The Marquis de Mayfair presents
Discover where the UK's most shocking scandals, secrets and steamy sex actually happened, and go and stand on the spot.
UK prices. Outside the UK, the buttons open your own country's Amazon store · For adults 18+
Hover a pin
Each pin is a place in the book. Hover over one (or tap it on your phone) for the story that happened there.
Not just London
A queen meets the tall young man who will wreck her reign. A king gives up a throne at his writing desk. Two Irish ladies elope to a Welsh valley and become the most famous couple in Georgian England. And a chalk giant has been showing off above a Dorset village for a thousand years.
Map: ONS boundaries, December 2024 · London enlarged in the North Sea, as in the book
What's inside
Royal bedrooms, scandal sheets, Georgian rakes, pagan Britain, literary passion, hidden queer history, runaway marriages, the twentieth century's great scandals, and London after dark.
Royal desire, and the constitutional trouble it causes
What the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did to people who were caught
The organised pursuit of pleasure, 1660–1930
Chalk, stone, water, and the rites we kept, or invented in 1873
The houses, moors and harbours behind the books
Queer Britain, from the molly houses to the Caravan Club
Running for the border
When the newspapers got cameras
The buildings and objects that changed what Britain was allowed to want
The old trades, licensed and unlicensed: a chapter for adults
How each story is set out
Every entry follows the same pattern, so you can read it in an armchair or use it on the road.
Sample pages
A word from the Marquis
“Britain does not much like talking about sex, which is odd, because it has left the evidence lying about everywhere: in palaces and parsonages, on hillsides and down Soho alleys. This book takes you to the door.”
The Marquis de Mayfair · Mayfair, London
The Marquis's Tours
The details
On Amazon, now. The paperback is £14.99: 392 pages, 7 by 10 inches, with a black and white interior. The Kindle edition is £4.99. Outside the UK, the same links open your own country's Amazon store.
Every entry is researched and checked against named sources. Where a story is legend, literary fiction or a later invention, the book says so plainly, and some of the best stories in it are the ones that turn out to be untrue.
It is frank, witty social history rather than erotica. The plates are pen-and-ink scenes in a period style. It is written for adults.
Most of them. Every place has a card with today's council, an Ordnance Survey grid reference, what is nearby and directions, and the fifteen tours gather them by region into routes you can open on your phone.
No. Every picture page carries a small map showing where in Britain the scene happened, how far it is from London and when it took place, and the book closes with a map of every place.
Yes. The online Erotic Map of Great Britain is free, with every place pinned and the story behind each one.
The Erotic Map of Great Britain
Sixty-five stories, 108 places and fifteen tours. Out now on Amazon.
New places and tours are added to the online map. Leave your email to hear of them.
For adults 18+ · Privacy
Marquis de Mayfair