The London Dungeon (for hire)

I’ve posted on interesting playspaces in the past (for example here and here). The one I’m featuring in this post sounds like it should be a popular tourist attraction, and in fact there actually is a London Dungeon attraction. I suspect any innocent American families who got them mixed up would be far more shocked by the modern day BDSM version than the genuine historical torture on display in the tourist version.

The photographs below show the two of the three main rooms, along with the sin bin, a pretty intense looking enclosed cell. There’s all sorts of other good stuff, including a head cage and head box, a pony beam, a vac bed, a dog cage and (one of my favorite bits of furniture) a bondage chair. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a playspace with quite so much fun stuff packed into it. If I still lived in the UK I’d pay it a visit for sure.

I came across the site via this post by Mz Jane Wild. In it she writes about taking tea with the Dungeon Keeper, and his experiences of looking for a Mistress in the pre-internet days…

He had described the process of scanning magazine and newspaper advertisements, of having to decipher the ambiguous wording to decide on the possibility of whether this was indeed a Mistress advertising. And then to apply by handwriting a letter and sending it off in the post!! If one was lucky a reply might be forthcoming, most likely something as terse as a phone number scrawled on the top of your own handwritten letter and the words ‘Call Me’.

When I bring up this topic there is some whistfulness as he speaks of the mystery and anticipation of those times, when things were so much more hidden and unexplored…
Ms Jane Wild

I can understand a little of the appeal of the mystery element. There’s always something a little more exciting about stepping into the unknown, that anticipation edged with fear and nervousness. But I for one am very grateful those days of scanning ambiguous newspaper advertisements are now gone. I’d have never got up the nerve to do my first session if that were still the case. These days people complain if a Mistress doesn’t show her face in her photographs. It’s hard to imagine writing a letter to an unknown person on the basis of a small and obscure advertisement.