About Secret London
what this site records, how it is checked, and what it will not do
Secret London is a record of the things this city has left in the street without explaining them: public sculpture, drinking fountains nobody drinks from, charity-school figures above doorways that are no longer schools, and a set of plaster noses stuck to walls as a protest about surveillance cameras.
What this site does
Each entry names the thing, gives the street and the nearest Underground station, says what is known about it, and keeps the folklore clearly labelled as folklore. That last part is the whole editorial position. A great deal of what circulates about London’s odder objects is invention that filled a gap where nobody had bothered to write down the truth, and repeating it as fact makes a guide less useful than no guide at all.
Where a source and a second source disagree, the page says so. Where an attribution cannot be stood behind, the entry describes the object and leaves the maker out. Where something has closed, moved or been taken away, the entry states that rather than sending a reader to an empty plinth or a locked door.
What it does not do
It does not review, rank or rate anything. It carries no advertising interstitials, no affiliate comparison tables and no invented editorial team. Photographs are other people’s work, used under Creative Commons licences or because they are in the public domain, and every one of them is credited on the image credits page.
It also makes no claim to be complete. Nobody has ever counted London’s public sculpture and no single body keeps a register of it, so any list of it is a work in progress by definition.
Corrections
Corrections are the most useful thing a reader can send. A statue that has moved, a bar that has closed, a sculptor credited to the wrong work, an address that was right in 2015 and is not right now: all of it is worth knowing. The contact page is the way to send it.