About

About Hidden London

Some background information about this website, and the person behind it

Horniman Museum totem pole
Horniman Museum totem pole

Now in its fifteenth year, Hidden London was orig­i­nally created to showcase extracts from what became Chambers London Gazetteer, a book that features all the local­i­ties and districts in Greater London, whether world famous or extra­or­di­narily obscure. The website, however, concen­trated on the more recondite local­i­ties, on the grounds that areas like Kens­ington or Covent Garden were already more than adequately covered by existing online resources. This proved a wise decision. Many more people come to Hidden London to read about minor local­i­ties such as Fish Island than much-visited places like Richmond Park (page views for the former article outweigh those for the latter by ten to one).

Hidden London now has articles on more than 750 London local­i­ties, mostly with greater histor­ical detail than in Chambers London Gazetteer. I’ve also added some original articles on micro-local­i­ties that didn’t appear in the book, and I try to keep all the content as up-to-date as possible. To read more, see the Gazetteer section, or view the alpha­bet­ical list in the Index of Places. Alter­na­tively, you can browse the site aimlessly, by repeat­edly clicking the ‘visit a random page’ button near the top right of each page – which will most often take you to a Gazetteer article – or use the search box to find a place of partic­ular interest to you. However, please bear in mind that the contents of Hidden London are at present selective, so you may not find every place you seek. One day, I hope not to have to say that.

All the Gazetteer pages include a map and at least one picture. A minority of the photos on Hidden London weren’t taken by me, and these are credited accord­ingly. All the borrowed images are licensed for reuse under Creative Commons licences and most of them are sourced from Geograph. On the subject of images, I’d also like to add a caveat borrowed from the admirable website London Remembers: “Be aware that London actually has more cars, more rain and less sun than our photos show.”

A secondary focus of Hidden London is the presen­ta­tion of a series of articles on lesser-known attrac­tions with qualities that make them worth visiting, or at least stopping to admire on your way past. This contrasts with the local­i­ties of the Gazetteer, many of which are little-known and rarely visited for good reasons.

As it evolves, The Guide will feature all sorts of publicly acces­sible buildings; parks, gardens and other open spaces; sculp­tures and curiosi­ties situated in or visible from the public domain; historic shops and markets, pubs, cafés and the like; plus the occa­sional themed walk and some paired attrac­tions located close to each other.

New articles will be appearing in The Guide at irregular intervals, so please come back every few weeks to see the latest.

Hidden London also includes some shorter, unindexed articles called ‘Nuggets’, a list of links to other London websites and very popular pages on the geography of London football, the boroughs of London and the pronun­ci­a­tion of London place names.

Finally, I apologise for the increas­ingly intrusive adver­tising on Hidden London nowadays, but needs must. Clicking one of the Google ads or ordering an item via one of the Amazon links (or indeed ordering anything from Amazon.co.uk within 24 hours of clicking the link) generate small emol­u­ments that help cover the cost of running the site (less than £3 a day). Not all the ads on Hidden London are intended to earn a little revenue; there are also a few pro bono messages dotted around the site, including those for that worthy – and convivial – club London Histo­rians.
 
 

About the author

Hidden London is researched, written, designed and (mostly) photographed by me, Russ Willey.

The man behind Hidden London
The man behind Hidden London

I’m a social sciences graduate who worked mainly in adver­tising and marketing before turning to the perils of self-employ­ment as a profes­sional writer and occa­sional photog­ra­pher, graphic designer, website creator, editor and proof­reader. (If you’d like to contact me about engaging my services in any of these capac­i­ties – espe­cially web design – I’d be delighted to hear from you.)

I began to build Hidden London early in 2005, at first just for fun, and then increas­ingly with the aspi­ra­tion that it would help me find a publisher for my gazetteer of London local­i­ties, an aim in which I succeeded with the assis­tance of literary agent Andrew Lownie. Whenever I could find the time, I continued to nurture Hidden London and it has evolved to become the world’s most visited website special­ising in lesser-known London.

I hope you enjoy your visit to Hidden London – and that it tempts you to explore some new corners of the world’s most fasci­nating city.
 
 

Technical acknowledgements

Hidden London has been created using the WordPress content manage­ment system and the (exten­sively customised) ColorMag theme. Thanks to Jackie Danicki for intro­ducing me to the wonders of WordPress. I’d also like to express my gratitude to the creators of the many clever plugins that enrich the site, including Josh Leuze for Meteor Slides and Mikko Saari for Rele­vanssi.

All the images on the site are created or optimised using PaintShop Pro. Most of the photographs were taken using equipment bought at the excellent Camera World, in Wells Street, W1.

Inci­den­tally, all recom­men­da­tions on this site are made altru­is­ti­cally, not because I’ve been paid to provide an endorsement.