London stories
Explore the stories of the world's greatest city and uncover the hidden treasures of our collections.
All stories
London’s folk customs & traditions
The capital’s cultural calendar is a rainbow of obscure customs, traditions, rituals and ceremonies
London’s fashion designers
Vivienne Westwood, Mary Quant and the many other talents that make London a fashion capital
London's Black history
Explore the stories of Black Londoners – African Romans, the Windrush Generation and modern trailblazers
Gustave Doré’s London pilgrimage
The artist’s gloomy illustrations recall his 19th-century trips through the poverty-stricken city
How Cleopatra’s Needle came to London
An ancient Egyptian obelisk – on the banks of the River Thames
Inside Homerton Hospital, 1988
A new hospital for Hackney – its patients and staff, needles and blood
Victorian photographs of Barnet & Enfield
Roaming rural north London in the late 1800s
The animals of London Zoo in the 1950s
Photographer Henry Grant takes us on a tour of these Regent’s Park residents
The toilet photos that saved gay men on trial
Fighting the prosecution of gay encounters in the 1980s and 1990s
The comic operas of Gilbert & Sullivan
The writer-composer pair behind the hottest shows in Victorian London
Katharine Hamnett shaped the style of the 1980s
Oversized silhouettes, worn-in denim, political slogans – Hamnett’s designs drove a new London look
Norman Hartnell: Couturier to queens & stars
The south Londoner who brought a theatrical flair to high-end fashion design
London’s stars of the stage & screen
The actors, singers, dancers and entertainers who’ve taken the city by storm
The Forty Elephants: South London’s supreme shoplifters
How an all-women clan of career criminals hounded West End department stores
Alvin Langdon Coburn’s ethereal photographs of London
A foggy, shadowy view of the capital in 1909
