Lost London (10 page)

However, when the station entrance was completely redesigned and rebuilt in 1962, the heedless demolition of the arch galvanized the nascent preservation movement. Although it failed to save the
arch, many other historic buildings owe their survival to groups formed as a result. There is even talk of having the arch reconstructed as the stone work itself was saved to make a bed for the
channels of Bow Backs River, which occupies the Lea Valley.

Wapping

A
MILE DOWNSTREAM FROM THE
T
OWER OF
London at the Wapping bend of the Thames was a jumble of houses and wharves known as
Execution Dock.

For 400 years from the time of Henry
VI
, condemned pirates met their fate at this site and, in contrast to executions at Tyburn, once they were dead
they were not immediately cut down. As John Stow explained, they were left ‘to remain till three tides had overflowed them’. The condemned were often housed at the Marshalsea Prison
before being taken by boat to Wapping to be hung close to the water’s edge at low tide.

Throngs of sightseers would attend on land and on the water, and there were still more degradations for these high-seas highwaymen. To discourage others, their bodies were
often covered in tar to preserve them from the weather and to prevent birds pecking out their softer parts. Their corpses were then hung in chains – gibbetted – along various points on
the river.

The notorious English privateer, Captain Kidd, was hanged here on 23 May 1701. During his execution, the hangman’s rope broke and Kidd had to be strung up again. His body was then gibbeted
and remained a landmark by the river for the next 20 years. The Captain Kidd pub in Wapping continues to keep his name alive. George Davis and William Watts were the final victims to hang at the
dock on 16 December 1830. John Rocque’s 1746 map of the capital marks Execution Dock as being near the modern day Wapping Tube Station.

The Strand

A
NOTHER OF THE GREAT
S
TRAND MANSIONS
, built in the reign of Edward
VI
(1547–1553) for Sir Thomas
Palmer, who was executed in 1553. Elizabeth
I
later gifted the house to William Cecil.

When she subsequently visited here, she graciously allowed him to sit, rather than stand, in her presence as he was
suffering from gout at the time.
‘My lord,’ she is reputed to have told her Lord Treasurer, ‘we make use of you not for the badness of your legs, but for the goodness of your head.’

The house was badly damaged in a fire and was rebuilt in 1627. After the Great Fire of 1666, it hosted the Admiralty Court, the Prerogative Court and Court of Arches until the Doctors Commons
could be repaired. Exeter House was demolished once and for all in the 1670s, with Exeter Change built in its place. This was intended to be a thriving marketplace, with space for a variety of
small shops, but it never took off. It was rented as office space until it was taken over by Edward Cross, who housed his famous menagerie here from 1773 prior to its move to Surrey Gardens.

Byron famously compared Cross’s hippos to the then Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. Another of the most popular exhibits was a five-ton elephant called Chunee, who one day ran amok and had
to be killed by its keeper with a harpoon after several failed attempts to halt the animal with gunfire and canon. Nine butchers flayed the animal – a job that took twelve hours –
before ten surgeons dissected the body in front of an audience of medical students.

The menagerie was closed and the Change demolished in 1829, to be re-built between 1829 to 1831 as Exeter Hall. It was used by the Ragged School Union, the Sacred Harmonic Society, the
Temperance Society and the Bible Society, and even received a visit from Prince Albert for a series of lectures conducted by the anti-slavery movement. It was ultimately taken over by the YMCA but
was knocked down in 1907 and replaced by the Strand Palace Hotel.

However, built at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million pounds, it quickly failed to live up to its owners’ aspirations. In his 1878 work
London Old and New
,
Thornbury reported:

Its produce, however, is very humble, and rarely rises above the rank of the modest onion, the plebeian cabbage, the barely respectable cauliflower, the homely apple, and other unpretending
fruits and vegetables. Pineapples and hot-house grapes are unknown to its dingy sheds.

The market became the resort of the poorest-of-the-poor traders, with receipts from the Common Council
showing an average annual income from the hire of stalls of just
£225.

Henry Mayhew, who visited one cold, November morning, recalled:

As the morning twilight drew on, the paved court was crowded with customers. The sheds and shops at the end of the market grew every moment more distinct, and a railway van, laden with
carrots, came rumbling into the yard. The pigeons, too, began to fly into the sheds, or walk about the paving-stones, and the gas-man came round with his ladder to turn out the lamps. Then every
one was pushing about, the children crying as their naked feet were trodden upon, and the women hurrying off with their baskets or shawls filled with cresses, and the bunch of rushes in their
hands. In one corner of the market, busily tying up their bunches, were three or four girls, seated on the stones, with their legs curled up under them, and the ground near them was green with the
leaves they had thrown away. A saleswoman, seeing me looking at the group, said, ‘Ah, you should come here of a summer’s morning, and then you’d see ’em, sitting tying up,
young and old, upwards of a hundred poor things, as thick as crows in a ploughed field.

However, Farringdon Market was the place to go for watercress, with upwards of twenty tons sold each week. Hundreds of retailers – men, women, girls and boys – would arrive here at
3am every day to sell cress by the hand. With the amount to be sold dependent on the size of the trader’s fist, the call of ‘Don’t pinch your hand, governor’ was regularly
to be heard from the buyers of Farringdon.

The market relocated in 1883 to Smithfield, though for many years booksellers continued to congregate on Farringdon Road.

Soho

S
TANDING ON THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF
Soho Square, (also home to the equally famous Monmouth House) this was the home of Thomas Belasyse, First Earl of
Fauconberg (1627–1700).

Originally from a Royalist family, he married one of Oliver Cromwell’s daughters but swapped sides again at the Restoration in 1660, only to betray James
II
and invite William
III
to take the English throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an act for which he received his earldom.

The famously cross-eyed Speaker of the House of Commons, Arthur Onslow, made Fauconberg House his residence from 1753 to 1761. The building was improved by Robert Adam and went on to serve as
Wright’s Hotel and Coffee House for almost fifty years until 1857, at which point it was taken over by an instrument-maker. In 1858 Crosse & Blackwell opened a pickle-bottling plant on
the premises, which the company later turned into offices and a five-storey factory producing soups, chutneys and marmalades to sell across the British Empire. With the building demolished in the
1920s to make way for the Astoria Cinema, only the dreary and rarely noticed Falconberg Mews remains as a reminder. The whole area was swept away to make room for the capital’s massive
Crossrail development in 2010.

Russell Square

I
N
1685,
THE YEAR OF THE
M
ONMOUTH
R
EBELLION
, it is said that two brothers, both
courting the same woman, fought a duel for her affections in the fields behind Montague House (now the British Museum).