In these leveling times when British professional men clip their own boxwood and their wives push their own prams, London exhibits no district more decorous and decorative than St. John's Wood. But in Queen Victoria's gilded reign a century ago, this first of the city's garden suburbs had another reputation. Then noble Britons liked to steal away from their confining Mayfair mansions and visit leafy little hideaways in St. John's Wood. There George IV and Napoleon III kept their well-hidden mistresses; beauteous Lily Langtry waited for Edward VII at 20 Wellington Road; many less famous women lived in well-kept seclusion with...
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