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.

A resort so anxious about flesh that in 1896 a man was hauled to court for the crime of swimming near his own three sisters.

A shepherdess-beauty, a fake colonel, a bigamous wedding at Lorton church — and a hanging at Carlisle that gripped all England.

The tyrant nicknamed 'Jemmy Grasp-all' who, when his tenant-farmer mistress died, could not bear to bury her — and kept the corpse until it could no longer be endured.

Victorian Liverpool's Sailortown was a waterfront economy of lodging houses, pubs, brothels and crimps—and also a set of close migrant communities that hostile observers reduced to vice.

Portsmouth Point packed taverns, pawnshops, suppliers and brothels into a tiny sailors' quarter outside the old city gate—preserved in all its disorder by Rowlandson's 1811 print.

At Aldershot, the Contagious Diseases Acts let police identify women as prostitutes on suspicion and compel intimate examination—while imposing no equivalent sanction on servicemen.