No other street in Britain contains more landmarks to our island's history than Whitehall. Here, Colin Brown takes us behind its closed doors. We visit what was the most notorious address in London when Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb conducted their very public and tempestuous love affair; the Admiralty, where Nelson received his orders to attack the French; and fragments of the tennis courts where Anne Boleyn watched Henry VIII playing tennis in his 'slops'. We follow in Henry's footsteps down a secret passageway leading to Number Ten Downing Street, later used by Alastair Campbell to avoid the cameras outside Number Ten, and witness never-before-published documents that show how Churchill, in 1940, prepared for street fighting in Whitehall's departments. Whitehalltells the story of our island race, its empire, its conquests and its decline, encapsulated in one small corner of the capital.

Author Biography

Colin Brown is deputy political editor of the INDEPENDENT newspaper. He lives in London and is the author of one previous book, a biography of the Labour politician John Prescott.