This short rather plain-looking passageway is actually a remnant of a longer alley that can be traced back at least to medieval London, at a time when there was a large fish market next to where the alley’s northern end is today. Known generally as the West Fish Market, Ekwall notes that “another…

This is a quiet set of low-rise mews houses and offices that can be found just off bustling Marylebone. Originally part of the Manor of Marylebone, the land was bought by John Holles, the Duke of Newcastle in 1708, and it was his daughter and her husband, Edward Harley who started early property…

This is a posh-looking alley to be found in Chelsea’s World’s End that has a link with the brutalist architects that designed the Barbican estate. There’s a hint of how the alley came to be where it is in the Greenwood map of 1828, where a line dividing two fields is perfectly aligned with the alley…

This is a short mews in Holland Park a short walk from the tube station, and another architectural gem for the area, the Cosmic House. It was originally called Alfred Mews, and was lined on the west with small stables and on the eastern side was the backs of gardens for the houses facing Clarendon…

This is a short well-used alley to the south of Westminster Abbey that has been home to spies and politicians in its long life. It first shows up as Bennets Yard in William Morgan’s map of London in 1682 as a wide-open space between a cluster of buildings surrounded by fields. As such is likely to…

This narrow lane in the City of London is famous for being lined with shops and cafes and is also one of the oldest surviving lanes in the City on its original layout. Bisected by the equally ancient Watling Street, Bow Lane was originally two roads, the southern half being Cordwanerstrete, and the…

This is a small back of flats courtyard mews that can be found just around the corner from Baker Street. The mews lies within the Portman Estate, a historic area that was once fields acquired by the Portman family in the mid 16th-century, and later developed in the 18th-century as London expanded.…

This tiny very well-hidden alley in Holborn has existed ever since the church it wraps around the back of was built in Norman times. Originally dedicated to St Edmund and today known as Holy Sepulchre London, the church was given its current name during the Crusades, venerating its Jerusalem…

This is a small alley and courtyard off Fleet Street probably more noticed today for the game of Space Invaders in the pavement. The alley probably first shows up in the 1600s as the previous row of Tudor houses facing Fleet Street with fields behind started to be developed. A cluster of unnamed…

This is a short grim dank smelly alley behind Leicester Square more notable for the rubbish bins pilled up inside it, and yet, it has a long and sometimes unexpected history. The alley first shows up in the 1740s when the area was developed with Leicester Fields where the Square is today, and the…

This is a wide alley just to the north of Trafalgar Square and sits between the St Martins Lane Hotel to the north and the London Coliseum to the south. Originally, the alley would have been lined with shops, but two very large buildings now occupy either side turning what would have been a bustling…

This is an alleyway in East Sheen that runs down an avenue of delightful 19th-century cottages, the model cottages. Model not because they were small, but because they were the perfect model for how homes for workers should be built. The first of the row of 2-storey cottages were built in 1853 by…

This alley just to the north of Oxford Street in the heart of Fitzrovia is a convenient shortcut through a block of shops and offices and is original from when the area was first laid out. William Franks, the developer who was responsible for the area was married to Mary Pepys, a relative of the…

Just off Baker Street, home of a famous detective can be found a small cobbled street, Sherlock Mews, but which came first, the man or the mews? The mews can be found running through the middle of a block of houses built as part of the wider development of the area in around 1800 as part of the…

This is a small side alley in Smithfield that’s famous for the pub that dominates the corner opposite Great St Bart’s church. The alley is named after the pub on the corner, the Rising Sun, even though the pub’s official address isn’t Rising Sun Court, but 38 Cloth Fair, the main road the alley…

This is a modern yard in Aldgate named after a long-standing, and not standing anymore, pub of the same name, and had been a coaching inn of some sort ever since Tudor times. The location at Aldgate, on the edge of the City of London, made it an ideal location for inns and hostels, and a lot of…

This is a subway under a busy road in Mill Hill Broadway that has two claims to fame, and the most obvious is that it’s decorated with images of the solar system. The subway is lined with what might be considered classic municipal subway tiles of blue and green, but what is very noticeable are the…

This is a short narrow passage on Strand that used to be somewhere else. It originally shows up as Heathcot Court in William Morgan’s map of London in 1682. Quite when it gained a C to become Heathcock is unclear. The origins of the name of the court are also unclear, sometimes cited as coming from…

This narrow alley sits next to Pudding Lane, famed for the Great Fire of London, and can trace its origins to the very first buildings erected here in Tudor London. The alley, although known today as St George’s Lane, was originally plain George Lane, and is named after St George Botolph Lane that…

A side alley off posh Bond Street that is a back entrance to an auction house but is more notable for the distinctive name of the yard. This part of London started being developed in the 1740s from fields into the layout we have today, although at the time it was far from the upper-class area that…

This delightfully unmodernised mews, owned by the Church of England is just to the north of Hyde Park and is one of the last such mews left in London. The mews sits in a part of London known as the Hyde Park Estate, and it’s a large swathe of land owned by the Church Commissioners for England, the…

This is an alley in Bankside that’s charmingly cobbled, but has a bloody history. As an alley, its path can be traced back to Tudor times, when the riverside was lined with pubs and wharves, and there was an alley leading from The Barge inn to Park Street behind. Although unnamed initially, by 1799,…

This is a cobbled passage just off Roman Road in East London that’s recently seen run down workshops being converted into loft-apartment style flats. The area was still fields until the late 18th-century when housing started to appear along the Roman Road, and Peary Place appeared about the same…

This is a very steep alley up the slopes that face Finchley Road in South Hampstead. Its origins likely lay with the early development of the farmland into housing as there seems to be no precursor for the alley, it just appeared on maps when the houses arrived. Most of the land around here was…

A short wide alley in Soho lined with Georgian and Victorian buildings, but also a link to one of the 19th-centuries worst terrorist attacks. This patch of Soho was once fields, known as Colman Hedge Close, but started being developed in the second half of the 17th-century. The layout of the area…

A large plaza in the heart of London’s Chinatown that has undergone many changes in its long life. Today the plaza is pretty much the heart of Chinatown, although it has only been so since the 1950s when the combination of an influx of workers from Hong Kong and the migration of Chinese workers from…

This verdant walkway near Kennington was until a few years ago a rather non-descript residential road, but in 2013 it was pedestrianised and renamed. Van Gogh Walk was originally Isabel Street, which was laid out when a row of larger houses and a former nursery ground was developed into terraced…

This narrow back lane in Kensington looks like a back passage for the houses that back onto it, but in fact, it predates the main roads around it. It originally shows up as part of a much longer path called Love Lane, when all around here was fields and nurseries. By the 1820s, the area that’s…

This is a secluded mews that can be found around the back of a disused tube station near Hyde Park. Unusually for a Mews, this one is not Georgian stables that were later turned into housing. In fact, the mews is relatively modern, although it was partially some stables. Originally, when the area…

A long narrow passageway in Soho that owes its origins to the era of horse-drawn carriage and the grand houses on the other side of the lane. When all around here was still fields, its fields were owned by Eton College until taken by the Crown in the 1530s, and was known as Windmill Fields. In…

This is a row of former stables that backed onto expensive houses in Chelsea, and are now themselves expensive mews homes. The area was developed from fields owned by Charles Cadogan, 2nd Baron Cadogan, when a lease was signed in 1777 for the architect Henry Holland to layout roads and housing in…

A polished and modern space, this alley links Bond Street with Hanover Square, and was built as part of the Crossrail project. A large block of buildings between Hanover Square and Bond Street had to be cleared to create space to build the eastern ticket office for the Elizabeth line, and naturally,…

This is a winding narrow passageway through Clerkenwell that borders a notorious prison and site of a terrorist attack. The north side of the alley is dominated by a tall old wall, and this was the southern boundary of the House of Detention, a particularly notorious prison built at the turn of the…

This is a Roman era alley in the City that was discovered during the soon to be completed Bank tube station upgrade project. Although the deep tunnels that make up Bank tube station were dug out of 50-million year old London clay, far below the archaeology layer, to get down there, a large shaft was…

This very shabby dirt ridden little alley near London Bridge is a legacy of judicial power, being named after an early prison on the same location. The prison was called the Borough Compter, a small prison controlled by a sheriff, mainly used to house debtors and religious dissenters. The name of…

This is a cobbled mews that sits between two grand linked buildings with a very impressive sculpture of the Madonna and Child hanging above the entrance. Although the mews is original from when the area was first turned from fields into houses, all of the buildings you can see here, even the old…

Walking up Palace Gate road in Kensington, just short of the main Kensington Road you might spy a sign for a Pedestrian Right of Way leading to Kensington Road, and be intrigued. It’s a curious right of way leading through a mews and private estate up to the main road, which you can easily see from…

This is a short alley leading to a former public square lined with nice houses, but the alley is now much more famous than the public square. Originally called Well Close Square, the area was laid out in 1694, with a Danish and Norwegian Church in the centre. Daniel Defoe mentions the square is his…

For the month of June, I decided to do an experiment where I would listen to music exclusively through an iPod. What I didn't know is how much bigger this would get. Tune in next week for part 2 of 4 in this mini-series. Thanks again to Kyle Chakya - check out his fantastic book "Filterworld: How…

Living Paradigms is a series about what we can learn from the customs and cultural practices of others when it comes to solving problems. It is sponsored by Wonderstruck. The lawns of Purana Qila in the historic quarters of New Delhi have been gleaming a brighter shade of green these past few years.…