London's Strangest Tales

by Tom Quinn

  The government certainly did own a very long lease on the land on which the hospital was built; that much was agreed, but when government officials were invited to take a careful look at the terms of the lease they discovered that it remained valid only if the land continued to be used for a hospital. Since a hospital was no longer required, the land reverted to the Grosvenors and the government was left with nothing.

  ENDLESS SECRET TUNNELS

  1980

  When journalist Duncan Campbell found an entrance to a shaft in the middle of a traffic island in Bethnal Green in London’s East End, he was astonished to discover a large tunnel at the bottom that led away into the distance apparently heading towards central London some half a dozen miles distant.

  Campbell went home, collected his folding bike, and some time later returned to the shaft entrance. He carried the bike down the shaft and started pedalling towards central London along a series of extraordinary tunnels.

  Over the centuries the curious have regularly come across underground tunnels beneath London’s streets – some are ancient, others, as Campbell discovered, more modern. But the oddest thing is that there are almost certainly far more tunnels – many-layered and interconnecting – than we imagine.

  Campbell’s tunnel started about one hundred feet down and he rode around the tunnels for hours covering in excess of a dozen miles in total, but it was clear to him, as it has been to others, that he had barely scratched the surface of London’s extraordinary underground tunnel network.

  Beautifully built brick-lined sewers, some dating back to medieval times, certainly exist in the oldest parts of the city and it is still possible to walk along the old bed of the Fleet River, which is now buried beneath Farringdon Street at the bottom of Ludgate Hill. The river – reduced to little more than a trickle – runs along the bottom of a giant pipe but there is plenty of room to walk.

  In Victorian times the vast network of ancient sewers provided a living for hundreds of men and children – intimate knowledge of the tunnel routes was passed from one generation to the next and a team of sewer searchers might travel from the city to the West End and back in a day and always entirely underground, but they had to be careful: a sudden storm in Highgate or Hampstead could lead to flooding – a torrent of water hurtling along the tunnels would sweep the men to their deaths. Experienced sewer men knew the dangers and posted lookouts before they went down as well as trying to restrict their activities to days when the weather was fine. In the thick layers of human fat that lined the tunnels they would often find a rich store of lost gold trinkets and coins.

  Those sewers are still there and beneath them, far deeper and almost as deep as London’s water table, is a vast array of tunnels that some believe are part of a nuclear network of bunkers centred on Whitehall. There is some evidence for this too. We know, for example, that when the Jubilee line was built planning permission for certain routes was refused but officials would not say why. The same happens when telecommunications tunnels have to be dug – certain areas and depths and routes are always out of bounds because London under London is still the capital’s greatest and most complex secret.

  DARWIN ON THE UNDERGROUND

  1985

  Only the very superstitious – meaning the religious – now seriously question the validity of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin’s idea about the survival of the fittest has been widely misinterpreted it is true – by fittest Darwin meant best adapted for survival in a particular environment, not strongest or toughest.

  Darwin also explained that time was the great factor in evolution: when groups of individuals of the same species are separated by some physical barrier – say a mountain range or an ocean – for long enough they will gradually change to such an extent that they would no longer be able to breed if they were brought together again. They would, in short, have become two different species.

  Astonishingly, London’s Underground provides a splendid example of Darwinism in action. In the mid-1980s scientists noticed that as well as the numerous rats and mice living in the Victorian tunnels deep under the streets of the capital there were also large numbers of mosquitoes.

  Nothing particularly unusual about that, except that studies quickly revealed that the mosquitoes were very different from other known mosquitoes. Comparisons were made with similar insects from Africa and Asia and with all the known subspecies of mosquito and the London mosquito was sufficiently different to be labelled a new species.

  How on earth could this happen? The answer is evolution by natural selection but in a speeded-up form.

  Scientists pieced together the likely history of the London mosquito.

  When the tunnels of the Underground were first being built at the end of the nineteenth century mosquitoes would have been more common than they are now, although they are still common enough. The pools of stagnant water inevitable in and around building sites would have provided perfect breeding grounds for the insects and when the tunnels were finally closed in the mosquitoes found themselves underground. As the years passed they reproduced and gradually migrated all along the system wherever there was water. Today mosquitoes exist in the deepest parts of the system and tests have shown that they can no longer interbreed with any other known species of mosquito – physical isolation has made them change to the point where they have become a separate species, exactly as Darwin predicted.

  The reason they have changed in a relatively short time is that a century is not in fact a short time at all when seen in relation to the lifespan of a mosquito. Those tunnel mosquitoes have probably gone through thousands of generations in the time they have been isolated.

  LOST LAVATORIES

  1985

  One of the great tragedies of the past fifty years is the gradual disappearance of London’s magnificent public lavatories. Built into the fabric of the environment by nineteenth-century urban planners who were concerned (unlike modern developers) that their buildings should be decorative as well as functional, public lavatories tended to be built at major street junctions and below ground.

  But, much as the Victorian pub builder wanted to celebrate his skill in the sumptuousness of gin palaces with their sparkling cut glass, fabulous mirrors and huge ornate ceilings and walls, so the lavatory builders created splendid subterranean palaces of gleaming copper pipework, hugely decorative tiles and basins, and lavatories with delicate flower decoration. Heavy mahogany doors were used for each lavatory cubicle and the overall impression was always one of spacious loftiness, for these were palaces to ease and bodily contentment.

  As it cost a penny to use these grand public conveniences the Victorian lavatory also gave us the splendid euphemism that survives to this day: the phrase ‘I’m going to spend a penny’ being among the politest and most delicate indications that one wishes to use the loo.

  The grand Victorian lavatories were gradually taken out of use by penny-pinching local authorities who simply assumed that the growth in cafés and restaurants would fill the gap – if the modern city dweller needs to spend a penny she has to go into an expensive restaurant for a cup of coffee she may well not want simply to use the loo.

  But oddly, though many of the old public loos were closed and their entrances sealed over, many still exist complete with all their magnificent pipework below ground, buried like Egyptian tombs and awaiting some enthusiastic future lavatorial archaeologist.

  One of the last lavatories to go was the splendid example in Covent Garden just outside the church in the piazza. Here in its dying days in the 1980s you could spend a penny and listen to opera, for the lavatory attendant was a keen opera buff who also decorated the walls with reproductions of some of the National Gallery’s most famous pictures. Tourists and Londoners flocked to this eccentric destination, and rightly so, until it was closed by unimaginative local officials.

  Odder still than the Covent Garden lavatory was the public loo that once stood in the middle of the road about halfway along High Holborn.

>   So magnificent were the fittings in this the ultimate public lavatory that they are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a testament to the public-spiritedness and architectural pride of our Victorian ancestors.

  The brass and mahogany fittings of the Holborn public loo were surmounted by a set of superb cut-glass cisterns. These were spectacular enough to provoke comment in numerous newspapers but the enthusiasm of the public for them knew no bounds when an attendant in the 1930s decided that each cistern would be far more interesting stocked with goldfish. He duly stocked them and the fish lived happily in the sparkling clean water to the delight of patrons for many years – until in fact the Holborn public loo suffered the fate of almost every other public loo in London.

  HOW CRIME BECAME ART

  1995

  In 1962 the future playwright Joe Orton, whose plays Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane were later to astonish theatregoers, was arrested along with his lover for defacing library books.

  Contrast that with the last year of Orton’s extraordinary – and sadly rather short – life. The year 1967 saw the first performance of his play What the Butler Saw, the latest in a string of theatrical successes. But Kenneth Halliwell, Orton’s lover since 1951, found it difficult to cope with his partner’s increasing fame and in a fit of depression killed Orton with a hammer while he slept and then took a massive overdose of sleeping pills.

  The newspaper obituaries tended to dwell on what was then described as Orton’s ‘unnatural relationship’ with Halliwell and his outrageous behaviour.

  The incident of the 1962 book-defacing offence was also dredged up. After the court trial of 1962 both Orton and Halliwell had been sentenced to six months’ imprisonment but the public was outraged – not by the severity of the sentence, but by its lenity.

  One commentator said: ‘People who deface library books must be dead to all sense of shame; six months’ imprisonment, the severest sentence that the law allowed, is totally inadequate for a crime of that kind.’

  Yet how strange is the world that over thirty years later Islington Library – the very library that instituted the prosecution against Orton and Halliwell – could proudly proclaim that an exhibition of the books defaced was to be held. Anyone wanting to visit the exhibition and see the images that outraged an earlier generation now had to pay an entrance fee. The defaced books – showing among other things Winston Churchill’s head on an ape – had become enormously valuable and still are. They are now among the library’s most prized possessions. If Orton had never become famous the books no doubt would have been thrown away long ago – such is the extraordinary power of celebrity.

  CAMILLA – DESCENDED FROM THE ROYAL MISTRESS

  2004

  One of the best-known things about the British is our obsession with class. In the past it was extremely rare for class barriers to be breached – in the seventeenth century and earlier the idea, for example, that a bricklayer might marry the daughter of an earl would have seemed not just outrageous but quite simply impossible. Her family would not allow it under any circumstances and any environment in which a bricklayer might meet the daughter of an earl on anything like terms of equality or intimacy simply didn’t exist.

  But with the rise of the mercantile middle classes in the eighteenth century the rules began to relax – Hogarth’s famous Marriage à la Mode series explains the new realities well. The old landed aristocracy frequently found itself with status, and no cash. The merchant classes had cash but not status, so they helped each other out by marrying their children off to each other.

  Despite these changes royalty was and still is very little affected by ideas of equality. When Prince Charles – the descendant of a minor German Prince – married Lady Diana Spencer there were complaints that he had married a commoner. In fact she was at least as nobly born as Charles, being descended from countless generations of English aristocrats with close ties to the pre-Hanoverian royal family.

  But when Prince Albert decided to employ the builder Thomas Cubbitt (1788–1855) to create Osborne House, the royal palace on the Isle of Wight, he would have been shocked and horrified to be told that a descendant of Cubbitt – who famously built the squares of London’s Belgravia – would marry one of his own royal descendants.

  In fact this happened in 2004 when Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles. He is the great-great-great-grandson of Prince Albert; she is a descendant of both Thomas Cubbitt and, even more extraordinarily, Edward VII’s mistress Alice Keppel (1869–1947).

  DEATH BY PELICAN

  2006

  There have been pelicans on the lake at St James’s Park since the first few were presented to Charles II by the Czar of Russia in 1660. Nothing so exotic had ever been seen in the capital and Londoners flocked to the park to see the new arrivals.

  By the early 1970s disease and bad luck had reduced the St James’s flock of pelicans to just one bird. Something had to be done and with a sense of tradition typical of the Court of St James, it was recalled that the original birds had been presented by the Imperial Russian Court.

  Despite the Cold War the British Government approached the Russian Government and asked if they could spare a few more birds. When the birds arrived everyone was delighted – except the other birds in the park.

  The newspapers were filled with stories of songbirds and more especially pigeons being eaten by the pelicans – the stories were not generally believed because pelicans are not carnivores, but the experts had not reckoned on these new and very ferocious Communist pelicans. Proof was difficult to obtain until in 2006 a photographer managed to get a close-up picture of a plump woodpigeon disappearing into a pelican’s gaping maw!

  GOING DUTCH

  2007

  Dutch ships that land their cargoes in the City of London – admittedly a rare event today when most cargo is unloaded miles downriver at Tilbury – are never charged harbour fees.

  In fact they have paid no fees since the plague year of 1665 when London was virtually cut off from the rest of the world.

  No other nation would land its cargoes at that time for fear of catching the terrible disease; only the Dutch kept trading with London, dropping supplies of food and other goods vital to the survival of a city which has shown its gratitude ever since by waiving the charges that apply to all other nations.