London: The Biography

by Peter Ackroyd

  The area itself is first noticed in the early records of St. Paul’s when, in the seventh century, it became part of the property of the bishop and canons of that institution. In the eleventh century William I awarded the land to one of his most successful supporters, Ralph fitz Brian, who in the proper terminology became lord of the fee of Clerkenwell, held of the bishop of London within the manor of Stepney by knight service. It is important to note here that from the beginning Clerkenwell was beyond “the bars” of London, and effectively part of Middlesex.

  The heirs of Ralph became lords of the manor of Clerkenwell, and they in turn granted land and property for the maintenance of two religious foundations. The convent of St. Mary in Clerkenwell was established, roughly where the present church of St. James now stands, and the priory of the Knights Templar-known as St. John of Jerusalem-a little to the south-east on the other side of the green. So from the medieval period Clerkenwell became known, and identified, through its sacred or spiritual affiliations. Since the priory was first in the ownership of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, it was a mustering point for the Crusaders; gradually it grew in size and extent over the adjacent area. The convent of St. Mary was similarly extensive but, as always, the life of the city kept on breaking through.

  In 1301 the prioress of Clerkenwell petitioned Edward I “to provide and order a remedy because the people of London lay waste and destroy her corn and grass by their miracle plays and wrestling matches so that she has no profit of them nor can have any unless the king have pity for they are a savage folk and we cannot stand against them and cannot get justice by any law.” This is one of the first reports that the Londoners were indeed “savage,” and it is intriguing to note that the miracle plays were “their” own; it throws a wholly new light upon the presumed sacredness of early drama. Two generations later an even more “savage” and violent assault was mounted against the priory of St. John when, in 1381, the stone buildings of the Order were put to the torch by Wat Tyler’s followers. The priory was badly damaged but not entirely destroyed, while the prior himself was beheaded on the spot because of his role as Richard II’s principal tax-collector. Tyler’s followers camped upon Clerkenwell Green, watching the hall and dormitory of the Knights go up in flame together with the counting-house, the distillery, the laundry, the slaughterhouse and very many other apartments or stables. It seemed as if the whole of Clerkenwell were on fire.

  One of the most notorious lanes in the neighbourhood was Turnmill Street (so named because of its proximity to the many mills which harnessed the current of the Fleet), also known as Turnbull Street (because of the lines of cattle which crossed it in order to reach Smithfield). By the late thirteenth century the salubriousness of the area had been under threat from “filth and ordure and rubbage” thrown into the Fleet and, a century later, Henry IV ordered that it be “cleansed anew.” He also obliged the authorities “to repayre a stone brydge over the Flete neare unto Trymyllstreate,” the remote ancestor of the bridge over the Underground line which was once more repaired in the late 1990s.

  Yet public works could not affect the public reputation of Clerkenwell; since it was “beyond the bars” it became the harbour for the outcast and those who wished to go beyond the law. So, from the beginning, it has been the home of groups who wish to be separate and separated. In Turnmill Street one William the Parchmenter in 1414 harboured the Lollard, Sir John Oldcastle, and was subsequently hanged, drawn and quartered for his hospitality. Clerkenwell also became the home of Jesuits and other recusants, and the district “was notorious as a centre for papists”; three suspected papists were hanged, drawn and quartered on Clerkenwell Green in the late sixteenth century. The Catholics moved out under the threat of persecution, although they returned in another guise 235 years later when Clerkenwell became an Italian quarter; in the interim other proscribed religious groups such as the libertarian Quakers, the Brownists, the Familists and the Schismatics congregated in the area of the green. Here is further evidence, then, of continuity in persecutions and outlawry. In more recent years the Freemasons have entered the area, with their headquarters in the Sessions House upon the green.

  But if Turnmill Street began life as a haven for heretical Lollards and other radical proselytisers, it soon acquired a more dissolute reputation. It was marked down for condemnation in an ordinance of 1422 for “the abolition of Stewes within the City” but, since it was literally “without” the walls, few public measures touched it. In 1519 Cardinal Wolsey raided houses in Turnmill Street and the aptly named Cock Alley. “Now Farewel to Turnbull Street,” writes the anonymous author of The Merrie Mans Resolution in 1600, “For that no comfort yields.” E.J. Burford in London: the Synfulle Citie has reconstructed the topography of the street itself, with no less than nineteen “rents”-alleys, yards or courts-issuing off it. Their conditions were generally described as “noysome” which, in the context of sixteenth-century London, suggests a degree of nastiness which is perhaps not now imaginable. One of them was only twenty feet long and two feet six inches wide, so that “there was not room to get a coffin out without turning it on edge.” Turnmill Street appears very often in city records as the haunt of crime as well as prostitution. In 1585 “Bakers hause, Turnmyll Street” was known as a harbouring house “for masterless men, and for such as lyve by thiefte and other such lyke sheefts,” while, seven years later, a pamphlet entitled Kinde Hartes Dreame cited Turnmill Street as a place in which the owners charged “forty shillings yearly for a little Room with a smoky chimney … where several of these venereal virgins are resident.” The association of Clerkenwell, and Turnmill Street in particular, with prostitution did not end in the sixteenth century. In 1613 Joan Cole and three more “Turnbull Street Whoares” were sentenced to be carted and whipped through the streets; one of them, Helen Browne, had been arrested while concealed “in a lewd house in Turnbull Street in a dark cellar.”

  If you come out of Farringdon Road Underground Station and walk a few feet to the left, you will find yourself in the very same Turnmill Street. Its left-hand side makes up the dead wall of the railway tracks, laid where the Fleet River once flowed, while on the other side are office premises and warehouses of a generally unprepossessing nature. There are one or two alleys which act as a reminder of its interesting past; Turks Head Yard, formerly known as Bull Alley, Broad Yard on the site of Frying Pan Yard, and Benjamin Street, first laid down in 1740, are still to be seen. Yet echoes of a more distant past also survive. At the very top of Turnmill Street was, until recent years, a twenty-four-hour night-club of equivocal reputation known as Turnmills. Mad Frank, the memoirs of Frankie Fraser, a member of a notorious London gang, begins: “The Independent had it wrong when their reporter said I’d been shot dead outside Turnmills Night Club in 1991. I was only in hospital for two days that time.” Streets such as this are reminiscent of Henry James’s description of Craven Street, which runs down from the Strand, as “packed to blackness with accumulations of suffered experience.” And, if there is a continuity of life, or experience, is it connected with the actual terrain and topography of the area? Is it too much to suggest that there are certain kinds of activity, or patterns of inheritance, arising from the streets and alleys themselves?

  Clerkenwell Green is notable in other respects. The invasion of Clerkenwell by Wat Tyler and his followers is an example of its continuing radicalism, while the popular obloquy directed against the wealthy nuns of the priory beside the green speaks for the individual and the dispossessed. But the ramifications of these actions are rich and complex indeed. That great populist and demagogue John Wilkes, commemorated in the phrase “Wilkes and Liberty,” was born just off the green in St. James’s Close in 1727. One of the first meeting-places of the egalitarian London Corresponding Society was established at the Bull’s Head in Jerusalem Passage just east of the green, and in 1794 “Clerkenwell crowds attacked recruiting offices at Battle Bridge and at Mutton Lane at the foot of the Green” with no doubt the same intensity as
early fourteenth-century Londoners showed in attacking the Clerkenwell Priory. A group of radical plotters, the United Englishmen, were seized “at a low public house at Clerkenwell” in the spring of 1798 and then, a year later, a number of United Irishmen were arrested in the Nag’s Head, St. John’s Street, which leads away from the green towards Smithfield. Here undoubtedly is a catchment area of dissent and possible radical disruption.

  In 1816 Henry Hunt, one of the leaders of the Chartist movement which called for universal suffrage, spoke to a crowd of 20,000 above the Merlin’s Cave Tavern just north of Clerkenwell Green. Ten years later William Cobbett addressed a meeting on the green itself in opposition to the Corn Laws; then, in 1832, the National Union of the Working Classes advertised a meeting in Coldbath Fields north of the green preparatory to a “National Convention, The only Means of Obtaining and Securing The Rights of The People.” On the day itself “a man wearing a new white hat excited passers-by by reciting passages from a publication called The Reformer and loudly proclaiming that people in such an emergency ought to carry arms openly,” a sentiment which had already been heard many times, over many centuries, in this neighbourhood.

  The mass meeting was held and an affray took place in which a policeman was killed, all this in the immediate vicinity of Coldbath Prison, one of a number of penal institutions in the area. On Roque’s map of London, delineated in the 1730s and 1740s, the area of Clerkenwell is seen to be exceedingly well regulated indeed and, as the editor of The History of London in Maps noticed, “Clerkenwell Green has a watch-house for policing; a pound for felons; a pillory to put them in; and a turnstile to provide a check on people passing through.” As a known centre of radical activity, there was a strong emphasis on official surveillance. On Roque’s map, too, can be seen the outline of Clerkenwell Gaol just to the east of the green.

  It was a notorious prison, built in 1775, part of which comprised a number of underground tunnels lined with cells. Many radicals and schismatics were incarcerated there, and it became known as “a jail for hereticks.” Of the inmates it was observed in W.J. Pinks’s History of Clerkenwell that “they were lamentably ignorant and superstitious, and took great delight in sitting in a ring and telling their adventures and relating their dreams; they tell stories of spirits.” We find in the “New Prison” of Clerkenwell one John Robins who “said that he was God Almighty … Richard King said his wife was with child of him that should be the saviour of all those that shall be saved … Joan Robins said she was with child, and the child in her womb was the Lord Jesus Christ.” Richard Brothers, the self-styled “Prophet of the Lost Tribe” and “Slain Lamb of Revelation,” was imprisoned a few yards up the road in the madhouse of Ashby Street. The Quakers, who in the mid-eighteenth century “went naked for a sign,” met in Peel Court off St. John Street, while in 1830 was instituted a Free-Thinking Christian Meeting House in St. John Square in the centre of the old Templar priory. There is evidence once more of a continuity.

  The radical history of Clerkenwell did not end with the riot of 1832. Five years later the Tolpuddle Martyrs, on their return from Botany Bay, were first greeted on the green, and a year later there was a great Chartist meeting on the same spot. In 1842 Prime Minister Peel “banned meetings on Clerkenwell Green,” but, in the same period, the Chartists met each week in Lunt’s Coffee House at 34 Clerkenwell Green; there were other radical meeting-places close by, such as the Northumberland Arms at 37 Clerkenwell Green. The unions, too, met in public houses in precisely the same area: the Silver Spoon-makers at the Crown and Can, St. John Street; the Carpenters at the Adam and Eve, St. John Street Row; and the Silversmiths at St. John of Jerusalem; altogether the Trade Union Directory lists nine separate unions meeting regularly in Clerkenwell. The disturbances and meetings in that area continued throughout the 1850s and 1860s, with marches leaving from the green, while an additional strength was lent to the area by the pro-Fenian Irish radicals of the Patriotic Society who used regularly to meet at the King’s Head in Bowling Green Lane a few yards north of Clerkenwell Green itself. At the time of the Paris Commune in 1871, “a red flag, surmounted by a ‘cap of liberty,’ crowned a lamp-post in the Green.” These events may provide an explanation why, in the press and on the music-hall stage, the area became a synonym for radical change.

  Yet not all the forces at work there were violently libertarian. John Stuart Mill was one of a number of subscribers who set up a fund to endow “a place for political lectures and discussions independent of coerced tavern keepers and licensing magistrates”; a location was chosen, “in a neighbourhood well known to the democracy of London,” and the hall was established at 37a Clerkenwell Green which had once been a school for the children of Welsh Dissenters. It became known as the London Patriotic Club and its history of twenty years “is a history of radical issues”; Eleanor Marx Aveling, Bradlaugh and Kropotkin all used it as a centre for demonstrations and mass meetings. But perhaps the most interesting occupant was one of the last. A socialist press had been founded at the premises in the 1880s, and in 1902 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin walked every day from his lodgings in Percy Circus to Clerkenwell Green in order to edit an underground revolutionary journal entitled Iskra, “The Spark,” which was meant to ignite Russia. It might be mentioned here that in the seventeenth century the printers of Clerkenwell were denounced for issuing “Blasphemous and seditious” literature. That prolonged pattern or alignment of activities continued well into the twentieth century when the Communist newspaper, the Morning Star, had its offices just west of the green in Farringdon Road. In the 1990s the magazine for the homeless and the unemployed, the Big Issue, took up residence a few yards south of the green in the same area where Wat Tyler had led his army of radical protesters more than six hundred years before.

  So over a period of time, in one tiny part of the city, at first outside “the bars” and then within the ever expanding capital, the same forms of activity have taken place. It may simply be coincidence that Lenin followed in the path of the seventeenth-century printers. It may have been in conformity to habit, custom, or some kind of communal radical memory that the Chartists, the London Corresponding Society and the unions chose the same area for their meetings and demonstrations. It may be chance that the nineteenth-century affrays took place in the same vicinity as those of the fourteenth century. The editor of the Big Issue has assured the present author that he had no notion of Clerkenwell’s radical history when he decided to situate the office of his magazine in the area.

  But other territorial clusters abound. The emergence of Clerkenwell as an instigator or abettor of radical activity is paralleled, for example, by the gradual identification of Bloomsbury with occultism and marginal spiritualism. When the great London mythographer William Blake was completing his apprenticeship in Great Queen Street, an elaborate Masonic lodge was being constructed opposite his employer’s workshop. It was the first city headquarters for what was then a controversial occult order of adepts who believed that they had inherited a body of secret knowledge from before the Flood. Before the erection of their great hall they had congregated at the Queen’s Head in Great Queen Street, and, in the same street less than a century later, the occult Order of the Golden Dawn held their meetings. The Theosophical Society met in Great Russell Street while around the corner, opposite Bloomsbury Square, exists the Swedenborg Society. Two occult bookshops can be found in the vicinity, while the Seven Dials close by marks the convergence of astrologers in the seventeenth century. So here again there seems to be a congregation of aligned forces, by coincidence or design, remaining active within the neighbourhood of a very few streets.

  One street, and a particular church, also throw a suggestive light upon London itself. According to Stephen Inwood in A History of London, St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, was “an old Lollard stronghold”; in the early sixteenth century it became a centre of incipient Lutheranism where heretical texts were placed on sale. In 1642 the five Members of Parliament whom Charles I rashly tried to arr
est on charges of treason took refuge in Coleman Street-“a loyal street to the Puritan party”-which was “their stronghold.” Six years later Oliver Cromwell met with his supporters in the same street, as can be gathered in the trial of Hugh Peters after the Restoration.

  COUNSEL: Mr. Gunter, what can you say concerning meeting and consultation at the “Star” in Coleman Street?

  GUNTER: My lord, I was a servant at the “Star” in Coleman Street … that house was a house where Oliver Cromwell, and several of that party, did use to meet in consultation.

  During this period, too, the parish and local congregation were also of strongly Puritan sympathies. Then in 1645 there were weekly public lectures “near Coleman Street,” established by women proselytisers and characterised by “confusion and disorder” during discussions subsequent to the lectures. A few years later, in a “conventicle” in an alley off Coleman Street, “that dangerous fanatic Venner, a wine-cooper and Millenarian, preached to ‘the soldiers of King Jesus’ and urged them to commence the Fifth Monarchy.” During the rising of the Anabaptists we read that “these monsters assembled at their meeting house, in Coleman Street, where they armed themselves and sallying thence, came to St. Paul’s in the dusk.” Even after the Restoration Coleman Street maintained its Puritan allegiances: the old Dissenting preacher, who had been presented with the living of St. Stephen’s in 1633, “opened a private conventicle” after the destruction of the Commonwealth from which he ministered to the “too-too credulous soul-murdered proselytes of Coleman Street and elsewhere.” We read of “Radical independents inhabiting the same quarter,” among them “Mark Holdesby of St. Stephen Coleman Street.”