by Tom Quinn
If you retrace your steps from Leinster Gardens to Porchester Road, which runs parallel to Leinster Gardens, you come to a long wall. Look over this and you will see the backs of 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens – a high, blank brick wall held up by steel girders. Below the wall is the tunnel entrance. But this is only a short stretch of exposed railway and it could have been covered over. The reason it is still open to the skies is that the first underground railway trains were steam driven and though they were specially adapted to reduce steam and smoke emissions in the tunnels (which would have been very unhealthy for passengers) they did have to release large amounts of coal exhaust fumes now and then. The spot behind the fake houses was established as an acceptable place for those early drivers to vent their engines!
ISLAMIC SEWAGE CENTRE
1868
Many of London’s strangest tales concern buildings put up for the oddest reasons – either the fashion of the time or as a result of the eccentricity of architect or owner. But there are a number of buildings put up in odd styles to hide their real purpose.
The Abbey Mills pumping station is a good example. This dotty-looking building with its Moorish domes and towers, looks like something from Asia or the Middle East – in fact it was built in Victorian times (during a period of enthusiasm for all things Islamic) to disguise, of all things, a sewage works!
The interior is even more bizarre as it looks exactly like an Eastern Orthodox Church.
The architect was Joseph Bazalgette (1819–1891), the man who rescued London from drowning in its own sewage by building the embankments along the Thames and their massive sewers that were designed to carry London’s waste miles downstream and away from the bulk of the populace.
Balzalgette’s embankment also provided a perfect place to build tunnels for the Circle and District lines as well – later on – as masses of communications wires and pipes.
The embankment sewer scheme had been proposed after Parliament found it increasingly difficult to meet at all in summer because of the stench from the river – at times it was so bad that huge sheets of canvas soaked in vinegar had to be hung behind the windows of the palace of Westminster. Without them the Parliamentarians were unable to stay in the chamber long enough to make any decisions. Bazalgette came up with the answer. But the embankment was only part of the solution and Bazalgette was given responsibility for the whole of London’s main drainage system. Hence Abbey Mills pumping station.
Completed in 1868, it had to be made to look like something – anything – other than a sewage pumping station because the Victorians couldn’t bear the idea of anyone going to the lavatory and would not have taken kindly to a large building clearly designed with sewage in mind. But with a Moorish palace in their midst they could kid themselves that it had nothing to do with bodily functions of any kind.
WHERE SPHAIRISTIKE STARTED
1869
Lawn tennis (as opposed to what is now known as real tennis) began in England; not in the sports field or even on a piece of ground we would today recognise as a tennis court. It actually started in the gardens of a now vanished house on the southern side of Berkeley Square. The badly designed modern building we see today is on the site of Landsdowne House, an eighteenth-century mansion designed by the great Robert Adam (1728–1792) and completed in 1762.
It was here in 1774 that the scientist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) discovered oxygen and, almost a century later, in 1869, the world’s first game of tennis was played. It came about almost by chance. A Major Winfield came to London to visit the third Lord Lansdown (the house had been built for his ancestor William Petty, first Lord Lansdown). Winfield told Lansdown that he’d been thinking about a new game that four people could play on a small patch of grass. He called his new game Sphairistike.
Lansdown invited A. J. Balfour (1848–1930), the future Prime Minister, and another friend to play the game the next day. It was a success and within a few years Sphairistike was being played all over the country.
The name Sphairistike was quickly dropped (which is not that surprising!) and it was Arthur Balfour who coined the name the sport retains to this day: lawn tennis.
A ROAR ON THE EMBANKMENT
1870
The Thames has always dominated life in London – the City’s huge wealth was built on trade via the river and for centuries most people travelled across London by water as the roads were almost always either cluttered or deep in mud or both.
London was in constant danger of flooding too and even today, with the Thames Barrier in place, rising sea levels could threaten the city again.
The real problem with flooding when the embankment walls were built was that, despite the great height of the embankment walls, they had the effect of narrowing the river and increasing its depth. Add to that the fact that nothing could control the great surges that began far out at sea and then drove remorselessly upriver. When heavy rain in winter coincided with a big spring tide the embankment was often breached in numerous places, causing tens of thousands of pounds of damage to property, not to mention disruption to transport and people’s lives generally.
There was, however, a bizarre and rather primitive early warning system that is still partially in use today.
Anyone who has ever leaned over the embankment to gaze out along the river will probably have noticed that well below the parapet and fixed at regular intervals into the stonework there are lions’ heads with mooring rings hanging from their mouths. Visitors often wonder why on earth so many mooring positions should be required so far below the top of the wall – the passengers of any boat tying up at any of these rings could not possibly disembark.
The solution to this mystery is tied up with the early warning system for flooding that existed in London before the Thames Barrier was built.
Every policeman whose beat happens to take him along the embankment on either side of the river was formerly instructed to keep an eye on the lions’ heads, because if the water level reaches the heads flooding is a serious and imminent danger. The rule used to be that once the water reached the heads all Underground stations were closed and London was put on red alert.
THE BRIDGE THAT COULD FALL DOWN
1873
Albert Bridge – never referred to as The Albert Bridge – looks like just any other bridge over the Thames. It’s rather pretty certainly, but nothing out of the ordinary until, that is, you look a little closer.
Built by R. M. Ordish in 1873 Albert Bridge is in fact highly unusual. It has three spans and what’s known in engineering circles as a straight-link suspension system. Each half of the bridge is supported by wrought iron bars attached to the top of the two highly ornamental towers. Meanwhile the side girders along the parapets are suspended, making the bridge an odd mix of cantilever and suspension.
What makes it even odder is that there is still a small hexagonal toll house on the south side of the bridge – in fact, this is a very rare survival indeed as it is the only bridge toll house left anywhere in London. But the strangest thing about Albert Bridge is neither its method of construction nor its toll house – it’s the sign, put here when the bridge was first built, which says that soldiers must not march in step when crossing the bridge. To the casual passer-by the sign has always been completely mystifying – but there is method in what looks like madness. The reason soldiers are not allowed to march in step over the bridge is that the rhythm set up by their synchronised movements might cause structural damage to the bridge. At worst it might collapse.
The difficulty is that older suspension bridges pick up and then massively amplify synchronised movement – a phenomenon to which Albert Bridge is particularly prone.
THE HOUSE WHERE TIME STOOD STILL
1874
There is a common misconception that London is still a wonderful place to find eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century architecture despite the deadly work of redevelopers and German bombs, but actually the majority of eighteenth-century houses are only eighteenth
century in outward appearance. Only a few rare examples are listed in such a way as to prevent their interiors being destroyed, even if their facades have to be left unchanged. This means that thousands of modern houses and office blocks have eighteenth-century fronts. This even happened – back in the 1960s – to houses of great architectural merit – like Schomberg House in Pall Mall, a beautiful seventeenth-century house that developers were allowed to destroy so long as they kept the façade. Great houses and churches often survive with their interiors but the least likely to survive of all are the interiors of the houses of the middle and working classes.
Linley Sambourne House is an extraordinary exception to that rule. Named after the cartoonist who lived here from 1874 to 1910, it is a perfect example of a solidly middle-class household of the mid-Victorian period. When Sambourne and his young wife moved into the house, which had been built only four years earlier, they decorated in the then fashionable aesthetic style – characterised by heavy velvet drapes, William Morris wallpapers, ornate Turkey carpets and a vast clutter of china ornaments.
Sambourne earned his living as a cartoonist, mostly for Punch magazine, for almost half a century. Most of his drawings were completed in this house and numerous examples of his work can be seen, along with his photographs – like many artists of the time he was fascinated by this still relatively new art form.
The house remained substantially unchanged through the twentieth century through extraordinary good luck. The Sambournes’ son Roy inherited the house and left it unchanged, probably because he never married. When he in turn died he left the house to his elder sister Maud. She too was passionate about preserving it intact, largely because – as she said herself – she’d been so happy there as a child. Her daughter Anne then used the house until at a party in 1957 Anne proposed that she and her friends, including the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman (1906–1984), should found the Victorian Society to preserve the house and its contents and to work for the preservation of other similar examples of Victorian taste. The Victorian style was then hugely unpopular – how unpopular can be judged by the fact that sometime in the mid-1950s George Frederick Watts’ famous painting ‘Hope’, now one of the most popular works in the collection of pictures at Tate Britain, was used to block up an old fireplace in a house in Battersea!
WORLD’S FIRST PHONE CALL
1876
Dover Street, which runs north of Piccadilly, is on the face of it rather unexceptional. A few eighteenth-century houses remain, but mostly their interiors are hopelessly and completely modernised. The Arts Club is here at number 40, it is true, and club members over the years have included such luminaries as the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), George du Maurier (1834–1896) – grandfather of Daphne – and of course Charles Dickens (who seems to crop up everywhere in London) but Dover Street’s real claim to fame is that it was here in 1876 that the world’s first telephone call was made.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Scotland in 1847, the son of an actor who was also at various times an orator and professor of elocution. With a naturally scientific mind and a deaf mother Bell became fascinated by how sound works – he used to speak in a low voice, keeping his mouth close to his mother’s head, convinced that she would feel the vibrations of his voice.
The Bell family eventually emigrated to America and it was here that Alexander Graham made a small mistake that was to change his life – while reading a book on sound written by a German author Bell mistook a line and thought, mistakenly, that the author was arguing that sound could be transmitted by wire.
Bell became convinced this was possible. By 1876 he had found a way to do it and he quickly became the sensation of the age – he travelled the world demonstrating his new device and it was here at Brown’s Hotel in Dover Street that his telephone, as it came to be known, was first successfully demonstrated.
A NEEDLE BY THE RIVER
1878
Londoners have never allowed the truth to get in the way of a good story, which is why Cleopatra’s Needle – that ancient Egyptian monument on London’s Embankment – has always retained a name that has nothing to do with reality.
But then everything about Cleopatra’s Needle is bizarre. Like most Egyptian artifacts its history is uncertain, but the most likely date for it is around 1500 BC. It was almost certainly commissioned by Thothmes III, whose name appears on the stone. By the year 23 BC it had been moved by Caesar to a position near Cleopatra’s Palace, but that is as far as any connection with the great empress goes.
After that it vanishes from history until early in the nineteenth century when it was presented by the local Egyptian ruler as a gift to King George IV. It arrived in London in 1878 after a long campaign to raise enough money to cover the cost of transporting it.
The cost was enormous because the stone is incredibly heavy – 160 tons – and a special case had to be made to move it without damaging it.
Once the obelisk arrived in England there was more trouble – a row immediately started about where it should be put up.
The forecourt of the British Museum was suggested initially; then Kensington Gardens, followed by Greenwich Park, but a site in Parliament Square near the House of Commons was finally decided on. To convince the doubters – of whom there were many – a wooden replica was first built and erected in the square so that Londoners’ reaction could be judged. Then disaster struck – the underground railway company whose line ran under the square was convinced that the obelisk would crash through into their tunnel. This argument was seen as compelling and Parliament Square was rejected. After lengthy further debate the obelisk was moved to its present position by the Thames – appropriate enough, given that it was first built to stand by the edge of the Nile and it now stands, as it has for over a century, on the banks of another great river.
If its journey to England was eccentric the pillar’s final placing was even more so. The ancient tradition of burying a child’s shoe or a coin beneath a new building for good luck was here taken to ridiculous lengths. Among the objects buried beneath the obelisk – and they are still there – are: a model of the hydraulic equipment used to raise the obelisk; a two-foot rule; a child’s feeding bottle and some toys; a tin of hairpins, some tobacco, a portrait of Queen Victoria, a map of London and a collection of newspapers; a set of coins, several empty jars; copies of the Bible; a translation of the hieroglyphics on the stone; a copy of Whitaker’s Almanack; some rope; photographs of women and some.
The obelisk is a great survivor, however. Having come through the ravages of more than three thousand years it still bears the marks of bomb damage from the Second World War, and Londoners who grew fond of this oddity in their midst soon came up with a rhyme about it that is somehow both affectionate and dismissive:
This monument as some supposes
Was put up in the time of Moses
It passed in time to the Greeks and Turks
But was put up here by the Board of Works.
WHY SALUTING IS VULGAR
1879
The fact that in the modern world members of the royal family are regularly mocked and their every action and statement scrutinised would astonish any earlier epoch. By the same token the deference shown the royal family in Victorian times seems incomprehensible today. Whatever they did, however badly they behaved, they were treated with the utmost respect.
This may explain why, following the death of Prince Albert (1819–1861) from typhoid (caused it appears by the terrible drains at Windsor), almost every clock made in Britain for the next forty years was cased in black slate or black marble; statues and monuments to the great man popped up everywhere, often paid for after collections among people who really could not afford to pay; other state-inspired monuments were erected at vast expense – most famously the great Albert Memorial folly in Kensington Gardens – and streets, stations, pubs and warehouses were named after Albert.
Among all this adulation one statue has always baffled visitors to Lond
on. It’s the statue of Albert, in the full dress of a field marshall, at Holborn Circus. Albert was hardly the most warlike or militarily competent of royal consorts – he was actually a rather talented composer – but there he is on horseback in his uniform. But instead of saluting as one might expect he is shown doffing his hat.
What on earth is going on? The answer is that saluting is a modern and some would say rather vulgar business. Until well into the Victorian era officers saluted by doffing their hats, which is why Albert is doing just that on this statue.
A HOUSEFUL OF ANIMALS
1880
William Buckland (1784–1856) was Dean of Westminster, a fanatical animal collector and one of the strangest characters ever to grace the streets of the metropolis.
He had a wide circle of friends, which is why tales of his bizarre behaviour spread far and wide. His house in London was always crammed with thousands of natural history specimens, some dead, some alive; some he slept with, others were kept till they died and then eaten or left to rot.
To prove the efficacy of bird droppings as fertiliser William once used great quantities of it to write the word ‘guano’ on the lawn at his Oxford college. When the summer came and the grass had grown well the letters could be clearly seen. At his house you were almost certain to be offered roast hedgehog or a slice of grilled crocodile steak – and if you partook, the chances are that one or both came from an animal that had roamed Buckland’s house and garden a little earlier as a pet!
Travelling to London on his horse one dark wintry night William got lost, but trusting to his extraordinary sense of taste he simply dismounted, picked up a handful of earth, tasted it, shouted ‘Uxbridge!’ and went on his way.
