by Tom Quinn
But astonishingly one of the churches earmarked for destruction was taken down carefully stone by stone and rebuilt out at Twickenham where it – or at least its tower – can still be seen as you drive out of London on the left-hand side of the A306: a rare ghost from the medieval City on a suburban bypass.
DEMOLISHED CAFE RETURNS
1929
Everyone talks about Regent Street as if it were one of London’s most famous and architecturally important thoroughfares, but that judgment is based on a complete misunderstanding – it’s based on the mistaken notion that what we see today is the work of that genius of Regency architecture, John Nash (1752–1835).
The great sweep of this magnificent thoroughfare remains as Nash, the man who built Carlton House and the exquisite terraces of Regent’s Park envisaged it, but though the route of Regent Street is as it was conceived by Nash, none of the buildings we see today in Regent Street has anything to do with him.
Despite the beauty of the street that he created here, developers in the 1920s demolished every Nash building (with the exception of All Souls’ Church, which was very badly damaged by German bombs) as well as the ornate colonnade that kept the rain off shoppers. The big ugly buildings that we now see in Regent Street are the work of a justly forgotten third-rate architect. However, amid all the devastation one feature of the vanished Regent Street that Nash built did survive: the Grill Room at the Café Royal.
The Café Royal was originally opened – in one of Nash’s now lost buildings – by Daniel Thevenon, a Paris wine merchant, in 1870. The café he created became so famous that artists, writers and film stars rarely visited London without insisting on a trip to the Royal.
When the new Regent Street was proposed the architects had every intention of building a new Café Royal and they were astonished when there was an outcry from across the world at the prospect of the beautiful Café Royal being destroyed. After a long campaign, which included representations from the royal family, a compromise was reached – the interior of the dining room, with its magnificent decorative scheme, would be carefully removed and then when a room the exact size of the old room had been built in the new Café Royal the old interior would be slotted back into place – and that’s exactly what happened.
Today – if you are wealthy enough to be able to afford lunch at the Café Royal – you can dine in an interior of deep red plush and golden cherubs that is identical to the interior known and loved by everyone from Oscar Wilde to Augustus John, Lillie Langtry, Duncan Grant, J.M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw.
ENTERTAINER WITH A POTATO HEAD
1929
In his famous book Down and Out in Paris and London (published in 1933) George Orwell recounts the extraordinary number of ways in which London’s destitute managed to earn a living, from the screevers who drew pictures on the paving stones outside galleries and public buildings to the singers, acrobats, jugglers and escapologists. Orwell – himself an old Etonian – met several other old Etonians who were destitute and sleeping rough on London’s streets.
But among the odd characters he meets none is perhaps more extraordinary than the big bald-headed Irishman who made a very decent living outside London’s theatres using nothing more than a large potato.
We have to remember that before the telephone was widely available many theatregoers if not most would queue outside the theatre to buy tickets for that evening’s performance. This meant that street entertainers had something of a captive audience.
The Irishman with the potato had a very simple and effective routine. He attracted the attention of the crowd, threw his potato (the biggest he could find) high into the air and then manoeuvred himself until he was directly underneath it. When the potato hit his bald head it splattered into tiny pieces and the Irishman immediately went along the queue with his hat.
Hard though it may be to believe, the audiences loved it.
A STATUE WITH ITS OWN INCOME
1929
St Dunstan’s Church in Fleet Street is one of London’s oddest churches. For a start it is octagonal in shape – the result of an oddly shaped site – and for many years it provided a home to a number of strange Christian sects: the Coptic Ethiopian Church, the Assyrian Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht.
Now hemmed in on all sides by later rebuilding, the churchyard was once a thriving place of business. Anyone who has a collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books will see on the title page again and again the address ‘Published at St Dunstan’s in the West’ followed by the date, for St Dunstan’s, like St Paul’s less than a mile away, was once a great centre of book publishing.
The most reprinted book after the Bible was first printed here – Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (far more a book about the contemplative life than about fishing) was sold here by Walton himself, who lived here and was St Dunstan’s churchwarden for many years.
But the strangest feature of St Dunstan’s is the statue of Elizabeth I that stands just in front of the church. Carved in the 1580s while the Queen was still alive it stood for many years on Ludgate where the Queen would regularly have seen it on her progresses from Westminster to the City and back. When Ludgate was demolished at the end of the eighteenth century the statue was brought to St Dunstan’s.
The statue has been here ever since and it is the only statue in London (probably the only statue in the world) that has its own income.
In 1929 the philanthropist Lady Millicent Fawcett, concerned that the statue should be properly looked after, left enough money in trust for it to be cleaned and repaired in perpetuity.
FISHING FROM THE ROOF OF THE SAVOY
1930
The Savoy Hotel and surrounding area is rich in history, much of it bizarre in the extreme, but there are also odd endearing tales that attach themselves to the modern hotel and the ancient palace that once stood on the Thameside site.
One of the best of these tales concerns two guests staying at the hotel back in the 1930s.
Like the English, Americans are obsessed with fishing with rod and line and to the enthusiast half the pleasure of fishing is arguing about flies and lines and the various techniques for casting them.
Two Americans staying at the Savoy in London were particularly keen on fishing and over dinner one evening they had an argument over whether or not it would be possible to cast a fly, using a salmon rod, from the roof of their hotel over the gardens and the busy Embankment and into the Thames.
They were so determined to settle the dispute that they went along to Hardy Brothers, the tackle-makers in Pall Mall, and asked them to decide if such a thing was possible. Hardy Brothers approached the angler and author Esmond Drury who agreed to attempt the feat on condition that he was tied securely to a chimney on the hotel roof.
Early one Sunday morning, and with the help of a policeman who stopped all the traffic on the Embankment, he proved that it was indeed possible to cast a fly into the Thames from the roof of the Savoy.
But the Savoy has always been a place that generates eccentricities. Take the short street at the front where taxis pull up to pick up hotel guests – this short stretch of roadway is the only place in the country where traffic is allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road. No one knows why this is but cars and taxis here must drive on the right.
The Savoy stands on the site of the old medieval Savoy Palace built by Henry III’s friend Count Peter of Savoy in 1264. The courtyard at the front of the present hotel is said to follow the lines of the original medieval courtyard palace. The present building, completed in 1889, was commissioned and paid for by Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844–1901) using the vast sums he made putting on Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The famous Peach Melba was invented here (in honour of the great opera diva Nellie Melba), as was the dry martini. And legend has it that if thirteen guests find themselves about to sit down to supper the hotel will provide a fourteenth guest (a black cat) to avoid the bad luck inherent in the numb
er 13.
And there is a long tradition at the hotel that if the guest is important enough they will put up with almost anything – one guest turned up with her pet crocodile, others have appeared with monkeys; marmosets and parrots are virtually commonplace. Two final strange tales about the Savoy: an American guest once took pot shots with his 12-bore shotgun from the roof at geese flying towards Green Park, and the great violinist Jascha Heifetz once had bagpipe lessons on the roof.
A little further west along the Strand from the Savoy is a short street that once ran down to the river. Savoy Street will take you to the Savoy Chapel, parts of which certainly date back to the original foundation, which is contemporaneous with Count Peter’s twelfth-century palace. Most of the present building is relatively recent but it was once the cause of a bizarre legal suit. Having reverted to the Crown following the death of Peter of Savoy (1203–1268) the chapel was given to the Duke of Lancaster – who also happened to be the king. This meant the chapel was owned both by the king and by the Duke of Lancaster, but as they were one and the same person confusion reigned. The difficulty was only eliminated in the early eighteenth century when the king sued the Duke (i.e. he sued himself) to establish who had the right to the chapel and the land on which it was built. Not surprisingly the king won.
THE BUILDING THAT’S REALLY AN ADVERTISEMENT
1930
In the early part of the twentieth century, London was still a rather strait-laced place where advertising was considered rather vulgar – to the extent that it was banned on the sides of buildings. Partly this was an attempt to tidy up after the chaos of earlier centuries when shopkeepers and tradesmen put signs outside their shops and then tried to outdo each other by gradually making their signs bigger or attaching them to long poles until narrow streets would be dark all day because of the shadows cast by countless signs.
The first buses were also covered in ads, which then began to creep up the sides of buildings until the authorities called a halt. Tall buildings began to appear and though they would have provided magnificent sites for advertisements the authorities were horrified at the prospect. But one or two advertisers were determined to get round the ban and in at least one strange instance they got away with it.
On the south bank near Blackfriars Bridge a tower was built above a warehouse. The tower still survives and is now home to a very fashionable restaurant which offers diners a magnificent view from their tables along the river. At the top of the tower and visible from miles away there is an advertisement for the famous Oxo beef cube. The ad has been here since the building was first put up and it escaped the ban to which all such similar ads would have been subject. It did it by incorporating the advertisement – the letters OXO – into the very structure of the building. What look like three big letters are in fact three gigantic windows filled with red glass.
COWS IN THE STRAND
1930
Until relatively recently all London’s food supplies had to be brought fresh to the capital – in the days before refrigeration there was no alternative, which explains why live animals were driven to Smithfield well into the twentieth century and milk was sold in various parks around London straight from the cow. Until 1900 you might often have seen a flock of geese marching towards London, each bird wearing a pair of tar boots (their feet were dipped in tar to prevent the long walk causing bleeding and pain).
But London was also a curiously unregulated place and the authorities were often more astonished than anyone to discover that odd trades and crafts were still being carried on long after everyone had assumed they were extinct.
Down by the river about halfway between Waterloo and Charing Cross Bridges was the world’s first block of flats. Adelphi Terrace, completed in 1768, was built by the Adam brothers and was split into apartments – to the utter astonishment of Londoners who had never seen anything like it before.
Sadly little remains of this marvellous scheme and the superb buildings that once stood here. Most were demolished in the 1930s (one part survives in nearby Adam Street) but it was discovered as demolition got under way that an elderly woman was still living in the building along with half a dozen cows whose milk she sold in the Strand!
Dozens of other curious tales attach to this most historic and relatively little-altered part of London – J. M. Barrie of Peter Pan fame and George Bernard Shaw, for example, lived opposite each other for a while in Robert Street and when they wanted a break from writing they would throw biscuits or cherry stones at each other’s windows to attract attention.
Another story tells how the Adam brothers wanted the building work on the Adelphi carried out as cheaply as possible so they brought workers down from Scotland. The workers quickly found out how much less than the going rate they were being paid and went on strike, so the brothers set off for Ireland where they employed Irish labourers, but only those who could speak no English! But the canny Irish, though they spoke only Gaelic, were not so easily fooled. Within days of their starting work in London they knew they were being swindled – the Adam brothers forgot that many of the workers would have had had relatives in London and they quickly discovered what they should have been paid. In the face of another threat of strike action the Adam brothers quietly gave in and paid up.
MAX MILLER’S LAST PERFORMANCE
1936
Much of what once made London a truly fascinating place has been destroyed in the name of profit. The Victorians were particularly bad at knocking anything and everything down for this reason but we have not learned by their bad example. When the grossly overpaid and incompetent officials at the Royal Opera House wanted to make their theatre bigger and therefore more profitable in the 1980s they destroyed a row of eighteenth-century buildings, including the house in which Tom’s Coffee Shop – one of the best-known coffee houses in eighteenth-century London – opened in 1722.
The much-loved buildings of the old Covent Garden Market were only just saved following a campaign by local residents in the late 1970s. Developers didn’t care a fig for the historic fabric of the area. In the 1930s a similar campaign to save the world-famous old Alhambra Theatre in Leicester Square was not so successful, but the destruction of this splendid old building led to one of the oddest and saddest of all goodbyes.
The great comedian Max Miller (1894–1963), who was banned by the BBC for telling rude jokes, heard that the Alhambra, one of his favourite theatres, was being demolished so he went along to have a last look at the building in which he’d performed on numerous occasions. He arrived at lunchtime and hearing that the famous stage was to be taken down that afternoon he climbed on to the boards and gave the workmen an impromptu – and by all accounts hilarious – one-hour performance. Ten minutes after he’d finished, the stage was gone for ever.
Towards the end of his life Miller confessed that in a distinguished career his proudest moment was not appearing on the BBC or at the Theatre Royal but, as he put it, ‘closing the old Alhambra’.
DOGS BEFORE NAZIS
1938
The British are famous, among other things, for tolerance – while Europe, from France to Poland and beyond, persecuted the Jews during the years leading up to and through the Second World War, Britain provided a haven for Jewish refugees; in the 1970s when Idi Amin expelled every Asian from Uganda, Britain offered them a home; and in recent years more migrants have targeted the UK precisely because of its reputation for tolerance.
But if the British are tolerant of foreigners they love their dogs even more. Indeed the British love of dogs is legendary – visitors to Britain over the past three hundred years have commented again and again on the fact that the average Briton is much fonder of his dog than of his friends and family. A long-forgotten magazine once printed the results of a survey of its readers: the survey revealed that given the choice of sleeping with their wives or their dogs the majority (the figures worked out roughly three to one) would prefer the dog!
One dog that enjoyed the tolerant affection of the Br
itish belonged to Hitler’s ambassador to Britain in the 1930s, Joachim Von Ribbentrop (1893–1946). In 1938 Ribbentrop’s dog Giro died and as a gesture of goodwill he was allowed to bury it in the gardens to the left of the Duke of York’s monument just off The Mall.
Despite the fact that when war came Von Ribbentrop immediately became a hate figure for the British no one would have dreamed of disturbing the grave of his dog – probably because they had always preferred the dog anyway. The dog’s little headstone can still be seen today.
WHERE THE DUTCH DECLARED WAR
1940
A relatively small hotel just off Piccadilly, Brown’s came into existence as early as 1837 when former servant James Brown and his wife Sarah opened their hotel at number 23. The Browns hung on until the late 1850s before selling for a handsome profit – by this time the hotel had expanded to include several neighbouring houses. Over the next century the hotel provided a temporary home for numerous celebrities including Cecil Rhodes, Rudyard Kipling and American President Franklin Roosevelt, who chose the hotel for his honeymoon.
In 1940 the Dutch government in exile – which seems to have consisted quite literally of two men and a dog – solemnly declared war on Japan from room 36. Since the announcement wasn’t broadcast it is difficult to imagine that the Japanese Emperor was quaking in his boots.
TOP-SECRET GRASS-CUTTING SERVICE
1940
In its present triumphal form The Mall was laid out in the nineteenth century to emulate the triumphal routes of various other capitals – for example, Paris and Rome. It joins Trafalgar Square to Buckingham Palace, passing Horse Guards Parade on the way. The Mall is a familiar thoroughfare, but just where it passes Horse Guards Parade there is a very odd building that most people completely fail to notice.
