A tour of the filthy and glamorous capital.
It was in the mid-winter of 2023, when I first fell under the spell of London noir. I’d been back in town 18 months, after years hiding away in Complacency-on-Sea, and found the city I’d returned to was as ungodly as ever, a thick and vicious morass laden with big money, bent coppers and blue tents.
Soaring, empty skyscrapers had arisen in unthinkable parts of town, while chi-chi members clubs and high-value street robberies had taken over the West End. The Russians had fled but everyone else had jumped into the vacuum. It seemed everything was up for grabs; municipal land, catalytic converters, Patek Phillipes, the soul of the city.
The story on everyone’s lips around this time was the Zac Brettler case, the tale of a north London schoolboy who was found dead on the banks of the Thames, after getting caught up with some old school villains. Then there was Vanity Bar, the Soho stripclub that had been spiking its punters and emptying their bank accounts. There was the Saif Rubie trial – a football agent who had allegedly ‘taxed’ a rival agent of an expensive watch in some godforsaken restaurant. There were infinite stories of murky property deals, eunuch rings, candy store money laundering fronts and Westminster kompromat scandals that even the broadsheets couldn’t quite land. I saw somebody define it as ‘London noir’.
Unlike many of my contemporaries, who were slowly falling in line with the safe, prescribed experience of pubs and pushchairs, I didn’t want to keep the action, or the juice, at bay. At a time when I was supposed to be settling down, softening the edges of my day-to-day life, I wanted to run my fingers along the capital’s underbelly, to hear its false promises and wild-headed schemes. I wanted to become entangled in something weird, sexy and dangerous. But first of all, I had to find it.
the crux
Endless are the film and literature historians who have tried to define the ‘noir’ genre. But for me, the best summation comes from that laureate of the American style, James Ellroy, who described it as such: ‘You have just met a woman, you are inches away from the greatest sex of your life… but within six weeks, you’ll be framed for a crime you didn’t commit. You’ll end up in the gas chamber, and as they strap you in, and you’re about to breathe the cyanide fumes, you’ll be grateful for the few weeks you had with her, and grateful for your own death.’ Which, to my mind, sounds a lot like a membership at 5 Hertford Street.
London noir is an interzone, a shadowland where villainy collides with ambition, eroticism, slime and glamour. The 24-hour slot machine pit on Holloway Road, or Leicester Square at 2am, may crackle with evil, but really, they’re more depressing than alluring. In noir-land, there has to be something worth dying for; the scope to make a fortune, to meet the fire of your loins, to escape from the drudge.
It isn’t entirely a new concept. Long before Raymond Chandler started venturing down those mean streets, the city had an established canon of noir-ish art and literature that spans everything from Victorian horror novels to early Hitchcock films. There are the key literary texts; Hangover Square, London Fields, The Caretaker, Hawksmoor. There are movies like Sapphire, Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday. There’s Walter Sickert and Francis Bacon too. But the reference that really sticks in my head is actually a flop reality series from 2014.
Bravo’s Ladies of London started out as a low-budget attempt to create a ‘Real Housewives of Sloane Square’ before being cancelled after three seasons. But in its afterlife, the series has taken on an air of tragedy and intrigue. In some uncanny convergence of fate, one of the show’s periphery characters is the late businessman Scot Young, whose demise was the subject of endless speculation, after he was found impaled on the railings outside his Marylebone flat.
The inquest returned an open verdict (and Young had made suicidal threats) but in the years after his death, everyone from the Kremlin to a major London crime family has been accused of putting the heat on him. In Ladies of London, Young appears as a spooked, agitated figure, phoning in the role of a hapless sugar daddy with palpable fear behind his eyes. Then, in 2018, primary cast member Annabelle Neilson, a Tatler fixture and onetime Alexander McQueen muse, was also found dead in her Chelsea flat. Although its producers probably didn’t understand it at the time, Ladies of London had all the makings of a London noir story, and appeared to define what I was looking for.
a nice neighbourhood to have bad habits in
There was only one place to start: Mayfair, the point where London’s haves meet the wanna-haves; a land populated by state asset strippers, injured footballers and those in search of high-end iniquity. It’s where Sultan Aldabbous – a playboy who was found dead in a Dorchester suite, overdosed on Rohypnol, skunk and coke – used to spend his evenings, as did Constantine Niarchos, the Greek shipping heir who died after consuming ‘more cocaine than any other recreational user in history’ back in 1999. It’s where Norwegian student Martine Vik Magnussen would meet Yemeni nepo-reprobate, Farouk Abdulhak – before he strangled her, stole her Marc Jacobs handbag, and fled home via a private plane. It’s where Lord Lucan, Richard Caring, Inigo Philbrick, John Aspinall and so many other velvet-jacketed creatures of midnight made and lost their fortunes.
I was looking for the right venue to kick off my night, and it seemed the Mayfair Hotel Bar was the place to go. There are umpteen such places in this part of town, but I chose this one because, first of all, you don’t need to be a member, and secondly because its online reviews were full of allusions to shady activity and licentiousness. Every noir story needs a femme fatale – was this where London’s were to be found?
To ensure entry, I brought my girlfriend along. To double ensure it; I chucked on a pair of penny loafers, shiny C.P Company trousers and a roll neck sweater from the back of my wardrobe. Like so many other Mayfair charlatans, my plan was to present myself as a rich Russian.
Stepping inside, the decor is all Palm Jumeirah chic, and weirdly public-facing for such an expensive joint. Situated on street level, the bar bares its chrome teeth to all the tourists in Union Jack rain ponchos. The Maître d’ takes us to a table. I order ‘The Socialite’, a house concoction that cost north of a score. My girlfriend has a Patron & soda, not much cheaper. Next to us is a South Asian guy, mid 50s, in a half-zip Ralph Lauren jumper. I recognise this as a rich man’s ‘night off’ look. His companion is at least two decades younger; Harley Street pout, New Bond Street leather jacket and fake red talons. They don’t seem to know each other too well. He clings to her like grease on a varnished floor.
Across from me is another 50-something guy with a crisp Baltic accent, fighter’s hands and a flash wristwatch. He’s alone, likely waiting for someone. Passing the time, he sips champagne on ice and watches football clips on Instagram. In the corner, a gorgeous DJ stares at her nails and plays Fred Again remixes at a nonadjacent volume. Through the window, I can see the harsh lights of a Rolls-Royce dealership, and a Roma lady thrusting red roses into the hands of cavorting city boys. Handsome bouncers with five o’clock shadow scan the room. I’m sure everything I’m looking for is here, but the main attraction is next door.
losing games
The Palm Beach Casino. There are places like this all over the capital, and I’ve spent my fair share of time and chips in them, but the location of Palm Beach has always set it apart in my mind. The Leicester Square versions may be full of stag parties and Chinatown waiters rinsing their pay cheques, but this always seemed like a place where you could lose real money, get yourself in real trouble.
After nodding my way through the manager’s instructions (‘come back tomorrow if you make more than £1600’), I order an £11.50 Peroni at the bar. Everyone here appears to be on a hiding to nothing. I spot a guy, late 30s, seemingly ‘normal looking’ on the surface, but twitching and muttering to himself as he stares into the foam of an Irish coffee. At one of the high stakes tables is a huge man who looks like a cross between Jay Rayner and Colonel Gaddafi. He’s getting an elbow-heavy back massage from a bored waitress in a tight black dress. If I were so inclined, this may be the place to become embroiled in an ill-fated crypto scheme, a deal for a tin in Manaus, or a fleeting romance with an oil widow.
I throw a tenner on the roulette table and bust out. My hopes of winning back tonight’s spendings, dashed in a clatter of imitation ivory. As the night edges on, crews of men in Balmain bomber jackets flood in; jeering at the tables, slapping each other’s backs and cursing the chandeliers.
a meeting with mr ecclestone
I’m heading west now, towards Knightsbridge, passing the glowering security goons at Novikov – a footballer-favourite restaurant-slash-bar with a £50 minimum spend. For all its bad taste, this part of town feels more alive than most of the city does. Maybe this is what London’s nightlife is now – a rigged cup and ball game behind a velvet rope. As the infamous Maddox Gallery comes into view, I’m reminded of its Creative Director, Jay Rutland, a man I’ve long been fascinated by.
Although chiefly famous for being married to Tamara Ecclestone, Rutland is a character who shimmers with sleaze. Barred from all financial trading for ‘market abuse’ as a young man, and then cleared of sheltering an international drug trafficker (due to insufficient evidence), Rutland is now the ersatz Duke of Mayfair, a coiffured bridge between Essex knavery and West End wealth. I saw him twice in a week once; the first time at a celebrity boxing event at York Hall, very much on ‘geezer mode’, the next in his gallery, sweeping through the door, private security in tow, patent leather man-bag, dead-eyed menace. If I could get close to him, Rutland would make a great villain in this noir story, my approximation of Noah Cross in Chinatown or Pierce Patchett in L.A. Confidential. But I can’t, and he remains a fantasy nemesis.
The cold, condensation glazed night bus rolls alongside the Piccadilly Underpass – a subterranean tunnel that will forever be associated with chizzed-up heirs and commodities cowboys, bombing through it in electric blue Lamborghinis. A distant acquaintance kicks up in my memory: Ivan Mazour, an oligarch’s son with an influencer girlfriend and an involuntary manslaughter conviction under his belt. Drunk, stoned and keen to impress, he slammed his Japanese sports car into a BMW at 90mph, killing one passenger and seriously injuring another. He was jailed for six and a half years, but he’s long free, and probably around here, somewhere. Now a ‘serial entrepreneur’, on his 5,000-word website ‘about me’, Mazour references only how his time at Cambridge ‘was cut short by a terrible tragedy.’
The bus crawls on and we pass even more infamous spots; there’s Ghislaine Maxwell’s Knightsbridge pad and the totemic One Hyde Park tower, built by the Candy brothers and inhabited by the bastards of the universe. There’s the Harvey Nichols Fifth Floor Bar, known for many years as an escort pick-up spot par excellence (but now apparently, cleaned up its act). As we make our way along the Cromwell Road, I spot MPW, a ‘cramming college’ for rich wastrels and boarding school bad boys (alumni include Petra Ecclestone, Alice Dellal and half the original cast of Made in Chelsea). There are so many stories to be found here; the TetraPak family crack binges, the American man who lived on a pond in St James’s Park and sent obscene letters to the Queen, Count Gottfried von Bismarck’s deathly balcony parties, tales of spies and spinsters dying alone in eight-figure flats.
hallowed ground
The downstairs dining area of a KFC, in the mid-range hotel district of Gloucester Road, doesn’t sound like the most seductive of environments – but it’s a space that pulled me under its spell from the moment I stepped in there, just weeks after I moved back to London. Windowless, unstaffed and open till 2am on the weekends, it didn’t feel like a restaurant of any kind. Moreover, it had the ambience of a drunk tank, a meat freezer – the end of the line.
I was convinced the place was endowed with some deep-lying, sinister energy. ‘Don’t you think that room has a weird vibe?’, I kept saying to a friend who lives nearby. ‘You’re not the first person to say that,’ she told me. For a while I forgot about it, but then, some months later, on one of those late-night Wikipedia sprees, I found out something astonishing. The basement is located on the exact site of John ‘The Acid Bath Murderer’ Haigh’s workshop, the very place where, in September 1944, he beat a caddish rent collector to death with a lead pipe, before disposing of his remains in a warm tub of sulphuric.
I paid it a visit on my way back from Mayfair. Lit up like a backstreet abortionist’s, there is a nightmarish, dihydrocodeine-dream feel to it all. It could be any time of day outside and you would never know. In the far corner by the toilets is a young man, completely passed out on a table, almost definitely there for some time. He has a huge hold-all with him. It occurs to me I could slide it from his feet and never be caught. I wonder if he’s waiting for something, or if he’s missed it altogether.
As I make my way through the soft, salty chicken parts, it’s impossible not to be reminded of John Haigh’s crimes here, the unfortunate echoes of hot flesh giving way in acid (the stomach variety, in my case). Is this London noir? It certainly feels like it to me. Although it’s no casino or ritzy cocktail bar, its location, its history, its place in the undergrowth of the metropolis renders it as a spot where glitter and grot collide in unnerving fashion. And then, you have to consider who Haigh was. A fraudster and a fantasist who stole his victim’s properties and pension checks, he was a prototype of every vicious fucker looking for an easy ride in this difficult city.
you know what happens to nosy fellows?
A few weeks have passed. It’s supposed to be summer now, a grey and soupy Friday afternoon in central London. I’m in a Costa Coffee – not really the kind of place you’d expect to find anything untoward, but I’d long heard whispers that this branch in Hatton Garden was a hotbed of underhand deals and well-known ‘faces’.
Hatton Garden, known as ‘the garden’ to insiders, sits on one of the city’s most enticing and opaque streets. Despite being the capital’s official jewellery district for 500 years or so, it’s a place that seems to operate in the margins between criminality and commerce. When the famous robbery happened here in 2015, it was said that much of what was stolen was regular Hatton Garden stock, kept there overnight to avoid insurance charges (the other long-standing rumour regarding that robbery is that the real target was one particular box, containing some deep level dirt or the like).
I take a sip of a large black Americano and watch the goings on at Costa. Across from me are a table of likely ghouls; a sandpaper-blasted geezer with a polar-white ponytail, a barely walking anachronism in a tattersall plaid suit and panama hat, a fella who looks like Brick Top from Snatch with emphysema. With the help of a mirror at the back of the room, I can just about see what they’re up to. On the table they are gingerly, but brazenly, opening and closing sandwich bags full of opulent geology. I try to listen to their conversation above the roaring steam of the espresso machine: ‘two carat… 4.7 grams that is… a monkey and a half of gold in that one.’ On the adjacent table, a wiry cockney in a short-sleeve shirt greets a party I instantly recognise as Ivy League Yanks, all heather grey fleeces and college baseball caps. The seller brings out another sandwich bag, and this one practically blinds the room as it opens. In this most benign of surroundings, international capital was colliding with old school skullduggery.
I thought I’d had my quota of villainy for the day. But I was very wrong. Like a bolt through the midday gloom, I came face-to-face with one of London life’s most notorious figures: Terry Adams. I’ve long been fascinated by Adams, the alleged head of a crime dynasty so powerful that only MI5 could dent their reign, a character who you think couldn’t exist in this day and age, but very much does. Questions remain about his current status in the rascal-sphere, but he has forged links with more contemporaries such as James Stunt (another Ecclestone hubby), while brother Patrick was caught up in the Scot Young affair.
Even based purely on the scant long-lens photos of Adams that exist online, I’d recognise those piranha teeth from a mile off. And there he was; scurrying down the main drag, ‘the godfather of London’, ‘El Tel’, in a pair of trendy tapered trousers and ASICS running shoes, trademark flat cap low over his brow. We made something that probably wasn’t eye contact, but certainly felt like it to me. He went into the nondescript offices above a shop, an honest afternoon’s work ahead of him, no doubt.
river’s edge
At this point, it dawns on me that I’m locked out of the real noir experience. That it goes on in places I don’t have the capital or the guile to enter; in the privater parts of private members club, in airless offices above ‘we buy gold’ stores and the back seats of matte black Range Rovers all over this city.
But still, I have one last stop: the unsettling non-zone between Vauxhall and Pimlico. As I arrive, I’m reminded what a brutal part of town this is, with its weirdo-friendly 24-hour bus station, booming white vans, psycho-cyclists, and foreboding steel mesh, open-air urinal. Somehow, Vauxhall feels like both the end of the line, and the gates to the city.
On the north side of the bridge is the building where the Zac Brettler story came to an end. On the south side are MI6, cruising saunas and a plethora of Blair and Johnson-ordered buildings, all turquoise glass and peacocking geometry. I head over to the Riverwalk complex, forever to be associated with the death of that teenage dreamer. In person it’s a terrifying proposition, part Blade Runner, part ergonomic office chair. Underneath the complex is a middling café, a slick concierge and some terrible corporate art. I look down at the foreshore where Brettler fell – a shade of Tarkovsky slate you don’t see too often. It appears like the soil of Old London. People find pig bones and coins and all sorts on these banks, but I found no flowers for poor Zac.
I gaze up at the circular, illusory apartment buildings, thinking about the secrets they still hold. For the first time, my ethical nerve-endings fire up. My quest starts to feel a little too much like a Ripper tour. I’m in the shadow of mass tourism, yet there’s a sense that I shouldn’t be here.
On the south side of the water, I can see the MI6 building looming. But it’s hardly the only imperial behemoth in town these days. Further west, you can see the immense, militarised spectacle of the US Embassy, rising over some chic red brick flats where 78-year-old architects in Japanese denim live.
I walk back over the bridge. There are anti-terror barricades cemented into the ground, and a tiny, laminated sign which reads ‘Don’t suffer in silence, let us help you’, fastened onto the railings – threshing over the fast-flowing Thames. Back on the Vauxhall side, I realise I’ve never had a proper look at the statues under the bridge before; these huge, rusting, gothic figures – apparently symbolising art, engineering and architecture. My eyes fix on one of them: a cloaked lady, clasping a model of St Paul’s. But it’s her other hand I’m focused on. To me it seems like she’s pointing at the river, as if she’s telling us that something, or someone is in there.
I don’t doubt her.
