One very frosty morning a couple of weeks ago I walked to Marylebone through Regents Park, remains of the woodland where Henry VIII and Elizabeth I once hunted deer. The river Tyburn used to flow through Marylebone, so the land would have been marshy as well as wooded.
I nipped into Daunts bookshop then walked past Jacobs Well Mews, formerly stabling and coach houses, where the young scientist Michael Faraday lived in the late 18th century. Did he ever think about his early years here whilst later working on the mysteries of electromagnetism? I looked down several drain gratings to see if I could see any signs of the long lost Tyburn, but only saw damp murkiness. The little Mews houses here now sell for more than two million pounds each apparently.
I thawed out in the nearby Wallace Collection, again impressed by the ornate staircase balustrade, originally from the Royal Bank of Paris, decorated with sunflowers, cornucopias of gold coins and fruit in its flourishes, but a little overwhelmed by some of the rest of the Collection’s sumptious frou-frou.
