticism by architectural commentators.
This viewpoint guides you through some of the architectural history of the naval hospital at Greenwich
This viewpoint will uncover how modernist animal housing was used as a prototype for bold new homes for British citizens, under the guidance of Julian Huxley and other visionaries.
In this viewpoint, Bevin Court – originally to be called Lenin Court – offers a lens for understanding how architectural modernism went from a movement associated with communist architects from abroad to a symbol of the British welfare state.
This viewpoint will explore architect Ernő Goldfinger’s integration into contemporary British literary circles – far beyond his (frequently misreported) connection to Ian Fleming’s famous villain – and will use 2 Willow Road’s status as a National Trust property to consider how a once-iconoclastic modernism has been reclaimed as national heritage.
This viewpoint will reveal how Senate House, notable for the “strangely semi-traditional, undecided modernism” that puzzled Pevsner, provided inspiration for George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The rowdy and disorderly funeral of Richard Russell in 1784. Russell was a local magistrate whose funeral was disrupted by the noise and behaviour of a large, enthusiastic crowd.
Not all people at funerals were there to mourn. In this account we discover what happened when a member of the funeral crowd was found to be stealing from the pockets of those around him.
The undertaker and coffin maker Barnard Feay lived and worked nearby. His premises are long gone but what remains of his business?
Francis Lydia took some ostrich feathers from undertaker John White and was convicted for his crime. How did Lydia take the feathers and what would an undertaker do with them?
Funeral spectators were expected to be mournful and well behaved – Jenkin Evans had other ideas.
The porters were an important but criticised part of life in London’s trading community as they distributed messages between individuals. Hear about the arrangements that porters made for the death of a member.
The story of Philip Baron, an undertaker who was robbed near the watch house in Holborn.
Describing a grand funeral conducted by the Company of Upholders – including the room where the dead man rested at Exeter Change and the organisation of his long journey back home for burial.
William Romaine’s funeral drew a large but peaceful crowd. The spectacular procession to Blackfriars involved many spectators, charity recipients and marshals from the City of London.
Discover Marx’s political activities and impoverished existence and suffering in London's Soho
The story of how coffee of arrived in London, not from Italy or America, but from the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century. It tasted bitter, but also of Islam and the East. This is how England learnt to love the 'wine of Islam' and the 'Vertue[s] of the Coffee Drink'.
A weird tunnel beneath Charing Cross station traces the edge of what was once London’s riverside embankment, a waterfront that witnessed the arrival of Viking raiding fleets.
The church of St Alfege was built on the site of the martyrdom of St Ælfheah: the archbishop of Canterbury who, having been kidnapped by Vikings and taken to their camp at Greenwich, was battered to death with animal bones…
St Paul’s was the heart of early London. It was the burial place of King Ethelred (‘the ill-advised’) and also of unfortunate Archbishop Ælfheah whose body was stolen from its tomb by King Cnut The graveyard was once home to the London runestone, a rare monument to a member of London’s Viking elite.
London's walls may have been built by the Romans, but when the Vikings encountered them in the tenth and eleventh centuries 'they suffered', as the anonymous Anglo-Saxon chronicler put it, 'more harm and injury than they ever imagined that any town-dwellers would do to them’.
Queenhithe is the only surviving section of the City of London’s ancient riverfront: excavations from here and neighbouring Bull Wharf have revealed evidence of London’s early medieval role in international trade – including the largest concentration of Viking artefacts in Britain outside York.
Excavations beneath the Royal Opera House have revealed stunning evidence of early London, both the homes and workshops of the inhabitants and also the defensive ditches that may have been built to protect against Viking attacks before the area was abandoned.
Although it was Edward the Confessor who is most associated with Westminster abbey, the first king of England to be buried there was Harold I ‘Harefoot’, the son of King Cnut. He didn't rest there for long...
St Olaf House stands on the site of an ancient church dedicated to St Olaf. It once stood at the southern end of old London Bridge - a bridge that may have been torn down by a Viking fleet: a fleet commanded by the very same Olaf...
The Church of St Olave on Hart Street is one of London's oldest medieval churches. Known to Dickens as 'Saint Ghastly Grim' and dedicated to a notorious Norwegian king, its likely origins lie in the Viking Age.
Before Devonshire House was the headquarters of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain from 1794 until 1925, it was a large house called Fisher's Folly.
The Gravel Pit Chapel was home to a radical religious congregation, now buried in a walled-off graveyard in Hackney.
Waltham Abbey was the first official Quaker school for boys, established by George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, in 1668.
Shacklewell was the first official Quaker school for girls, established by George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, in 1668.
Before there was St John-at-Hackney, there was St Augustine's Church, which was Hackney's parish church from 1275 to 1789.
In the 17th century, the Salmon school was one of the biggest and most renowned girls' schools in the London area and the country. The school taught girls from middling and elite families for approximately 40 years.
Palestine Place was the nineteenth-century headquarters of the London Jews Society, an Anglican missionary society that worked to demonstrate the value of Christianity to Jewish populations.
Bunhill Fields was the burial ground for more than 123,000 nonconformists in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries.
The Bull and Mouth was an important coaching inn in the 17th through 19th century. This viewpoint focuses on the inn's importance to the growth of 17th-century London Quakerism.
In the 17th century, the Perwich school was one of the biggest and most renowned girls' schools in the London area and the country. The school taught girls from middling and elite families how to be accomplished and successful wives, mothers, and women in their own right.
This viewpoint focusses on a toilet tower (a series of bathrooms stacked in the shape of a helix), built as part of scheme to transform four Victorian terraced houses into student housing in Paddington, London, in the late-1960s. More specifically, how architects Nicholas Grimshaw and Terry Farrell promoted plastics in architecture on aesthetic grounds in a way which has ultimately proved to be unsustainable.
In this viewpoint, I tell the story of Terry Farrell & Partners' TV-AM building (1981-83), a maverick television studios near Camden Lock. The TV-AM building, which - as the name suggests - was home to one Britain's first breakfast television programmes, is associated with the architectural style of postmodernism and with colour in architecture and interior design. The building was substantially refurbished by architects Jacobs Webber in 2012-13 and is now home to Viacom International.
The Barbican Redevelopment Scheme, comprising the Barbican Estate, Barbican Arts Centre and the office buildings around London Wall and Moorgate, is well known to people with an affection for twentieth-century architecture, and has become major cultural centre in its own right. Nevertheless, very few people are aware of how a type of plastic manufactured in rural Kent quietly revolutionised the design and construction of modern office building, in particular the curtain-walling systems that enabled open-plan offices. In the first of two viewpoints on the New Barbican, Alexander Davidson tells a story encompassing two office buildings built as part of the Barbican Redevelopment Scheme – Lee House and St Alphage House - and how the plastic Holoplast was manufactured, used in construction, and eventually came to be demonised by the City of London Corporation.
The Barbican Redevelopment Scheme, comprising the Barbican Estate, Barbican Arts Centre and the office buildings around London Wall and Moorgate, is well known to people with an affection for twentieth-century architecture, and has become major cultural centre in its own right. Nevertheless, very few people are aware of how a type of plastic manufactured in rural Kent quietly revolutionised the design and construction of modern office building, in particular the curtain-walling systems that enabled open-plan offices. In the second of two viewpoints on the New Barbican, Alexander Davidson tells a story encompassing two office buildings built as part of the Barbican Redevelopment Scheme – Lee House and St Alphage House - and how the plastic Holoplast was manufactured, used in construction, and eventually came to be demonised by the City of London Corporation.
This viewpoint focusses on a futuristic vision for plastics in architecture and interior design: Alison and Peter Smithson‘s House of the Future, which was shown at the Daily Mail Ideal Home Show at the London Olympia Exhibition Centre in 1956. The exhibition structure, containing everything from chairs made of fibreglass to bedding fashioned out of Nylon, popularised an aesthetic for the materials’ use in architectural and visual design which has lasted until the present day.
The viewpoint deals with four Greater London Council housing blocks - two in Tower Hamlets and a second pair in Westminster, where the architects employed an experimental plastics building system in their design and construction. More latterly, the buildings were involved in the "Homes for Votes" scandal in the 1980s, which has received renewed attention in the light of the Grenfell Tower disaster.
This viewpoint deals with BedZED, the most notable mixed-use sustainable community to be developed in London over the last twenty years. Develped by Bioregional and the Peabody Trust to designs by Bill Dunster Architects, BedZED was subject to significant media attention upon its completion in 2002 and no shortage of controversy. In this viewpoint, I argue that rather than being seen as good or bad, the scheme should be seen as an indication of how much our expectations regarding sustainabilty have changed over the last two decades.
In this viewpoint, I tell the story of the BBC's headquarters, its design by Val Myer and FJ Watson Hart and its magnificent recording studios. The story features angry local residents, neo-Art Deco facades, and a type of early plastic made of formaldehyde resin.
The court performances of the early seventeenth century presented an image of perfect political harmony; but backstage the reality was very different.
For more than 800 years, in frosty weather the frozen Thames played host to spectacular festivals.
For Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway the clocks of Big Ben and St Margaret’s, Westminster do more than just tell the time.
Flames are racing towards your house: what do you save? In 1666, Samuel Pepys prioritised his cheese.
From a mechanical garden to an automatic tea-table, in the late eighteenth century you were bound to find something extraordinary at Merlin’s Museum of Mechanical Amusements.
The unique Tudor House on 23 West Heath Road - known as Sarum Chase - was beloved by director Andy Milligan who used it in his 1970s cult horror films. Listen to hear about the different horrific families he placed here and how his films impacted London's occult history.
Lewisham Art House was once the Deptford Library, home to a brooding vampire in 1992 romantic horror "Tale of a Vampire"
Hammersmith Bridge appears in a handful of horror films, but truly stands out in Roman Polansky's 1965 "Repulsion" and the unusual 1967 horror "It!" or "Curse of the Golem".
The beautiful suburban home is overtaken by living nightmares in 1988 horror "Dream Demon". Listen to hear more about the punk-inspired film starring Timothy Spall (Harry Potter FIlms, Turner) and Kathleen Wilhoite (Gilmore Girls)
The elegant flats off Regents Park are home to a sinister nanny and maid played by Bette Davis in "The Nanny". Listen to this viewpoint to hear about this lesser-known of Davis' horror films which inspired a generation of evil babysitters, nannies and caretakers.
One of the big seven cemeteries, Kensal Green Cemetery has been an inspiration to horror directors. The gothic and historic location is the backdrop to brutal murder in "Theatre of Blood" (1972), a solemn memorial in "Secret Ceremony" (1968) and the power of a Mummy in "The Awakening" (1980)
This stunning church is visited by Elisabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow in the surreal horror "Secret Ceremony".
This suburban house in Cricklewood was home to interdimensional demons including Pinhead in the 1987 cult horror Hellraiser. Listen for more details on why this was the perfect spot for a very political horror film.
The former Dolphin Square Baths, now simply the entrance to Dolphin Square, makes an appearance in the 1967 psychological horror "The Sorcerers" starring Boris Karloff, Ian Ogilvy and Catherine Lacey.
By Rosamund Lily West. In 1962, the LCC installed 'The Dockers' by Sydney Harpley on the Lansbury estate in Poplar. Today, the sculpture is not there, it's just an empty plinth. This viewpoint looks at why the LCC chose the subject of dockers and how the collapse of the industry in the area is linked to the vandalisation, and subsequent removal, of the sculpture.
By Rosamund Lily West. The sculpture, 'The Lesson', by Franta Belsky, was installed on the Avebury estate in Bethnal Green in 1959 by the London County Council.
By Rosamund Lily West. This viewpoint looks at the earliest of Peter Laszlo Peri’s Lambeth murals, ‘Following the Leader (Memorial to the Children Killed in the Blitz)’. Dating to 1949, it was installed on the stairwell of Darley House on the Vauxhall Gardens estate.
By Rosamund Lily West. After the Second World War, Hungarian artist Peter Laszlo Peri approached the LCC with the idea of depicting scenes of family life to ‘brighten up’ the facades of new LCC housing in Lambeth. ‘Boys Playing Football’, dates to between 1951 and 1952 and was installed on the South Lambeth estate.
By Rosamund Lily West. The sculptural mural, 'Pied Piper', by Willi Soukop, was installed on the Elmington estate in Camberwell in 1959 by the London County Council. This viewpoint looks at the theme of the Pied Piper and how the LCC wanted the mural to resonate with residents, in particular, children.
By Rosamund Lily West. Elisabeth Frink’s Blind Beggar and his Dog’ was installed in 1963 outside the bungalows built for the elderly on Bethnal Green’s Cranbrook estate. This viewpoint looks at the significance of the blind beggar for the early residents of the Cranbrook estate and the old Metropolitan Borough of Bethnal Green.
By Rosamund Lily West. After the Second World War, Hungarian artist Peter Laszlo Peri approached the LCC with the idea of depicting scenes of family life to ‘brighten up’ the facades of new LCC housing in Lambeth. ‘Mother and Children Playing’ dates to between 1951 and ‘52 and was installed on the stairwell of Horton House on the South Lambeth estate.
In 1500 St Pauls Cathedral was a great bastion of medieval Catholocism but over the next 150 years the Protestant Reformation and successive natural disasters changed it beyond recognition until in 1666 it was destroyed in the Great Fire. This is the story of a Cathedral and of England during some of the most tumultuous years in their history.
The parish and burial grounds of St Olave, Silvers Street and the individuals that were interred there.
Today the site of one of London’s most notorious prisons is occupied by the Mount Pleasant office. During the years Coldbath Fields Prison operated, it had a reputation for severity. This viewpoint will take a look at the history of Coldbath and explore the stories behind the reputation.
This viewpoint will touch on the history of Gatehouse and what lies in its place today.
Marshalsea was known for its imprisonment of the poorest of London’s debtors and became particularly well known through the work of Charles Dickens. Today, we can still see the two gate arches and original brick wall in Southwark, London.
The original building of Birdewell, London’s first house of correction, was largely destroyed in the great fire of London. However, original architecture can be found at the entrance to an otherwise unassuming Unilever building on new bridge street.
Constructed using convict labour, HMP Wormwood Scrubs was opened in 1891 and is still operational today. This viewpoint will explore the building of Woodworm and how it obtained its rather unusual name.
HMP Holloway has a rich feminist history and connection to the suffragettes. This viewpoint will touch on the feminist history of the prison and the current use and future of the site.
Although never officially a prison, the Tower of London has held hundreds of London’s most dangerous prisoners. Like the story of the Tower itself, its role as prison is a varied one.
Newington Gardens offers a pleasant afternoon stroll in Southwark, however, the park has a long history. Between the years 1791 and 1799, Horsemonger lane goal – one of Southwark’s biggest prisons - operated on this site.
The Tate Gallery in London stands in the same spot where Millbank prison once was. It is rumoured the red bricks were taken from the old prison and repurposed in the building of the Tate Gallery.
This viewpoint will trace the history of one of London’s oldest prisons, Brixton. HMP Brixton has a 200-year history and is still operational today. The prison has functioned as a local prison, a female convict prison and a military prison and in use today as a men’s prison.
Where multiple houses stand today on Burlington Road, one or two of the prison buildings once used for Fulham’s women’s convict prison still stand
The original wall of Newgate Prison can still be seen here behind the Amen Court of the Old Bailey. This viewpoint takes a look at some of the early prison architecture in London.
Once described as the most desirable place to be imprisoned in London, King’s Bench Prison is most known for its literary connections and long list of notable prisoners.
Clink prison dates back to 1144, making it one of England’s oldest prisons. On the site now lies the Clink Prison Museum, with a collection of original artefacts.
Beneath a block of flats in London lies the Clerkenwell catacombs, boasting 9000sq ft of vaults. This viewpoint will explore the history of Clerkenwell Prison, most well-known for the attempted escape of Ricard O’Sullivan Burke.
Brockwell Park was home to Rock Against Racism's Second Carnival Against the Nazis. It brought together the likes of Elvis Costello, ASWAD, and Stiff Little Fingers in a musical triumph with a few notable logistical problems.
Billy Walker's Upper Cut Club was an East London hot spot for a brief but glorious run. It served as an important site for inter-racial encounters, but it did little to eliminate racial tensions in Forest Gate.
This converted religious site provides an interesting window into the changing culture of Notting Hill in the contemporary period.
This viewpoint uses the Carnival Against the Nazis in Victoria Park as an avenue to explore the birth of the Rock Against Racism movement.
The Academy in Brixton is one of London's most successful music venues. It's rise to prominence was anything but pre-ordained though. Listen here to find out about the Academy and the role of Brixton in the venue's success.
The Hammersmith Palais lasted nearly a century as a top spot for nighttime fun. Nights at the Palais reflected the ever-changing demographic makeup of West London and led to cross-cultural interactions of many varieties.
Ridiculed by labyrinth historians and enthusiasts, Hampton Court Maze has become crucial to behavioural psychology and AI research. [CW: animal cruelty]
Witness the most famous game of chess ever played – and discover the tragic downfall of its loser, Lionel Kieseritzky.
Join Andy Warhol at the Dorchester Hotel as he goes to the opening of his Athletes Series at the ICA; as he parties with Bob Dylan, Bianca Jagger and Jack Nicholson; and as the drug-fuelled lives of his entourage are spinning out of control. [CW: suicide attempt]
1797: from a cell in Bedlam, James Tilly Matthews believes a gang of villains are controlling politicians and nobility using the terrible Air Loom. Find out who they are and their plans for Britain's downfall. [CW: mental illness, torture]
On this spot, between brothels and drug addicts, John Spilsbury invented the first 'Dissected Puzzle'. It was intended to educate upper-class children, but it found its greatest hour in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
On March 8th, 1941, the Café de Paris – 'the safest and gayest restaurant in town' – was destroyed in the Blitz. Among the dead was one of the most important figures in Black British jazz: Ken "Snakehips" Johnson. This viewpoint includes extracts from 'Snakehips Swing' by Ken "Snakehips" Johnson and his West Indian Dance Orchestra, available on 'Black British Swing: The African Diaspora's Contribution To England's Own Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s'. [CW: war; death]
At the height of the Great Plague of London, great bonfires of rare herbs burn across the deserted city. Join Samuel Peyps in the midst of this hellish vision – a last-ditch attempt to stop the spread of disease.
Take a tour around the pyramid for the London dead. Designed by failed architect Thomas Willson, the Sepulchre – though ultimately never built – would have been as tall as the Shard, with space for five million coffins.
Take your final trip on the London Necropolis Railway, which transported coffins and mourners from the city to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Make sure to get a first-class ticket so that your body doesn't mix with those of a lower sort.
Just outside Broadgate Circle, five gigantic sheets of rusting steel have been haphazardly propped up against one other. This is Fulcrum, a sculpture by Richard Serra. Discover one of the boldest, and most controversial, artists of the twentieth century.
Rimbaud and Verlaine, two of the most influential poets in French literature, had a sadistic and dysfunctional relationship – drinking, smoking opium, staying up for days at a time, and writing some of their greatest works. [CW: domestic violence; child abuse; suicide threat; drug abuse]
On June 18th 1982, Roberto Calvi – financial advisor to the Pope – was found hanging from scaffolding underneath Blackfriars Bridge. The murder remains unsolved, and to delve into why is to dive into the confusing and corrupt world of the Vatican, the Freemasons, South American dictatorships and the Mafia. [CW: murder; suicide]
Walk back in time with prehistoric monsters, and discover how these Victorian sculptures were designed – a history which includes a cruel professional rivalry and a decadent dinner in a dinosaur's stomach. [CW: suicide]
A showpiece council estate of the London County Council opened in 1960, famous its 18-storey point blocks and a Henry Moore sculpture.
A Westminster City Council housing estate of the 1950s; winner of a Civic Trust Award in 2000 as the outstanding building scheme of the previous forty years.
An unusual, Modernist-style, council estate built by the London County Council in the late 1920s and owing a little to the grand municipal blocks being built by Red Vienna in the same era.
A small cottage estate built by Bermondsey Metropolitan Borough Council in 1928 - a monument to the ideals and reforming ambitions of Alfred and Ada Salter, Christian socialists and Labour pioneers.
A cottage estate built by the London County Council from 1911 - 'the culminating achievement of the Council's venture into garden suburb planning before the First World War'.
A 'Homes for Heroes' estate begun by the London County Council in 1919 and reckoned - with its Arts and Crafts touches and greenery and open space to be one of the Council's finest.
A Denys Lasdun Grade II-listed masterpiece, council housing designed in innovative cluster block form for Bethnal Green Metropolitan Borough Council and completed in 1959.
One of a number of distinguished housing estates created by Camden Council in the 1960s and 70s and commonly regarded as some of the finest council housing in the land, now Grade II-listed.
Discover the alley which housed the clubroom of the John Groom Watercress and Flower Girls' Christian Mission from 1866, where flower women could go for an early morning breakfast-and-bible-lesson after buying their flowers at the market.
Come on a visit to the amusement halls of the Royal Westminster Aquarium where you'll be in good company with educated dogs, ladies on bicycles, frozen flowers, and - possibly - some fish...
Discover the fields and glasshouses of the Walker farm at Ham in Richmond, a farm which exported its quality flower bulbs to Holland in the 1890s...
Follow the Great Western Railway from Penzance to Paddington with its 'perishable' trains which carried fish and flowers to market from the 1860s, transforming the landscape and fortunes of the temperate Scilly Isles.
The graffiti piece on Camden Lock Railway Bridge is considered to be the oldest surviving pieces of street art in Camden, having been created by John Bulley in 1989. Whilst working on a number of new shop signs in the area, Bulley was asked if he could come up with an idea for the Camden Lock Railway Bridge as it was about to be refurbished and repainted by British Rail. Knowing that he wanted the design to be visible from a distance and have some humour in it, Bulley used a bold typeface and photographed two men he was working with to include in his design. The resulting work features the two men who appear to be constantly painting the bridge. The work has been repainted in recent years to freshen up the paint but using the same iconic design. Having lasted for over thirty years, the piece is considered an icon of London’s oldest pieces of street art.
Although they may be easy to miss, Myddelton Passage in Clerkenwell contains a unique historical record as a series of numbers, letters and dates can be found carved into the brickwork on the left side of the passage, many of which were scratched onto the wall by officers of the London Metropolitan Police. The practice started at some point around the mid to late 19th century and continued until around the time of the First World War, with many of the carvings referring to personal collar numbers and divisions, carved by local Police Constables.
Sutton House is the oldest domestic building in Hackney and one of London’s last remaining Tudor houses, having been built in 1535 by Tudor Statesman and Secretary of State to King Henry VIII, Ralph Sadlier. Even though the house is called ‘Sutton House’, it was never the dwelling of Thomas Sutton who actually lived in the house next door. The house was originally called ‘Bryk Place’ and was rested among long open green spaces and near to the town centre of Hackney. The history of the house is complex as, over time, it has been a Tudor manor house, a Victorian school, a Men’s Institute during the First World War, a Trade Unions Office in the 1960s-70s and a punk squat in the 1980s. The house was restored in the early 1990s by the National Trust and opened to the public in 1994. In order to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the squatter’s arrival to Sutton House, the National Trust converted the Squatter’s Room to recreate how it would have looked in 1985 with the help of some of the squatters who had lived there. In the room, visitors can see some of the original graffiti art left by the squatters which includes anti-fascist, anti-Thatcher and feminist political slogans.
Described as a "den of beasts", Newgate's women were often victims of circumstance who went on to make new lives after being transported to the colonies.
When Pentonville "Model" Prison opened its doors in 1842 it was a great carceral experiment. One which turned its human guinea pigs insane spending 24 hours a day in total solitary confinement.
The laboratory of 2 Plough Court, hub for Quaker scientists and inventors, and an ancestor to today's Glaxo Smith Kline.
Known for its bad food and its worse atmosphere, the Hotel d'Italie is far from the most famous of Victorian restaurants. But in 1894 it was host to one of the most exciting literary dinners of the century - the launch party for the scandalous and decadent Yellow Book. With everyone from Aubrey Beardsley to W. B. Yeats, it was a night to remember! Listen to find out more ...
The wonderful inventions of John Joseph Merlin, immigrant, instrument maker, and socialite extraordinaire. With a poem about his inventions, to listen to while walking around Hanover Square.
Here, in 1803, was one of the first public demonstrations of high-pressure steam locomotion, by Cornish inventor Richard Trevithick, aka Captain Dick.
In the eighteenth century, Leicester House was transformed to a since-lost museum. Among its curiosities was a stuffed Hippopotamus and objects brought to Britain by the colonist Captain James Cook.
In 1791, workmen at the Tower of London discovered extensive historical graffiti left by prisoners - including the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey - centuries earlier.
Although Wellclose Square Prison is now lost to history, the wooden walls of one of the cells survive at the Museum of London and are covered in graffiti documenting the distant voices of the incarcerated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In 1786, the bon ton flocked to Privy Gardens in Whitehall to attend a vast auction of curiosities, art works and antiquities owned by the deceased Duchess of Portland
This viewpoint explains why Nelson Mandela has a bust on the South Bank and the large-scale protests and festivals held in his name.
The City of London Anti-Apartheid Group organised a continuous picket outside of South Africa's embassy in the late 1980s and ruffled the feathers of both the police and the national Anti Apartheid Movement.
In the late 1970s a group of squatters in Notting Hill declared their independence from the United Kingdom and called upon UN peacekeepers to protect them from eviction. Hear their story here.
Learn about the history and evolution of fried chicken shops in London through the lens of South London's finest.
The Astoria Picture Theatre and Dance Hall opened in 1927, quickly becoming a popular spot for socialising and dancing. The Astoria was built during the British dancing ‘boom’ of the 1910s and 1920s.
How could the launch of a theatre with the most modern, prize-winning stage machinery go so disastrously wrong?
Bentham's skeletal "auto-icon" watches students in UCL's hallways. In life Bentham believed that surveillance could make us behave better. His dream of a Panopticon penitentiary was never realised. Instead he became the first man to campaign against transportation to Australia.
Simpsons of Piccadilly. The elegant premises for Simpsons mens outfitters, designed by Joseph Emberton in Portland stone and internally arranged by Laszlo Mohloy-Nagy.
Step into a Sunday School 'Flower Show and Industrial Exhibition' from 1889 in Peckham to hear a rather disparaging newspaper report on the children's exhibits.
Discover the work of Miranda and Octavia Hill's Kyrle Society, and their mission to 'bring beauty home to the people' in the late-nineteenth century.
Discover the Spitalfields 'Home of Industry' where flowers were sent by train from the countryside to be distributed by the women of the Bible Flower Mission amongst the poor of the East End.
Join me on a visit to a working people's flower show, held in the quiet square of Dean's Yard in Westminster in 1883, to find out why window-gardening was encouraged by social reformers in the Victorian era.
What do the 'Housing of the Working Classes Act' of 1885, the Chubb Patent Lock and Safe Company, and a 'laughing jackass' have to do with one another? Find out in this short Viewpoint...
Visit the window-gardens of nineteenth century Herbrand Street to explore why an experimental flower show in 1860 was thought to be a solution for the poor living conditions of the working-class parishioners of St George's, Bloomsbury.
This viewpoint will explain how the structure’s inclusion in an ugly buildings competition brought to a head a larger “crisis of the English avant-garde,” to the lament of one prominent architectural critic.
The Ring was one of the hubs of working-class sporting life in London, encapsulating the allegiances and rivalries of sport in the capital.
In 1911 a new retailer opened up shop here. Yet this was no ordinary retailer. This was the grand new Trade Headquarters of the Salvation Army.
This is the story of the murder of Captain Joseph Johns near Devonshire Square in 1747.
The Bunhill Fields burial ground was the first freehold property to be owned by Quakers in 1661, it is now peaceful gardens.
Before Smithfield sold meat, it sold live animals and lots of them – thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs every single week – all of which had to be driven on-the-hoof through the streets of the world’s busiest city. The trade was worth a fortune but wreaked havoc.
The pioneering female doctor set up this hospital for women in the nineteenth century against fierce opposition.
By Rosamund Lily West. The sculpture, 'The Neighbours', by Siegfried Charoux, was installed on the Highbury Quadrant estate in Highbury in 1959 by the London County Council. This viewpoint looks at the choice of neighbours for this sculpture, and how the theme of neighbourliness was used by the LCC to establish the post-war Highbury Quadrant estate and its community.
John Scurr House is a renovated modernist housing block built by Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council in 1937. At the time, it was the first council scheme to be selected for display at the Ryal Academy's Annual Exhibition.
The former house of comic actor Will Hay, a star of the 1930s and a renowned amateur astronomer.
The amphitheatre, set into the slopes of Streatham Common, is a great place to sit and gaze over the towers of Croydon towards the North Downs.
An old, narrow footbridge stars in Patrick Keiller's film, Norwood, as a border – perhaps between the lands of the living and of the dead.
Along a private road behind a block of flats, the land drops away to reveal South West London all the way to the Surrey Hills, spread out before you.
A wild piece of woodland, a reminder of the dairy that was on this site for more than 150 years and Streatham Wells, where spa water was bottled and sold.
A lost church, destroyed in the Second World War, leaves a strange, triangular space and a sense that something is still missing.
A single cedar tree is the only reminder of the demolished seat of the Dukes of Bedford and the Earl of Coventry, later Britain's only Anglican convent.
If you have watched a horror film set in Victorian London, you have probably been looking at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich. It has been the imagined Baker Street for Sherlock Holmes, a bar for Victor Frankenstein and a dozen more besides. Listen to this viewpoint to discover five of the most interesting horrors filmed here.
In "28 Days Later" bike courier Jim awakens from a coma and finds himself in deserted London, beginning a walk that leads him to St. Anne's church and the horrors inside.
This unassuming corner building was once the Duke of Argyll Pub, better known as The Winchester, the pub that saved lives in "Shaun of the Dead". Starring Simon Peg and Nick Frost as two best friends faced with the zombie apocalypse, the film's stars can only think of one place to shelter from it all: The Winchester. Listen to hear more about the film and the scenes shot here.
The Arched entrance of Canary Wharf Underground appears in 3 horror films, each with its own take on the area and the underground, but the station really shines in the zombie apocalypse film "28 Weeks Later". Listen to discover which films set here and to explore a deleted scene from Boyle's iconic zombie horror.
Oval Tube Station is the setting where all characters come together in the alien comedy-horror "Attack the Block".
Grassy Blackheath Park - just north of Greenwich Park - is also the location of a voodoo exorcism in the 2004 cult horror "London Voodoo".
At low tide, timbers have been discovered in the Thames mud south of Vauxhall bridge that represent the earliest evidence of settlement in London - from the Mesolithic era, 6,000 and more years ago.
After nearly 300 years in the making, the Portuguese National Pantheon now houses the tombs of Portugal's major historic figures and celebrities.
The place of many a good night out, the Golden Cross pub in Coventry, dating back to 16th century and complete with a few ghosts!
Keeping watch over the River Corrib is the Fishery tower. Hear of its origins up to its uses in the present day, and perhaps you can pay it a visit!
In the Abbey church of St Albans, Hertfordshire, beneath the shrine of Britain's first martyr, Saint Alban, lays a tomb of a Prince of England - Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. But his tomb hides a story of intrigue, witchcraft, and treason...
From medieval ferry crossing to secret World War II operations, the waterside hamlet of Helford Passage was formerly a far busier place than it appears today.
The parish church of Mawnan in Cornwall has far older Christian foundations than its medieval architecture suggests.
Examples of the philanthropy of one man returning to his village roots in the 17th century
Once capable of making up to 20 million bricks a year they are the only steam driven brickworks left in the country.
An account of a patch of land between Fleet Street and the Thames. Now occupied residentially by judges and senior lawyers and enclosing the Inner Temple library and nearby Temple Church, the land was originally leased by the Knights Templar in the fourteenth century. Its rose garden was later - according to William Shakespeare - the place where the fifteenth century War of the Roses began.
Famous Fleet street pub dating from the sixteenth century, haunt of a gamut of literary types including Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, P. G. Wodehouse, Charles Dickens and the imaginary Hercule Poirot
St Pancras Old Churchyard has a turbulent past, from body snatching to an unexpected walrus. Memorials in the churchyard recall the invasion of the railway, which gave the writer Thomas Hardy one of his earliest, and most gruesome jobs.
One of the largest medieval public toilets stood on this site for over four centuries. Explore the turbulent history of Dick Whittington's Longhouse, founded by the famous Lord Mayor of London.
Two blue plaques, almost side-by-side in Tavistock Place, commemorate very different people. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the founder of the USSR with no sense of humour, and Jerome K Jerome, a British humourist with a sceptical take on Socialism.
Peel back the centuries on a walk down St John's Lane exploring the industrial, literary and religious histories of this street.
The story of the church of St Dunstan-in-the-East, surviving and not surviving disaster after disaster since its foundation around 1100. Expect the devil having his nose burnt, the Great Fire doing its worst, and Samuel Pepys narrowly avoiding a couple of armed rogues.
A potted history of the RAC club on Pall Mall. Housed in very grand buildings near to Buckingham Palace that were once used as the War Office, the RAC offers members an Edwardian marble swimming pool, Turkish baths, squash courts and chandeliered drawing rooms.
The Wren church where William Blake, radical English poet, painter and engraver, was Christened on Sunday 11th December 1757.
The site where radical English poet, painter and engraver, William Blake, lived with his wife Catherine for five years, and where he developed his revolutionary printmaking technique.
Where William Blake, at the age of 8, saw a vision of a tree "filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars."
The site of the workshop of the engraver James Basire, to whom visionary artist William Blake was apprenticed, 1772-1779
Frederick's Place, in the City of London, used to be called Gropecunt Lane in the medieval period due to its many brothels. As nearby Milk Street and Bread Street can attest, medieval Londoners valued pragmatism above all in their naming of streets.
The statue of the Golden Boy marks the spot where the Great Fire of London was finally stopped. It sits at the corner of Cock Lane in Smithfield, so-named because of the many brothels lining the street.
Up to 15,000 sex workers and their kin are buried here at Crossbones Churchyard in Lambeth, unhallowed ground since sex workers were designated unrepentant sinners by the Church.
A fascinating account of the rules & regulations, including financial instruments, surrounding the brothels industry in medieval Lambeth, which paid for the erection of Winchester Palace
Until the C16th, the area next to the river in Lambeth was home to the so-called Bankside Stews, a collection of bathhouses that doubled as brothels.