100-Word Fiction: ‘The Storming of Beake Street’

A thin blue line unravels through the back streets, broadens, becomes a gushing force, a flood, across the hunting fields where gelders and nailers worked, land then acquired by the Queen’s Messenger Thomas Beake, by the old houses intended for tradesmen and lower middle-class occupation, whereat the Venetian painter Antonio Canaletto lodged in a room of cabinet maker Mr Richard Wiggan’s, and, more precisely, towards the very building that architect J Dixon Butler, in an approximation of the style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, erected for the Metropolitan Police in 1909–10, which is due to be reincarnated as luxury flats.