London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets Ahead.
Story time.
History time.
And word time.
Our word for today is cantankerous.
What a word.
Cantankerous.
Bad-tempered. Quarrelsome. Contrary. Difficult.
The sort of person who could start an argument in an empty room.
And here’s the pleasing thing.
Cantankerous is itself a slightly cantankerous word.
Etymologists have been arguing about it for a couple of hundred years.
Nobody knows for certain where it came from.
It turns up in English in the eighteenth century. There may be contentious lurking somewhere in there. There may be rancorous. There may even be an Irish connection.
But the word won’t tell us.
It digs its heels in.
Folds its arms.
Refuses to cooperate.
Cantankerous to the last.
And why have I chosen cantankerous?
Because today we’re going to meet an extremely cantankerous eighteenth-century Irish actor.
Charles Macklin.
A man so cantankerous that an argument backstage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane ended with another actor dead.
And today, just a few minutes’ walk from Drury Lane, there’s a London street named after him.
Macklin Street.
And that street is where today’s story begins.
And that street is where today’s story begins.
Here’s a London street.
Macklin Street.
Nothing street.
Ho-hum street.
Blink and you’ve missed it street.
There is absolutely nothing about Macklin Street that says: stop. Look at me. I’ve got a story to tell.
Except it has.
Good God, has it got a story to tell.
Macklin Street came into the news a few days ago for the worst possible reason.
In the early hours of August 22, 2026, a woman in her twenties was raped in a doorway there. Police subsequently appealed for information and released CCTV footage of a man they wanted to identify.
A terrible event.
A terrible reason for the name Macklin Street suddenly to be in front of us.
But it was.
And the historian in me looked at those two words.
Macklin Street.
And wondered.
Who was Macklin?
And that little question opened a trapdoor.
Because Macklin Street has had not one name, not two names, but three.
It’s been pasture.
It’s been notorious.
It’s been renamed in an attempt to wash away its reputation.
It’s been home territory for one of the most extraordinary criminals in London history.
And its present name commemorates an actor who killed another actor by driving a stick through his eye.
And there’s a memorial to him just down the road which appears to remember precisely that moment.
All of that.
In this little street.
This completely ordinary, nothing-to-see-here London street.
And that’s what today’s podcast is really about.
It’s about what happens when you go down a London street with somebody who knows.
Because the guide stops.
The story starts.
The walls move.
Four hundred years come roaring out.
And Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore.
So.
Macklin Street.
Let’s rewind it.
Keep going.
Past Victoria.
Past George III.
Past Jonathan Wild.
Past Charles II.
Right back to the early seventeenth century.
And take the buildings away.
There.
That’s better.
Because there isn’t a Macklin Street.
There isn’t a street at all.
We’re standing in a field.
Rose Field.
Pastureland attached to the Rose Inn on Drury Lane.
That’s our starting point.
Grass.
Cows, presumably.
Sky.
Hard to imagine now, isn’t it?
This is one of the most densely built-up bits of central London and our little street begins life as a field.
Then, in the early seventeenth century, the developers arrive.
A lane is laid out across Rose Field.
And it gets its first name.
Lewkenor’s Lane.
L-E-W-K-E-N-O-R.
Named after Sir Lewis Lewkenor.
And Sir Lewis was somebody.
Master of Ceremonies to James I.
Think diplomatic London.
Ambassadors.
Foreign visitors.
Court ceremonial.
The complicated business of making sure some touchy Venetian envoy wasn’t seated two inches lower than the ambassador of France and starting a European war.
That world.
Sir Lewis had his house and gardens here.
So the new street takes his name.
Lewkenor’s Lane.
Perfectly respectable beginning.
It doesn’t stay respectable for long.
London changes.
The fashionable people move west.
The poor move in.
And Lewkenor’s Lane goes spectacularly downhill.
It becomes notorious for prostitution.
Not just slightly dodgy.
Not somewhere your mother might have advised you not to linger after dark.
Notorious.
One old description calls it a “rendezvous and nursery for lewd women.”
There’s a phrase for you.
A nursery for lewd women.
And then into Lewkenor’s Lane walks one of the greatest rogues London has ever produced.
Jonathan Wild.
Now, Jonathan Wild deserves a podcast all to himself.
Several podcasts.
He was born in Wolverhampton, probably in 1682.
Started out as a buckle-maker.
Came to London.
Got into debt.
Went to prison.
And prison turned out to be his university.
Because there he met thieves.
Receivers.
Prostitutes.
Confidence tricksters.
The entire criminal ecosystem of early eighteenth-century London.
And, crucially, he met a woman called Mary Milliner.
Mary was a prostitute.
She knew the underworld.
She showed Wild the ropes.
And when they got out of prison, Jonathan Wild and Mary Milliner set themselves up right here.
Lewkenor’s Lane.
They ran a brothel.
And Wild began receiving stolen goods.
And then the penny dropped.
He realised there was much more money to be made not simply by receiving stolen property but by controlling the whole market.
You steal a gentleman’s silver.
Wild takes the silver from you.
The gentleman desperately wants his silver back.
And, goodness gracious me, Mr Wild knows people.
Perhaps he can recover it.
For a consideration.
So the victim pays Wild.
Wild pays the thief.
Wild takes his cut.
Everybody’s happy.
Well, everybody except the victim.
And if a thief became inconvenient?
Wild could turn him in.
That’s the genius of it.
Jonathan Wild became simultaneously one of London’s greatest criminals and one of London’s greatest thief-takers.
He ran the thieves.
And arrested the thieves.
Crime was the disease.
Jonathan Wild was the cure.
Except Jonathan Wild was also the disease.
It was magnificent.
For a while.
Eventually the game was up.
Wild went to Tyburn in 1725.
Huge crowd.
The great thief-taker himself was hanged as a thief.
And Mary Milliner?
Their relationship had ended somewhat badly.
Wild cut off one of her ears.
There’s Lewkenor’s Lane for you.
A nursery for lewd women indeed.
And eventually the name itself became a problem.
This happens in London.
A street acquires such a reputation that you don’t rebuild it.
You rebrand it.
New name.
Fresh start.
Nobody will remember.
Lewkenor’s Lane becomes…
Charles Street.
There.
Job done.
Except it wasn’t.
Because Charles Street promptly acquired much the same reputation as Lewkenor’s Lane.
Poverty.
Prostitution.
Overcrowding.
Lodging houses.
Crime.
The name had changed.
The street hadn’t.
By the nineteenth century the housing conditions here were appalling.
Think rooms divided and divided again.
Families crammed together.
Common lodging houses.
Poor sanitation.
Disease.
People living right on top of one another.
By 1886 the local Medical Officer of Health was recommending that the area around what was now Macklin Street and Parker Street should simply be cleared.
The houses were beyond repair.
Overcrowding was severe.
The death rate was dreadful.
And eventually much of it was swept away.
London County Council housing went up.
A lodging house for 345 people was completed nearby in 1893.
More blocks followed.
The streets were widened.
A different physical world began to emerge.
But before all that, in 1878, somebody had decided Charles Street needed the same treatment Lewkenor’s Lane had received.
Another reputational witness-protection programme.
Change the name.
Again.
And this time they chose a local theatrical hero.
Charles Macklin.
Macklin Street.
Our third name.
And this is where the story becomes almost too good to be true.
Because if your object was to cleanse a street of its associations with violence and bad behaviour…
Charles Macklin was an interesting choice.
Macklin was Irish.
Born around the end of the seventeenth century.
Ran away to become an actor.
And became one of the great actors of the eighteenth-century London stage.
A giant of the theatre.
He was especially famous for playing Shylock.
Indeed, Macklin helped change the way Shylock was played.
Less comic stereotype.
More dangerous.
More serious.
More human.
Macklin was also famously cantankerous.
There’s our word again.
And on May 10, 1735, backstage at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, he got into an argument with another actor.
Thomas Hallam.
Now, what could possibly be important enough for two actors to come to blows backstage at Drury Lane?
Politics?
Religion?
A woman?
Money?
No.
A wig.
They were arguing about a theatrical wig.
There was a struggle.
Macklin had a stick or cane in his hand.
He thrust it at Hallam.
And the cane went into Hallam’s eye.
Hallam died the following day.
Imagine that.
An argument over a wig.
A jab with a stick.
A man dead.
Macklin was arrested and tried.
For murder.
He defended himself.
And successfully got the offence reduced to manslaughter.
He survived the scandal.
More than survived it.
He went back to the theatre.
Had an enormous career.
And lived to a phenomenal age.
Ninety-something certainly.
Possibly a hundred.
Perhaps even a little more.
And then London supplies the final touch.
Because we can leave Macklin Street.
Walk down Drury Lane.
Head towards Covent Garden Piazza.
And go into St Paul’s.
The Actors’ Church.
And there, on the wall, is Charles Macklin.
His memorial.
Look closely at it.
There’s a theatrical mask.
And through the mask’s left eye…
a blade.
A dagger.
Straight through the eye.
Now, it wasn’t a dagger Macklin used on Thomas Hallam.
It was a cane.
But there it is.
On Macklin’s memorial.
A theatrical face.
Something sharp piercing the left eye.
The very manner in which Macklin killed another actor.
Coincidence?
You decide.
But if a London Walks guide takes you into that church, stands you in front of that memorial, tells you about Macklin and Hallam and the wig and the cane…
you will never look at that memorial in the same way again.
And you certainly won’t look at Macklin Street in the same way again.
And Macklin Street still isn’t finished with us.
Because remember what they were trying to do in 1878.
New name.
New reputation.
Charles Street was dead.
Long live Macklin Street.
Four years later.
There was a tremendous fight in Macklin Street.
Two women were arrested.
When they appeared in court both had their heads heavily bandaged.
One of them, Catherine Day, had two black eyes.
Her mouth was so badly swollen she could scarcely make herself understood.
So much for the rebranding.
The street was apparently determined to remain itself.
And then there are the buildings.
Because once somebody has opened your eyes, you start looking.
Number 17A.
St Giles’s Almshouses.
Founded in 1665.
Moved onto this site in 1790.
Rebuilt in 1885.
They’re still there.
Four almshouses arranged around a little quadrangle.
Another survivor.
Another layer.
And then numbers 24 and 25.
Look at that building.
Gothic.
Red brick.
Pointed arches.
What was that?
A church?
A chapel?
No.
A mortuary.
The old Bloomsbury Public Mortuary.
Later associated with the coroner’s court.
Now offices.
Of course it is.
This is London.
People sitting at computers and having meetings in what used to be the local mortuary.
And most of the people walking past haven’t the faintest idea.
Why would they?
Nothing tells you.
Until somebody tells you.
And that brings us back to where we started.
August 22, 2026.
Another terrible event enters the history of Macklin Street.
A woman in her twenties is attacked there.
As I record this, police have appealed for information and released CCTV of a man they want to identify and speak to.
We don’t know that woman’s name.
Nor should we.
This isn’t our story to turn into entertainment.
But what happened to her is the reason I looked at Macklin Street.
And looking at Macklin Street reminded me of something I spend a large part of my life thinking about.
What a walking tour can do.
Because there’s Macklin Street.
Go there tomorrow.
Look at it.
It’s a street.
That’s it.
Buildings.
Doors.
Windows.
Pavement.
Cars.
Bikes.
Bins.
People hurrying somewhere else.
Nothing to see here.
And then the guide says…
Stop.
And suddenly there’s a field underneath your feet.
Rose Field.
Then Sir Lewis Lewkenor appears.
Then the prostitutes arrive.
Then Mary Milliner.
Then Jonathan Wild.
Thieves carrying stolen silver through the door.
Lewkenor’s Lane disappears.
Charles Street goes up.
Charles Street goes bad.
Down comes Charles Street.
Up goes Macklin Street.
An Irish actor appears.
There’s an argument backstage.
Over a wig.
A cane flashes.
Thomas Hallam falls.
We walk down to the Actors’ Church.
There’s the memorial.
There’s the mask.
There’s the blade through the eye.
Back up the street.
Two battered women are hauled before a magistrate.
There are the almshouses.
There’s the mortuary.
Four hundred years.
All of it stacked up vertically in one short London street.
And five minutes earlier you thought there was nothing there.
That.
That right there.
Is the magic trick.
Except it isn’t a trick.
The guide hasn’t put anything there.
It was there all along.
The guide has simply given you the eyes to see it.
And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
Macklin Street will never again be a nothing street.
You have crossed an invisible line.
Toto…
we’re not in Kansas anymore.
We’re in Oz.
AKA London.
This is London.
See you tomorrow.