Viewpoints – Placecloud

London, United Kingdom. Maiden Lane - a "country dance" from John Playford's English Dancing Master, 1651. The dance and its melody is thought to be named after Maiden Lane in Covent Garden, and it is just one of a great number of dances called for London places. Situated between the Covent Garden Market and the Strand, Maiden Lane was originally a path running from Drury Lane to St Martin's Lane...

London, United Kingdom. Brick Lane, in the heart of the East End of London, is often considered one of the most famous locations in the UK for graffiti and street art. Whilst international street artists aspire to paint on Brick Lane, it is kept fresh by local artists who change the graffiti on a weekly basis. Works can be found by famous street artists from around the world, including Phlegm, Ben...

Byfleet, United Kingdom. A variety of graffiti marks can be found across Hampton Court Palace, the Grade I listed royal palace located in the London borough of Richmond upon Thames. Historical graffiti at the site includes marks left on the King’s Staircase including dates, names, initials and even an engraving of a shoe! Further graffiti marks can also be found in the Cumberland Suits (including...

London, United Kingdom. For about twenty years, not a single pint was been pulled in The Lord Napier pub, located near to the Hackney Wick overground station. The pub was licensed in 1868 under the name The White’s Arms and was then advertised for sale, whereupon its news owners changed its name to The Lord Napier. During the twentieth century, the pub appeared in the local and national news as th...

London, United Kingdom. Leake Street Graffiti Tunnel, found underneath the platforms and tracks of Waterloo Station, is London’s largest legal graffiti wall at 300-metres in length. The site gained fame after famed British street artist, Banksy, held a street art festival called Cans Festival (a play on The Cannes Film Festival) in the tunnel. Banksy had recognised the potential of the tunnel whic...

London, United Kingdom. The Southbank Undercroft is a space under the Queen Elizabeth Hall of the Southbank Centre that has been a very popular with skateboarders and graffiti artists for over four decades. The Undercroft was completed in the 1960s and became popular with skateboarders in the 1970s. Over the years it has been covered and re-covered in graffiti and contains work created by thousand...

London, United Kingdom. Trellick Tower is a Grade II* listed tower block on Cheltenham Estate in Kensal Green which was designed in a Brutalist style by architect Ernö Goldfinger and opened in 1972. The base of the tower is renowned as a centre for urban arts and is another example of one of London’s legal ‘Graffiti Halls of Fame’, where graffiti artists can paint without the risk of arrest and, c...

London, United Kingdom. The Tower of London is home to some of the most well-known historic graffiti in the city, and many of the marks are located in the Beauchamp Tower. The Beauchamp Tower was built between 1275-1281 during the reign of King Edward I and was later used as a state prison, housing high-ranking prisoners including Lady Jane Grey and her husband, Guildford Dudley. This former priso...

Ealing Broadway, United Kingdom. IWA Southall had been running a pioneering welfare service from Southall Community Centre before they opened their welfare centre here in 1962.

London, United Kingdom. The arch still standing here marks the site of the first housing estate of the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company, a pioneering social housing project set up by Nathan Mayer Rothschild in the 1880s.

London, United Kingdom. In 1864, the first families moved in to these Peabody Buildings, the first of the housing projects funded by the American banker George Peabody.

London, United Kingdom. This Grade II listed arts and crafts building is still home to Toynbee Hall, one of the world's first university settlements.

London, United Kingdom. From October 1739 until June 2020 there was a statue of the philanthropist after whom the hospital is named at the centre of this Georgian courtyard. So why did it become a point of controversy?

London, United Kingdom. Where today we find Chanel, between 1964 and 1970 we would have found the first Christian Aid shop. This was not, however, quite like the charity shops so familiar to us now.

London, United Kingdom. Between 1870 and the end of the 1930s, this was the site of the first known fundraising shop in London's history. It was, however, rather different from the charity shops we know today.

London, United Kingdom. Originally one of the main Roman roads of Londinium this main city street was inhabited during the medieval period by many immigrants from Lombardy in northern Italy and in time hosted many early coffee houses, the Post Office and eventually became famous as a centre for banking.

London, United Kingdom. In medieval times, Eastcheap was the main meat market in the City of London, with butchers' stalls lining both sides. It was also the location of Falstaff's Boar's Head Inn, featured in Shakespeare's plays and the home to Nehemiah Wallington, the woodturner whose notebooks reveal a great deal about life in the seventeenth-century city.

Ealing Broadway, United Kingdom. This battle took place in November 1642 near the village of Turnham Green in the first few months of the English Civil War. The Parliamentary army, along with many ordinary Londoners rallied to prevent the forces of King Charles I take the city in an important strategic victory.

London, United Kingdom. Cheapside takes its name from ‘chepe’, a Saxon word for a market and was a main thoroughfare of London for much of the city’s history possibly from the time of Alfred the Great. In this street was seen trade of all kinds. Eventually it became an avenue for royal processions, such was its importance.

London, United Kingdom. This tavern in Lothbury was once a headquarters of the Levellers, radicals who during the English civil who proposed changes to the political and legal systems in what are today seen as early calls for democracy.

London, United Kingdom. From the early sixteenth centuries the area around St Pauls Cathedral including the famous Paternoster Row, were the centre of publishing trade in England. Printers and booksellers working from shops here spread ideas and information across the country.

London, United Kingdom. The north-east corner of St Paul’s Churchyard was from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries a space where people came to gather and hear sermons preached from an open-air pulpit. During the fierce debates of the Reformation it was on the frontline of a vicious war of words.

London, United Kingdom. Coleman Street during the civil wars of the seventeenth century became home to religious and political firebrands, a hotbed of radical ideas during a period when the world was turned upside down.

London, United Kingdom. From the early sixteenth centuries the area around St Pauls Cathedral including the famous Paternoster Row, were the centre of publishing trade in England. Printers and booksellers working from shops here spread ideas and information across the country.

London, United Kingdom. The Stockwell Park Graffiti Pen, known as ‘The Pen’ and the ‘Stockwell Hall of Fame’, is another legal graffiti site in London. It was originally built in the 1950s to be used by children from the estate to play sports but attracted graffiti and later became known as a legal graffiti site. It has been used as a graffiti pen for over forty years and can be found in the sunke...