Lost London (19 page)

Lyons opened its first teashop at 213 Piccadilly in 1894. However, it was with their massive eateries that they really captured the public’s imagination.

The Coventry Street Corner House, for instance, was opened in 1909 and had seating for 4500 customers over five floors. Two other restaurants, on Tottenham Court Road and the Strand, could each
feed 2500. The company kept prices down by catering on a vast scale, with the Corner Houses offering different menus on different floors, along with bespoke musical accompaniment. Indeed, by 1930
Lyons was employing so many musicians that it had its own Orchestral Department. Meanwhile, ‘Nippies’ – the name given to female serving staff – passed into the popular
lexicon, with the name even registered by the company in 1924.

Founded by Messers Gluckstein, Salmon and Lyons, Lyons teashops spread firstly across London, and then throughout the nation until there were 250 sites. J Lyons and Co Ltd also catered for
corporate clients, including Buckingham Palace, the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Association and the Chelsea Flower Show. By 1887 it was the biggest food-manufacturing company in Europe. However, come the
1970s the company had overreached itself financially and was dismantled and sold off, the last Corner House closing its doors in 1977.

The Buggery Act of 1533 made sodomy a crime punishable by either a fine, the pillory and even death. Old Bailey records from 1726 provide us a small insight into one of the
capital’s most famous – Mother Clap’s, on Field Lane, Holborn. Following the execution for sodomy of Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and George Kedear in May 1726, Margaret Clap
was herself brought before the judges, charged with keeping a house in which ‘she procur’d and encourag’d Persons to commit Sodomy’.

One Samuel Stevens gave the evidence
: I found near Men Fifty there, making Love to one another as they call’d it. Sometimes they’d sit in one anothers Laps, use their Hands
indecently Dance and make Curtsies and mimick the Language of Women – O Sir! – Pray Sir! – Dear Sir! Lord how can ye serve me so! – Ah ye little dear Toad! Then they’d
go by Couples, into a Room on the same Floor to be marry’d as they call’d it. They talk’d all manner of the most vile Obscenity in her Presence, and she appear’d wonderfully
pleas’d with it.

Margaret was found guilty and sentenced to the pillory. It is thought that she died of the injuries she received there. It is sometime assumed that Margaret Clap gave her name to Molly Houses
– Molly being a popular shortening of Margaret, but the activities of two of the city’s most fearsome crime bosses a
decade earlier would suggest otherwise.

Before bearing the self proclaimed title of ‘Thief Taker General of England and Ireland’, Jonathan Wild, a failed button maker from Wolverhampton, had been trying to steal the
business off his predecessor, one Christopher Hitchin. In 1718 Hitchin published a broadside – a one sheet pamphlet – called
A Trout the City of London.
This was an attempt to
expose Wild for what he really was, an underworld crime boss and receiver of stolen goods, (as was Hitchins himself). The tactic disastrously backfired when Wild countered with
An answer to a
Late Insolent Libel
, the main thrust being that Hitchin frequented Molly Houses and enjoyed the pleasures thereof.

With Hitchin’s reputation destroyed, Wild went on to enjoy unprecedented power, posing as a saviour for the capital’s crime problem, whilst at the same time running a network of
criminals, and even chartering vessels to transport his ill-gotten gains abroad to Holland, where they could be sold. Thankfully he was found out and executed at Tyburn on 24 May 1725.

When the capital was still a thriving port city unloading goods from around the globe, the shoreline of the Thames was a workplace for these pathetic creatures.

Nearly always young children whose terrible family circumstances had forced them into a truly pitiable state, mudlarks collected goods such as coal, old rope, nails and
cloth that had fallen from vessels docked in the Pool of London – the area immediately downstream of London Bridge. Henry Mayhew, in his
London Labour and the London Poor
(1851),
recounted an interview with one of the sorry orphans, describing him thus:

He was fourteen years old. He had two sisters, one fifteen and the other twelve years old. His father had been dead for 9 years ... He had fallen (in a state of intoxifaction) between two
barges ... He [the boy] went into the river, up to his knees, and in searching for the mud often ran pieces of glass and long nails into his feet. Having dressed his wound he would immediately
return to the river-side directly.

Mayhew estimated that almost 300 children made a living in this way.

Waterloo

M
ASSIVE URBAN EXPANSION DURING THE
1800
S
had led to horrendous over-crowding in the city’s 200 burial sites.

This crisis resulted in mass graves, bodies spilling out of the ground, and outbreaks of cholera and typhus. Indeed, so dire was the situation that the government passed the
Burial
Act of 1851, banning all interments in built-up areas.

To cope with the huge numbers of burials, Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey was opened in November 1854. At the time it was the largest graveyard in the world, and was connected to London by the
Necropolis Railway, which originally ran from a separate platform at Waterloo Station. Waterloo was chosen for its proximity to the Thames and the ease of transporting bodies along the river.

With its entrance on Westminster Bridge Road, the Necropolis Railway had a variety of waiting rooms for different mourning parties and catered for 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-class funerals. A steam lift
raised coffins to the private platform on the first floor. Frederick Engels, one of the fathers of modern communism, made his final journey from the station on 10 August 1895, before being cremated
and his ashes scattered at Beachy Head.

Increased use of Waterloo Station by living commuters led to a new station for the dead being built on the west side of Westminster Bridge Road. It opened in 1902, its entrance still visible at
No 188, although the word ‘Necropolis’ has been covered up. The station was bombed during the final stages of the Blitz in April 1941 and by the end of hostilities it was considered
economically unviable to re-open the station or the route to Brookwood.

When the line had first opened, it had been expected that 50,000 of the city’s dead would travel along its tracks each year. After 90 years of service, in fact only just over 200,000 had
boarded its trains, the first being a pair of stillborn twins from Borough on 13 November 1854 and the last a Chelsea Pensioner, Edward Irish, who was born in 1868 and died on 11 April 1941.

Old Bailey

B
UILT ON THE SITE OF TODAY
’
S
O
LD
B
AILEY
, Newgate was the city’s
principal prison from at far back as the 12th century. Over its long history, it inhabited a variety of buildings that variously fell into ruin or were burnt down by rioters.

The jail was originally housed in the Newgate, the fifth of London’s gates built during the reign of Stephen or Henry
I
. In 1423, Richard
Whittington, he of the famous cat and three times the capital’s mayor, left money in his will for the ‘re-edification of Newgate Prison’ but by then it was in one of its periods
of ruin. Having subsequently been rebuilt, it burnt down in the Great Fire of London, only to be rebuilt again by
1672 with ‘great magnificence’ externally, though
conditions for the inmates inside were as appalling as ever.

Described as a ‘prototype for hell’ by Henry Fielding, it suffered from a poor water supply, virtually non-existent ventilation and repellant odours. Outbreaks of disease, known as
‘jail fever’, were common. One outbreak in the 1700s swept through the prison and into the neighbouring Old Bailey, to which it was connected by a walkway, killing not only convicts but
also judges, barristers and jurors. In total, sixty court officials died, prompting some attempts to improve the air by building a ventilation tower. Two workers died of noxious inhalations during
construction, while neighbouring residents complained that they too were now being poisoned, while very little difference was felt in the conditions inside.

If the sanitation was terrible, then the jail regime to which prisoners were subjected can only be described as fiendish. New arrivals were clapped in irons, the weight of them dependent on how
much they could pay the keeper. In general, wealth bought privileges, from beds and bedding to rooms higher up in the building, further away from the stench, filth and misery that constituted daily
life on the lower floors.