The Cat's Meat Shop

Notes written by a manager of the Alexandra Palace, c.1880? (Haringey Museum AP1/17)
These notes appear in the archives without an author, but display a series of one-line ideas, added over a period of time (months?) for developing the north London pleasure-ground of Alexandra Palace, which was perennially on the verge of bankruptcy...

THE SHADY SIDE OF NOTTINGHAM
No.IV
A BALL AT A "WORKING MAN'S CLUB"

The Argyll Rooms was a notorious night-club in mid-Victorian London, closed in 1878 by magistrates increasingly concerned about West End prostitution (though, as a group, bitterly divided on how to tackle the subject). A letter from a prison chaplain...

I've just finished Peter Watts' book Up in Smoke: The Failed Dreams of Battersea Power Station. Peter is a friend of mine, so perhaps I'm biased, but it's a thoroughly satisfying, immersive read; a total pleasure.
Peter notes in his introduction 'Rather that a straightforward history, this is a journalist's book'. True, he has interviewed many of the key players in the power station's peculiar trajectory from post-industrial albatross to property developer's goldmine...