Police Inspector Shaw and Detective Sergeant Morley of Wandsworth’s V Division were concerned with a series of thefts that had taken place on their patch during the last month of 1890.  The locus of the crimes was the abandoned yard of Messrs Bell’s Match Factory at 94 South Street.  They quickly deduced that the thief was entering the site via …

If you have been following the story of Charles Dickens and the begging-letter writer, John Walker, of which Part One and Part Two can be accessed on the London Overlooked website, you will remember that the episode culminated in a hearing at the police court in Marylebone on the 22nd of May 1844.  Walker’s guilt was uncontested, and yet the case was …

If you read Part One of the story, which can be found on the London Overlooked website by following this link, you will remember that in 1844 Charles Dickens, who was still young but already successful, was in receipt of a series of begging letters written by a certain John Walker, a married man with four children.  Walker claimed to …

On the 18th of May 1844, which was a Saturday, a well-dressed gentleman stood outside a mean dwelling in a street in Lambeth.  The weather was showery, and there was a slight chill in the air.  Even as the light was beginning to fade, children were playing in the street.  Their fathers were porters and cabinet makers, wheelwrights and labourers, …

Walk along the north pavement of Fleet Street between Chancery Lane and Bell Yard, and you will pass a heavily rusticated building of imposing proportions, home of an executive recruitment firm and a magazine publishing company.  But in the late eighteenth century there stood here a row of brick-fronted premises, one of which was owned by a Benjamin Rackstrow.  He …

Can a building qualify as an overlooked Londoner?  On this website it can.  Take for example no.40 Leicester Square, which is currently occupied by the Odeon Luxe cinema adjoining the new Londoner Hotel.  The cinema opened in 1930 as the Leicester Square Theatre, and was renamed the Odeon Leicester Square in 1988.  And before that?  Well, there lies a good …

Theophilus Dunkley was described by those who knew him as convivial, clubbable, charitable and very fond of the music hall, not qualities one immediately associates with the Victorian undertaker—perhaps unfairly.  Theo lived on and around Westminster Bridge Road all his life, and now rests in Lambeth Cemetery in Tooting among the many variety performers who were both his friends and …

The year is 1836, the last year of the reign of William IV, and the sunset of the Georgian era.  The month is March, and the day is the 3rd, a cold and cloudy Thursday.  The setting is the workhouse in Lambeth in Surrey, where one of the inmates has just died. Ordinarily the death of a workhouse pauper would …

The desperate cry of “Save my darling, save my darling!” echoed around Clapham Common at around eleven o’clock on the night of the 4th of May 1871.  Edward Hanniford, native of Devon and local fishmonger, rushed from his shop on the Polygon towards the cry.  Police Constable Reasy, who was on his beat, also hurried towards the commotion.  Both men …

On an August Friday in 1888, with the temperature at 80o in the shade, two seemingly mismatched friends met up in London.  The older of the two, William Richard Hughes, was in his late fifties, while the younger, Frederic George Kitton, was in his early thirties.  Hughes was an important financial official, the Treasurer of the City of Birmingham.  Kitton …