Picture the scene. An 18th-century gentleman straightens his wig, smooths his breeches and steps from his elegant front door into the flesh fair of the city’s nightlife. There are whores to the left of him, harlots to the right. They crowd the streets, parks, taverns and coffee houses, ply their trade in the bagnios (bathhouses) and bawdy houses (brothels); prostitutes and their clients fumble on bridges and tumble in bushes. What’s a man to do with so much choice? Our gentleman pulls from his pocket Harris’s List of

Covent Garden Ladies, the libertine’s Time Out. Here he finds, in alphabetical order, a guide to pleasure. There is Miss Johnson of 17 Goodge Street, who has “such elasticity in her loins that she can cast her lover to a pleasing height and receive again with utmost dexterity”. Or Mrs Dodd of 6 Hind Court, who “after a whole night’s entertainment will give you a comfortable cup of tea in the morning, for one guinea”. Fees vary, especially where a “virgin” is concerned, but Miss Corbett has “one fixed rule” on price, and she means just that: “She always measures a man’s Maypole by a standard of nine inches and expects a guinea for every inch it is short of the full measure.”

Eighteenth-century London contained more prostitutes than anywhere else in Europe. In this fascinating account of sex and the Georgian city, Dan Cruickshank suggests that one woman in five was involved in some way with the sex industry. These women — often no more than girls — slotted into a strict hierarchy from lowly “bulk-mongers”, a category hardly regarded as women at all, to high-class courtesans, with demireps, park-walkers, streetwalkers and “bunters” in the middle.

The city’s own steadily expanding body was also graded, with the smart new streets of Marylebone providing exclusive brothels, seedy South Molton Street serving the streetwalker, and Soho replacing Covent Garden as the heart of vice. Before the Victorians pushed sex underground, it was woven into the very fabric of metropolitan life. “People go to church, to the inns, and to the prostitutes,” Voltaire noted with some surprise of the average Sunday in the city.

Cruickshank, who is good with figures, calculates that the average London male spent £80 a year on purchasing sex (a skilled workman earned between 18 shillings and £1 a week). The average prostitute charged two guineas a night (what many working men earned in four months), and the annual gross value of the city’s sex industry during the last quarter of the 18th century was 20.8m guineas, or £21,840,000.

The majority of prostitutes passed their earnings on to the bawd (usually a superannuated whore) who managed their house, but courtesans with rich protectors had houses of their own in London’s smartest addresses, areas such as Bloomsbury and the freshly painted Mayfair. When Kitty Fisher (an infamous courtesan memorialised in the children’s rhyme — “Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it”) was offered £100 for a night of her company, she reputedly placed the bank- note between two pieces of bread and ate it. She wouldn’t get out of, or, in this case, into bed for less than £500.

Sex, Cruickshank arg-ues, was the century’s most successful industry and the force behind the creation of Georgian London. The vast sums generated by lust were ploughed back into the wider economy, shaping not only the sober and graceful appearance of the capital but also its literature and art, in particular the work of Joshua Reynolds, who took Kitty Fisher for his model and muse, and William Hogarth, whose documentary series of engravings, The Harlot’s Progress, provides the frame to The Secret History of Georgian London.

Cruickshank is an architectural historian and finds evidence all over London of buildings erected on or maintained by the wages of sin. A German traveller in 1789 observed that “without these girls, many thousand homes in the West End of London would stand empty”. As Cruickshank puts it, “Georgian London was a corporate work of art, a thing of beauty forged out of a quest for profits — and among the key partners in this collaboration were the rich West End courtesans and the owners of profitable bagnios and brothels.”

An example is the bawd Moll King, on whom it is thought Defoe based his “sawcy” heroine Moll Flanders. Mother King bought land on Haverstock Hill, towards Hampstead, where she built a row of terraced houses and a detached house for herself. These buildings were lived in by a microcosm of characters with an interest in the city’s sex trade. Opposite Moll lived Richard Steele, essayist for The Spectator and apologist for whores. Next to Moll lived the celebrated actress Nancy Dawson, a former harlot made famous by her lascivious hornpipe in Gay’s phenomenally popular The Beggar’s Opera. Casting its harlots as heroines, The Beggar’s Opera was itself a product of and comment on the Georgian sex trade.

Moll King’s houses are still there. No longer on a country road, they have blended into the bland urban landscape of what is now Belsize Park. They are worth seeing because the London Cruickshank describes, with its seraglios (Parisian-style brothels), bagnios and nunneries (organised brothels), has otherwise disappeared as completely as Pompeii. So too have the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, the Magdalen House for Penitent Prostitutes, James Graham’s famous Temple of Health on the Strand (a sex emporium made up of swirling smells and scientific paraphernalia such as electrometers, lodestones, rods, tubes and magnets that supposedly stimulated fertility), and the cacophony of linkboys, abbesses (bawds), monks (lechers), rakes and rogues who roam through these pages, figures as strange to us now as masquerade balls and taking a pint of wine and a side of pork for breakfast.

It is the bagnios, “one of the lost architectural wonders of late 17th and early 18th-century London”, that particularly fascinate Cruickshank. They were supposedly Turkish in style, and we know there was one in St James’s Street, one in Silver Street and one in Newgate Street, but we can neither be certain what they looked like — was there a now-forgotten kind of Ottoman-style architecture in central London? — or what, apart from the advertised “Sweating, Bathing, Shaving and Cupping”, their specific purpose actually was.

London is the city of disappearances, and The Secret History of Georgian London tells of vanishing people as well as vanishing buildings. There is Elizabeth Canning, a servant girl who went missing for a month and then claimed — falsely, it seems — that she had been abducted by gypsies and sold into prostitution. Where had she been? What was her secret? This is a colossal melting pot of a book: ambitious, rigorously researched, vigorously narrated and marvellously illustrated. All of life is here, but it is not life as we know it. This was an age before sex became policed, regulated and repressed, when a gentleman had a whore as well as a pastry cook. Cruickshank has uncovered an underground city but also the maelstrom of bodies, disenfranchised and dispossessed, who made a living from male desire, or who simply survived. Perhaps this is what Dr Johnson meant when he said “there is in London all that life can afford”.

The Secret History of Georgian London by Dan Cruickshank
Random House £25 pp672

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