Cardinal Cap Alley

Cardinal Cap Alley is an alley in Bankside. It used to lead to a brothel called The Cardinal's Cap named because it had been owned by Henry Cardinal Beaufort, the Bishop of Winchester, who had paraded here wearing his red hat, after being appointed a cardinal by the Pope.[1]

View of Saint Paul's Cathedral from Cardinal Cap Alley before the alley was gated in the early 1990s
The entrance to the alley is under the lamp, left of the yellow door

The architectural critic Ian Nairn highlighted it in his 1966 guidebook to London, and the following year it featured in the documentary The London Nobody Knows, based on the Geoffrey Fletcher book of the same name. It has been gated since the 1990s.[2]

References
  1. Benedict Le Vay (2007), Eccentric London, Bradt, p. 202, ISBN 9781841621937
  2. http://bermondseyphotographs.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-strange-tale-of-cardinal-cap-alley.html

Nairn, Ian (1966) Nairn's London, Penguin Books


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