This Wapping pub, Turner's Old Star, was owned by JMW Turner, who installed his mistress, Sophia Booth, as landlady and came to enjoy the low life of London's docklands. John Ruskin, that upright critic who denied the world the enjoyment of Turner's erotic drawings and paintings, which he destroyed on the artist's death, said that Turner would come here to draw "sailors' women in every posture of abandonment".
Today, April 7, the house Turner built in Twickenham, where he sketched and painted the Thames' upper reaches, is open for the first time. See the story here
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