The streets and squares of the West End of London, some of the most famous in the world, have been home to poets and pop stars, world-renowned artists and revolutionary anarchists.  They have been a playground of gangsters and gamblers, secret agents and religious visionaries.  The exploits of these and many other colourful characters are recounted in Ed Glinert's latest volume.  Packed with atmospheric incident and detail, it's a treasure trove of stories of the people, places and events at the hub of the world's most exciting city.

Three favourite West End sites by Ed Glinert, author of West End Chronicles

(1) Entrance to St Anne’s Church, Shaftesbury Avenue
High above the awning of a gift shop on the north side of Shaftesbury Avenue, almost impossible to notice unless you were looking for it, is an ancient sign etched beneath Baroque-styled stone swags of fruit proclaiming: “St Anne’s Church, South Entrance”. The opening has long been boarded up. The church, bombed in the Second World War, long closed.

Here is not just a mysterious remnant of a vanished past, a memento of an old church located in the heart of the West End that was the focal point of Soho life, but a reminder of a link with the West End’s uglier alter ego – the East End. It was at St Anne’s that Theodore Von Neuhoff, the so-called King of Corsica, was buried in 1756. The German had been elected king of the Mediterranean island of Corsica twenty years previously, after promising the islanders he could free them of Genoese rule, and had promptly left on a fund-raising tour of Europe. In the English capital Von Neuhoff sought divine help from Chaim Jacob Samuel Falk, the so-called “Ba’al Shem of London”, an expert in Hebrew mysticism, Freemasonry and the Kabbalah.

Von Neuhoff brought Falk lavish gifts and commissioned him to undertake alchemical experiments which he hoped would transmute base metals into gold to fund his Corsican campaign. He also invited Falk to his country retreat at Upton, Essex, a mile south-east of Stratford, where Falk stored for safe keeping a trove of gifts and contributions granted by grateful clients. The treasure still has not been found. Maybe it is buried under the site now occupied by West Ham United’s football ground and will be uncovered when the club leaves the site for the new Olympic stadium; maybe it is under the old church burial ground on Wardour Street.

(2) Curzon Street – home of the spies
A winding and delightful Mayfair street lined with sumptuous properties conceals well its murky past as a centre of espionage and intrigue. At Crewe House, an antebellum mansion on the north side that is now the Saudian Arabian Embassy, the British Government set up its First World War Ministry of Propaganda. The ministry was run by Lord Northcliffe, Britain’s most powerful newspaper magnate, who in the early years of the 20th century owned the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and the Times.

Northcliffe appointed the novelist H. G. Wells as director of propaganda and put Wickham Steed, the Times’s foreign editor, in charge of campaigns. Steed targeted the Balkans, where many natives had been forced into fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and at Crewe House produced thousands of leaflets decorated with nostalgic east European imagery which the Allies dropped by aeroplane over divisions of wavering enemy troops. Northcliffe’s and Stead’s coup de grace was to send Allied soldiers near to enemy lines armed with gramophones that played nationalist songs. Hundreds of Polish, Rumanian and Czech troops fighting unenthusiastically for Austria-Hungary downed arms, later admitting that the turning point was when they heard a few stirring bars of native melodies.

Curzon Street was home to spies and spycatchers in the Second World War as well. At Nos. 1–4 was Curzon Street House, a block built in 1939 which was given a fortified bunker, constructed as part of the mass tunnel-building programme devised by Minister of Production Lord Beaverbrook. The bunker was so solid members of the Royal family sheltered within during air raids.

A few hundred yards west, at Curzon Street’s junction with Chesterfield Gardens, was the army’s London District Command headquarters. A corner of the building was fortified with gun ports, just in case German paratroopers landed in the nearby parks and began street battles in Mayfair. After the War MI5 moved in and continued to man the ports, especially on Sundays when the mobs assembled at Speaker’s Corner may have been thinking of storming the streets.

(3) George Orwell’s Ministry of Love
Forget the idea of George Orwell’s 1984 simply being a nightmare vision of a dystopian totalitarian world where free thought has been all but obliterated and people’s lives are run by an all-powerful, all-knowing state watched over by an all-seeing eye – Big Brother.

1984 is also a satire; the bleakest and blackest of satires. One of its targets is the Catholic Church, in particular the Anglo-Catholic Church, a long-term target of Orwell. In the West End the Anglo-Catholic Church has a gorgeous setting, the Gothic revival church of All Saints on Margaret Street, designed by William Butterfield in the 1850s, which Orwell used to pass daily journeying from the BBC studios to the pubs of Fitzrovia. Orwell once said of the Catholic church, “It’s influence is and always must be against freedom of thought and speech, against human equality,” and a re-appraisal of 1984 as a satire of religion soon throws up the following comparisons.

Infallible Big Brother is God. O’Brien Jesus Christ. Winston is Adam. Julia is Eve. Charrington, who runs the junk shop, Judas. Goldstein is Satan (Both traitors had elevated positions before they rebelled, almost on a level with God/Big Brother himself). Thoughtcrime equals Sin. The Two-Minute Hate is Christian prayer in which Big Brother (God) is worshipped and Goldstein (Satan) despised. The systematic denial of reality by the Party in 1984 ties in with the way the Church denounced the Copernican solar system and the theory of evolution. As for the novel’s plot, Julia (Eve) lures Winston (Adam) into rebellion against Big Brother (God) and thus causes his fall from the “paradise” of Ingsoc or English socialism. The Party’s Revolution, in which Big Brother heroically defeated the tyrant capitalists and established “freedom”, equates with Christ’s death on the cross and the Good News for mankind.

Clues to this interpretation of 1984 are difficult to spot. In Part 2 Chapter 8 of the novel there is a strange scene in which Winston and Julia visit O’Brien hoping to join a secret brotherhood that will campaign against the current regime, unaware that they are being duped by one of the party’s leading figures. After drinking a glass of wine to Big Brother’s enemies Winston and Julia go to leave but O’Brien intervenes.

“They emptied their glasses, and a moment later Julia stood up to go. O’Brien took a small box from the top of a cabinet and handed her a flat white tablet which he told her to place on her tongue. It was important, he said, not to go out smelling of wine”

Evidently the wine and tablet are the ingredients of a communion, maybe part of a longer, more overtly religious scene that Orwell decided not to include in the end. But there are other, even more subtle links between 1984 and Anglo-Catholicism involving All Saints church on Margaret Street. When Winston first meets O’Brien at the beginning of the book we read the following cryptic passage:

“Winston knew – yes, he knew! – that O’Brien was thinking the same thing as himself. An unmistakable message had passed. It was as though their two minds had opened and the thoughts were flowing from one into the other through their eyes. ‘I am with you,’ O'Brien seemed to be saying to him.

which has similarities with Matthew 28 from the New Testament.

“And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.”

Can it be coincidence that these are the first words O’Brien says, or rather Winston Smith imagines O’ Brien saying, to him are from this Biblical passage? Probably not. Framed on the church wall today, as they have always been, is the same passage from Matthew 28. It is not hard to imagine Orwell dropping into the church out of curiosity one lunchtime, catching sight of this excerpt, and deciding to adapt into his dialogue as part of the religious subtext to what has become his most important novel.