Modern Notoriety

At Cliveden's walled-garden pool on the weekend of 8–9 July 1961, War Secretary John Profumo, 46, encountered nineteen-year-old Christine Keeler. Her exact state of undress is disputed; their subsequent affair and Profumo's lie to Parliament helped bring down a government.

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 sprung-floor hotel ballroom hosted the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Who and a generation of British rhythm and blues. The club closed in 1967; after a brief revival and a hippy commune, the hotel burned down in 1971.

Keith Richards's moated cottage, raided by eighteen officers on 12 February 1967 with Marianne Faithfull wrapped in a fur rug. The trial produced The Times editorial 'Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?'; the notorious Mars-bar detail is an unevidenced later rumour, not court evidence or contemporary reporting.

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.

Blackpool made seaside innuendo a mass-market art—and Donald McGill's wildly popular postcards eventually put their seventy-nine-year-old artist in court under Victorian obscenity law.