Ruth Ellis

Ruth Ellis lived in a bed-sitting room at 44 Egerton Gardens and managed a members only drinking club in nearby Brompton Road.

Ellis, aged 28 years, was executed at Holloway Prison on 13 July 1955 for shooting dead her former lover David Blakely.

Blakely was an amateur racing driver from an upper middle-class background while Ellis had fairly humble origins. This led at least one writer to claim the murder as an act of class revenge but most people recognised the shooting as a classic crime of passion.

The hanging of Ellis produced a shift in public opinion against hanging - the hanging of women at any rate.

She was the last woman executed in Britain and capital punishment itself was suspended in 1965.

The case was the subject of the film, Dance with a Stranger starring Miranda Richardson and Rupert Everett.