The Shame of London: Prostitution and Panic in the Post-war Metropolis

Abstract

On a sunny afternoon in 1950, Rosalind Wilkinson, a young sociological researcher based at LSE, sat upon a bench in Hyde Park’s carriageway, near the site where, in 1885, the crusade against prostitution and the sexual exploitation of girls and young women had sounded its most memorable battle-cry. Wilkinson was waiting nervously, trying to make contact with some of the prostitutes who frequented the park, but, by her own admission, was feeling more ‘like a prostitute’ herself, ‘isolated by a bank of trees from the body of people enjoying the park’.¹