Lost London

by Richard Guard

  After Raleigh’s untimely eviction from the property when he fell from favour, James I used it mainly to house visiting ambassadors, although its gardens were incorporated into neighbouring Cecil House. In Oliver Cromwell’s time it was used for billeting troops and in 1660, by then much dilapidated, it was demolished. Slum housing occupied the site for the next 100 years until the construction of the Adams Brothers, Adelphi Buildings in 1769. The only reminder of the original building left today is Durham House Street.

  Eel Pie House

  Highbury

  STANDING JUST NORTH OF HIGHBURY SLUICE, WHICH controlled the flow of water from the New River (a man-made channel), Eel Pie House was famous not only for its pies but its tea and hot rolls too.

  Although it was commonly believed that the eponymous eels were local, they were in fact imported from the Netherlands.

  The pub was a hot spot for the working class from at least 1804, ideally situated for leisure pursuits and fishing. With gardens next to the ‘Boarded River’ aqueduct, a walk from the pie house to Hornsey Woods became a Palm Sunday tradition. Although urban development rapidly encroached, guidebooks still listed it as a popular destination as late as 1844. But within twenty years the river and the surrounding countryside were built over. The approximate site of Eel Pie House is today covered by No. 57 Wilberforce Road.

  Effra River

  South London

  ALTHOUGH NOT TRULY LOST – HIDDEN IS A MORE appropriate word – the Effra is one of several central London rivers of which there is now almost no evidence above ground. Others include the Peck, the Fleet, the Tybourne, the Westbourne and the Walbrook.

  The Effra rose in Upper Norwood and flowed through Dulwich along Croxted Road to Herne Hill, along the side of Brockwell Park, then down Brixton Road to Kennington Church, around the curve of the Oval, past what used to be Vauxhall Gardens, then into the Thames immediately above Vauxhall Bridge. History records that it was 12ft wide and 6ft deep around Brixton Road. Although it served as a sewer in Brixton from the 17th century, its waters were still being used in Dulwich as late as 1860. It provided water to the Vauxhall Water Works Company until they moved their source of supplies outside the capital. Still visible in Dulwich’s Belair Park, today the river supplies a couple of ponds before disappearing underground and linking into the sewer system.

  Egyptian Hall

  Piccadilly

  BUILT IN AN ORNATE EGYPTIAN STYLE BY G F Robinson in 1812 at a cost of £16,000, the Hall housed a natural history museum based on the collection of William Bullock, who spent thirty years travelling in South and Central America.

  Even more popular was a collection of memorabilia it hosted celebrating Napoleon Bonaparte, including his bullet-proof carriage. It drew enormous crowds totalling 800,000 in the course of a year, producing an income that could pay the building costs twice over. When the exhibits were eventually sold off, Madame Tussaud bought many of them.

  In 1820 the Hall was hired by the painter Benjamin Haydon to display his enormous canvas depicting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. When it was later used to show artefacts from the tomb of Seti I, it attracted 1800 visitors on the first day alone. As the century progressed, the Hall became ever less high-brow, coming to specialize in freak shows. Although Turner showed his watercolours here in 1824, one was more likely to come across Claude Amboise Seurat, a Frenchman know as ‘the living skeleton’.

  Later it would showcase Cheng and Eng (Siamese Twins), and in 1844 the American showman, Phineas T Barnum, took an impressive £125 a day showing off General Tom Thumb. Other highlights included a family of Laplanders complete with sledges and dogs, a three-mile-long canvas panorama of the Mississippi River and the skeleton of a mammoth. From 1852–58, Albert Richard Smith used the Hall for over 2000 re-enactments of his ascent of Mont Blanc. The building was demolished in 1904, with an office block at Nos 170–173 now standing on the site.

  Enon Chapel

  Near the Strand

  OPENED IN 1822, THIS BAPTIST CHAPEL BECAME notorious for a scandal that erupted in 1844 when a sewer was being constructed beneath it.

  Having for many years charged cheap burial fees, the crypt beneath the chapel had long proved a popular choice among the local poor from whence to embark on the afterlife. With the sewer requiring that the chapel undergo structural alterations, the Baptist minister took the opportunity to remove some of the ‘earth’ building up beneath his chapel. He had the earth carried off to a new road being built on the south side of Waterloo Bridge and the alarm was raised when a human hand was discovered in one of the carts. It emerged that the church’s worshippers had had only a few floor boards separating them from over 12,000 people interred in the crypt, covered by the merest scattering of earth.

  The renovation works were halted and the chapel subsequently closed, to be taken over by a group of teetotallers who seemed content to hold dances and host a Sunday school just a matter of feet and inches above the corpses. The affair brought attention to the disgraceful state of many of the city’s burial grounds and a Parliamentary Select Committee was established to deal with numerous overflowing sites from Aldgate to Soho. A worshipper from Enon Chapel was called to give evidence and told the committee:

  At the time I attended it ... there were interments, and the place was in a very filthy state: the smell was most abominable and very injurious; I have frequently gone home with a severe headache which I supposed to have been occasioned by the smell, more particularly in the summer time; also, there were insects ... I have seen them in the summertime hundreds of them flying about the chapel; I have taken them home in my hat, and my wife has taken them home in her clothes; we always considered that they proceed from the dead bodies underneath.

  The remains were finally removed in 1847 and reburied in a single pit in a cemetery in Norwood, but not before becoming something of a tourist attraction. In his 1878 work London Old and New, Thornbury wrote:

  The work of exhumation was then commenced, and a pyramid of human bones was exposed to view, separated from piles of coffin wood in various stages of decay. This ‘Golgotha’ was visited by about 6000 persons, previous to its removal, and some idea may be formed of the horrid appearance of the scene, when it is stated that the quantity of remains comprised four upheaved van loads.

  The London School of Economics’ St Clement’s Building now sits atop the former charnel house.

  Essex House

  Near the Strand

  LOCATED ON THE CURRENT ESSEX STREET, SOUTH of the Strand, Essex House was home to the Bishops of Essex from the early 1300s.

  In a history chequered with uprisings, the property witnessed Walter Stapleton holding out against the rebellious city populace here in 1326 until they stormed the gates, plundering or burning the plate, money, jewellery and goods contained within. Bishop Stapleton rode out on his horse to seek sanctuary but was dragged from his saddle near St Paul’s and hauled by the mob to Cheapside, where he was stripped and beheaded. His head was set on a pole and his body burnt in a pile of rubbish outside his own gates.

  In the 16th century, Essex House became the property of Robert, Earl of Essex, one of Elizabeth I’s favourites. But after a failed military campaign in Ireland, he foolishly attempted to rouse the city against the queen. Despite being personally popular, none of the citizenry joined his cause and while attempting to return home, he was met by a troop of soldiers who promptly delivered him to the Tower of London. After being tried for treason, he was beheaded on 25 February 1601 on Tower Hill.

  His son, Robert Devereux, achieved some success as a Parliamentarian general during the Civil War and received a delegation from the House of Commons at Essex House after his victory at the First Battle of Newbury in 1643. When Pepys visited Devereux’s body as it lay in state in 1646, he set aside his admiration for the general to describe the mansion as ‘large but ugly’. In a famous depiction of one of London’s 17th century ‘Frost Fairs’, parts of Essex House and its gardens can be seen in the background as C
harles II and the royal family walk along the ice to view the sports on offer.

  The building had been divided in two in 1640, with half sold to a speculator who demolished it and laid out Essex Street in its place. For a while the remaining half of the property served as the Cotton Library of Manuscripts (now part of the British Library) but was finally demolished in 1777.

  Euston Arch

  WHEN EUSTON STATION WAS FIRST OPENED IN 1837, its entrance was dominated by Euston Arch, which stood 72ft high and was supported by four Doric columns to make it the largest arch in Great Britain.

  Costing over £30,000, the railway board attempted to publicly justify the expense: ‘The entrance to the London passenger station, opening immediately upon what will necessarily become the Grand Avenue for travelling between the Midland and Northern parts of the Kingdom, the directors thought that it should receive some embellishment.’

  A hundred years later, with the Victoria and Adelaide hotels having been built either side, the arch was recognized as a major landmark and ‘the most imposing entrance to a London terminus’. Some contemporaries, though, were much less forgiving. In Old and New London, Thornbury described it as ‘a lofty and apparently meaningless Doric temple – for it seems placed without reference to the courtyard it leads to ... and although handsome in itself, and possibly one of the largest porticoes in the world, it nevertheless falls far short in grandeur to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Some of the blocks of stone used in its construction weighed thirteen tons.’

  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.

  Execution Dock

  Wapping

  A MILE DOWNSTREAM FROM THE TOWER 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.

  Exeter House

  The Strand

  ANOTHER OF THE GREAT STRAND 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.

  Farringdon Market

  OPENED ON 20 NOVEMBER 1829 TO REPLACE Fleet Market – which had been closed after the widening of Farringdon Road – Farringdon Market traded fruit and vegetables and was designed to serve a middle-class clientele.

  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.

  Fauconberg House

  Soho

  STANDING 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.

  Field of the Forty Footsteps

  Russell Square

  IN 1685, THE YEAR OF THE MONMOUTH REBELLION, 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).

  Both died from their resulting wounds and from that day forward, so the legend goes, no grass would grow in the footsteps where they trod, or on the tussock where the girl at the centre of the dispute sat to watch the contest.