Detective Shaw’s London: old New Scotland Yard

Book locations, episode 1

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.