If you go down to the woods today

ABBEY ROAD is quiet in late November, the world’s most famous zebra crossing almost lost in the grey drizzle of the autumn morning, from which only red-brick buildings emerge unscathed. It makes it a little easier to imagine what St John’s Wood was like when it was still a rural backwater, before the elegant houses with their pretty gardens, before cricket and before The Beatles.

Unlike other parts of London, whose monikers are often misnomers, St John’s Wood did start life as a wood belonging to the Knights of St John. It was still rural and secluded in the Elizabethan era when, according to Alexander Wood’s , five Babington Plot conspirators, including Anthony Babington, fled here to avoid