Lost London

by Richard Guard

  A letter addressed to the poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) from his friend John Walsh encouraged Southey to visit the Fields:

  I think it would be worth your while to take a view of those wonderful marks of the Lord’s hatred to duelling called ‘The Brothers’ Steps.’ They are in a field about a third of a mile northward from Montague house ... The prints of their feet are about the depth of three inches, and nothing will vegetate them so much as to disfigure them ... Mr. George Hall, who was the Librarian of Lincoln’s Inn, first showed me these steps twenty-eight years ago ... he remembered them about thirty years, and the man who first showed them to him about thirty more, which goes back to the year 1692 ... My mother well remembered their being ploughed up and corn sown to displace them, about fifty years ago, but all was labour in vain, for the prints returned in a while to their pristine form.

  The exact location of the site is debated, with some arguing for the car park behind Senate House on the west of Russell Square while others suggest an area in front of Birkbeck College, slightly to the north. Fanciful visitors might still glimpse footprints in the grass newly laid there, though students taking short-cuts across the lawn might be a more logical cause.

  Fleet Marriages

  BETWEEN 1617 AND 1753 A LEGAL LOOPHOLE meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’.

  Many of the pubs nearby bore the sign of a happy couple holding hands, alongside a caption: ‘Marriages performed within’. Often the ceremonies were conducted by clergymen incarcerated in the Fleet for debt. It was widely believed by the ruling classes that many of these marriages were forced and nothing but a sham. The image of a drunken son of the aristocracy reeling down the street in the arms of a lady of ill-repute was much bandied about and angry voices were raised in Parliament on the matter.

  Indeed, no doubt some illicit matches did take place, against the will of one or other of the parties. But judging from the number of unions made (estimated to be almost 250,000 in just sixty years up to 1753), it seems more likely that the ability to marry without parental consent – that is to say, to marry who you wanted, rather than who they wanted – might well have been the commoner motivation. Records show that in the four months up to 12 February 1705 alone, almost 3,000 marriages took place.

  The Liberties of the Fleet in many ways resembled Las Vegas of today, a notorious area famed for debauchery and where the reach of the law was restricted. A campaign led by Lord Hardwicke eventually resulted in the Marriage Act of 1753, which finally put an end to the practise in England and Wales.

  Fleet Prison

  Blackfriars

  STANDING ON THE EAST BANK OF THE FLEET River on the site of the current Blackfriars Railway Station, this prison was first recorded in 1171. The office of Keeper was a hereditary post handed down through the Leveland family from 1197 to 1538.

  The job offered opportunity for hideous abuses, with the Keeper entitled to raise levies on prisoners for almost everything, from food and lodging to privileges. Inmates could also pay to be released for short periods and many escaped.

  Very unpopular among the public, the prison was burnt down during both the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Gordon Riots of 1780. In between, it was ravaged by the 1666 Great Fire of London. Although nominally a debtors’ prison, the Fleet was used in the 14th century to incarcerate those condemned by the King’s Council and the Court of Chancery, as well as those convicted by the Court of the Star Chamber between Henry VIII’s reign and 1641.

  In 1691 a prisoner named Moses Pitt wrote Cry of the Oppressed about his experiences at Fleet, in which he revealed the full extent of his degradations. Instead of the regulation 4s flat fee, he was charged £2 4S 6D to be housed in the ‘gentleman’s side’ and paid a further 8s a week for his room. Having run out of money after sixteen months, he was thrown in a dungeon to sleep on the floor with twenty-seven other inmates ‘so lowsie, that as they either walked or sat down, you might have pick’d lice off from their outward garments’.

  A Parliamentary inquiry in 1726 found the then Keeper, Thomas Bambridge, guilty ‘of great extortions, and the highest crimes and misdemeanours in the execution of his said office’, treating prisoners ‘in a most barbarous and cruel manner’. New rules were imposed but in reality little changed for the unfortunates held at Fleet. Charles Dickens described in vivid detail life within its walls in the 1830s in The Pickwick Papers. The prison was closed in 1842 and demolished four years later.

  Fleet River

  ALTHOUGH THE FLEET RIVER HAS ENTIRELY disappeared from above ground, its source is still visible and, weather permitting, you may even swim in it still.

  It rises in Hampstead Heath and fills the ponds from Kenwood House down through the heath towards Kentish Town (a name possibly derived from ‘Ken Ditch Town’). The Fleet’s upper reaches were long famed for their health-giving waters, though the same could not be said for its lower reaches.

  The river’s ancient valley followed the route of Kentish Town Road, then St Pancras Way, Kings Cross Road, Phoenix Place and Warner Street, before joining Farringdon Road and Farringdon Street, then flowing into the Thames at Blackfriars. The Fleet marked the western limit of the Roman city boundaries and was deep enough for navigation as far as Holbourne Bridge until the 1500s, when it fell foul of rapid urban expansion and a population explosion.

  The once-proud river turned into little more than a repellent ditch blocked with filth, offal and blood, though time and again the city authorities tried to restore the Fleet to its former glory. Under Queen Elizabeth I and then Lord Protector Cromwell, it was scoured and cleaned. In the aftermath of the 1666 Great Fire it was able to be used for the transportation of coal barges but by the early 1700s it was again in trouble. Jonathan Swift wrote of it:

  Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

  Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,

  Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.

  The Fleet’s death knell sounded when it was turned into a sewer from Fleet Bridge (at the junction of Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street) all the way to Holbourne Bridge. Stretches of the sewer remained uncovered until 1768, despite the death of a drunken Kentish barber in 1763 who was found stuck fast and frozen solid in its filthy waters. The northern part of the river was gradually covered over as the surrounding land was given over to housing projects over the course of several years.

  By 1850 the Fleet was one of London’s main sewers, moving 1,500,000 cubic feet of sewage per day. Its Thamesside entrance was a popular ingress into the sewer system for toshers, who made their living by sifting the dirt for anything remotely useful or valuable. ‘A more dismal pursuit can scarcely be conceived’ wrote John Archer in 1851 in Vestiges of Old London. In 1855 the Fleet was incorporated into the city’s main sewage system and diverted to Barking Creek. Its name lives on in Fleet Street, Fleet Lane and in the notorious Fleet Prison.

  Frost Fairs

  WHEN THE WEATHER WAS SEVERE ENOUGH that the River Thames froze over, the people of London would take advantage and build stalls and booths along the ice for an impromptu fair.

  There are numerous records of these events that describe how pretty much anything normally available to buy on the streets was for sale on the ice, too. One contemporary sketch of an ice fair depicts signs for shops and stalls including ‘the Duke of York’s Coffee-house’, ‘the Tory booth’, ‘the Halfway House’, ‘the Bear Gardenshire Booth’, ‘the Roast Beef Booth’, ‘the Music Booth’, ‘the Printing Booth’, ‘the Lottery Booth’ and ‘the Horn Tavern Booth’.

  Other attractions included football matches, skating, sledging and ice-based fairground games, such as a whirling-chair or a car drawn by several men using a long rope fastened to a stake fixed in the ice. Bear- and bull-baiting were also commonplace, as was the sight of a whole ox roasting, a ritual carried out with some ceremony. In 1715, one Mr
Hodgeson claimed the right to dispatch an ox for the purpose – his father having performed the same task in 1684 – and arrived ‘dressed in a rich laced cambric apron, a silver steel, and a hat and feathers, to perform the office’.

  It is believed that there were ice fairs on the Thames in the following years: 1150, 1281, 1408, 1435, 1506, 1514, 1537, 1565, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635, 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1677, 1684, 1695, 1709, 1716, 1740, 1776, 1788, 1795 and 1814. The ice appealed to members of all classes, too. Elizabeth I was reported to have gone walking on the impromptu rink one year, while Charles II even went fox hunting on it during the great frost of 1685–6.

  Printers, meanwhile, would set up stalls selling mementos of the occasion. One such included the following lines of descriptive verse:

  There you may also this hard frosty winter

  See on the rocky ice a Working-Printer,

  Who hopes by his own art to reap some gain

  Which he perchance does think he may obtain.

  Here also is a lottery, music too,

  Yea, a cheating, drunken, lewd, and debauch’d crew;

  Hot codlins, pancakes, ducks, and goose, and sack,

  Rabbit, capon, hen, turkey, and a wooden jack.

  The frosts that ushered in the fairs were not without their hardships, however. The price of food and fuel would inevitably go up while as many as 3,000 people who normally earned a living ferrying goods and people along the Thames found themselves without work. The eventual break-up of the river ice caused new havoc, damaging property and taking both lives and livelihoods. In 1739, for instance, the big freeze resulted in many boats being crushed and smashed, causing damage estimated at over £100,000, while on 6 February 1815 two young men are known to have drowned. Ice also frequently carried away integral parts of London Bridge.

  Gaiety Theatre

  The Strand

  BUILT WHERE CATHERINE STREET MEETS the Strand, the Gaiety Theatre opened on 21 December 1868 after the demolition of its predecessor, the Strand Music Hall.

  The Gaiety was run by Lionel Lawson, owner of the Daily Telegraph, who wanted to create a theatre and restaurant despite laws demanding that the two businesses be separated.

  The Gaiety established two firsts in British theatre – it boasted the first electrically-lighted signage on its frontage and was the first theatre to offer matinee performances. Under the management of journalist John Hollingshead and with a quick turn-around of shows, it enjoyed great success with a mixture of drama, farce and (most effectively) burlesque.

  The theatre’s heyday of musical comedies followed a take-over by George Edwards, with shows such as Gaiety Girls (1893) and Shop Girl (1894) proving hugely popular. A crowd of supposedly aristocratic hangers-on, besotted by the performers, came to be known as the Gaiety Girls and the Stage Door Johnnies.

  The original Gaiety closed in 1903 as part of the scheme to widen the Strand, but the New Gaiety opened on 26 October that year at the corner of the Aldwych and the Strand, though with its audience capacity reduced from 2000 to 1338. It was nonetheless a wildly successful enterprise, and two of its longest running productions were Theodore and Co. (1916) and Going Up (1918), which featured Ivor Novello’s first musical score. Both shows recorded over 500 performances each. Demolished in 1957, the theatre gave way to a spectacularly ugly office building for Citibank, which featured a blue plaque incorrectly dating the Gaiety’s closure to 1938, until the offices themselves were demolished.

  Gamages

  High Holborn

  OPENED WITH JUST 5FT OF STORE FRONTAGE in 1878 on High Holborn, Gamages grew into a successful department store. It was founded by Arthur Walter Gamage, a farmer’s son who trained as a draper.

  After his first year of trading he had turned over £1,632, which he used to expand his premises into the surrounding buildings. The motto that hung over the door read ‘Tall oaks from little acorns grow’. It could not have been more appropriate, for the store would eventually become a veritable labyrinth, full of twists and turns and flights of steps. To give an idea of the extent of its stock, in 1911 Gamage published a mail-order catalogue running to 900 pages.

  Apart from being the official supplier to the Boy Scout movement, the ‘People’s Popular Emporium’ sold everything from pets and cars to haberdashery, furniture, gardening equipment, and sports and camping gear. Forty-nine pages of the 1911 catalogue were given over to cycles and cycling goods alone. But for children, the toy department offered the greatest delights, as Charles Spencer recalled in A Trip to Gamages:

  Gamages was THE toy store. Every child would look forward to a visit there. Families from all over the place would take buses to High Holborn. The kids would jump off the bus with glee and dance along the street with excitement in the direction of the store ... for here they would be presented with floor upon floor of all the toys fit to see and all the toys fit to buy. Gamages was an Aladdin’s cave just waiting to be discovered.

  When Gamage died in 1930, he lay in state in the store before his funeral at St Andrew’s, Holborn. His shop was sold in 1970 and closed in March 1972, to be redeveloped into a vast office block at a cost of £20 million.

  The Gentleman’s Magazine

  PRODUCED OUT OF ST JOHN’S GATE (A POOR likeness of which it carried on its front covers), this was the first publication to use the word ‘magazine’ in reference to itself.

  It was founded in 1731 by a printer, Edward Cave, and provided a monthly digest of London news and parliamentary reports for those unable to get hold of a daily newspaper – which was almost everyone who lived more than a few miles outside the city. It went through a series of name changes, being originally known as The Gentleman’s Magazine or Monthly Intelligencer, only to replace Monthly Intelligencer with Historical Chronicle and then Historical Review, before finally settling on simply The Gentleman’s Magazine.

  The title ran for almost 200 years, keeping the gent-about-town up-to-date about the latest fashion trends and reading materials, as well as all the gossip he may have missed when he was away from the capital. Typically, an issue might contain an article on astronomy and another on the restoration of old paintings, a selection of Latin verse, the latest stock market prices, a list of promotions among the armed forces, clergy and legal professions, as well as the records of births and marriages plus the Bills of Mortality and obituaries.

  Cave got around certain restrictions on the reporting of House of Commons debates by styling articles as the ‘proceedings in the senate of Great Lilliput’ – a knowing nod to Jonathan Swift’s recently published satire, Gulliver’s Travels. Dr Samuel Johnson gained his first employment as a journalist for the magazine. Other famous contributors included Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick. By the late 1850s it had become something of an anachronism and rather unfashionable but staggered on into the 20th century, publishing its last full issue in 1907.

  The Globe

  Bankside

  CONSIDERING THAT IT IS PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS theatre in the world, the original Globe had a surprisingly short, though highly eventful, existence.

  It was built by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors that included among its number the most famous playwright of them all, William Shakespeare.

  Constructed entirely from wood, the theatre opened in 1599 and for the next fourteen years served as Shakespeare’s base. During this time he wrote many of his greatest works, including The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Measure for Measure, As You Like it, All’s Well That Ends Well, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. Although the theatre owes its enduring fame to this association, by the time that the Globe was destroyed in a fire on 29 June 1613, Shakespeare had already sold his share of the business and retired to Stratford-upon-Avon.

  A letter written by Sir Henry Wotton on 2 July 1613 gives a colourful description of the inferno that burnt the theatre to the ground:

  The Kings Players had a new play, called All is True, representing some of th
e principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII, which set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty even to the matting on the stage ... Now King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s House, certain canons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, it did light the thatch, where, being thought at first but idle smoak, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabrick, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and only a few forsaken cloaks: only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would have broiled him, if he had not, by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle of ale.

  And that was the end of Shakespeare’s Globe. A new theatre was built in 1614, on the same plans and with the aid of King James I, and survived until the Civil War, at which point all plays were banned by the Puritan parliament. The theatre was thus demolished in 1644.

  Goodman’s Fields Theatre

  Whitechapel

  THE NAME OF TWO INSTITUTIONS THAT HAD A profound effect on 18th-century theatre.

  The original was opened in 1727 by Thomas Odell, deputy Licenser of Plays and himself a playwright, in a converted shop in Leman Street, Whitechapel. He had hoped to draw customers away from the West End but after a sermon was preached against him, Odell sold out to his leading actor, Henry Giffard. In 1732 Giffard opened a second premises under the same name, just around the corner in Ayliffe Street.