Lost London (12 page)

Printers, meanwhile, would set up stalls selling mementos of the occasion. One such included the following lines of descriptive verse:

There you may also this hard frosty winter

See on the rocky ice a Working-Printer,

Who hopes by his own art to reap some gain

Which he perchance does think he may obtain.

Here also is a lottery, music too,

Yea, a cheating, drunken, lewd, and debauch’d crew;

Hot codlins, pancakes, ducks, and goose, and sack,

Rabbit, capon, hen, turkey, and a wooden jack.

The frosts that ushered in the fairs were not without their hardships, however. The price of food and fuel would inevitably go up while as many as 3,000 people who normally
earned a living ferrying goods and people along the Thames found themselves without work. The eventual break-up of the river ice caused new havoc, damaging property and taking both lives and
livelihoods. In 1739, for instance, the big freeze resulted in many boats being crushed and smashed, causing damage estimated at over £100,000, while on 6 February 1815 two young men are known
to have drowned. Ice also frequently carried away integral parts of London Bridge.

The Strand

B
UILT WHERE
C
ATHERINE
S
TREET MEETS
the Strand, the Gaiety Theatre opened on 21 December 1868 after the
demolition of its predecessor, the Strand Music Hall.

The Gaiety was run by Lionel Lawson, owner of the
Daily Telegraph,
who wanted to create a theatre and restaurant despite laws demanding that the two businesses be
separated.

The Gaiety established two firsts in British theatre – it boasted the first electrically-lighted signage on its frontage and was the first theatre to offer matinee performances. Under the
management of journalist John Hollingshead and with a
quick turn-around of shows, it enjoyed great success with a mixture of drama, farce and (most effectively) burlesque.

The theatre’s heyday of musical comedies followed a take-over by George Edwards, with shows such as
Gaiety Girls
(1893) and
Shop Girl
(1894) proving hugely popular. A crowd
of supposedly aristocratic hangers-on, besotted by the performers, came to be known as the Gaiety Girls and the Stage Door Johnnies.

The original Gaiety closed in 1903 as part of the scheme to widen the Strand, but the New Gaiety opened on 26 October that year at the corner of the Aldwych and the Strand, though with its
audience capacity reduced from 2000 to 1338. It was nonetheless a wildly successful enterprise, and two of its longest running productions were Theodore and Co. (1916) and
Going Up
(1918),
which featured Ivor Novello’s first musical score. Both shows recorded over 500 performances each. Demolished in 1957, the theatre gave way to a spectacularly ugly office building for
Citibank, which featured a blue plaque incorrectly dating the Gaiety’s closure to 1938, until the offices themselves were demolished.

High Holborn

O
PENED WITH JUST
5
FT OF STORE FRONTAGE
in 1878 on High Holborn, Gamages grew into a successful department store. It was founded
by Arthur Walter Gamage, a farmer’s son who trained as a draper.

After his first year of trading he had turned over £1,632, which he used to expand his premises into the surrounding buildings. The motto that hung over the door read
‘Tall oaks from little acorns grow’. It could not have been more appropriate, for the store would eventually become a veritable labyrinth, full of twists and turns and flights of steps.
To give an idea of the extent of its stock, in 1911 Gamage published a mail-order catalogue running to 900 pages.

Apart from being the official supplier to the Boy Scout movement, the ‘People’s Popular Emporium’ sold everything from pets and cars to haberdashery, furniture, gardening
equipment, and sports and camping gear. Forty-nine pages of the 1911 catalogue were given over to cycles and cycling goods alone. But for children, the toy department offered the greatest delights,
as Charles Spencer recalled in
A Trip to Gamages
:

Gamages was THE toy store. Every child would look forward to a visit there. Families from all over the place would take buses to High Holborn. The kids would jump off the bus with glee and
dance along the street with excitement in the direction of the store
...
for here they would be presented with floor upon floor of all the toys fit to see and all the
toys fit to buy. Gamages was an Aladdin’s cave just waiting to be discovered.

When Gamage died in 1930, he lay in state in the store before his funeral at St Andrew’s, Holborn. His shop was sold in 1970 and closed in March 1972, to be redeveloped into a vast office
block at a cost of £20 million.

It was founded in 1731 by a printer, Edward Cave, and provided a monthly digest of London news and parliamentary reports for those unable to get hold of a daily newspaper
– which was almost everyone who lived more than a few miles outside the city. It went through a series of name changes, being originally known as
The Gentleman’s Magazine or Monthly
Intelligencer
, only to replace
Monthly Intelligencer
with
Historical Chronicle
and then
Historical Review
, before finally settling on simply
The Gentleman’s
Magazine.

The title ran for almost 200 years, keeping the gent-about-town up-to-date about the latest fashion trends and reading materials, as well as all the gossip he may have missed when he was away
from the capital. Typically, an issue might contain
an article on astronomy and another on the restoration of old paintings, a selection of Latin verse, the latest stock market
prices, a list of promotions among the armed forces, clergy and legal professions, as well as the records of births and marriages plus the Bills of Mortality and obituaries.

Cave got around certain restrictions on the reporting of House of Commons debates by styling articles as the ‘proceedings in the senate of Great Lilliput’ – a knowing nod to
Jonathan Swift’s recently published satire,
Gulliver’s Travels.
Dr Samuel Johnson gained his first employment as a journalist for the magazine. Other famous contributors included
Oliver Goldsmith and David Garrick. By the late 1850s it had become something of an anachronism and rather unfashionable but staggered on into the 20th century, publishing its last full issue in
1907.

Bankside

C
ONSIDERING THAT IT IS PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS
theatre in the world, the original Globe had a surprisingly short, though highly eventful,
existence.

It was built by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company of actors that included among its number the most famous playwright of them all, William Shakespeare.

Constructed entirely from wood, the theatre opened in 1599 and for the next fourteen years served as Shakespeare’s base. During this time he wrote many of his greatest works, including
The Winter’s Tale
,
The Tempest
,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
,
Measure for Measure
,
As You Like it
,
All’s Well That Ends Well
,
Anthony and
Cleopatra
,
Hamlet
,
King Lear
,
Macbeth
and
Othello.
Although the theatre owes its enduring fame to this association, by the time that the Globe was destroyed in a
fire on 29 June 1613, Shakespeare had already sold his share of the business and retired to Stratford-upon-Avon.