From 221B Baker Street to the Old Curiosity Shop

by Stephen Halliday

  Charing Cross station itself was the scene of Ford Madox Ford’s poem ‘Antwerp’, written in the early days of the First World War as an anxious crowd awaits the return of a train carrying troops, including the wounded:

  This is Charing Cross,

  It is midnight;

  There is a great crowd

  And no light.

  At the bottom of Whitehall, which runs south from Trafalgar Square, is Parliament Street where Charles Dickens, during his days in the blacking factory, took a glass of ale at the Red Lion, where it was ‘served to him with kindness’. David Copperfield does the same. The Red Lion still stands, still serving glasses of ale to those in search of Dickens, and to MPs and journalists from the Palace of Westminster nearby.

  A short walk across Parliament Square into St Margaret Street and Millbank takes us to Dean Stanley Street and Smith Square. Here Jenny Wren, the crippled dolls’ dressmaker, lived with her drunken father in Our Mutual Friend. Smith Square, dominated by St John’s church, is now a very grand place indeed, but in Dickens’s time it was not so and Jenny Wren’s house, in the shadow of the great baroque church, has ‘deadly repose on it, more as though it had taken laudanum than fallen into a natural rest’. Jenny described the huge church, now used mostly for concerts, as ‘generally resembling some petrified monster, frightened and gigantic, on its back with its legs in the air’.

  The world famous Piccadilly Circus as seen in 1932. (Wikimedia Commons)

  PICCADILLY AND SOHO

  Piccadilly itself was lampooned as a thoroughfare for the pretentious in the operetta Patience, which is a satire on the posturing of aesthetes, particularly Oscar Wilde. It was the sixth work of Gilbert and Sullivan and contains the phrase ‘As I walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in my mediaeval hand’. Oscar Wilde also expressed strong views about the artists’ models, who were to be found in London in the late nineteenth century and were to be seen in the bohemian quarters around Soho and Piccadilly. He described them as ‘Intellectual Philistines’ and declared that: ‘For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as for a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings and the other gets no dinners.’

  The Criterion Bar at the east end of Piccadilly, near the Eros statue, was the place where Dr Watson, anxiously seeking affordable accommodation, was told by his young friend Stamford of ‘a fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital’ looking to share with someone. When Watson expressed interest he was warned: ‘You don’t know Sherlock Holmes yet, perhaps you would not care for him as a constant companion.’ Thus began one of the most famous partnerships in literary history.

  Indeed, it was outside the Cafe Royal restaurant, once a grand old restaurant at the Piccadilly end of Regent Street, that Holmes was viciously attacked in The Adventure of the Illustrious Client.

  No. 347 Piccadilly was the house that Count Dracula purchased in Bram Stoker’s novel. Although the address doesn’t exist, contemporary writers have suggested 138 Piccadilly was the building Stoker had in mind when he wrote the novel.

  The Cafe Royal restaurant on Regent Street shortly after its closure in 2008. (Mark Beynon)

  No. 138 Piccadilly is believed to have been the building Bram Stoker based Count Dracula’s London residence on. It is now home to Eon Productions, the company behind the James Bond films. (Meyer Verlag)

  John Galsworthy, in the second volume of The Forsyte Saga, entitled In Chancery, wrote that:

  Soho is least suited to the Forsyte spirit. Untidy, full of Greeks, Ishmaelites, cats, Italians, tomatoes, restaurants, organs, coloured stuffs, queer names, people looking out of upper windows, it dwells remote from the British Body Politic. Yet has it haphazard proprietary instincts of its own, and a certain possessive prosperity which keeps its rents up when those of other quarters go down.

  Adam Dalgleish, P.D. James’s poetry-writing detective, described Soho in Unnatural Causes (1967) as: ‘An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe.’

  Robert Westerby’s (1909–68) 1937 novel Wide Boys Never Work was an account of the Soho criminal underworld and introduced the expression ‘wide boy’ to the language to describe a dishonest person on the fringes of crime. The book was made into a film, Soho Incident, in 1956 and republished in 2008. These descriptions of Soho are recognisable today, though rents are no doubt supported by the large number of media organisations – magazines, television producers and film companies – who have made it their home.

  In Wardour Street, Soho, stands the tower of St Anne’s Church, all that remains of a church built in the late seventeenth century to a design by Christopher Wren; the rest of the building was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1940. In 1976 an appeal to restore the tower was launched by John Betjeman, who wrote some lines for the occasion:

  High in the air two barrels interlock

  To form the faces of this famous clock

  Reduced to drawing-room size this clock would be

  A Paris ornament of 1803.

  Let’s make it go again, let London know

  That life and heart and hope are in Soho.

  Not, perhaps, his most memorable lines, but the tower, and eventually the whole church, was rebuilt.

  Nearby, at No. 43 Gerrard Street, is the former site of the infamous ‘Forty-three club’, run by Mrs Kate Meyrick in the intervals between her spells in jail for offences ranging from selling alcohol without a licence to bribing the police. It was very popular with artists and writers, and makes many appearances in novels featuring the ‘Bright Young People’. In Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time it is the haunt of the drunkard Charles Stringham, and in Brideshead Revisited it is the club to which Charles Ryder, Sebastian Flyte and ‘Boy’ Mulcaster retreat, following which Sebastian is arrested for driving while drunk. The latter event was based on an incident when Matthew Ponsonby (brother of Elizabeth, see page 101) was fined £20 for driving in the Strand while drunk, his father attributing this misdemeanour to the influence of the ‘disreputable friend’ with whom he was driving – Evelyn Waugh!

  In Bleak House Esther Summerson, the unacknowledged daughter of Lady Dedlock, meets Caroline (‘Caddy’) Jellyby in Soho Square, and to the south of the square is Manette Street, linking Greek Street to Charing Cross Road, which reminds us that this was the home of Dr Manette after his release from the Bastille in A Tale of Two Cities. To the west is Golden Square, where Dickens places the grand home of Ralph Nickleby, though many of the houses that existed in Dickens’s time, including No. 13 which has been suggested as Ralph’s, have been demolished. Dickens disparages the square, informing the reader in Nicholas Nickleby that:

  Brown’s Hotel on Albemarle Street was the inspiration for Agatha Christie’s Bertram’s Hotel. (Mark Beynon)

  It is one of the squares that have been; a quarter of the town that has gone down in the world and has taken to letting lodgings. Many of its first and second floors are let, furnished, to single gentlemen; and it takes boarders besides. It is a great resort of foreigners. The dark-complexioned men who wear large rings, and heavy watch-guards, and bushy whiskers, and who congregate under the Opera Colonnade, and about the box-office in the season, between four and five in the afternoon…Its boarding houses are musical and the notes of pianos and harps float in the evening time round the head of the mournful statue, the guardian genius of the little wilderness of shrubs in the centre of the square.

  One of the square’s more humble dwellings also serves for a time as a refuge for Little Em’ly after she is found by Martha Endell after Em’ly’s abandonment by the villainous Steerforth in David Copperfield. The square is now the home of companies in the advertising, entertainment and fashion businesses, but its nineteenth-century buildings are still in evidence.

  Cambridge Circus, an intersection of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Roa
d, is the home of John Le Carré’s fictional headquarters of the British intelligence service in his George Smiley novels. Aptly nicknamed ‘The Circus’, the headquarters is believed by some to have occupied 90 Charing Cross Road, just north of Cambridge Circus.

  MAYFAIR AND ST JAMES’S

  The Mayfair district of London, usually associated with the final (and most expensive) stop on the Monopoly board, is bounded by Park Lane, Regent Street, Oxford Street and Piccadilly. It takes its name from a fair held in May near Hyde Park Corner until 1764, but didn’t assume a clear identity until the architect John Nash (1752–1835) constructed its eastern boundary, Regent Street, to separate it from Soho, in 1813–16. Much of it belongs to the Grosvenor family, later Dukes of Westminster, whose judicious marriages (for example in 1677 to Mary Davies, who brought to the estate the land now occupied by Davies Street and much else besides) created a property empire of unsurpassed value. It has long been associated with wealth and aristocracy, and benefits from its proximity to the even more exclusive St James’s district to the south of Piccadilly with its royal palaces and gentlemen’s clubs. This takes its name from St James’s Palace, a former leper hospital which was taken over by Henry VIII and turned into a fine Tudor palace and royal residence. Foreign ambassadors are still accredited to the Court of St James and the palace is at present the London home of Princess Anne, the Princess Royal.

  On Albemarle Street lies the upmarket Brown’s Hotel, considered to be the inspiration for the setting of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novel At Bertram’s Hotel. Arthur Holmwood stays here in Dracula, although in the book it is referred to as the Albemarle Hotel. Nearby, to the north, is Mount Street, which contains the London home of Archdeacon Grantly in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels, and to the west is Bruton Street, which is the London home of the Bishop of Barchester and his wife, the formidable Mrs Proudie (it was also the home of the late Queen Mother as a young woman, from which she proceeded to her marriage to the future George VI and where the future Queen Elizabeth II was born).

  A short distance away, across the Mall, stands Buckingham Palace, which has been the London home of the sovereign since the reign of George IV (1820–30). It is the subject of one of A.A. Milne’s best-known ‘Christopher Robin’ poems, ‘Buckingham Palace’, which begins:

  They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace –

  Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

  Alice is marrying one of the guard.

  ‘A soldier’s life is terribly hard,’

  Says Alice.

  They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace –

  Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

  We saw a guard in a sentry-box.

  ‘One of the sergeants looks after their socks,’

  Says Alice.

  In Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf made one of her rare excursions from her Bloomsbury redoubt into the fashionable West End (where she had been brought up, at No. 22 Hyde Park Gate) and commented unflatteringly on the architecture of the Palace: ‘A child with a box of bricks could have done better.’ A similar verdict is delivered by Nazneen, the heroine of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, with its not always sympathetic portrayal of the area’s Bangladeshi community. After living in London for many years, rarely straying much beyond Brick Lane itself, Nazneen gives her verdict on the monarch’s London home:

  If she were Queen she would tear it down and build a new house, not this flat-roofed block but something elegant and spirited, with minarets and spires, domes and mosaics, a beautiful garden instead of this bare forecourt. Something like the Taj Mahal.

  EVELYN WAUGH

  Mayfair and St James’s feature extensively in the works of Evelyn Waugh and P.G. Wodehouse, and to a lesser extent in the works of other authors. Much of Evelyn Waugh’s early novel Vile Bodies is set in the Mayfair and St James’s area. It was made into a film, Bright Young Things, by Stephen Fry and many scenes in the novel are set in the Cavendish Hotel, which still flourishes on the corner of Duke Street and Jermyn Street, to the south of Piccadilly. In the novel it is called Shepheard’s Hotel. The Cavendish was run by an eccentric proprietress called Rosa Lewis (1867–1952), of whom the novelist (and friend of Waugh) Anthony Powell wrote: ‘All Cavendish life completely depended on the proprietress.’ Rosa and the hotel featured in a television series of the 1970s called The Duchess of Duke Street.

  Rosa was a watchmaker’s daughter who became cook to Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother). With her husband, a butler called Excelsior Lewis, she took a house in Eaton Terrace, Belgravia, which she seems to have run as a bordello for the particular convenience of King Edward VII, who may have helped her to buy the Cavendish Hotel, which she ran from 1904–52. In 1914, following the outbreak of war, she transferred a signed photograph of the Kaiser from the drawing room to the servants’ lavatory. Aldous Huxley, who often used the hotel, described it as ‘a run-down country house – large, comfortable rooms but everything shabby and a bit dirty’. When the hotel was visited by a famous American pianist, Rosa told him: ‘Go and play Old Man River and do as you’re told.’ The only wine served was Champagne, the cost being put on the bill of whoever seemed most likely to be able to afford it. Rosa was noted for her inconsequential conversations. One resident was greeted as follows:

  Rosa:

  ‘Have you come about the drains?’

  Resident:

  ‘I’m staying here.’

  Rosa:

  ‘Then why are you wearing a brown hat?’

  Such a character was irresistible to Evelyn Waugh, who presented Rosa as Lottie Crump, proprietress of Shepheard’s Hotel, in Vile Bodies with many of Rosa’s habits, including that of charging food and drink to any guest who was wealthy or had offended her. In Vile Bodies this role is assigned to ‘Judge Thingummy’, an American judge whose anxiety to ingratiate himself with the assembled company makes him an easy victim of Lottie’s vicarious generosity. In an article in the Daily Mail in May 1930 entitled ‘People who want to sue me’, Evelyn Waugh disavowed any intention of portraying Rosa as Lottie Crump. He wrote:

  I made it the most fantastic hotel I could devise. I filled it with an impossible clientele. I invented an impossible proprietress. I gave it a fictitious address. I described its management as so eccentric and incompetent that no hotel could be run on their lines for a week without coming into the police or bankruptcy court. Here at last I thought I was safely in the realm of pure imagination.

  Rosa, however, was not deceived. After Vile Bodies was published she declared: ‘There are two bastards I’m not going to have in this house. One is that rotten little Donegal [a gossip columnist of the time] and the other is that swine Evelyn Waugh.’ Waugh recalled that the last words she ever spoke to him were ‘Take your arse out of my chair’. In fact, the unmistakeable resemblance of Shepheard’s Hotel to the Cavendish was very good publicity and led to its being patronised both by penniless authors and rich Americans, the latter being especially welcomed by Rosa.

  In a preface to a new edition of Vile Bodies, written in 1965 a year before his death, Evelyn Waugh confessed all, writing of Shepheard’s Hotel that it was ‘A pretty accurate description of Mrs Rosa Lewis and her Cavendish Hotel, just on the brink of their decline but still famous’. Following the death of Rosa Lewis in 1952 the Cavendish was taken in hand by Brian Franks, a professional hotelier friend of Evelyn Waugh, and it is largely his hotel which visitors may now use, secure in the knowledge that they will not be asked to clear the drains and that other people’s drinks will not be placed on their bill at the whim of the management!

  Another character who appears in Vile Bodies is the gossip columnist Mr Chatterbox, who fills his column in the Daily Excess with purely imaginary stories about the Bright Young People, including the fact that ‘the buffet at Sloane Square tube station had become the haunt of the most modern artistic coterie’.

  CLUBLAND

  Other parts of the area feature in Evelyn Waugh’s works. In Waugh’s earl
y wartime work, Put Out More Flags, the principal characters have homes in Mayfair, with the alcoholic Angela Lyne living in ‘a set of five large rooms high up in the mansard floor of a brand new block in Grosvenor Square’.

  The St James’s area is also the home of Bellamy’s Club, where Guy Crouchback spends much of his time in the war trilogy Sword of Honour as Waugh himself did in its original, White’s Club, during his frequent visits to London. White’s Club, at the top of St James’s Street, dates from 1693 and owes its name to its Italian founder, Francesco Bianco (Francis White) who founded it in 1693. It moved to its present site in 1755 and the bay window which is a prominent feature of the building was favoured by one of its members, the dandy Beau Brummell, as a place from which to see and, above all, to be seen. Waugh was for many years a member of Bellamy’s/Whites. One of London’s most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs, he used it during his frequent visits to London where it was the scene of many of his drunken rows with fellow members like his friend and wartime companion Randolph Churchill.