Table of Contents Table of Contents Assumed Audience Pregnant people, partners of pregnant people, people who expect to become pregnant at some point, and anyone curious about the experience of growing another human inside of you. I’m currently growing a human – my first. Having never grown a human…

Listening is the dark matter of conversation, a mysterious activity that shapes the cosmos of any society or relationship. A friend who is a good listener can turn an ordinary conversation into a life-changing one, though we’re more likely to recall what they said (the evidence of their listening)…

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Build your own This repository is a compilation of well-written, step-by-step guides for re-creating our favorite technologies from scratch. What I cannot create, I do not understand — Richard Feynman. It's a great way to learn. Tutorials Build your own 3D Renderer C++: Introduction to Ray Tracing:…

This short alley in the heart of the City has existed for hundreds of years, but in recent times, it has gained an unfounded and totally undeserved reputation. The alley often claimed to be associated with the boiling of whale bones — actually baleen from whale mouths — to soften them for use in…

This alley behind the Bank of England is likely one of the oldest alleys in the City of London, with an alignment that can be traced back to at least medieval times, when it was a gap between rows of houses. By the 1670s, the area was sufficiently developed that the alley had become the short dead…

This is an alley of mixed appearance in Holborn that starts at one end with large modern offices, but at the other still retains a bit of its older Victorian heritage. The alley is a lot older than that, though. It first shows up in the middle of the 1600s as Cole Yard and was slightly longer than…

This short, rather shabby alley in central Croydon is named after one of the oldest professions in the world. No, not that one! A fellmonger was a dealer in hides or skins, particularly sheepskins, who might also prepare skins for tanning. The name is derived from the Old English ‘fell’ meaning…

This is a short Camden passageway that dates all the way back to when all around here were fields, which wasn’t that long ago, as it happens. The alley leads off Delancey Street, but when that was first laid out in the 1820s, it was a much shorter road called Warren Street. The alley didn’t exist…

This is a posh looking alley in Mayfair that has been around since the area developed some 300 years ago, and was likely originally provided access to the stables behind a row of grander houses. The alley first shows up as an unnamed passage north of Brook Street in John Roque’s map of London in…

This passageway sits alongside Paddington Street Gardens in Marylebone, giving the residents of the houses a good view of the park opposite. While today it looks very inviting, it wasn’t originally. The park was laid out in the 18th century as an additional burial ground for St Marylebone Parish…

This is a very narrow slip of a passage leading off the busy Commercial Road in Limehouse. This part of London was first developed around the second half of the 18th century, and the row of shops where the alley slips through in the first decade of the 19th century. The alley was lined with some…

This is a very busy passage between the South Bank and Waterloo station, but at around 200 years old, it’s also one of the oldest streets in the area. This part of London was still fields in 1800, with wharfs lining the riverside, but apart from a few roads behind the wharfs, there was not much else…

This is a covered alley in Seven Dials near Covent Garden that looks old and is on an old alignment but is actually entirely modern. An alley that aligns loosely with Cucumber Alley first appears on the William Morgan map of 1682 and is called Mairmaid Alley. William Morgan map 1682 However, the…

This is a winding passage next to Hyde Park Corner that has recently been redeveloped into a posh little passage. There was very little here before the end of the 17th century when a narrow road passed through the fields at Hyde Park Corner. Ownership passed through quite a lot of people, until…

In the heart of Marylebone, a narrow gap between rows of upmarket shops leads to an alley that was once a notorious slum. The slums were built on the site of an actual grotto — an early tourist attraction built by John Castles in what was still countryside along the newly built Paddington Street.…

This charmingly quiet passageway in the centre of London feels cottagey, thanks to the row of old houses and the rich use of pot plants along the passage. This part of London was still fields right up until the 1740s, when developments along Tottenham Court Road started expanding outwards. Within 50…

This is an unremarkable alley in north London with few interesting features, so I had to have a look. Although Lilley Lane is very much an alley in all the classic senses, it once was an actual road when all around this part of London were still fields. Linking Hale Lane with Marsh Lane, it passed…

This is a charming, plant-filled mews alley just north of Hyde Park, sitting next to a former and once very large cemetery. The area first started developing in the late 1790s, when St George’s church in Hanover Square bought a large plot of land north of Hyde Park to use as an overflow cemetery.…

Once the site of a notorious prison, this little alley just to the north of Ludgate Hill in the City of London has an interesting way of advertising its cycle parking hub. The Fleet Prison was built in 1197, sitting alongside the River Fleet, now long buried underneath Farringdon Street. Notorious…

This is a very short little stump of an alley in Clerkenwell that today leads to the side entrance to a warehouse office conversion. The area developed from the 1600s onwards, and this 1676 map shows that the western side of the alley had developed, but the corner plot was still empty. Ogilby and…

This is a short but charmingly cobbled little passage in Hampstead that unexpectedly leads to a cluster of hidden cottages. There is a hint in John Roque’s map from 1746 that the alley ran through the block to the road on the other side, although that could be a reference to Oriel Place or Perin’s…

This upmarket looking Soho passageway lined with posh shops and a hotel is a far cry from what it looked like just a decade ago — as one of the last remaining WWII bomb sites in central London. Indeed, the run-down site with the empty plot of land fenced off in otherwise busy Soho was a curious…

This is one of London’s more famous passages, often nicknamed Booksellers’ Row, thanks to the large number of bookshops that line both sides of the alley. Although the alley route is old, and the buildings look old, in fact, most of what you see here is late Victorian, as the entire site was rebuilt…

This narrow, and currently very yellow passageway near Bruce Grove station in Tottenham has seen a lot of changes in it’s fairly short life. The alley leads off Tottenham High Road, squeezing in between two shops and leading to a road behind the shops. However, when first laid out in the early 19th…

This is a long footpath in Broxbourne (yes, just outside London) that for once lives up to its name – there’s a lot of holly here. It starts showing up on maps from the mid-1850s as a footpath through still largely undeveloped fields north of Broxbourne. However, with the arrival of the railway…

The origins of this narrow alley in Twickenham are exceptionally easy to guess when you look at its neighbour, St Stephen’s Church. This is the alley that separates the church from the houses. Although the area was still fields in the 1740s, John Roque’s map already shows what would later become the…

Around the back of Sloane Square tube station is this short rather fine passageway that was once a lot longer until the railway sliced through the middle of it. Skinners Place is about 200 years old, having been laid out in the late 1820s as the area developed from fields into the posh housing that…

This small slip of a side passage off busy Tottenham Court Road is one of the few surviving passages from when this area was first built. The alley appeared as a short passage lined with houses in the late 1700s, when the area was still being turned from fields into homes. R Horwood map 1799 The…

This is an odd alley in Farringdon lined on one side by rough office backs and the other by a listed Victorian school. The alley would have been on farmland owned by the Priory of St John of Jerusalem, but following King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the monasteries, the land was sold off to…

This recently revamped Knightsbridge alley has existed on this site ever since the area was first turned from fields into posh shops. The alley first appears in R Horwood’s map of 1799 as a house-lined passage between North Street and Queen’s Row—today, that’s Basil Street and Brompton Road. It also…

This is a small back passage hidden behind the shops in busy Kentish Town and offers a well-hidden patch of greenery in the area. The alley seemed to have arrived with the property developments that sprung up along the nearby railway which opened in 1868. Within just a few years, the whole area had…

A few minutes walk from Isleworth station in southwest London is a residential alley that looks nice but fairly unadorned until you spot the metal arch in the middle. What’s that doing here? Well, what looks like an alley created when housing was added predates the houses and was once the path to a…

There’s a remarkable alley in Wimbledon that many people passing by will notice one distinctive feature, but you can only see the other by walking along it. This is Dairy Walk, with a locally famous turnstile. Although described as an ancient right of way, Dairy Walk doesn’t seem to exist on any…

This charmingly cobbled residential mews is just around the corner from Paddington Station, but it was dominated by light industry and lock-up garages until a few decades ago. The area was first laid out just 200 years ago, in the first few decades of the 1800s, with the north side of Junction Mews…

This is a long sloping passage in Denmark Hill that existed before the housing around it and was originally called Green Lane. Originally, it linked two large houses at the northern end, Hill Lodge and the Pelican House girl’s college, to Dulwich via Henry Bessemer’s Observatory. Henry Bessemer was…

This is an unusual one for the London Alleys series, as it’s a modern walk with a new canal created in the 1980s and a very pleasant walk to enjoy. To understand why it’s here, we need to go back to the 19th century, when surging imports from overseas saw the marshy Rotherhithe peninsula dug out to…

It is an outwardly normal mews in the Fitzrovia part of London with an old pub at the front, but something unexpected lurks behind. Like so many in this part of London, the mews came when the fields were developed into housing for the expanding city and provided stabling for the grander houses that…

This is a narrow passage in Hampstead that, unsurprisingly for its name, runs past a large church, and then over a hill and back down past blocks of housing. It’s also an alley that presents two very different appearances, feeling more like garden steps at the north end while wide and open at the…