Lake Como
That branch of the lake
Alessandro Manzoni opened The Betrothed on this branch of Lake Como, and the novel went on to teach a whole country what its written language should be.
Read the storyHave You Been Told?
Every Told London fragrance starts with a place. These are the stories those places kept to themselves: the odd, the overlooked and the half-forgotten, told one at a time.
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English GardensThe Victorians went mad for ferns
Why the Victorians lost their heads over ferns, and what a fern hunt really meant for a woman in 1855: the place-story behind Glorious Gardens, England.
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LondonThe longest sprint in Tudor England
Catherine Howard, Hampton Court’s Haunted Gallery and the sprint that became a legend: the place-story behind City Grandeur, London.
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LondonWhat the Underground keeps in the dark
Around forty disused Underground stations lie beneath London, still tiled and still signed. North End was abandoned in 1906 and never reached the surface.
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English GardensWhat Vita built instead
Vita Sackville-West lost Knole to an accident of birth, built Sissinghurst instead, and Virginia Woolf gave her the house back in a novel called Orlando.
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ScotlandThe people who came ashore
The selkie folklore of Orkney and Shetland: seals that came ashore as women and men, the sealskin everything depended on, and the fisherman who stole one.
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SeychellesThe seed that came from nowhere
The coco de mer, the largest seed on earth, grows in one valley on Praslin. Nobody knew its source, so sailors assumed a tree growing beneath the sea.
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IndiaThe garden grown to bloom after dark
Mehtab Bagh, the moonlight garden across the Yamuna from the Taj Mahal, was planted with white blossom chosen to give up its scent only after dark.
