London S Underworld

London’s Underworld takes us on the nightmarish last journeys of condemned criminals to the gallows at Tyburn. We enter death-trap eighteenth century prisons, one of which the novelist Henry Fielding described as a ‘prototype of hell’. We walk the crowded streets of Victorian London with its swarms of prostitutes and follow the ingenious villains who carried out the first great train robbery in 1854. We see the rise and fall of the interwar racecourse gangs and the bloody battle for control of the Wes End. This fascinating book illustrates how crime in the capital has evolved from the extreme violence of the early eighteenth century to the vastly more complex and lucrative, but no less brutal, gangland of today.

Beginning with an atmospheric account of Tyburn, we are set up for a grisly excursion through London as a city of ne'er do wells, taking in beheadings and brutality at the Tower, Elizabethan street crime, cutpurses and con-men, through to the Gordon Riots and Highway robbery of the 18thcentury and the rise of prisons, the police and the Victorian era of incarceration. As well as the crimes, Arnold also looks at the grotesque punishments meted out to those who transgressed the law throughout London's history - from the hangings, drawings and quarterings at Tyburn over 500 years to being boiled in oil at Smithfield. This popular historian also investigates the influence of London's criminal classes on the literature of the 19thand 20thcenturies, and ends up with our old favourites, the Krays and Soho gangs of the 50s and 60s. London's crimes have changed over the centuries, both in method and execution. Underworld London traces these developments, from the highway robberies of the eighteenth century, made possible by the constant traffic of wealthy merchants in and out of the city, to the beatings, slashings and poisonings of the Victorian era.

Reproduction of the original.

A thrilling exposé and a considered anthropological review of London's seedy underbelly.

The spectacular trial of the high-profile Kray brothers blew the lid off the London Underworld of the 1950s and 60s. But what of the great city's gangland before and since? In this comprehensive and thoroughly researched history of London's secret life, James Morton exposes some startling conclusions about exactly who lurked - and still lurks - in the powerhouses of the Underworld. From the Dover Road Gang of the 1880s to the era of the Krays and up to the Triads and Yardies of the present, GANGLAND reveals the people who ruled, robed and regulated vast areas of the capital - and those who hold ominous power today. Fascinating accounts are recorded - many from contemporaries of the controllers of vice in Soho, of contract killers, bank robbers, drug dealers, grasses and supergrasses - and of the crooked police officers and lawyers who helped them perpetuate the Underworld structure.

This highly acclaimed study draws on information from spy reports and contemporary literature to look at English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government "Terror" of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. The book traces for the first time the history of theunderground revolutionary-republican grouping founded by the agrarian reformer, Thomas Spence. Challenging conventional distinctions between "high" and "low" culture, McCalman illuminates the darker, more populist sides of Romanticism. Radical Underworld broadens the conventional boundaries ofpopular politics and culture by exploring a political underworld connected with poverty, crime, prophetic religion, and literary culture.

This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.