Scandal & Society

For some 25 years the celebrity duchess Georgiana shared her marriage and her home with her husband and her best friend Bess Foster in the most famous ménage à trois of the age; Georgiana's own affair with the future PM Charles Grey produced a secret daughter.

Belfast's most ornate Victorian bar, its private snugs built so the 'reserved' could drink and talk unseen. Popular tradition adds courting couples and even prostitutes — but this is unsourced rumour; the documented function is privacy and discretion.

The villa Nelson bought so he could live openly with Emma Hamilton — while her husband Sir William completed the most famous ménage à trois of the age under the same roof. England's hero left Merton for Trafalgar in 1805; Emma, ruined by his death, lost the house within four years.

Behind a genteel Georgian door in respectable Stockbridge, Dora Noyce ran Edinburgh's most celebrated house of ill repute for over thirty years — twinset, pearls and Conservative Party membership, greeting the fleet with 'business is always good when the Navy's in'. She preferred the term 'YMCA with extras'.

The house of a marriage agreeing to differ, architecturally: Bernard Ward built his front classical Palladian, his wife Anne built her back fashionable Gothick, and the divide runs straight through the middle of the rooms. They separated soon after; the house preserves the incompatibility in stone.

Cardiff's legendary dockland — one of Britain's first truly multicultural quarters, notorious in its coal-boom heyday for sailors' taverns, dance halls and commercial affection, and beloved by those who lived there as a warm, tight community the papers never bothered to understand. Shirley Bassey is its most famous daughter.