Catherine Howard's ghost at Hampton Court
The corridor never entirely swallows sound. A footstep begins beside a door, passes over the carpet, strikes the wooden panelling and reaches the listener a fraction later than the body…
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London
Practical guides, city routes and the author’s London research. Choose a subject, then open the complete article.
Execution Dock at Wapping: the last journey of London's pirates
First comes the silver oar. It is carried before the procession as the sign of Admiralty authority. Behind it are the cart, the condemned, officials, a minister, guards and a crowd that…
John Dee at Mortlake: court scholar, angels and a vanished library
Mortlake, Friday 16 November 1582. Five in the evening. The Thames is darkening outside John Dee's windows, while an impossible audience assembles in his study. One man watches the surface…
John Dee's black mirror at the British Museum
The circle before us is slightly smaller than a dinner plate. It weighs less than a kilogram, yet its surface contains three continents and five centuries of…
Simon Forman: Elizabethan astrologer and his secret casebooks
September 1611. A boat leaves the south bank of the Thames. Aboard is a man who has spent almost twenty years persuading Londoners that the minute in which a question is asked can reveal a…
The Templars of Temple Church: history, myth and hidden secrets
Leave Fleet Street and pass beneath a gateway. The buses recede. Stone chambers form a corridor, then a court opens and a round building appears as though it has been transported from…
Masonic London: Freemasons' Hall between ritual and mythology
On Great Queen Street, the promised secret is difficult to find. The doors are open. Visitors enter the vestibule. Aprons, jewels, snuffboxes, books and meeting records sit in public cases.…
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the house on Blythe Road
Imagine an April morning in 1900. Shops are opening on Blythe Road, omnibuses move across West London, and upstairs in an ordinary building people are disputing possession of the keys to…
Aleister Crowley's London: magician, provocateur and self-made monster
London, April 1934. At the Royal Courts of Justice, a man who has called himself the Great Beast 666 for decades asks twelve jurors to believe that the phrase “black magician” unjustly…
The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly: illusionists, marvels and belief
Picture Piccadilly in 1895. Among shop windows, carriages and top hats stands an Egyptian temple that was never a…
Sweeney Todd in Fleet Street: how fiction became a 'true' London crime
Fleet Street—not a film set filled with decorative fog, but a narrow commercial artery carrying printers, lawyers, messengers, sailors and food sellers. Old St Dunstan’s church projects…
Spring-heeled Jack: Victorian panic and the making of an urban monster
Old Ford, February 1838. In the evening, a man at the gate calls himself a police officer. He asks for a light, saying that Spring-heeled Jack has been caught in the lane. Eighteen-year-old…