Scotland Yard: How a Back Door in London Became a Detective Legend

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The most famous police headquarters in the world is not a yard and is nowhere near Scotland. When Sir Robert Peel pushed the Metropolitan Police Act through Parliament in 1829, the first commissioners, Charles Rowan and Richard Mayne, set up in a private townhouse at Four Whitehall Place. The public was sent around to the rear entrance on a narrow street called Great Scotland Yard, and Londoners began calling the whole force by that name. This episode follows the headquarters from that cramped house through every later address.

The force swelled to 13,000 officers and annexed neighboring houses and stables, was bombed in 1884, then moved in 1890 to Richard Norman Shaw's grand building on the Victoria Embankment. A 1967 office block on Broadway brought the rotating sign and, decades later, a remarkable property deal. Alongside the bricks runs the fictional Yard, shaped by the Jack the Ripper press frenzy, Wilkie Collins, and Sherlock Holmes, which may now be more famous than the real one.

• During construction of the new headquarters in 1888, workers found a woman's dismembered torso in the foundation. The Whitehall Mystery was never solved.
• The police authority bought the Broadway freehold in 2008 for around 120 million pounds and sold it in 2014 to the Abu Dhabi Financial Group for 370 million.
• The original Great Scotland Yard site, bought by Lulu Group International in 2015, is now a luxury Hyatt hotel.
• Queen Elizabeth II was due to open the Curtis Green building on March 23rd, 2017, but the ceremony was postponed after the Westminster terrorist attack the day before.
• The Crime Museum, founded in 1874 and once called the Black Museum, stays closed to the public as a training collection for police.