Until the C16th, the area next to the river in Lambeth was home to the so-called Bankside Stews, a collection of bathhouses that doubled as brothels.

Up to 15,000 sex workers and their kin are buried here at Crossbones Churchyard in Lambeth, unhallowed ground since sex workers were designated unrepentant sinners by the Church.

Frederick’s Place, in the City of London, used to be called Gropecunt Lane in the medieval period due to its many brothels. As nearby Milk Street and Bread Street can attest, medieval Londoners valued pragmatism above all in their naming of streets.

An account of a patch of land between Fleet Street and the Thames. Now occupied residentially by judges and senior lawyers and enclosing the Inner Temple library and nearby Temple Church, the land was originally leased by the Knights Templar in the fourteenth century. Its rose garden was later – according to William Shakespeare – the place where the fifteenth century War of the Roses began.