In a hallowed nook of Westminster Abbey is Poets' Corner, where our greatest literary bastions are set in stone. There, in stained-glass light, the tombs of Chaucer, Kipling and Tennyson lie alongside the memorials of Milton, Shelley and Keats. A short walk down Broad Sanctuary leads to 187 Piccadilly, London's oldest bookshop, where great minds have paced the floorboards for centuries. And in Camden, on 48 Doughty Street, Charles Dickens once hunched over Oliver Twist, perhaps the best known story in this country's history.
But Spoonfed wants to take you down less trodden ways, wants to whet your perverted whistle with a bitter-sweet morsel of London's more colourful literary past. For, nestled in the bosom of this city are the locales for various scandalous, salacious and bloody literary tales, a couple of which are recounted here for your base fascination.
Take St James' Park. Stretched out in the sun, it is the epitome of Englishness, with perfectly proportioned gardens, well kept grass, and an aspect of the Queen's regal seat. From Austen to Woolf, literature has described high society's penchant for a daily constitutional in the park grounds. But the original Libertine and London boy, John Rochester, casts a more interesting light on Caroline leisure activities in his poem ‘A Ramble in St. James' Park'. The narrative is simple: a drunken Rochester stumbles out of The Bear late at night, and walks home through the park, where he meets courtiers and chambermaids alike, conjugating under the night sky. So if the pursuit of literary edification is yours, shirk the well trodden Dickenso-Shakespearian route, and instead find a shaded spot under a tree in St James', whereupon you may think of these immortal lines, 'And now nightly beneath their shade/ Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made'. Caligula might well have blushed.
For those whose literary tastes are rooted in the 20th century, perhaps Islington would provide a gritty alternative to Bloomsbury, where the original Sloanes, T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf once conducted their elitist orgies. On 25 Noel Road, a round plaque denotes the dwelling place of Joe Orton, a sixties writer of considerable controversy. From here, Orton wrote some of his most famous work, including his notorious diaries, which describe his sexual escapades with men all over London, (most notably, an encounter with a dwarf, and a dalliance at his mother's funeral). Noel Road is also where Orton was bludgeoned to death with a hammer by his lover Kenneth Halliwell, who afterwards committed suicide by overdosing on Nembutal. Charming.
Next time literary inspiration descends, harness your inner-voyeur and indulge your macabre fascination: take a peak under the slimy rocks of London town, and delve, elbow-deep, in your viscous finds.
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