This book is intended to be the first of a series documenting London Streets and a thousand years of their respective histories. Clearly some routes were only trackways, pathways or even fields but where Londoners have existed, worked, fought, traded, played, lived and died on the site it’s fascinating to mark the journey, growth, sights and sounds of these iconic London thoroughfares. Denmark Street wasn’t built until the 1680s, but fascinating characters from all walks of life have been active on the site since the 1000s at least. Royalty, singers, musicians, highwaymen, murderers, thieves, arsonists, inventors, pioneers, regicides, politicians, revolutionaries, songwriters, poets and artists are all part of the colourful past of the street that became known as Tin Pan Alley.

Denmark Street, and the site on which it was built, has witnessed a millennium of mass murderers, rock stars, inventors, serial killers, queens, rebels, rogues, lepers, poets, explorers, arsonists, swordsmen, activists, criminals, anarchists, racing drivers, reformers, schemers, dreamers, pirates, plague victims, great lovers, pioneers, regicides and songwriters.

The Beatles, Queen Matilda, Jimi Hendrix, The Kray Twins, David Bowie, Karl Marx, General Tom Thumb, Elton John, Tom Jones, Casanova, Claud Duvall, The Rolling Stones, Denis Nilson, The Sex Pistols, Paul Simon, Charlie Chaplin, Johan Zoffany and hundreds of other familiar names, all walked, worked, or wrote in this site. The New Musical Express and the Melody Maker were born here, and it was, for a century, the home of our great songwriters and the British music publishing industry.