Caught with your trousers down!

For the last month I’ve immersed myself in all thing Soho, as I’m currently publishing an audio tour about the area ( when it’s published it will appear HERE ) As with all the tours I write you sometimes get a bit stuck in a particular part, sometimes inspiration appears and you move on, or…

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting…..stolen!

I came across a seasonal tale recently, one that Charles Dickens if he’d been alive at the time might have woven into one of his stories about the metropolis. It’s a tale with a lesson, one that warns against greed during the festive season. It also goes to show that as today Christmas to some…

Why not catch some proper criminals?

I was sitting in Fitzroy Square recently having a sandwich and playing a memory game. The square, located near to Regents Park has always been the home of some of London’s great and good and I was trying to recall who lived where. Sir Charles Eastlake, first director of the National Gallery, painter James McNeill Whistler, Bloomsbury Group artist Duncan…

Similar crimes, different outcomes

Recently I posted a picture that made me smile due to the strange use of punctuation. Overzealous use of the full stop is a picture of the entrance to Ludgate Square near to St Paul’s Cathedral and to me there seems to be an issue with carving of the name. Having explored it I found…

Den of Thieves

The title of this piece wasn’t hard to come up with, however I wasn’t sure what the source was. It actually comes from the Bible. Well in this, the Den of Thieves is known as a Patter-Free Lumber. There were many of these dotted around London, one of them was located at 23 New Boswell…

Learn to talk proper

I recently came by a fascinating old book called Passing English of the Victorian era, a dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase (published 1909) written by James Redding Ware, the pseudonym of Andrew Forrester a British writer who created one of the first female detectives in literary history in his book The Female Detective (1863). The…

The Monster Of London

There have been many violent and disturbing crimes committed in the Capital over the centuries, some single incidents, and others of a more serial nature. The latter attract much more attention, sometimes with the culprits achieving cult status. Obviously Jack the Ripper is usually the first to come to mind, along with latter-day perpetrators, John…