Richard Marggraf Turley has just put up an interesting post on the White Swan in Vere Street, which operated as a male brothel (or ‘molly house’) for about six months early in 1810. It’s not entirely clear to me at this point which building on Vere Street the White Swan was, but Vere Street itself was a couple of blocks north of Drury Lane Theatre, near the entertainments clustered around Covent Garden, the bustling trade of the Strand and just west of the Inns of Court and the Inns of Chancery, the centre of the business of the law in London. The street was demolished in the 1900s to make way for Kingsway.
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Turley has just published a historical crime novel, The Cunning House, which takes the Vere Street coterie as one of its centres. You can also find out more in Rictor Norton’s online essay on the coterie and its contexts, which includes details of the principal primary sources.
