Black apps... learn about London's darker side with Black Plaques

Visitors to the capital this summer will find us at our most presentable, offering cleaned-up attractions and upbeat entertainment just in time for the 2012 Games. But the creators of a new app — Black Plaques — want us to learn about London’s darker side.

Mimicking the blue plaques that mark where Charles Dickens lived or Alan Turing was born, the app tells users that they are standing by a lamppost used by Soviet agents as a dead letter box (Audley Square) or outside the building where high-ranking Nazis were allegedly tortured (Kensington Palace Gardens).

Or while you are strolling outside Buckingham Palace the app will tell you where royal stalker Edward Jones was caught escaping with a pair of Queen Victoria’s underpants stuffed down his breeches. Or in Norwood you might like to learn that you are standing by the bush where Pickles the mongrel sniffed out the stolen World Cup in 1966.

Author Ambrose Hide has written 75,000 words about 600 different sites and told the Standard his app allows people to “indulge in some retrospective rubbernecking”.

“I didn’t recognise the London portrayed in safe, sanitised guides,” Hide says. “I wanted to be a breath of foul air and inject some gritty home truths.”

Further black plaques mark the point where a heretic was murdered by a red hot needle up his nose in the St Paul’s Cathedral prison in 1511 and the place outside St Magnus Martyr in London Bridge where orgiastic dancing and self-castration took place in Roman times.

Black Plaques London — Memorials to Misadventure costs £1.49 from the iTunes store.