Salon for the City is London's longest running cultural event. Every month we take a look at the City through a different lens with two amazing speakers in the historic location of London's only surviving 18th century Horse Hospital.
Doors 7pm
Capital Crooks, Crazies and Curios
Historian of Science LAURENCE SCALES surveys some of the London cranks whose controversial claims have somehow escaped historical oblivion. Figures such as Archbishop James Ussher, buried at Westminster Abbey, who pinpointed the Creation to the evening of 22nd October 4004BC - just one of the eccentrics lurking at the fringes of science and theology, with cosmological theories, schemes of perpetual motion, and impractical inventions.
Did any of them manage to leave us with anything important, and if so, was it by insight or accident? Laurence investigates.
Meanwhile, London guide and historian ROBERT STEPHENSON goes in search of the underbelly of Victorian society with tales of some of the criminals, frauds, social outcasts, philanders, quack doctors, card cheats, blackmailers and murderers who are buried at Kensal Green.
Most occupants of this pioneering garden cemetery were respectable, but a significant few fell prey to lust, broke the law or scandalised society in some way. Amongst them, the narcissist extraordinaire Robert ‘Romeo’ Coates, generally described as the worst actor in England. Robert will exhume their controversial corpses for our scrutiny.
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LAURENCE SCALES is a London guide and historian of science. He is an avid collector of the colourful and often neglected characters who made the extraordinary technological and scientific history of London.
ROBERT STEPHENSON is a qualified City of London Culture and Heritage guide and a trustee at Kensal Green and Brompton cemeteries. He teaches on London and death studies and is chairman of the National Federation of Cemetery Friends.
