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  Something looked wrong with the grand old police station – which by the thirties had been ‘the principal Metropolitan station’ for over a century – and as I strolled up to the door I saw what it was. ‘CLOSED FOR USUAL POLICE BUSINESS’ read a typically tortuous notice affixed to the sturdy panelling. At first reading this seemed to imply that within police were carrying on their usual business, isolated at last from the irksome and sometimes distressing outside world. Then I noticed that all the windows were filthy and that the door had clearly not been opened for many months; presumably the historic station, in common with so many buildings further down the street, would soon be framed in scaffolding and internally gutted for more lucrative commercial use. On this basis, ‘CLOSED’ would have sufficed, but for an organisation that thrives on lexical overload – how the police must cherish those endless reiterations on the Go To Jail card – this wouldn’t have done at all. I wondered if anyone, delighted at last to find a station that so nobly declared itself open for unusual police business, had hammered on the door demanding a topless tug-of-war or a piggyback.

  It was a shame about the police station – surveying it from across the street I was reminded of those photographs of a forlorn Devonshire House awaiting demolition – but the magistrates’ court next door was what I’d really come for and it was still doing its stuff. A security guard passed all my possessions through an x-ray scanner – the Monopoly board caused him slight but excusable consternation, though not as much as my explanation of its purpose – before directing me to court number I, where I gathered the only action of the afternoon was taking place.

  Number I court was packed floor to ceiling with moroccospined works of legal reference, volumes of the sort I’d seen a trio of bamboozled west London magistrates riffle through when Birna successfully smart-talked her way off a TV-licence rap with the old ‘portable monochrome set powered by its own internal batteries’ loophole gambit. The magistrate – there was only the one, which surprised me as I thought like drunk footballers they always went around in threes – wore half-moon specs and sat in a high-backed red-leather chair. He was talking, but, from behind the glass screen that gives spectators something to lean against when they’re carving ‘AFC’ on the seat next to them, I couldn’t hear a word.

  ‘What’s he on about?’ I hissed to my only fellow public gallery incumbent, a tiny woman of middle years who I’d assumed was, like me, here for a sit-down and some free theatre.

  ‘It’s my son,’ she whispered, angling her head towards the rear view of a young male seated in what I consequently deduced was the dock.

  With what I can only describe as quiet pride she ran down his rap sheet: possession of a class B drug in Leicester Square, jumping bail, resisting arrest. Taking my lead from her, I smiled and nodded as if informed of an unexpectedly solid across-the-board O level performance. ‘Oh,’ she said, raising a beige-gloved finger in recollection, ‘and, um, carrying a concealed offensive weapon.’ She raised her eyebrows teasingly, saving that A in Geography for last. ‘A police baton.’

  Her son was asked to stand, and did so with studied sloth before immediately tilting his thin neck to the requisite ‘yeah, whatever’ angle. No suit and tie, just a soiled and voluminous green shirt apparently fashioned from a discarded sofa cover. Clearly the last thing he wanted was to get off, but straining my ears I picked up snatches that suggested this might indeed be happening. ‘Possession of a small amount of herbal cannabis is hardly . . .’ I heard the magistrate say, rounding off with something about ‘the public purse to consider’.

  The defendant shrugged extravagantly, and without turning to his mother was led away by a Securicor guard. I turned to her in puzzlement; of course, she’d heard everything.

  ‘Remanded for three weeks,’ she said brightly, clearly relishing another appearance. I suppose in a tragic way it gave the two some sort of focus for their lives. She tottered happily out, leaving me alone for the next case, the last of the day. This was much better. A man with a very long Eastern European surname was accused of being drunk and disorderly in Dean Street, a charge with a pleasing vaudevillian ring, like a line out of ‘Burlington Bertie From Bow’. He was a model of combed and collared contrition, clasping his hands behind him as the clerk or usher or whoever began to read the police evidence. This demeanour was explained when we reached the accused’s response to the officer who coaxed him out from a prostrate wheelie bin. ‘Shit, shit, fuck it, shit, fucking, shitting, shit,’ intoned the clerk, replicating the rhythm and metre of Brian Cant’s roll call of the Trumpton fire-engine crew with commendable precision.

  The defendant was given a £60 fine plus costs. Not a bad result, I calculated, stepping back into the street. In 1935 Orwell’s Gordon Comstock had joined a parade of drunk and incapables being processed by the magistrate at the rate of two a minute: his standard £5 fine was almost three times what he earned in a week behind the counter of a second-hand bookshop.

  Great Marlborough Street was a ten minute ride away, through the dense Soho lanes and alleys so nearly buried under Harold Clunn’s central London expressway. Bow Street was one of those I’d only ever glimpsed in the wing mirrors of the car in front, but I spent three years working at the offices of Esquire magazine just down the road from Great Marlborough Street, and consequently chained my bike to a meter there with as smugly proprietorial a bearing as you can summon with your trouser legs stuffed into your socks.

  Ah, Liberty, whose staff had learned to usher me so speedily towards the final reduction rack; the back entrance of Marks & Spencer, whose glazed steel doors knew me so well as ‘The £1.29 Lunch Man’; and yes, the magistrates’ court itself, wherein as a youth I answered a litany of moped misdemeanours with such beatific stoicism that they let me off with two points and a ten-quid fine.

  Named in honour of Winston Churchill’s antecedent, the first Duke of Marlborough, and more particularly in recognition of his victory over the French at Blenheim, Great Marlborough Street could for many years boast at least five peers among its residents, along with artists, actresses and scientists from Cavendish to Darwin. It was also, in common with two separate addresses in Bond Street, once the central London home of Lord Nelson. By lying in state in Whitehall and making a notable and ongoing contribution to Trafalgar Square, Nelson thereby stakes a decent claim to be the board’s dominant historical figure – Monopoly’s dead Daddy. He should by rights nab an extra half-point for Piccadilly, where in 1801 Emma gave birth to his illegitimate daughter, though I’m docking that from him for having insisted the child be named Horatia Nelson Nelson.

  Only Oliver Cromwell runs the good admiral close, even though his challenge didn’t come to life until he was dead. He’d been three years in the ground when Charles II triumphantly reclaimed the throne – and why faff about with street parties and bunting when you could exhume the Great Protector’s mummified remains and string them up at the end of Oxford Street? In such a larky carnival atmosphere it was inevitable that Cromwell’s head should soon be hacked – one might more accurately say eased – off and stuck on a pole overlooking Whitehall. There it stayed for twenty years, before embarking on a showbiz career that in 1799, more than 130 years after his death, saw it on display in a museum of curiosities in Bond Street. It’s a wonder Hasbro looked any further when they pondered those designs for a new Monopoly token (though as the head’s three subsequent owners all met sudden deaths, perhaps it’s just as well they didn’t).

  Once a street of genteel residents, all Great Marlborough Street’s original houses are gone, the last dubiously vanishing less than ten years ago to make way for the six storeys of green glass and white plastic that house the headquarters of Sony Music Entertainment. This and a pleasingly shabby old record shop (‘Choose any 25 LPs for £10’) aside there were no extant traces of the street’s Tin Pan Alley days: looking through the Gothic windows of what since 1896 had been the London College of Music I was presented with the novel spectacle of dozens of young women in B
arbie nurse outfits buffing each other’s nails. I went in, inhaled acetone vapours and was politely informed by the reassuringly unbuffed receptionist that for the last two years this had been the London College of Beauty Therapy. From high-brow to eye-brow.

  There was no evidence of the old Philip Morris factory that spawned the world’s most widely recognised cigarette brand, but the rag trade was still maintaining at least one Marlborough Street tradition, if only in an administrative and retail sense. What had in the thirties been only slightly glorified sweatshops were now painfully small and painfully trendy fashion company offices, and I spent a very short amount of time in a shop called Uth – sorry, UTH – selling ‘menswear for girls’ in a challenging environment where breeze blocks and amoeba-shaped sofas stood on a bare concrete floor emblazoned with slogans such as ‘if it’s high street, it’s not us’ and ‘if you’re tempted to compromise, don’t’.

  Taking my lead from this latter maxim, I herded the sneering, androgynous staff into a cubicle and ceremonially torched every last pair of thirty-quid camouflage knickers on the pavement outside. I can’t think of the last time a retail outlet which didn’t sell Disney merchandise or tinned shortbread boiled my innards with such furious wrath. In fact, just to teach it a lesson I’m going to call it a boutique. A unisex boutique.

  Two poncy hairdressers; bell-plates labelled ‘modo’, ‘e-dreams’ and ‘Electric Dog’ before expanses of etched glass and brushed aluminium; an ad agency receptionist sipping Volvic at a pulpit marooned on a sea of planed maple. But just as Great Marlborough Street seems certain to disappear up its own arse, along comes the junction with Carnaby Street and pulls it feet first back into the daylight.

  I suppose the reason every two-wheeled courier in London congregates at the western end of what they might easily call GMS is the presence of one of the last free public conveniences in town. It’s an odd sight, though, all those smutty faces and roll-up fags imparting an atmosphere more redolent of a colliery shift-change. But standing over the road, blinking as the sun speared dramatically through a gap in the scurrying clouds, I was quickly diverted by a neighbouring spectacle: one of my very favourite London structures, the splendidly eccentric Liberty building.

  Seeking to expand his successful oriental goods emporium on Regent Street in the early years of the last century, Arthur Liberty was frustrated by a conservative landlord who routinely vetoed any architectural flamboyance. Because this landlord was the King of England, there wasn’t much Arthur could do. Instead, he bought up the properties behind his store along Great Marlborough Street and, allowing free reign to his pent-up frustrations, in 1925 replaced them with an edifice as stately yet unhinged as George III tucking into a tasty hearth rug. From the gilded galleon weather vane via the handmade roof tiles, mullioned windows and fussily galleried balconies to the third-storey bridge that connects it to the Regent Street store, Liberty’s Great Marlborough Street annexe isn’t so much the acceptable face of mock Tudor as its boss-eyed clown mask. It’s wattle and daub and darkened wood; it’s black and white and lead all over. But to appreciate the inspired lunacy, you have to go inside.

  Launched in 1805, the Royal Navy man-o’-war HMS Hindustan’s maiden voyage took her to the East Indies; later, after a brief spell as a store ship anchored off Portugal, she sailed to New South Wales, returning via the Mediterranean in 1819. Renamed the Dolphin she served another fourteen years as a storage vessel, this time at Chatham, before seeing out her days down the Thames at Woolwich as the prison hulk Justitia. HMS Impregnable’s story began seven years after the Hindustan’s, but quickly made up for lost time. She landed Austrian troops in Italy during the campaign that ended with Waterloo, and a year later was involved in an idiotically ill-advised attack on Algiers (my, we put it about a bit back in those days) which cost the lives of midshipman John Hawkins, along with thirty-seven of her seamen, ten marines and two boys. So ravaged was the Impregnable that the bill for hull repairs alone topped £10,000; every mast was shattered, every sail shredded. After a spell as a guard ship at Plymouth she was pensioned off as a training vessel at Chatham, being finally decommissioned in 1862.

  Have you got all that? Good. Now follow me as we wander through Liberty’s low-ceilinged labyrinth of dark stairways and panelling, through the stained-glass doorways to the public school assembly hall that serves as the millinery department. Now, sliding between two scarily lipsticked old duchesses fighting over a £500 scarf, we approach one of the stout but somehow crudely fashioned timber uprights that, far above, support beams of similar design. The surface of each, we note, running our eyes and fingers over their sculpted and pitted surfaces, is regularly marked by the planed-off rumps of vast dowels, tenons and mortices, features associated with jointing techniques of another age and a very different field of construction. And, as concerned but compassionate security personnel lead us gently outside one of us – oh dear, I’m rather afraid it’s you – collars a Burberry-clad browser and in a panicky wayward falsetto hisses, ‘Blood-stained boats – don’t you see, you do see it, tell me you see it too – it’s all made out of blood and boats and the bones of old John Hawkins!’

  For the facts are these: measure the length of the store’s Great Marlborough Street frontage and you will discover it tallies identically with that of the two aforementioned vessels. Built twenty years after the Ritz became Britain’s first steel-framed building, the structural integrity of Liberty’s Great Marlborough Street rests entirely upon a prison hulk coming up to its bicentenary and a ship that helped defeat Napoleon and was later blown to bits off the coast of North Africa. Surveying the shop again from the other side of the road I actually shook my head in disbelief: perhaps no story reveals more vividly what an inspirationally eccentric city London can be.

  Just as well, because having paused briefly to admire a more conventional twenties masterpiece, the black and yellow granite mausoleum that is Ideal House, I ambled to a halt in front of the magistrates’ court – which as ever I’d been saving for last – and realised I wouldn’t be hearing any stories there. A man in a yellow hard hat stamped dustily past me up the steps and opened the stoutly panelled front door; before it slammed shut I glimpsed deconstructional activity whose profundity could not have made it more starkly clear: Marlborough Street magistrates’ court had heard its last case. It was the end of a legal connection that had endured unbroken since the first police station opened its doors on to the Great Marlborough Street pavement in 1793.

  In fact, the link went back further: in 1786, on the site where the court’s disembowelled remains stood before me, Joshua Brookes had opened a museum whose most popular gallery displayed the bodies of executed criminals. The court opened next door nine years later, and soon acquired a salacious celebrity of its own. It was here that Gladstone gave evidence against a man who had attempted to blackmail him after seeing the then chancellor talking to a prostitute near Leicester Square; here also that Oscar Wilde appeared as a defendant in the libel case that proved his undoing.

  Continuing this tradition, and perhaps influenced by its proximity to the heart of Swinging London, it was at Marlborough Street magistrates’ court that the Establishment chose to take on bad-boy rock ’n’ roll. In 1968 Brian Jones was bailed there for possession of cannabis resin and later fined £50; two years later it was Mick Jagger’s turn – £200 for the same offence. John Lennon also made an appearance at Marlborough Street in 1970, after the Bond Street gallery in which he had exhibited ‘14 lithographs detailing intimate and erotic scenes from his honeymoon with Yoko Ono’ was charged under the indecency laws. Eight of these images were considered inappropriate for public display (Yoko wasn’t in the other six), but the charges were dismissed on a legal technicality. And in 1973, Keith Richards made it a Stones hat-trick when he appeared before the Marlborough Street beaks impressively charged with possession of marijuana, heroin and the tranquilliser Mandrax, as well as a Smith and Wesson revolver and an antique shotgun, both held without licence, and a
mmunition. Worth a good long stay in that big house with Dr Crippen in the garden, you’d have thought, but somehow Richards got off with a £205 fine.

  But what’s sadder than the loss of this heritage is the loss of a certain humanity, a character and individualism that coloured the grey streets of London. Almost everywhere I was getting the slight sensation of corners being rounded off, of genuine idiosyncrasy giving way to contrived commercial wackiness. The orange set was no longer where the law met the lawless; the extremes of Monopoly’s London seemed to have been snipped off, and I couldn’t help feeling we were all somehow the poorer. Where will London get its folklore from when every courtroom is a corporation, every strip club a Starbucks? Marlborough Street magistrates’ always had a reputation for the grand and eccentric gesture; on his retirement in the late seventies St John Harmsworth received good luck cards from the many Soho call girls he had dealt with so humanely over the years, and reciprocated by writing off all their outstanding fines – and my later investigations proved this tradition endured to the last.

  At the end of the court’s final case in 1999, the magistrate Miss Wickham turned to the young man accused of shoplifting in Oxford Street. ‘Tomorrow you are twenty-one and you are going to start a new life,’ she said. ‘We are also all going to start a new life tomorrow, because this court is closing.’ Mark Gavin Jones was given an absolute discharge, and the officials filed out for the last time.

  There’s something endearingly bijou about thoroughfares so diminutive that their names had to be drastically abbreviated on my A–Z – R Op Ac for Royal Opera Arcade, B H1 Sc for, I dunno, Brown Hole Scouts – and seeing the relevant cul-de-sac near Piccadilly labelled Vin S I’d known to expect a stubby affair. The grand extent of that stubbiness, however, only became apparent as I wheeled my bike up a passage that smelt of mislaid Chinese takeaways and was presented at its conclusion by a road shorter than Whitehall’s width, one rudely stopped in its tracks by the deadest of dead ends.