Picture London in the 1980s. A frenzy of acid wash jeans and Katharine Hamnett tee’s, Boy George and New Romantics, big shoulder pads and even bigger eye makeup. And hidden among this, dressed up in furs with a head of bleached blonde hair to accompany, was Britain’s most notorious jewellery thief.
Known as “the Godmother” of London’s criminal underworld, ITV’s latest drama tells the story of Joan Hannington’s rise from rags to riches. The youngest of six children born in 1957 to a working class Irish family in London, Joan described being influenced by her own godmother to pursue a different kind of life away from the tough upbringing she had in London’s East End. After being gifted a glass stone bracelet by her glamorous godmother “I dreamed of having money and diamonds,” she said in a piece written for the Scottish Daily Herald,
