History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

While we all enjoy or endure the current heat wave, spare a thought for Edith Armitage, a young dress maker who bared all – well, almost all – in public, in 1899. Not once but twice!  The papers noted August 1899 was the driest August since 1866. Early September, like now, enjoyed some fine weather and around midnight on the 5th, passersby were surprised to see a young woman on Lisson Street close to Lisson Grove, ‘with nothing whatever on save an under garment’. They called a policeman, who took some time before he could catch the girl, ‘promenading between lamp-posts, which she evidently mistook for trees’. The tongue in cheek reporter said that Edith had clearly been struck by ‘the strange hallucination that Lisson Grove was the Garden of Eden’, and that she had been found ‘in a state of attire closely resembling that worn by her famous ancestress’, in other words, Eve.  ‘It was a delightfully cool costume, but at the same time, she carried her other garments under her arm’...