What did Catherine Walters blue plaque do at 15 South Street?

The Story

# 15 South Street Standing before the elegant townhouse at 15 South Street, you're looking at the final chapter of Catherine Walters's extraordinary life—the place where the legendary courtesan known as "Skittles" retreated into her twilight years, having traded the glittering salons and racetrack scandals of her youth for a quieter existence. For nearly five decades, from 1872 until her death in 1920, these walls contained a woman who had once captivated Victorian high society and royalty alike, now living as a respectable widow—though her past remained inseparable from her identity. It was here, in this South Street residence, that Walters transformed herself from the daring young woman who had ridden horses astride in Rotten Row and scandalized the aristocracy into an aging matriarch, a living ghost of a vanished era of unregulated female power and pleasure. This address represents not triumph or notoriety, but something perhaps more poignant: the long, quiet survival of a woman whose notoriety had made her simultaneously famous and unforgettable, spending her final decades in the same city that had once found her irresistible.