Literary Passion · London, Greater London
The Tabard Inn site (Chaucer's Wife of Bath)
The pilgrims' departure point of the Canterbury Tales — and the stage entrance of the Wife of Bath, five husbands down and gloriously unrepentant, English literature's first great celebrant of appetite. The inn is gone; the voice has never stopped talking.
Sources
Nearby on the map
London's most famous molly house, a coffee-house refuge for gay men run by Margaret Clap. Constable Samuel Stevens' report of his 14 Nov 1725 visit records 'between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call'd it'; the raid of 17 Feb 1726 saw ~40 arrested and three men — Gabriel Lawrence, Thomas Wright and William Griffin — hanged at Tyburn on 9 May 1726.
Documented + folkloreBohemian & LibertineVauxhall Pleasure Gardens (the Dark Walks)London, Greater London · EnglandFor two centuries London's great pleasure garden, where ten thousand a night promenaded by lamplight — and the unlit 'Dark Walks' at the garden's edge were the most notorious assignation spot in Georgian England. Pepys complained as early as the 1660s that one could not walk them without hearing what he ought not.
Documented historyHot spotRoyal LiaisonBanqueting House, Whitehall (Charles II's court)London, Greater London · EnglandThe last standing fragment of Whitehall Palace, the sprawling warren where the Merry Monarch kept his court and his mistresses — Barbara Villiers chief among them — sometimes within corridors of the Queen's own apartments. The palace burned in 1698; the gossip proved more durable.
Documented historyHot spotSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.