When a committee of MPs investigating the state of the country’s gaol’s visited the Marshalsea debtor’s prison in Borough in 1729 the conditions they reported were appalling. Wards were “excessively Crowded, Thirty, Forty, nay Fifty Persons having been locked up in some of them not Sixteen Foot Square”. […]
Oxford Street once boasted London’s best shops, but many would agree that it lost its way long ago. While it isn’t today struggling to pull in the crowds, the outlets on offer are far from imaginative – chain stores you could find anywhere, fast food joints and stalls […]
When the first copies of the Daily Mail hit the newsstands 120 years ago, prime minister Lord Salisbury dismissed the new newspaper as “run by office boys for office boys”. But it was an immediate success, selling nearly 400,000 copies on the first day and it soon would […]
When Francis Russell licensed the development of land in Covent Garden he declared that it needed to be “fitt for the habitacions of Gentlemen and men of ability.” It was most ambitious of West End projects in the first half of the 17th century, with Inigo Jones being […]
Past In The Present 