Modern Notoriety

On the night of 8 July 1961, 19-year-old Christine Keeler was swimming naked in Cliveden's walled-garden pool when War Secretary John Profumo, 46, wandered over — the encounter that detonated the Profumo affair and helped bring down a government. The estate carries further scandal from the Astor set, making it a genuine hot spot.

Ward's Marylebone flat was the hub where aristocrats, showgirls and diplomats mingled; the shots Johnny Edgecombe fired at its door on 14 December 1962 dragged the Profumo affair into open court.

The Thames island whose crumbling hotel ballroom hosted the Stones, the Yardbirds and a generation discovering what the sixties were for — reached by footbridge, remembered for sprung dance floors, spilled bitter and midsummer entanglements on the towpath. Free love with an R&B soundtrack.

Keith Richards's moated cottage, raided by eighteen officers on a February evening in 1967 with Marianne Faithfull famously wrapped in a fur rug. The trial threatened prison and produced the era-defining Times editorial 'Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?'

The Soho supper club where showgirls in feathers were forbidden to move — and where the teenage Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies met Stephen Ward, the introduction that set the Profumo affair in motion. Discretion was the house rule; history had other plans.