Lost London (21 page)

Slaughter’s also hosted the first ever meeting of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824 but the building was demolished in 1843 to make way for the
construction of Cranbourn Street.

Oxford Street

O
PENING TO GREAT FANFARE IN
1772,
THE
Pantheon was one of the largest rooms in England.

Designed by James Wyatt, it was intended that its entertainments should attract some of the crowd from Ranelagh Gardens, the pleasure gardens located in Chelsea, come the
winter season. A city guide of the time described how its ‘interior, in point of extent, design, convenience of arrangement, and beauty of execution united’ was ‘unequalled by
anything of the kind in London, or even in Europe’. The
building was topped with a domed roof roughly based on Santa Sophia in Istanbul.

Here the great and good were invited to masquerades, fetes and concerts, with the opportunity to visit card rooms, drink tea or have supper in between the entertainments. Horace Walpole gave the
Pantheon a most enthuasiastic review:

It amazed me myself. Imagine Balbec in all its glory! The pillars are of artificial giallo antico. The ceilings, even of the passages, are of the most beautiful stuccos in the best taste of
grotesque. The ceilings of the ball-rooms and the panels are painted like Raphael’s loggias in the Vatican. A dome like the Pantheon, glazed.

Nonetheless, its popularity soon declined and in 1791 it was converted into a theatre. A disastrous fire in January 1792 completely gutted the building but, following a rebuild by Chrispus
Clagett, it re-opened in 1795. It was not a success, though, and Clagett soon disappeared, leaving huge debts. The massive cost of upkeep continually hampered new ventures. Neither the efforts of
the National Institute for Improving Manufacturing nor the expansion of Henry Greville’s Argyll Rooms were able to make it profitable, and in 1813 it once again reverted to serving as a
theatre.

Alas, the promoter Nicholas Cundy attempted to stage plays here despite being unlicensed to do so, so the Pantheon was closed by order of the Lord Chamberlain. Meanwhile, its interior was
stripped of its fixtures and fittings. It was subsequently converted into a bazaar and then, in 1867, a wine warehouse. The premises were sold to Marks & Spencer in 1937, who demolished what
remained of the original building and erected the store that sits on Oxford Street today.

Bankside

T
HIS WAS THE SITE OF
L
ONDON
’
S FIRST PLEASURE
gardens, although from our modern perspective
‘pleasure’ might seem a dubious label.

Here originally stood the manor house of Robert De Paris and later the home of Jane Seymour, Henry
VIII
’s third wife. Its gardens had opened to
the public and were being marked on maps as early as 1574. The site extended from the current Southwark Bridge to the western side of Blackfriars Bridge, its approximate area still measurable by
the streets that continue to bear the names of Bear Gardens and Paris Gardens. Southwark had long been a favourite haunt of pleasure-seeking city-dwellers, lying as it did outside the jurisdiction
of the city elders.

Bear-baiting was a popular spectacle here, along with dog- and cock-fights, as well as prize fighting. But visitors could pursue almost any leisure activity (illicit or not) that they might
choose, from theatrical performances (both the Globe and the Rose theatres were built in Paris Gardens) to rendezvous with local prostitutes (or Winchester Geese as they were known, so called
because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester).

The Gardens’ bear pits were built in the style of amphitheatres, with banked wooden seating that on several occasions collapsed, resulting in the deaths of several spectators. One such
notable incident occurred one Sunday in 1582, which
Puritan elders celebrated as being ‘heaven-directed’. Yet even these tragedies did not seem to dampen
Londoners’ ardour for the sport, and for many years the Gardens were under royal patronage. Elizabeth
I
, for instance, was said to be a keen fan of bear-baiting and
visited several times.

The theatre impresario Edward Alleyn (1566–1626) was for some time the ‘keeper of the king’s beasts or ‘master of the royal bear gardens’ and derived an annual
income of £500 from the position, which goes some way to illustrating the popularity of animal contests during this time. Alleyn went on to found Dulwich College and many other philanthropic
enterprises, all of which have something to thank animal-baiting for.

Although bear-baiting was suppressed during the period of the Commonwealth (1653-1659), the Gardens re-emerged with the restoration of Charles
II
in 1660. Diarist Samuel
Pepys recorded a visit to watch a prize fight here on 28 May 1667:

Abroad, and stopped at Bear-garden Stairs, there to see a prize fought. But the house so full there was no getting in there, so forced to go through an ale-house into the pit, where the bears
are baited; and upon a stool did see them fight, which they did very furiously, a butcher and a waterman. The former had the better all along, till by-and-by the latter dropped his sword out of his
hand, and the butcher, whether or not seeing his sword dropped I know not, but did give him a cut over the wrist, so as he was disabled to fight any longer. But Lord! to see in a minute how the
whole stage was full of watermen to revenge the foul play, and the butchers to defend their fellow, though most blamed him: and there they all fell to it, knocking and cutting down many on each
side. It was pleasant to see; but that I stood in the pit and feared that in the tumult I might get some hurt. At last the battle broke up, and so I away.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Paris Gardens won for itself a shady
reputation. Being unlit at night, it was reputedly a hangout for conspirators, with one 17th-century commentator
noting: ‘This may better bee termed a foule dene than a faire garden ... here come few that either regard their credit or losse of time: the swaggering Roarer, the cunning Cheater, the rotten
Bawd and the bloudy Butcher all have their rendezvous here.’

Much of the Gardens was developed during the 17th century, while the popularity of bear-baiting went into decline until it was eventually banned in 1835. The last recorded incidence of
animal-baiting at Paris Gardens recorded on 2 April 1682.

The 1800s saw the emergence of patterers – men who gathered intelligence on the streets to reproduce in newspapers, pamphlets and tracts which they sold on the public
highway. They typically lured potential customers by describing recent murders or reporting the last words of the condemned to passers-by, hence their alternative name, ‘Death
Hunters’.

Titles such as
The Life of Calcraft, the Hangman and The Diabolical Practises of Dr, ---- on his patients when in a state of mesmorism
were their stock in trade. They also did good
business in ‘secret packages’, which would either contain pornographic material or, as some of the unwary found to their cost, nothing at all.

In making his exhaustive study of the capital’s underclass, Henry Mayhew discovered that patterers were exclusively male and had a cant, or slang, all of their own that was in some ways a
forerunner of Cockney rhyming slang:

They weren’t, however, without theatres that played to their tastes. Shop-front theatres, called Penny Gaffs, sprang up in the poorer parts of town, hosting up to six
shows an evening. A penny was charged for admission and shows typically consisted of a musical performance, lewd dancing and a ‘vulgar’
comic. A Victorian visitor
reported his trip to one of the least offensive shows he could find ‘in the environs of Smithfield’: ‘The visitors were all boys and girls. They stood laughing and joking with the
lads, in an unconcerned, impudent manner that was most appalling.’ The shop in question had had its first floor removed to make a larger space, and an audience of about 200 people was
present. ‘One woman carrying a sickly child with a bulging forehead, was reeling drunk with saliva running down her mouth as she stared about her with a heavy fixed eye,’ reported the
appalled guest.

An 8ft stage contained not only the performers but also a piano and space for a violinist. The one-hour performance consisted mainly of singing and dancing, including a comic singer who was
greeted with rapturous applause and who sang a song:
the whole point of which consisted of the utterance of some filthy words at the end of each stanza ... In this, not a single chance had been
missed: ingenuity had been exerted to its utmost lest an obscene thought should be passed by, and it was absolutely awful to behold the relish with which the young ones jumped to the meaning of the
verses.