Detective Shaw’s London: old New Scotland Yard

In common use the term Scotland Yard is another way to define the Metropolitan Police of London, also called Met, which has jurisdiction over the area called Greater London (excluding the City, which has its own police), but it actually means the building where it is based, the full name of which is New Scotland Yard, often referred to simply as the Yard. This denomination originates from the address of the first police headquarters in Great Scotland Yard (1829), although the main entrance was at 4 Whitehall, and followed the moves first to Victoria Embankment (1890), with the addition of the adjective “New”, then to Broadway (1967) and finally again to Victoria Embankment (from 2016).

In the previous headquarters of the London police there was the famous rotating sign (see images), which had become a real tourist attraction (in fact I too could not resist the temptation to take a picture in front of it in the 2011). But the building at 10 Broadway was abandoned by the Metropolitan Police in late 2016. It had, in fact, already been sold since 2014 to the Abu Dhabi Financial Group (ADFG), although it was still in use. As part of a real estate redevelopment for the police force, the headquarters was relocated, along with its rotating sign, to the Curtis Green Building (again on Victoria Embankment) after it underwent a refurbishment.

You have no idea how many problems these latest developments, whose timing was far from certain, created me during the writing of “Syndrome”, until its publication, which took place in 2016, and during the writing of the last book in the trilogy, “Beyond the Limit”, published in 2017.

Having to write books set a few months after they were written, I found myself having to guess about the future.

“The Mentor” luckily was published before the Broadway building was sold, but for “Syndrome”, I was forced to sift through the news on the internet to figure out when the move to Curtis Green would take place. Needless to say, the information was scarce and often contradictory. Once I established that it would not take place before June 2016, I limited myself to mentioning the imminent move in the novel. For the next one, however, the matter became more complicated.

“Beyond the Limit” is set at the end of May 2017. In theory, the transfer should have been finished by then, but I wasn’t at all certain of this in November and December 2016, when I wrote the first draft. I was forced to choose to show that my characters were already in the new location, then just before the book’s publication, I had to make sure it was the truth and possibly prepare to edit some passages of the text.

Then there was a second problem. The old New Scotland Yard housed one of the three forensic science laboratories of the Metropolitan Police, which is the one where Detective Shaw’s team works in my trilogy. Considering that the Curtis Green is a smaller building (the picture is an illustration showing its expected look after the refurbishment), that the police were looking to cut costs, and that the refurbishment of the laboratory located in Lambeth was among their projects, I really had no idea if the place of work of my characters would be moved to the new headquarters or elsewhere or merged with another laboratory. Having found no further information on this, before working on the book, I had to pick one option and stick with it. The easiest thing was to talk about a simple move to the Curtis Green Building. If that were the truth, fine. Otherwise, it would have become just another of the many artistic licences I took while creating this story!

But let’s go back to the old location, the one on Broadway.

It also included the Crime Museum, also known as the Black Museum, which contained, among the various exhibits, some letters presumably written by Jack the Ripper. This was moved to the Curtis Green Building. Unfortunately, it is not open to the public; only police officers from all over the UK can visit it by appointment.

The area where the old New Scotland Yard was located is nevertheless very interesting from a tourist point of view. It is practically midway between Westminster Abbey, which is a stone’s throw from the Parliament, and the Westminster Cathedral (the latter is Catholic), connected by busy Victoria Street. The nearest Tube station is St James’s Park (which is mentioned in “The Mentor”), on Broadway itself and near the park of the same name.

I honestly have no idea what the inside of the old New Scotland Yard looked like. In describing the forensic science lab in “The Mentor” and “Syndrome”, I relied on my imagination, but during my latest search, I found a Daily Mail article showing old photos of the inside of the building dating back to 1967, when the police moved in. You can find them at this link. They are truly images from other times that depict archives full of paper, huge switchboards, enormous maps, and automatic teletypewriters, which at the time were the state-of-art of technology.

Who knows how it had become in more recent times. Perhaps somewhere there was a state-of-the-art computer (or maybe a futuristic one!) and a nerdy forensic investigator, like Martin Stern, walking around the department in a Darth Vader t-shirt. Or there was the office of a detective chief inspector, like Eric Shaw, with a semi-transparent door through which he peered at a young colleague, like Adele Pennington. Or perhaps there was a meeting room, with a table, a screen and many chairs, where together with the detective of a Murder Investigation Team, like Miriam Leroux, everyone discussed clues and physical evidence to find out the identity of the killer.

I don’t know if there was any of this, but I still like to think so.