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We're off to Marylebone - using the neighborhood's dark origins as a launch pad for a story of spectacular reinvention.

Our walk begins at Marble Arch, where a barely-noticed pavement plaque marks the site of Tyburn Tree - London's primary gallows for nearly six hundred years and the execution ground for over 50,000 people.

From there, we traces how the area shed its grim "Tyburn" identity through a medieval rebranding around a church dedicated to St Mary, eventually becoming the elegant Georgian grid of Harley Street, Portland Place, and Baker Street laid out by the Portland and Portman estates in the 18th century.

Against that backdrop, Expat Andy guides listeners through a carefully chosen set of historic pubs - including the 1791 Barley Mow on Dorset Street, one of the last free houses in central London, with its rare surviving Victorian drinking booths - weaving in characters ranging from executed highwaymen and Catholic martyrs to Charles Babbage and the piano player Tony "Fingers" Pearson, who has been holding court at the Golden Eagle on Marylebone Lane since 1988.

Marylebone's pubs are the living memory of a neighborhood that reinvented itself so thoroughly it nearly erased its own history. Its pubs are the best place to find what was buried underneath.

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Trailer for Episode 8 - Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Marylebone Style

This is Marylebone. Its story - told through its pubs - is one of execution and resurrection, bodysnatching and high society, muddy fields and marble halls.

What?

You expected Sherlock Holmes, didn’t you? Well, your guidebook will cover the detective, we’re going to be detective, as today, we decode Marylebone, the Publicity way…

I’m Expat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. You’re listening to Publicity – The Travel Guidebook Gap.

Episode 8 drops March 9. Until then catch up on former episodes at publicitythepodcast.com

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In this episode, we rip the polished Instagram filter off Covent Garden and ask a far more interesting question than “Where’s the Apple Store?”

We ask what scene this place is playing.

Beneath the street performers and opera crowds lies a district that has shape-shifted more times than London itself. From monastic vegetable patch to aristocratic social experiment, from chaotic fruit-and-veg battlefield to theatreland playground of actors, rogues, and bare-knuckle brawlers.

Designed as a pristine piazza for “Gentlemen and men of ability,” it veered way off script, and filled with market traders, taverns, gossip, vice, and spectacle. When you build a stage, London sends in a cast.

Through pub lore, architectural ambition, market mayhem, and near-demolition drama, we trace how Covent Garden became a pressure valve between power and performance - a place that was never what it was supposed to be, and is far more compelling because of it.

By the end, you won’t just see Covent Garden - you’ll decode it.