Secret London Secret LondonDifferent doors. A deeper city.

Secret London: a hidden guide to the places the city keeps quiet

the hidden places nothing signposts, and how to find them

Published · last checked

Hidden London is not one place but many, and most of them are unmarked: side doors, strange museums, lost palaces and stories below street level. A darker guide to a brighter city.

Same streets. Different stories.
Goodwin's Court, a narrow Georgian passage off St Martin's Lane, its bow-fronted shopfronts lit after dark
Goodwin's Court, off St Martin's Lane Photograph Davric, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Central London / field sheet 0151.5074° N · street level

Choose a layer The hidden city, layer by layer

Interactive diagram of hidden LondonThree selectable layers. Every numbered point is a link: the street layer opens that stop on tonight’s route, the other two open the guide for what is behind that door or under that ground. THE THAMES 01 Covent Garden02 Holborn03 Clerkenwell04 Spitalfields05 WHITECHAPEL / 00:00 01 No sign outside02 A house of rooms03 Rooms behind Mayfair Crypt 12 STEPS BELOWHidden station PLATFORM CLOSEDRoman wall STILL BENEATH US
OPEN
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At street levelFive stops connect the quieter route from Covent Garden to Whitechapel. Select another layer to see what the street map leaves out.

Six ways into the places most visitors miss

Six routes. One city underneath.

Hidden London is not one subject, so this guide does not pretend it is. Each route below collects a different kind of overlooked thing, and every entry gives the street and the nearest station, so the places stay findable rather than merely described.

The Horses of Helios, Rudy Weller's 1992 bronze group, at the Haymarket corner of Piccadilly Circus

Statues & Public Art

The sculpture this city walks past every day, with the street and the nearest station for each one.

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Brydges Place, an alley barely shoulder-width, running between Bedfordbury and St Martin's Lane

Secret Bars

Low lights, unmarked entrances and rooms that keep no sign above the door.

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The facade of Sir John Soane's Museum on Lincoln's Inn Fields

Strange Museums

The eccentric, the forgotten and the wonderfully odd, room by room.

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The Crystal Palace in Hyde Park seen from the north east during the Great Exhibition of 1851

Lost Palaces

Grand houses that vanished from the map, and the traces they left behind.

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Nineteenth-century tombs under trees in the West Cemetery at Highgate

Spooky London

Sourced history kept clearly apart from the folklore that grew around it.

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An 1828 engraving of Crockford's Club House on St James's Street

Casino Treasures

A forgotten empire of card rooms beneath Mayfair and St James's.

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Tonight’s route

An after-dark walk through a quieter city.

The plaque marking Goodwin's Court, off St Martin's Lane in Covent Garden
Goodwin's Court, Covent Garden Photograph John Levin, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why this stop. Begin where the theatres empty into lanes that still remember older stages.

Lincoln's Inn Fields in Holborn, the largest public square in London
Lincoln's Inn Fields, Holborn Photograph Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why this stop. Holborn keeps its collections behind plain doors on a very large square.

Clerkenwell Green, the small square at the centre of Clerkenwell
Clerkenwell Green Photograph Peter Trimming, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why this stop. A green, a clock tower and a parish that was once outside the city walls.

The Georgian terraces of Fournier Street in Spitalfields, off Brick Lane
Fournier Street, Spitalfields Photograph Stephen McKay, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why this stop. Georgian silk-weavers' houses, their shutters still on the top floors.

Number 88 Whitechapel High Street, a nineteenth-century building that housed the Jewish Daily Post
88 Whitechapel High Street Photograph Hjamesberglen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why this stop. The eastern edge, where the street names change language every few decades.

The cabinet of London

Extraordinary places. Real streets. Still there.

A coloured lithograph of the Crystal Palace transept, looking towards the Grand Entrance
Inside the Crystal Palace, 1851 Photograph J. McNeven, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The lost palace in Hyde Park

History

A spectacular glass palace stood in Hyde Park for less than a year. Its story did not end when it was taken down.

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The bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes outside Baker Street station on Marylebone Road
Sherlock Holmes, Marylebone Road Photograph Oxfordian Kissuth, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Statues of fictional characters

Sculpture

Sherlock Holmes on Marylebone Road, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens: the city puts up monuments to people who never lived.

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The former Crockford's club house on St James's Street as it stands today
Crockford's, later the Devonshire Club Photograph Debonairchap, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

London's first casino

Hidden histories

Crockford's opened on St James's Street in 1828 and made a fortune from the men who ran the country.

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Everything on this site

Index

Sculpture by theme

The recurring subjects, each with its own sheet of entries.

  • Statues of fictional characters

    Sherlock Holmes, Peter Pan, Paddington Bear and the rest of the people who never lived.

  • Workers

    Cleaners, gardeners, cordwainers and commuters, in a city that mostly commemorates generals.

  • Animals

    Lions, a cart horse, a cat with an oyster, and a flock of sheep in Bloomsbury.

  • Horses

    From the Quadriga at Hyde Park Corner to the oldest bronze statue in London.

  • Bluecoat and greencoat figures

    Charity-school children in painted uniform, still standing above their old doorways.

  • War memorials

    The Embankment run, from the Anglo-Belgian memorial to the Battle of Britain.

  • Heraldry and building arms

    Coats of arms on livery halls, insurance offices and the Stock Exchange.

Walking the districts

Nine neighbourhoods, and what is still standing in each of them.

  • London walks

    Smithfield, Clerkenwell, the City, Borough, Bermondsey, Shoreditch, Highgate, Hornsey and Woolwich, with the street for every entry.

Sculpture by place

Where it is worth walking with your head up, park by park and street by street.

  • Kensington Gardens

    Peter Pan, Physical Energy, the Albert Memorial animals and the Elfin Oak.

  • Kensington Gardens, continued

    The rest of the park, including Queen Anne's Alcove and the Italian Gardens.

  • Hyde Park

    Achilles, the Serpentine, and the memorials that arrived late.

  • Horse Guards Parade

    The Guards Memorial, the Cadiz Memorial and an Ottoman gun.

  • Piccadilly Circus

    Anteros rather than Eros, the Three Graces on the roof, and a listed police post.

  • Bond Street

    An Egyptian goddess over a saleroom door, a Moore, and the only carillon in London.

  • Wapping

    River stairs, Execution Dock, and the churches of the sea captains.

  • The Remembrancer's office

    The one office in the City with a seat in Parliament, and the figures above it.

Objects in the street

The furniture nobody photographs: the datable, the listed and the misexplained.

  • Post boxes

    How to date one from the cipher, and the eight in London that are listed.

  • Street furniture

    Vulliamy's sphinxes and camels, cattle troughs, real cannon and a sewer gas lamp.

  • Drinking fountains

    What the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association left on the streets.

  • Ships in unexpected places

    Weathervanes, emblems and reliefs, and the truth about the Mall lampposts.

  • London oddities

    The South Bank Lion, the Panyer Boy and the things that fit no other category.

  • The Thames bridges

    Eight central crossings, the eight bronzes on Vauxhall Bridge, and which of them is the Ladies' Bridge.

  • The seven noses of Soho

    Rick Buckley's protest against surveillance cameras, and where the noses are.

Underground and vanished

What closed, what was demolished, and what is still down there.

Going out

Places you can walk into, checked for whether they are still there.

  • The secret bars

    The ones behind another door, with the closures marked.

  • The strange museums

    Small, specialised and mostly free, from Leighton House to an operating theatre.

  • Pub names

    Where the odd ones come from, and the stations named after them.

  • Spooky London

    The documented, the part-folklore and the outright invented, labelled as such.

  • Casino architecture

    A Grade I Mayfair staircase, a Frank Matcham theatre, and where the art is free.

Where to start

If you have never looked at London this way before.

How to use this guide to Secret London

What this is, and what it is not.

Secret London started as a catalogue of the city’s public sculpture, compiled street by street, and that is still the spine of it. This guide keeps the same habit: name the thing, say where it stands, say what is known about it, and leave the folklore clearly labelled as folklore. Secret places in London are not usually far away. They are simply unlabelled, which is a different problem, and one a guide can fix.

Nothing here is a tour and nothing needs booking. Secret places in London reward the detour of a hundred metres more reliably than the detour of a day, so the entries are written to be read standing up, on a phone, in the rain.

What counts as secret London?

Anything the city keeps in plain sight without explaining it: a statue with no plaque, a drinking fountain nobody drinks from, a doorway that leads somewhere unexpected. Nothing here is behind a paywall or a private door, and nothing requires permission to look at.

Are the locations exact?

Each entry carries the street and the nearest Underground station, which is enough to stand in front of the thing described. Where a work has moved or been removed, the entry says so rather than sending you to an empty plinth.

Do these places change?

Frequently. Sculpture gets cleaned, relocated and occasionally stolen; bars close; museums change their opening hours. Entries are dated so you can see how old the information is before you rely on it.

Can everything here be visited?

Most of it, free, at any hour, because it stands in the street. Museums and bars keep their own hours, and a few of the places described below street level are not open to the public at all. Those are marked.