Mr Slang’s Diary

In which Mr Slang takes stroll through Great Wen, calls for Armageddon... Some Lord’s day. I know not which and care less for I have no time for man-made jacks-in-boxes and believe but in a single rule: that after A comes B and thence to C and thus is the tale ... Read More...

Location, location

Kensington Gore: Luke Honey takes us on a trip around some London landmarks captured on film and uncovers some strange and groovy goings on down the King's Road... I first noticed him one Saturday morning; about a week or so after moving into my new house in Battersea: a man with ... Read More...

Ruskin and the River

In a recent Dabbler post, Nige sang the praises of the River Wandle. But as Jonathan Law explains, the river also had a profound significance for a great Victorian... On a sultry morning in May, Nige celebrated the rebirth of the little River Wandle, now running fresh and clear through Sutton, ... Read More...

Norbiton: Linear City

In this week's bulletin from Norbiton, Toby Ferris considers the remarkable Linear City of town planning visionary Arturo Soria y Mata... Town planning is predominantly a literary form. The boiling visions of the great city planners remain for the most part locked on the page, quaint and harmless. Writing, insofar as it ... Read More...

The Slang Guide to London: Limehouse

From Fu Manchu to Fred Astaire this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London by venturing into the East End's Chinatown and the heady scents of opium and white slavery ...  It's not so much the slang coinage, because Limehouse as such didn't generate any (other than the rhyming slang ... Read More...

The Slang Guide to London: Tyburn

Death-sweats, Paddington spectacles and gallows humour this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to Tyburn... It is an old place. A crossroads where as we know wicked deeds assemble. It had a marker: Oswulf’s stone, seemingly pre-Roman and which may have been the meeting-place ... Read More...

The Slang Guide to London: Turnmill Street, EC1

Jonathon Green gives us a slang historian's guide to a street in Finsbury... Now farewell to St. Giles That standeth in the Fields And Farewel to Turnbal strete For that no comfort yeeldes In Whitecross street and Golden Lane Do strapping lasses dwell And so there do in every street Twixt that and Clerkenwell At Cowcross and at Smithfield I have ... Read More...

Plotlands

Plotlands began in the 1870's as a way for speculators to offload marginal farmland as Britain's agrarian populace uprooted en masse to the big cities. Whether barren or dangerously flood prone, worthless land was portioned up and sold off square by square; mostly to the naive and newly mobile working ... Read More...

Dabbler Heroes: Harry Beck

Some, like Mozart or Sid Waddell, are born as geniuses. Others have genius thrust upon them, in the form of a single brilliant, radical idea. And the very best sort of brilliant, radical idea is the one that appears so obvious that it’s hard to believe that nobody had thought ... Read More...