The House by the Thames

by Gillian Tindall

  A new church, Christ Church, had been built in 1671 in the Paris Garden manor, to serve a new parish split off from St Saviour’s. The money for this had been left in the Will of a Southwark worthy in 1631, but the religious uncertainty of the mid-seventeenth century meant that the executors waited prudently till after the Restoration to put the dead man’s wishes into practice. Apparently they did not realise that the Paris Garden was still very poorly drained at that date: in fact, over the following decades, the new church and its yard became so waterlogged that it had to be entirely rebuilt in 1741. This perennial water problem may have been one of reasons why, apart from Bankside itself, the increase in houses south of the river was always rather slow – perhaps slower than the church-builders or the citizens of Bankside anticipated. Only three hundred and forty-nine houses are recorded as having been added to St Saviour’s parish between the time Charles I came to the throne and the Restoration of Charles II, and then none till the late 1670s. But there must have been a substantial increase in the last three decades of the seventeenth century, with infilling along Maid Lane, ribbon development down the tracks leading south from it and many more houses near the Borough High Street, for in 1708 the number of houses in St Saviour’s parish was said to be ‘about 2,500’. They housed a total population of some fourteen thousand, an increase of more than tenfold on Stow’s figure of twelve hundred not much more than a hundred years before. Fourteen thousand does sound about right, if the figure of two thousand five hundred houses is to be believed, as that would indicate an average of 5.6 people per house, including children, servants and apprentices. But if the population for the whole of the London area at that time is to be estimated at between five and six hundred thousand, it is clear that Southwark was as yet far from built up. Indeed great tracts of it were open land, with paddocks, market gardens and cloth-drying grounds, and continued that way for much of the eighteenth century.

  It was not a backwater, however. Conforming to its traditional role as a refuge for those who could not be accommodated officially within London proper, the suburb of the south bank had for some time been home to a number of respectable Nonconformists who, after James II’s Act of Indulgence, could declare themselves as such. A Quaker Meeting House was built near Bankside, and several other dissenting chapels. The best known of these was a place that crops up in incidental references of the era as ‘Shallett’s meeting house’; it was a pretty wooden building in a newly constructed cul de sac off Gravel Lane which was christened ‘Zoar Street’ – Sanctuary Street. John Bunyan is always said to have preached there, but as he died within a year of the chapel being put up (1688), this is by no means sure. A charity school was also run from there, and several other free schools were started in the following decades, including a Roman Catholic one – whose existence spurred the low-Church factions to greater efforts. These little schools were intended primarily to inculcate Christian virtues into the offspring of the lower classes, to promote a proper spirit of obedience and to ‘suppress the beginning of vice’: too much book learning might, after all, have encouraged the children to get above their station. But the schools did induce a basic literacy and numeracy, and must have given many youngsters a first glimpse of other things beyond the street and the vagaries of casual labour. St Saviour’s too, thanks to two bequests from wealthy parishioners, started its own free school for small, poor boys (as distinct from the Free Grammar School for older boys which had been in St Saviour’s churchyard since the days of Queen Elizabeth) and also made efforts towards providing them with respectable clothes and getting them apprenticeships.

  The modern, decent, progressive-minded citizens who busied themselves with such works clearly required modern, cleanly built houses to live in, did they not? Otherwise, in the absence of such a stratum of society on the south bank, the gabled Elizabethan houses would simply have remained, let out into tenements as such houses were in other parts of Southwark, gradually becoming ‘rookeries’ or slums, to be swept away more summarily by later waves of progressive thought.

  The reason that I know that many of the houses along Bankside were rebuilt in the days of Queen Anne, or soon after, is that I have seen them. Not in real life: except for number 49 they have all vanished now, like the river ice of long-past winters. (The pair standing next to 49 across the alley look convincing, but they are little more than a decent simulacrum of what were originally three houses, reconstituted after incendiary bomb damage in the Second World War.) Everywhere else on Bankside late nineteenth-century warehouses gradually replaced the Queen Anne houses, to be replaced again now by still larger blocks of modern flats.

  None of the extant early nineteenth-century panoramas of London, of which there are several, manages to show the sweep of Bankside with any clarity. But, when in pursuit of nineteenth-century drainage, I chanced upon a set of Flood Prevention plans of 1881. There was the whole river wall of Bankside, laid out detailed section by section complete with suggested extra defences, and beneath each section was a little elevation drawing of the one or two buildings relevant to those particular few yards. By re-drawing these elevations for myself, carefully measured, and then stringing them together in the right order, I was able to achieve my own Long View of the Bankside we have lost. (see here.)

  As my laborious vista accumulated, it became apparent from the style of many of the houses still surviving in 1881 that they were of the same period as number 49, or only a decade or so later. There was a building boom in London after Marlborough’s wars ended in 1715, which lasted till the mid-1720s: I believe that the bulk of Bankside’s initial rebuilding dates from then. As you would expect from the multiple land-holdings, although the houses butted up against one another they did not anywhere form one complete terrace, but hung together in twos and threes, a procession of slightly varying rooflines, cornices and windows. Evidently many minds had had the same idea for improving their property within the same era, and had all gone about it in the same way, with just an ad hoc gentleman’s agreement about style and proportion. As for the old footpaths running alongside the garden walls and down onto Bankside – Moss Alley, White Hind Alley, Cardinal Cap Alley, Pond Yard – these were simply slotted under masonry arches that ran, in several cases, through the ground floors of the new houses. Cardinal Cap Alley now emerged onto Bankside beneath the upper floors of what would become number 50.

  Architectural historians have ignored Bankside, training their sights rather on the great estates north of the river and on what has survived rather than what is lost. In popular London mythology the playhouses and bear pits gave way to smoking chimneys and ‘slum courts’ with no intervening period. But the days of Queen Anne and the early part of the reign of George I were, arguably, Bankside’s own time in the sun, its moment of near-elegance. Even the more modest two-storey houses that were going up in the new side streets, and were sometimes still made of timber, were not then the working-class hovels they were later to become, but could be described by a contemporary (John Strype) as ‘clean and handsome … pretty well built and inhabited’.2 Across the water Wren’s huge new St Paul’s, almost the only baroque building in London, glimmered in white splendour. There is some indication that Wren himself lodged on Bankside for a while – not in the yet-to-be-rebuilt 49, where he is misleadingly commemorated, but in another house further along by the Falcon Tavern. The story, which was collected from a ‘very old man’ some eighty years later,3 is that Wren designed this house himself for a Mr Jones who had started an iron-working business there, and that he rented a room there as a vantage point from which to survey the progress of work on his new cathedral. What is a fact is that Jones supplied the ornate railings that were eventually fitted at pavement level round the cathedral. Apparently, in the mid-eighteenth century, a porcelain plaque referring to Wren was made and placed on Jones’s house, which survived for another hundred and fifty years.

  The iron for St Paul’s railings (and for similar ones round Jones’s own house) was said to be from the l
ast load of iron to leave an ancient forest smelting works in Sussex, such as the one owned by Henslowe’s family a hundred years before. It travelled by boat round the coast and up the Thames, to the site above London Bridge which Jones had decided would be a promising place to establish his works. After that date, the manufacture of iron migrated almost entirely to areas where the available fuel for the forges was not wood but coal. So Wren and the Falcon Iron Works, as it was to become, coincide there on Bankside, on the cusp of a world that was passing and a new one that was soon to come.

  Chapter V

  GENTEEL HOUSES AND

  A GLAMOROUS TRADE

  THE IMPETUS TO rebuild the fabric of London was not only driven by the wish to avert further terrible conflagrations. For the first time, those in charge of the spreading metropolis had a vision of the kind of town they wanted the capital to be. This owed much to the Palladian ideals that had been first expressed by Inigo Jones in the days of James and Charles I, and which surfaced after the Great Fire in the form of a grandiose Venetian style design for the Thames’s north bank. This never got built – the wharf owners would certainly have objected. Nor were other schemes that were equally visionary and short on practicality, such as the transformation of the dirty Fleet ditch, which poured into the Thames opposite the Paris Garden, into an arcaded ship canal.

  But the spirit of these grand projects was now diffused into a general architectural agreement about what was correct. The late seventeenth-century perception among educated people was that there was a universal law of proportion and beauty, of which architecture was only one manifestation. House widths in relation to heights, the placing of windows and their corresponding height and breadth, all now began to be codified. So was the positioning of houses. It had been a peculiarity of London that substantial and even aristocratic mansions were often approached down narrow side lanes, but this was to become a thing of the past. The country-style individualism of London building practices, in which each house was built by rule of thumb according to the fancy and habits of the original owner, and then enlarged and altered in any direction to meet the needs of subsequent ones, was to be controlled. Only four distinct types of house were now officially recognised – a concept of the Building Act of 1667 that was to dominate the building and leasing systems for the next two hundred years. These types were, firstly, mansion houses; secondly, big houses with four storeys, basements and attics; and thirdly more ordinary houses of three storeys, basement or cellar and attic, ‘fronting streets and lanes of note and the Thames’ – a category which covered huge numbers of the newly built houses, including those along Bankside. In the fourth category were two-storeyed houses for occupants in a more modest way of life, and only these were thought suitable for the by-lanes. Most importantly, none of the houses was to have an upper storey, or added further storeys, jutting out from the lower in the time-honoured way, nor dormer windows projecting from the walls, nor outward-opening casements. Instead, sliding sash windows (a new idea imported from Holland) were set flush with the walls. The one major characteristic shared by all these new constructions, whatever their size, was the flat front, and the scaling down of the pitched roof so that it partially disappeared behind this façade.

  ‘Façade’ is, however, the word. These new houses were not really as different from the old ones as at first they seemed. Although the classic terrace house that evolved then appeared to be a brick building, it still contained a great deal of timber both in its structure and in its internal finishing. Partitions between rooms and round the staircase were often still entirely of wood; at intervals even in the brick walls bond timbers were laid, to stabilize the whole structure while the lime-mortar slowly dried and also to provide fixings for panelling, lintels, etc. in the old way. After the 1707 and 1709 Acts exterior wooden eaves and cornices were not officially to be allowed, and the wooden sash windows, with their internal shutters, were supposed to be set back four inches from the outer brick, which meant that the brick walls had in theory to be thicker. But in practice these further stipulations were only implemented gradually, and in any case did not strictly apply to houses outside the confines of the City. Number 49 Bankside, built not long after these Acts, shows even today all the internal signs of having been hand-crafted to fit the site in the medieval way.

  For all the talk about classic proportion and harmony, most of the new houses occupied the same sort of space as the medieval or Tudor houses they replaced. Much has been written about the logistics of London estate development, but it seems that the system of long, narrow land-holdings, running back from the street in strips, had fixed itself in the London psyche well before the Georgian speculative builders came along to maximise the financial potential of such plots. So ancient custom lay behind the house-frontages of sixteen, eighteen or twenty feet which now became arbitrarily established (according to the house’s social status) as the basic unit of measurement from which all the other ‘harmonious proportions’ were calculated. But in the case of number 49 the identification with the former building on the site is closer and more intricate than this. For it was built in the actual footprint of the Cardinal’s Hat, re-using not only the footings but the two deep Elizabethan cellars, front and back, with their timbered and vaulted roofs and stone-flagged floors, where Fritter and his predecessors stored their barrels. Some of the central chimney stack may have been used as well.

  The house as it was built c.1710 stands today with its frontage only slightly modified by a later addition of stucco and new window and door cornices. What appears to be the front door, with a fanlight in the style of the time as if to light a passageway behind, opens onto Bankside. It is set to one side, in a way that was to become general for houses of that class, with one window alongside, two on the first floor and two on the second in the approved ‘harmonious’ manner. But, when it was built, was this door really the principal entry? For it leads not into the standard hallway/passage, with a room to one side and stairs at the end, of later Georgian houses. Instead, it opens directly into a pleasant panelled room, with a window-seat overlooking the river and a fireplace set diagonally in the far corner. We might almost be in the parlour-bar of Fritter’s tavern.

  So which way is number 49 really orientated? The front façade is only sixteen foot wide, but the house goes back much further. The nearest thing to a hallway is beyond a doorway at the far end of the front room, in the middle of the house. Here, quite out of sight from the Bankside door and facing sideways to it anyway, the square, dog-leg staircase rises in an open well, with its original newel-posts and oak treads intact. It also descends from the same point into the cellars. The corner-set flue backs up against this staircase, and naturally this pattern continues on the upper floors and also down below. Here is the central nexus of the building around which the rest of the house is deployed. This was a not uncommon pattern in late seventeenth- and very early eighteenth-century town houses, but in most of them an internal side passage leading to this centre from the door at the front gave an appearance of new urban logic to what was, in essence, a traditional, rural-type structure.1

  With 49, however, these vernacular origins are much clearer. For down Cardinal Cap Alley at the side of the house, roughly at its mid-point, are the remains of another substantial entry, now blocked up, with a gridded light above it. If you could get in here, you would step directly into the central lobby with the staircase facing you and a room opening off on either side. Here in the by-lane, I suggest, was the main door of the inn, allowing people to come and go both from Bankside and from the gardens and lanes behind. And here too, I think, when the house was remodelled and given a brick face-lift, did the old entry survive and for a long time was probably more used than the cosmetic Bankside door which led straight into a room. The entrance in the centre of the house would obviously have been more convenient for deliveries (unlike later Georgian houses, 49 never had a basement area with its own service-stairs) and also more convenient for servants, children and anyone else
coming into the house to run directly up those wide, creaking stairs with their hint of a ship’s ladder. Some timbering apparent in the wall where the stairs go down to the cellars, and in the main beams of the cellar itself, suggest days far more distant than those of Queen Anne. What we have here in 49, surrounded by wood and airy spaces, with Fritter’s cavernous storehouse below, is only the simulacrum of an eighteenth-century terrace house with its front on the street. The benign ghost that co-exists on the same site is that of a much older structure, built sideways on, with its gable-end to Bankside.2

  Although owning a few houses had long been a popular way of securing an income, especially for respectable widows, the logistics of this meant that the majority of Londoners had always been tenants paying an annual rent. This system in fact continued well into the twentieth century and ran right through society: it should not be taken as indication that the tenants were necessarily of any lower social status than the landlords, nor that the landlords themselves were wealthy. It is clear, however, that the people who lived in 49 Bankside when it was newly rebuilt were not among London’s poor. I do not know if the property-owning Bruce sisters lived there themselves, nor whether either of them had acquired a different name through marriage; none of the Poor Rate and Land Rate records for St Saviour’s parish have survived from before the year 1748. (Such records are the main source for information on pre-Census populations. The very fact of being liable to pay one or both of these rates indicates a social and financial status above that of ordinary working people.)