A History of Sex in Britain: 14 Places Where It Actually Happened

Britain does not much like talking about sex, which is odd, because it has left the evidence lying about everywhere. It is in the brickwork of a Surrey palace, the byelaws of a Welsh beach, the snugs of a Belfast pub and a chalk hillside in Dorset. The country has spent several centuries being publicly mortified and privately busy, and the buildings have kept the receipts.

What follows is a tour of fourteen real places, each of which can be visited, and each of which has a better documented story than the one usually told about it. They are drawn from The Erotic Map of Britain, our source-checked atlas of where the nation actually did its loving, scheming, eloping and misbehaving.

The Crown, behaving badly

Start at Hampton Court Palace, which was built to feed one man's appetites in the most literal sense: at its Tudor height the kitchens turned out over eight hundred meals a day for a household of hundreds. Henry VIII honeymooned here with Anne Boleyn, married Jane Seymour here, and learned here — at Mass, by letter, which is a peculiarly cowardly piece of admin — of Catherine Howard's alleged adultery.

The courtship that started it began at Hever Castle in Kent. Henry loathed writing letters and wrote them anyway: "Having been for above a whole year stricken with the dart of love." Seventeen of them survive, in the Vatican Library, because someone stole them. The most consequential love letters in English history are preserved by an act of theft.

North of the border, on 17 February 1565, a twenty-two-year-old Mary, Queen of Scots met Lord Darnley at Wemyss Castle above the Firth of Forth and was, by the ambassador's account, instantly captivated. They married five months later in the Chapel Royal at Holyroodhouse. It went wrong with remarkable speed. Darnley wanted the Crown Matrimonial — actual kingship — and when he did not get it, he helped murder her secretary in front of her while she was six months pregnant.

The Restoration brought a different energy. Charles II came back in 1660 with an appetite that eleven years of Puritan government had merely sharpened, and installed it at Whitehall, where the Banqueting House still stands. His most famous mistress kept a house at 79 Pall Mall — although, and this is the sort of thing our map exists to say out loud, the building there now is not hers. The Italianate block was put up in 1866 for an insurance company, by which time Nell Gwyn had been dead for nearly two hundred years.

At the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, George IV built the most flamboyant building in England partly to be near Maria Fitzherbert, whom he had secretly and illegally married in 1785. On her memorial in a Brighton church, the carved figure wears three wedding rings. The third was for the King.

Then there is the Victoria nobody pictures. Forget the widow in black: the Victoria of Osborne House wrote about her wedding night as "bliss beyond belief", commissioned nudes for her husband, and had a private beach. After Albert died, the most scrutinised relationship of her life played out at Balmoral with a Highland servant named John Brown — a story about which almost everything popularly asserted is unproven, and which is interesting enough without the embroidery.

The line ends, more or less, at Fort Belvedere in Surrey, where on the evening of 10 December 1936 Edward VIII sat in the drawing room of the house he loved best and signed away the throne.

Arrangements the neighbours pretended not to notice

At Chatsworth, picture the household: a duke, his duchess, and her closest friend, under one roof for twenty-five years. The duke and the friend were lovers and had children. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was meanwhile the most famous woman in England. The arrangement was not a scandal because it was hidden; it was a scandal because it very much was not.

At Merton Place, Nelson set up home with Emma Hamilton and her husband, all three living together while the country cheered. The detail that stops you is earlier and worse: in 1786 Emma was handed from one man to another to settle a debt, and the correspondence arranging it survives.

Not every story ends well, and the map does not pretend otherwise. Mary Robinson, the Maid of Buttermere, had the misfortune to be called beautiful in a guidebook in 1792, in the decade when beauty first became a tourist attraction. What followed — a bigamist posing as a colonel, a national sensation, a hanging — happened to her, not because of anything she did. Her near neighbour "Wicked Jimmy" Lowther was the richest and most detested man in the north, and is remembered chiefly for how thoroughly he was hated.

And in the genteel New Town of Edinburgh, Dora Noyce ran Scotland's best-known brothel from an elegant terraced house at 17 Danube Street for more than thirty years, describing her occupation on official forms with a straight face and considerable style.

Pleasure, and the panic about it

For two centuries Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was the most famous pleasure garden in the world, and the part everyone remembers is the Dark Walks — the deliberately unlit avenues that the management periodically promised to illuminate and then, sensibly, did not.

Up at West Wycombe, the Hellfire Club has the most lurid reputation in Britain and very nearly none of it survives contact with the evidence. The Satanism and black masses come from a satirical novel of the 1760s and from a political vendetta by a former member. The caves themselves were dug as famine relief, with Sir Francis Dashwood paying the local poor a shilling a day after the harvests failed.

Newstead Abbey is where Byron became Byron, having inherited a ruined priory at the age of ten. And Castle Ward in County Down is the house that cannot agree with itself — Palladian at the front, Gothic at the back, because husband and wife wanted different things. It is a glorious metaphor for a failing marriage. It is also, and we say so on the page, not a proven one.

Which brings us to the two best examples of the British genius for policing appearances. The snugs of the Crown Liquor Saloon in Belfast are always "rumoured" to have been used by prostitutes; the claim appears in tourism copy and in no listing or historical record anywhere. Their documented purpose is quieter and far more revealing — privacy, for respectable people who wanted to drink unobserved in an age that policed being seen far more strictly than being.

Best of all, on the beaches of Llandudno, men and women were kept apart in the sea by law. In 1896 a man was summonsed for bathing within two hundred yards of the ladies' bathing ground. The ladies in question were his own three sisters. He had gone for a swim with his family and thereby committed an offence.

Why we built the map

Because the good stories keep being told badly. The chastity belt in the museum is Victorian. The Hellfire Club orgies are a novel. Nell Gwyn's house is an insurance office. Almost every juicy claim in this subject turns out to be a nineteenth-century invention, and the actual history underneath — messier, funnier, more human — is nearly always better.

So every entry on The Erotic Map of Britain carries its sources, its coordinates, and a plain statement of how confident we are. Where the popular story is wrong, we say so. Where we cannot prove something, we say that too. There are currently over a hundred locations across England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and more arrive every week.

If you would rather start with yourself than with a map, our persona assessment is sixty-four questions and takes about ten minutes. And if you want to know what to do once you have got the history out of your system, there is always The Positions Atlas.