The Skulls of the Walbrook
Excavations in the Walbrook valley have produced an unusual number of human skulls, often without the rest of the skeleton. Older theories linked them with Boudica's revolt or…
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2034 articlesThe Lost River Fleet
The Fleet rose near Hampstead, passed through Clerkenwell and entered the Thames at Blackfriars. Boats once used parts of it and mills and trades worked along its banks, but…
London's Secret Postal Railway
The Post Office Railway began operating in 1927, carrying mailbags through narrow tunnels between sorting offices without passengers or street congestion. Driverless trains ran…
The Abandoned Aldwych Station
Aldwych station opened in 1907 as Strand on a short Piccadilly line branch and never attracted heavy passenger traffic. During the world wars its platforms and tunnels served as…
Sweeney Todd: Did the Demon Barber Exist?
Sweeney Todd first appeared not in a criminal trial but in the cheap serial The String of Pearls, published in 1846–47. The Fleet Street barber murders customers while Mrs Lovett…
Spring-Heeled Jack on London's Streets
From 1837 newspapers reported a high-leaping attacker with claws, fiery breath and shining eyes who became known as Spring-Heeled Jack. Some incidents may have been pranks by…
Dickens and the Marshalsea Prison
When Charles Dickens's father entered the Marshalsea debtors' prison in 1824, the twelve-year-old future author worked in a blacking factory and visited his family inside. The…
Plague, Bears and Shakespeare's Dark Theatreland
Shakespearean Bankside placed playhouses beside bear-baiting arenas, taverns and other entertainment beyond the City's strict jurisdiction. Plague outbreaks closed theatres for…
Dr Jekyll's Dark Door and Victorian Soho
Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1886, making a London house with two entrances an image of divided identity and double life. The novella…
The Darker Story of Peter Pan
J. M. Barrie developed Peter Pan through his relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family and his own preoccupation with childhood, loss and refusal to grow up. The Kensington…
The British Museum's Unlucky Mummy
British Museum object EA 22542 is a painted inner coffin lid belonging to a woman, not a mummy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries journalists and occultists…
The Home of the Man Who Never Existed
Arthur Conan Doyle gave Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson the address 221B Baker Street when no such street number yet existed. After numbering expanded, letters to Holmes arrived at…
