The longest walk of all

Were one able to juxtapose two ages of history, Obiter could pop into the Fleet Street Pret for a latte and then view the traitors’ heads atop Temple Bar before coming into work.

This rather surreal notion is prompted by an excellent new exhibition at the Museum of London devoted to the capital’s zeal for offing its citizens in public. How imaginative our monarchs and city burghers were in the 700 years or so until the last public execution in 1868. It’s all here. Hanging via short drop, hanging via long drop, evisceration, quartering, beheading by sword, beheading by axe. And, of course, burning at the stake, an unimaginably grisly fate greatly favoured by the Tudor queens. (Henry VIII was no mewling liberal himself, of course. Good King Hal boiled to death a cook who allegedly poisoned a bishop’s dinner – Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard got off lightly in comparison.)

Forgive our heavy-handed levity. It is misplaced. This is not Madame Tussaud’s chamber of horrors, but rather a sober and grown-up effort to bring together the rarely told human stories behind events both terrifying and terminal. Among the items on show are a silk vest said to have been worn by Charles I when he met his end in Whitehall, a 300-year-old bedsheet embroidered with a love note in human hair, and items belonging to the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. There are also many plaintive and generally unsuccessful letters pleading for leniency. One, dictated by an illiterate mother whose son got into bad company, is signed only with an X. She knew no one important, so the boy was hanged.

The most arresting exhibit of all, however, must be the Newgate prison door that served as the condemned prisoner’s final portal before the longest walk of all – to the scaffold.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Executions runs at the Museum of London Docklands until 16 April 2023. Tickets are available from the Museum of London website, starting at £12. Age 12+ recommended.