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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781843178965 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michael O'Mara Books |
| Publication date: | 05/04/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Having moved to London in 1984, Richard Guard worked for six years as a cycle courier, during which time he fell in love with the city, while also gaining an intimate knowledge of its history and topography. Eventually he succeeded in breaking into the film industry, and is one of the country's most sought-after documentary editors with a string of awards to his name.
He has lived in seventeen different parts of the metropolis over the years, and is now settled in East Dulwich with his wife and three sons. He has published articles on cycling and on travelling in Asia, and is also the lead singer of the Dulwich Ukulele Club, an eleven-piece band that tours the country and plays at a variety of music festivals.
Read an Excerpt
Lost London
By Richard Guard
Michael O'Mara Books Limited
Copyright © 2012 Michael O'Mara Books LimitedAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84317-896-5
CHAPTER 1
Ackerman's
* * *
The Strand
Opened by Rudolph Ackerman, an Anglo-German bookseller and print-maker, this shop was not only the first art library in England but also the first to be lit by gas 'which burns with a purity and brilliance unattainable by any other mode of illumination'.
The building had been an art school from 1750 until 1806, attended by such notable figures as William Blake, Richard Cosway and Francis Wheatley. Beginning in 1813, Ackerman held soirées each Wednesday attended by the great and good, many of whom were attracted by the fact that he was a prominent employer of aristocrats and priests who had fled the French Revolution. As well as selling books, prints, fancy goods and artists' materials, it was for many years the 'meeting place of the best social life in London'.
Ackerman was also a notable publisher. Each month from 1809 to 1828, he printed The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce and Manufactures, a major historical source of information on Regency fashion and a treasure trove for modern makers of Jane Austen period dramas. Meanwhile, his The Microcosm of London, or London in Miniature (1808–1810) contains hand-coloured aquatints of many since-lost city views. Ackerman's publishing business ended in 1858 and the site of his shop is now home to the legendary restaurant, Simpson's-in-the-Strand.
Adam and Eve Tea Gardens
* * *
Tottenham Court Road
From 1628 until the late 1700s, city dwellers tired of the hustle and bustle of life could take a stroll to this countryside tea garden famous for its tea and cake.
Located on what is today one of London's most filthy traffic junctions where the Euston, Tottenham Court and Hampstead Roads meet, this public house was known for its quiet orchards of wild fruit trees.
Its reputation declined as building developments encroached, with Larwood reporting the arrival of 'highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, and low women'. By the early 19th century the gardens were surrounded by houses notorious as hang-outs for prostitutes and criminals. The public house was subsequently closed by magistrates although it reopened as a tavern for a short time in 1813.
Agar Town
* * *
King's Cross
Charles Dickens described the slum that grew up here from 1840 as 'a suburban Connemara ... wretched hovels, the doors blocked up with mud, heaps of ash, oyster shells and decayed vegetables, the stench on a rainy morning is enough to knock down a bullock'.
The 72-acre site was previously the property of William Agar, a notorious litigant whose complaints even forced a change of direction in the intended route of the Regent's Canal.
After Agar's death in 1838, the shanty town in King's Cross emerged when his widow sub-let the land. In 1851 one W M Thomas, a visitor to London, described his journey through the area: 'The footpath, gradually narrowing, merged at length in the bog of the road. I hesitated; but to turn back was almost as dangerous as to go on. I thought, too, of the possibility of my wandering through the labyrinth of rows and crescents until I should be benighted; and the idea of a night in Agar Town, without a single lamp to guide my footsteps, emboldened me to proceed. Plunging at once into the mud, and hopping in the manner of a kangaroo – so as not to allow myself time to sink and disappear altogether – I found myself, at length, once more in the King's Road.'
Among the slum's most famous residents was the boxer Tom Sawyer, while the music hall star Dan Leno was born here in December 1860. The Midlands Railway Company bought Agar Town in 1866 and demolished it to make way for the railways. Such was the area's poor reputation that there was little protest, even though its residents received no compensation. Today its name lives on in Agar Grove, a street running along the old slum's northern boundary.
Alhambra
* * *
Leicester Square
Built in a Broadly Moorish style with two minarets, the Alhambra had a variety of different names and purposes. Originally opened in 1854 as the Royal Panopticon of Arts and Science, it boasted a huge hall, hydraulic lift, lecture theatre and 97ft-high fountain.
This initial venture was a failure and in 1856 its exhibits, displaying scientific wonders of the age, were sold off for a mere £8,000 – 10 per cent of what it cost to build.
Two years later the building reopened as a circus and from 1861 served as a music hall. Featured performers included Charles Blondin, who had recently tightrope-walked across Niagara Falls, and Jules Léotard, whose performances inspired the song 'The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze' (and after whom the tight-fitting one-piece garment is named). However, the Alhambra lost its entertainment licence in 1870 after hosting the first London performance of the Can-Can, during which the dancer 'Wiry Sal' lifted her foot 'higher than her head several times towards the audience and had been much applauded'.
For the next decade it staged plays and promenade concerts before burning down in 1883. The following year it returned as a music hall and became a venue for ballet in 1919. The theatre was demolished in 1936 and where it once stood, facing into Leicester Square, is now an Odeon cinema. The Alhambra name does live on in Alhambra House on nearby Charing Cross Road, though rather than a palace of entertainment it is a somewhat miserable black marble-fronted building housing offices and a bank.
Alsatia
* * *
Temple
The name Alsatia derives from the long-disputed Alsace region on the French–German border that was historically outside normal legislative jurisdiction.
In London, Alsatia covers the area formerly occupied by London's Whitefriars monastery, which is commemorated in an eponymous street that runs south from Fleet Street towards the River Thames.
After he dissolved the religious orders, Henry VIII parcelled out monastic lands to his favourites and so Alsatia was given to his physician, Doctor Butts. The area soon deteriorated into a maze of alleyways and squalid housing. Yet the idea of medieval religious sanctuary lived on in the area and from the 15th until the 17th century, the population defended itself against any bailiff or city official who tried to enter the area to arrest any of its inhabitants. However, by Elizabeth I's time attempts were being made to clean up the area, as the State Papers record:
'Item. These gates shalbe orderly shutt and opened at convenient times, and porters appointed for the same. Also, a scavenger to keep the precincte clean.
Item. Tipling houses shalbe bound for good order.
Item. Searches to be made by the constables, with the assistance of the inhabitants, at the commandmente of the justices.
Item. The poore within the precincte shalbe provyded for by the inhabitantes of the same.
Item. In tyme of plague, good order shalbe taken for the restrainte of the same.
Item. Lanterne and light to be mainteined duringe winter time.'
But these attempts had little or no effect and, surprisingly, the area's liberties where enshrined in 1608 when James I granted it a charter.
It was once said of Alsatia that 'the dregs of the age that was indeed full of dregs, vatted in that disreputable sanctuary east of the Temple'. It was immortalised in two major literary works, Thomas Shadwell's The Squire of Alsatia and Sir Walter Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel, both of which drew vivid pictures of this ramshackle kingdom where people defended their liberties at all costs. Shadwell, for instance, depicted the following scene:
'An arrest! An arrest!' and in a moment they are 'up in the Friars,' with a cry of 'fall on.' The skulking debtors scuttle into their burrows, the bullies fling down cup and can, lug out their rusty blades, and rush into the mêlée. From every den and crib red-faced, bloated women hurry with fire-forks, spits, cudgels, pokers, and shovels. They're 'up in the Friars,' with a vengeance!
In 1678 an Act of Parliament abolished the liberties of Alsatia and several other areas in the city, including The Minories, Salisbury Court, Mitre Court, Baldwins Gardens and Stepney. In 1723 London's last two sanctuaries – at The Mint in Southwark and The Savoy – were finally abolished. However, the spirit of lawless autonomy lived on in many of these areas for years to come and grew elsewhere, as in the notorious 'Rookeries' that survived until the late Victorian era.
Archery
* * *
In 1369 an Act of Parliament decreed that Londoners must practise archery and 'that everyone of the said city of London strong of body, at leisure times and on holidays, use in their recreations bows and arrows'.
Despite the decline of the longbow as a potent military weapon over the preceeding 300 years, both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I tried to re-establish the practice. In 1627 archery regiments were formed by the City of London and practised annually in Finsbury, St George's Fields and Moorfields. But towards the end of the 18th century urban encroachment forced the archers further away, with the Royal Toxophilite Society (founded 1781) eventually being driven to move from its Regent's Park home to Buckinghamshire. Several parts of London maintain an association with the activity, such as the Archery Tavern, Bayswater, and Newington Butts at the Elephant and Castle.
Astley's
* * *
Westminster Bridge Road
Originally called Royal Grove, Astley's was London's first circus. It was opened by a former cavalry officer, Philip Astley, who received a licence for his enterprise after he used his Herculean proportions to help George III subdue a runaway horse.
When his original site burned down in 1794, he rebuilt it as Astley's Amphitheatre. Shows often featured clowns, acrobats and conjurers, and there were vast spectaculars featuring, for instance, 'several hundred performers and fifty-two horses, two lions, kangaroos, pelicans, reindeer and a chamois'. Other entertainments included sword fights and exotic melodramas. The venue, though, was plagued by fires and had to be rebuilt in 1803, 1841 and 1862, when it reopened as the New Westminster Theatre. It was finally demolished in 1893. Charles Dickens was an avid Astley's fan as both a child and adult, writing of it fondly in Sketches by Boz.
Atmospheric Railway
* * *
South East London
1845 saw the opening of a remarkable and revolutionary form of railway transport, powered not by steam but by compressed air.
Designed in Southwark by Samuel Clegg and the Samuda brothers, a line ran from Forest Hill to West Croydon with carriages driven by a piston connected to a pipe running between the rails.
A pumping station at either end of the track provided the air. With the trains unable to pass over the tracks of the regular railway at Norwood, Clegg and the Samudas built the world's first railway flyover, which is still in use today.
The system was plagued by technical difficulties, mainly due to metal corrosion and wear and tear on leather seals. Indeed, passengers were frequently forced to push trains between stations when the pressure failed. Another major problem stemmed from the quietness of the trains, which somewhat perversely unnerved passengers.
By 1846 the cost of breakdowns and repairs forced the London and Croydon Railway Company to abandon its experiment and turn to the more reliable power of steam. But this wasn't the end of atmospheric and pneumatic transport in London. In 1863 the Post Office built two tunnels out of Euston Station, one running half a mile to a sorting office and the other to St Paul's in the City. Using pneumatic trains, the journey to St Paul's took a mere nine minutes. The route ran until 1874 but high costs forced its closure. When the Tube system was first conceived, pneumatic power was again considered, and construction of such a line between Whitehall and Waterloo even got under way until a financial crisis in 1866 halted work that was never restarted.
Barbican
* * *
EC2
Named after the outer fortifications of the city, the original Barbican was most likely a watch-tower, which the great historian of London, John Stow, said was pulled down in the reign of Henry III. In the 16th and 17th centuries the area became well known for its market in new and used clothes.
Much of the locality was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and was again devastated in the Blitz during the Second World War, when thirty-two acres were completely razed. Six major historic streets and numerous other courts and alley-ways were lost forever in the bombing. Amongst them were Jewin Cresent and Jewin Street, which had been the site of a Jewish enclave and burial ground until the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.
John Milton was a resident here when he wrote Paradise Lost, while Redcross Street was formerly the home of the Abbot of Ramsey (as well as the site of a red cross that was still standing in the 16th century during Stow's lifetime). Other places of interest included Paper Street, replete with warehouses for paper, and Silver Street, a hub for the city's silversmiths. Elsewhere, Australia Avenue, built relatively recently in 1894 between Barbican and Jewin Crescent, was much used by those active in Antipodean trade. However, such was the destruction wrought between 1939 and 1945 that it was decided to rebuild the entire area on a new plan, creating the Barbican Centre that we have today, the largest multi-arts venue in Europe.
Bartholomew Fair
* * *
Smithfield
Of all the great city fairs, Bartholomew Fair was the oldest and most famous. It was held at West Smithfield, the site of modern-day Smithfield Market.
It was first celebrated in 1133 when Rahere, the founder of the local priory, was granted a charter to raise money for a newhospital, the now famous St Bartholomew. For the next 400 years Bartholomew was the primary cloth fair in the country, held over three days from each 24th August, the feast day of St Bartholomew. It was traditionally opened by the Lord Mayor, who would ride from the Guildhall to Smithfield to read the opening proclamation at the Fair's entrance – having stopped on his way for a jug of wine spiced with nutmeg and sugar supplied by the keeper of Newgate. In 1688, one unfortunate Mayor, Sir John Shorter, closed his tankard lid with such violence that his horse bolted, dismounting the venerable gent, who died of his injuries the next day.
The mood of the event began to change at the beginning of the 17th century, when the city's cloth dealers began to explore national and international markets outside of London. The fair evolved instead into an opportunity for general merriment and over the next century became increasingly rowdy, now less a trade fair than a joyous celebration and public holiday, complete with plays, puppet shows, freak shows and exotic animals. Samuel Pepys wrote of the experience in his diary:
Thence away by coach to Bartholomew Fayre, with my wife, and showed her the monkeys dancing on the ropes, which was strange, but such dirty sport that I was not pleased with it. There was also a horse with hoofs like rams hornes, a goose with four feet, and a cock with three. Thence to another place, and we saw a poor fellow, whose legs were tied behind his back, dance upon his hands with his arse above his head, and also dance upon his crutches, without any legs upon the ground to help him, which he did with that pain that I was sorry to see it, and did pity him and give him money after he had done.
The year 1817 witnessed the appearance of Toby, a 'real learned pig' who, with twenty handkerchiefs covering his eyes, could tell the time to the minute and pick out cards from a pack. Meanwhile, Thomas Horne recorded seeing 'four lively little crocodiles hatched from eggs at Peckham by steam'. But the drunken debauchery among visitors to the fair began to irk the city authorities. In 1801, for instance, a gang of thieves surrounded a respectable lady and tore the clothes from her back, while a year later random victims were attacked with cudgels and several windows were broken.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lost London by Richard Guard. Copyright © 2012 Michael O'Mara Books Limited. Excerpted by permission of Michael O'Mara Books Limited.
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