Free The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson Page A

stores.”
    “Well, pardon me for saying so, but you’re an idiot,” I said matter-of-factly. “I have been coming here since the early 1970s, and there’s always been a food hall here. Every Marks and Spencer’s in the country has a food hall.”
    He looked at me for the first time, with a kind of unfolding interest. “This isn’t a Marks and Spencer’s,” he said with something like real pleasure. “This is H&M.”
    I stared at him for a long moment as I adjusted to this new intelligence.
    “Marks and Spencer’s is next door,” he added.
    I was quiet for about fifteen seconds. “Well, you’re still an idiot,” I said quietly and turned on my heel, but I don’t think it had the devastating effect I was hoping for.
    —
    After that, I resumed long days of walking, on account of it involves little contact with strangers. One afternoon, taking a shortcut between Euston Road and Tottenham Court Road, I chanced upon Fitzroy Square, a large open space enclosed by cream-colored houses, nearly every one of which had a blue plaque on it announcing the identity of someone famous who had once lived there. Some nine hundred of these plaques can be found on buildings all over London. Fitzroy Square is particularly well endowed. It has plaques to George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, James McNeill Whistler, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Ford Madox Brown, and August Wilhelm Von Hofmann, a German-born chemist who did novel and transformative things with isomeric orthotoluidines and triphenyl derivatives. That may not mean anything to you or me, but there are chemists reading this page right now who are having orgasms. In one corner of the square was an Indian YMCA—a YMCA just for people from India; how splendid!—and opposite it was a statue to Francisco de Miranda, liberator of Venezuela, who also lived here. A later resident, it appears, was L. Ron Hubbard, beloved father of Scientology. Goodness me, what a city.

    Just beyond Fitzroy Square was a quiet, anonymous-looking road called Cleveland Street. I couldn’t think why the name was familiar until I looked it up afterward and then it all came back. Cleveland Street was the scene of one of the great scandals of the nineteenth century. In the summer of 1889, a policeman stopped a telegraph boy and found that he had a suspiciously large amount of money in his pocket. The boy confessed that he had earned it working in a homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street. The police investigated and found it full of men of superior rank, including the sons of two dukes. But what made the story particularly juicy was the widespread belief, hinted at in all the papers, that one of the other Cleveland Street regulars was Prince Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales and second in line to the throne. Later, this same Albert would be proposed (on scanty evidence, it must be said) as a possible Jack the Ripper, which must set some kind of record for least salubrious royal personage. At all events, with telling swiftness the prince was dispatched on a lengthy tour of the empire, and on his return was summarily betrothed, whether he wished it or not, to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck. Just over a month after the engagement was announced, however, the hapless prince caught pneumonia and, to the relief of nearly everyone, died. Amazingly—well, amazingly to me—Princess Victoria Mary thereupon married his brother, who went on to become King George V, our old friend of “bugger Bognor” fame. And all that, I think, may go some way to explaining why the royal family is occasionally just a trifle strange and emotionally challenged.

    Now I am not saying that London is the world’s best city because it had a homosexual brothel scandal or because Virginia Woolf and L. Ron Hubbard lived around the corner, or anything like that. I am just saying that London is layered with history and full of secret corners in a way that no other city can touch. And it has pubs and lots of trees and is often