Disgraceful Women of Old St John's Wood

Disgraceful Women of Old St John's Wood

In St John's Wood Alternative Lifestyles were the norm, but nearby Lisson Grove saw the first sex-slave scandal, of young Eliza Armstrong.

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By The Naked Anthropologist
386 followers
50 events hosted 📈

Date and time

Starts on Sat, 7 Jun 2025 13:00 BST

Location

Outside St John's Wood Station

Wellington Road London NW8 6DN United Kingdom

Refund Policy

Refunds up to 1 day before event

About this event

  • Event lasts 2 hours 30 minutes

This walk begins 200 years ago in St John’s Wood, where family arrangements routinely diverged from Victorian rules of respectability. What did it mean to be a Kept Woman? Was it only disreputable or an act of shameful immorality? Some mistresses were movers and shakers, like Harriet Howard who financed the return of Louis Napoleon to the French throne. Novelist George Eliot lived placidly for many years with someone else’s husband, not far from a brothel where sex workers were known as laundresses. A bigamous Agapemonite minister lived with multiple rich unmarried female followers. All this took place in a suburb built with high walls and thick trees to ensure privacy and discretion.

We walk south into Lisson Grove, considered a Victorian slum, where journalist WT Stead staged a scandal he called The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, when he bought Eliza Armstrong from her mother to prove it could be done.

How much did social class determine whether society was appalled by alternative sexual arrangements? Were unmarried women with lovers heroines or victims? Come on this walk to consider scandals of 200 years ago that might sound familiar today, and at the same time join up two neighbourhoods you never thought about together before.

L aura Agustin is an historian, author and qualified guide interested to bring out the lives of unnamed Londoners, the 'ordinary folks', highlighting issues of gender, sex and class.

The Naked Anthropologist is Laura's longtime blog, focusing now on London history walks with Gender, Sex and Class.

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The Naked Anthropologist
386 followers
50 events hosted

Laura Agustín has been a writer, researcher and critical historian all her life. She has been a Londoner since the 1960s, although she has lived in other towns and countries. Author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, she has for many years focused on getting the stories out of women and others marginalised because of being poor, foreign, ‘different’ or doing jobs some folks think are Wrong, in the present and in the past. She spent time with illuminated manuscripts at the British Library looking for clues to how women lived 1000 years ago, and couldn’t stop reading even if she wanted to. She is known as The Naked Anthropologist. She has qualified as a tour guide in order to take this focus to the streets, where guided history walks rarely talk about the poor except as objects of charity.

£15Jun 7 · 13:00 BST