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wear, was brought back here to Wapping to be rehanged in chains for carrion birds to peck at. Hanging bodies were left ‘until three tides have overflowed them’.

    When notorious pirate-catcher turned pirate himself, Captain Kidd, died here in 1701 the first attempt at his execution failed because the rope broke and he fell to the ground. There was no reprieve though, the still conscious Kidd was hauled back up and, in a nifty bit of improvisation, pushed from a ladder leaning against the gallows and so rehanged. Kidd’s tarred body was to be seen, hung in chains, for the next two years at the mouth of the Thames Estuary.

2   WEST LONDON
1) The Cato Street conspirators

    Tube: Edgware Road.

    Remarkably, The actual former cow and horse stable, where the conspirators met prior to attempting to behead every member of the Cabinet, is still in Cato Street with an official blue plaque on it.
    To get here, go to Edgware Road station using the Circle/District/ Hammersmith & City lines (because the Bakerloo line station is an entirely separate building some 150 yards away). Turn left out of the station. Walk to the top of the road you are on, called Chapel Street, and at the top opposite on the right is a street called Homer Street. Walk down Homer Street, at the end turn right into Crawford Street past the Larrik pub on the left and into Crawford Place. One minute later you come to Cato Street on the left which you enter through a white-bricked archway. The actual building with its plaque does not have a number on its door so it presumably belongs to the building immediately to the left which is No. 1 Cato Street.
    If you want a quiet place to read this chapter, just across the road from Cato Street is the Windsor Castle pub and there is the aforementional The Larrik.

REVOLUTION IN A COWSHED

    Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, Thomas Brunt, Richard Tidd and William Davidson and others plot to behead the entire Cabinet.
    In 1820, revolution was in the air in Europe, and England was not immune from the feeling that ‘the times they were a-changin’. The Battle of Waterloo had been won in 1815 but with a huge cost to the country as soldiers flooded back home. Many had been injured and had become rudely disillusioned at the lack of rehabilitation, and indeed their general treatment. In addition, the passage of the first of the Corn Laws that same year meant that farmers were protected but poor people had to pay artificially high prices for corn and other grains. The cost of living rocketed and wages were depressed. The Manchester Peterloo massacre in 1819, when soldiers attacked a working-class meeting demanding the reform of parliament leaving 11 dead and 400 injured, radicalised thousands.

    Then, in January 1820 King George III finally died and a newspaper revealed that the entire Cabinet was due to have a meal together in Grosvenor Square, close to Marble Arch.
    All of this was the crucible from which the Cato Street conspiracy emerged.
    The leader of the conspiracy was Arthur Thistlewood, and the four other main protagonists were Ings, Brunt, Tidd and Davidson. It was a working-class assembly of carpenters, butchers, shoemakers, tailors, etc.
    There are parallels with the Guy Fawkes plot to kill King James and others at the state opening of parliament in 1605, not least because both groups of conspirators had been infiltrated by spies and both governments knew of the plots against them but played along to try to catch the conspirators red-handed.
    It was Arthur Thistlewood’s right-hand man, George Edwards, who first suggested the wholesale murder of the Cabinet as he pointed out the newspaper item about the meal the ministers were going to have in Grosvenor Square. In fact no such meal had been planned and the newspaper item had been deliberately fabricated and then inserted in the newspaper precisely to entrap the would-be assassins. The whole thing was a set-up and Edwards was a government agent, one of many spies and