London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  On three occasions in the late medieval period the Mayor of London attempted to enter the Inns of Court; each time the lawyers slammed the doors in his face and threatened to fight him and his men if they attempted to break down the gates. The Mayor appealed to the King who was forced to seek legal advice – the result of course was a foregone conclusion and the lawyers advised in their own favour.

  The City didn’t forget the slight and when a major fire broke out in the Temple they refused to help put it out. Legend has it that the lawyers raided their vast cellars and found enough wine and beer to put the flames out unaided!

  Just before the Great War in 1913 the lawyers’ sense that they were outside the law was tested when the City coroner tried to enter the Temple to register a death. The gates were slammed in his face and nothing could be done. Today, according to legend, the lawyers refuse to pay council tax or business rates in the normal way – they insist on deciding themselves just how much they will or will not pay.

  It took several centuries for the lawyers to persuade the Crown to sell them the land they had leased since the fourteenth century. James I finally gave in but he did so reluctantly – so much so that the lawyers were fearful he would change his mind. To prevent any going back they buried their freehold agreement beneath the altar in the Temple church where it remained until early in the twentieth century.

  The person with ultimate control of the lawyers here on the banks of the Thames is the Master of the Temple. In the past, masters thought of themselves as easily the equal if not the superior of the Mayor of London and they took their duties very seriously. One of these duties was looking after the moral welfare of the junior members of the inn. A Victorian master decided that too many young lawyers were bringing women into the inn so he decided to put a stop to it by issuing a directive that all women coming into the Temple must in future sign their names in a ledger together with the name of the lawyer they were visiting.

  Imagine the poor master’s horror when he discovered a few days after the new rule was in place that hundreds of young women had signed themselves in and put his name down as the lawyer they were visiting!

  A STREAM FLOWS AT WESTMINSTER

  1360

  It’s difficult to visualise now but Westminster Abbey once stood on a windswept inhospitable island in the Thames. Not a distinct island midway across the river, but a solid island surrounded by marsh and bisected by streams. The abbey was part of a monastery, deliberately sited here to be well away from the worldly temptations of the city of London but with plenty of fresh water from the Thames and from the streams that separated Thorney Island, as it was then known, from the surrounding land.

  You might think that not a scrap of physical evidence of that distant time remains but you’d be wrong – opposite Charles Barry’s (1795–1860) splendid Gothic Revival Palace of Westminster, and standing isolated now on a small patch of grass is a stone tower – the Jewel Tower.

  Other parts of the old Whitehall Palace survive – most notably Inigo Jones’s (1573–1652) Banqueting House of 1620 further up Whitehall. But this is the earliest part of the ancient structure still standing. It has been here since the second half of the fourteenth century, built when the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) was a young man.

  Visitors today can see a small exhibition about the history of the palace and the tower, and until recently large rainbow trout lived in the remains of the moat that surrounds the tower. A stream fills the moat before running under the main road and into the Thames. Astonishingly the stream is still running exactly as it ran a thousand years ago to separate this side of Thorney Island from the countryside beyond.

  PLANNING FOR CENTURIES AHEAD

  1399

  When a new building goes up the builders and planners never think of how that building may (or may not) survive into the near future let alone the more distant future, but in the past buildings were put up that were meant – at least when they were built – to last forever. A case in point is Westminster Hall, whose builders came up with an extraordinary idea to ensure that it would last for generations.

  The lower parts of the walls of Westminster Hall, which seem now to the casual observer to be part of the Georgian Palace of Westminster, are actually unchanged since this huge building was begun shortly after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The earliest work is dated to the end of the eleventh century and what we see today is the building that was finally completed in 1399.

  The hall has one of the greatest architectural treasures of the late Middle Ages – the vast, intricate and magnificent hammer-beam roof. Like any ancient building Westminster Hall has needed to be repaired now and then: parts of the walls were rebuilt or repaired along with the windows in earlier centuries; the roof too has been renewed here and there as the ancient timbers have decayed, and a section had to be replaced after a bomb caused some damage in the 1980s.

  The last major period of restoration was in 1913 when several major timbers had to be renewed. But this presented the board of works with a major headache. England’s oak woods had long ago been felled and officials simply could not find a plantation with oaks big enough to provide the right sort of timber. Oak trees there were but they were perhaps two or three hundred years old and therefore simply not big enough. What was to be done?

  Then someone had the bright idea of checking where the original timbers had come from. It was discovered that at the end of the fourteenth century they had been brought to Westminster from an estate near Wadhurst in Sussex. The estate had been owned at that time – nearly five hundred years earlier – by the Courthorpe family. In 1913 there was a descendant of the original Courthorpe family in Parliament – he was MP for Rye, the beautiful Cinque Port on the south coast.

  When he was approached Sir George Courthorpe astonished officials with the following story. He explained that when the original trees had been cut and sold to the king in the fourteenth century, Courthorpe’s ancestors had thought that the time would come when the timbers needed repair or renewal so they planted a new stand of oak trees specifically for the purpose. Those trees were now – in 1913 – ready and they were duly cut and used to repair the great roof of Westminster Hall.

  THE CURSE OF CENTRE POINT

  1417

  A curious tale surrounds the land on which the tall tower of Centre Point now stands. This busy area where Tottenham Court Road meets Oxford Street was once part of the area known as Seven Dials, centred on the church of St Giles that still stands a little behind Charing Cross Road. Until the mid-nineteenth century St Giles and Seven Dials was a dense warren of tiny courtyards and alleys where vast numbers of criminals and prostitutes lived and the police dared not go. Tucked away between Covent Garden to the south and Bloomsbury to the north the area is a strange survivor – it miraculously escaped wholesale redevelopment in the 1960s, for example.

  A medieval leper hospital existed here amid open fields and well away from the City of London until the first developers came in the seventeenth century. They put up houses for artisans and skilled tradesmen, but within a few decades an area that had seemed a model development to Pepys when he visited it, had degenerated into a dark, overcrowded and fearsome place.

  The old road to Oxford (now Oxford Street) runs along what is now the northern extremity of the district. It passes close by the parish church of St Giles, patron saint of lepers. For centuries church officials paid for a last drink at the Resurrection Gate for the condemned who passed the church and pub as they took their journey by cart from Newgate Prison in the east to the gallows at Tyburn (now Marble Arch) in the west.

  The Resurrection Gate (rebuilt in the nineteenth century and renamed the Angel Inn) is still next to St Giles’s Church and you can follow the route of the old Oxford Road as it winds its way through what were once fields.

  St Giles’s Church was completed in 1712 after the earlier church began to collapse. The walls of the old church, built in the twelfth century, had been gradually undermined by the huge n
umber of burials. St Giles is one of a relatively small number of London churches that escaped Victorian ‘improvements’ and bombing in the Second World War.

  The great seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvel (1621– 1678) is buried here and the pulpit from which John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism, preached can still be seen. The plague of 1665, probably the worst outbreak in the whole history of that terrible disease, began here in St Giles. Here, too, lived London’s ballad sellers, including James Catnach from whom we get the phrase catchpenny – meaning designed merely to sell quickly. The area was also famous for doctors and astrologers, trinket makers, bird sellers and pawnbrokers.

  By the eighteenth century, when William Hogarth (1697– 1764) depicted the area in his famous engraving ‘Gin Lane’, Seven Dials was a place avoided by anyone with the least pretensions to respectability. It was also pretty much beyond the reach of the authorities. Gin shops were everywhere and poverty and desperation made the inhabitants widely feared. If a criminal from the area was being taken from Newgate to Tyburn extra soldiers were drafted in to guard him because, as likely as not, his friends would mount a rescue operation as he stopped for his last drink at the Resurrection Gate and once he’d been carried off into the Rookeries, as Seven Dials was then known, he would never be found. Even with the presence of armed guards pitched battles still sometimes ensued and numerous condemned men escaped.

  The name Seven Dials comes from the place, in the southern part of the district, where seven small streets meet to form a star. The plan is that of Sir Thomas Neale and dates back to 1694. There is still a small market here every weekday – the market has been here for more than a century – and many of the houses in the surrounding streets are basically eighteenth century, though much altered. Charles Dickens (1812–1870) called the area Tom All Alone’s in Bleak House and something of the atmosphere Dickens must have known still lingers.

  The obelisk at the centre of the star where the seven streets meet is a modern replacement, but from here narrow streets from the eighteenth century and one or two earlier houses radiate towards Covent Garden, Charing Cross Road, Shaftesbury Avenue and Long Acre.

  Much of the original Rookeries, certainly that area north of St Giles’s church, was destroyed in the 1880s to make way for Shaftesbury Avenue and New Oxford Street.

  St Giles’s Church once faced open fields but now faces into a narrow alleyway, so it’s difficult to appreciate what a splendid sight it would have been when first built, as it gazed out across open ground towards Tottenham Lane, but the inside of the church is one of the chief glories of the whole area. For some extraordinary reason it is hardly ever visited either by local people or tourists. It is a quiet, forgotten backwater and therefore the perfect place to stop for a few moments to enjoy that rare thing – a London interior pretty much unchanged in almost 300 years.

  But the strangest thing about this area is that businesses very rarely thrive – the shops and other outlets towards the top of Charing Cross Road, particularly around Centre Point, have constantly changed and the rate at which they tend to fail is far higher than the failure rate of comparable businesses elsewhere. Even Centre Point itself was a London scandal for a decade after it was built because it was so ugly that no one wanted to lease office space in it.

  Why should the area be so unlucky? Rationalists would dismiss the idea but we know that in 1417 Sir John Oldcastle – the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff – was burned here for heresy on the orders of King Henry V. As the flames rose around him Sir John is said to have cursed the land and surrounding area on which he was burned as well as the executioner, the king and all his descendants. Perhaps the Curse of Falstaff still lingers.

  GROPECUNT LANE

  1450

  We tend to think of the modern world as a place where anything goes – we take a very liberal view of swearing and sexual morality and we imagine that all other ages before ours were characterised by strict prudish morality, a morality typified by the Victorians who are popularly supposed to have covered the legs of their tables as the very idea of any sort of leg on display was shocking to them.

  The Victorians may well have been excessively prudish, worthy and hypocritical, but it is completely wrong to imagine that all other earlier epochs were similar – there have been many periods in the past that have taken a far more liberal view of life in general than the modern age.

  During Charles II’s reign, for example, Nell Gwynn (1651–1687) was adored by Londoners who loathed the king’s French wife and this despite the fact that Nell was always referred to as the king’s whore. Whore in the seventeenth century seems to have lacked at least some of the harsher overtones that it now has.

  Charles II himself cared little for traditional morality – he allowed plays to be written and performed that made the pursuit of pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure, the centre and mainspring of life. Puritan London was scandalised but there was little the religious could do as the plays had the king’s sanction.

  In medieval London too, sex was far more acceptable in a public context than it is now – anyone who looks at a map of London produced before 1450 will see several street names that are so extraordinary by our standards that they simply would not be allowed today.

  Addle Street appears on these earlier maps, for example, and to a medieval Londoner Addle Street mean ‘filthy spot’. Or take Fetter Lane, which still exists – in 1450 it meant the street of the dirty beggars.

  Other names were dropped after the Reformation as the influence of killjoy Protestants came to dominate public life. Public holidays on saint’s days were largely abandoned and many London street names were changed. Shiteburn Lane near Canon Street – so named because of the number of cess pits to be found here – was changed to the far more genteel sounding Sherborne Lane, a name it retains to this day.

  But the most extraordinary street of all, that vanished with the arrival of the Reformation and the serious sensibility that seems to have accompanied it, was a small lane that ran north from Cheapside. It was called Gropecunt Lane for the simple reason that it was a famous haunt of prostitutes.

  WHY WE SAY SIXES AND SEVENS

  1490

  Only London would retain something as dotty as a company of tailors who have had absolutely nothing to do with making clothes for more than three hundred years.

  But like most London guilds, the Merchant Taylors have long since lost all connection with their original calling. Most guilds exist – again like the tailors – merely to administer ancient and sometimes more recent charitable bequests.

  The Merchant Taylors – now rather sadly run by grey men in suits – still has some three hundred members and they administer a number of charities including alms houses in south London, a school in north London and a number of churches. But they have enjoyed – or suffered – a turbulent and fascinating history. Perhaps most interestingly, the Merchant Taylors are also responsible for that curious phrase where one describes a state of chaos or indecision as ‘being at sixes and sevens’.

  To find out how this odd phrase came into the language we need to take a brief look at the early history of the guild.

  The Merchant Taylors, who were later joined by the Linen Armourers, originally made clothes – but most particularly a medieval jacket called a gambeson. This was a thick padded jacket – padded because it was worn in battle either under armour, by the nobility, or on its own by the common soldiers. As the gambeson fell out of use with the introduction of firearms and abandonment of swords and pikes, the Merchant Taylors moved on to make tents for the army until sometime in the seventeenth century even this became a pointless exercise.

  The company received its charter as early as 1327 and is, as a result, considered one of the twelve great livery companies. These tend to be the most ancient companies and they include the mercers, drapers, fishmongers and goldsmiths. They were livery companies because members of particular guilds wore distinctive clothes (or livery).

  I
n its Royal Charter of 1503, the guild is given its full name – ‘The Gild of Merchant Taylors of the Fraternity of St. John Baptist in the City of London.’

  Early in their history the guilds were jealous of their status and fought for their place in the order of precedence during any progress of the Lord Mayor across London.

  After endless arguments with the Guild of Skinners about who should take sixth place in the order of precedence and who seventh, the Lord Mayor of London issued an order in the late fifteenth century to the effect that the Skinners and Merchant Taylors would alternate in precedence: in odd-numbered years the Merchant Taylors would be sixth in order; in even years the Skinners would take the sixth place and the Merchant Taylors would be seventh. Hence the phrase – to be at sixes and sevens.

  The alternating precedence continues to this day.

  THE HOUSE THAT SHAKESPEARE KNEW

  1501

  Few domestic houses in central London can lay claim to as many strange tales as a tall narrow house that stands on the south bank of the Thames looking towards St Paul’s Cathedral.

  The fact that the house is still standing is a remarkable tale in itself for this elegant narrow building – once part of a terrace – is the last remaining of the many Bankside houses that once lined the river here where Shakespeare’s plays were first performed.

  The house is still privately owned but when Henry VIII’s future wife Catherine arrived from Spain in 1501 she stayed here and two centuries later when Christopher Wren (1632–1723) was building St Paul’s he too stayed in the house to supervise the work on his great cathedral directly across the water.