Three years passed before Christie murdered his own wife in December 1952, then three other women in January, February and March of 1953. He used the domestic gas supply to ensure that they were unconscious before raping and strangling them with a rope. Despite the suspicions of his wife’s relatives, Christie sub-let his flat and took rooms in King’s Cross under his own name. The bodies were discovered on 24 March and Christie was arrested on Putney Bridge a week later.
Confessing to the murders, he pleaded insanity but was found guilty and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 15 July. Following his execution, a campaign was started to clear Timothy Evans, who was eventually posthumously pardoned in 1966 by Roy Jenkins, the then Home Secretary. His case contributed to the parliamentary campaign for the abolition of hanging in 1965.
As for Rillington Place, it was renamed Ruston Close, and No 10 was demolished in the 1970s as part of the Westway development scheme. The residents of Ruston Mews, W11, are often keen to point out that their street is not the site of these terrible crimes.
Rivers
APART FROM THE AFOREMENTIONED EFFRA and Fleet, there are a number of other lost or subterranean rivers in London. These include:
The Neckinger – a small stream in Bermondsey, close to the medieval abbey. It may have derived its name from being an ancient site of execution (‘the Devil’s Neck Tie’ being a term for hangman’s noose). It formed part of the boundary of Jacob’s Island, immortalised as the home of Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and is still visible as it enters into the Thames at St Saviour’s Dock.
The Peck – providing the root of the name Peckham, this river ran from Forest Hill and emptied into the Thames at Rotherhithe.
The Tyburn – giving its name to London’s historical site of executions, this stream once provided water for the city’s populace via a three-mile tube called the Great Conduit, which ran from Marble Arch to East Cheap. Its waters once filled the ponds in St James’s Park and its ancient course formed part of the boundary of Thorney Island.
The Walbrook (Walbrook Street, City of London) – thought to be the original source of water for the Roman city.
The Westbourne – giving its name to Westbourne Park, this river used to flow into the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Now a sewer, it can be seen in a large pipe running over the Circle and District Line platforms at Sloane Square Station.
The Rookeries
A GENERIC NAME USED FOR A NUMBER OF terrible slums in London during the Victorian era. Etymologically, it is derived from one of two associations with the rook, a bird of the crow family.
It may relate to the habit of rooks of nesting in large and noisy communities called rookeries, or perhaps it is a play on words, with ‘rooking’ a slang term for thieving that dates from the 16th century and which supposedly reflects another trait of the bird.
London’s most notorious Rookery was at St Giles, which spread from St Martin’s Lane up to where the Centre Point office block is today and included the area of Seven Dials. Irish immigrants flocked to London seeking employment in the early part of the 1800s, with many of them settling in the squalid tenements of St Giles so that it became known as ‘Little Dublin’ or ‘The Holy Land’. But holy it was not.
Poverty forced many families to share their rooms, with up to seventeen people per room sleeping in shifts. Although many of the residents were undoubtedly honest and hardworking, the area’s run-down buildings and warren-like alleys encouraged a mood of lawlessness. Police hardly dared venture in and the Rookery served as a home for thieves, prostitutes and assorted low-life for many years.
Charles Dickens visited one night in the interests of research (he was accompanied by five policemen) and used the experience to great effect in a number of his novels. For many Victorian reformers, the Rookeries became something of an obsession, and Charles Booth’s Map of London Poverty describing the area, which he coloured black, as home to ‘the lowest class ... street sellers, loafers and criminals’.
Aside from St Giles, the city’s other Rookeries included Westminster, Rosemary Lane (see entry below) and Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey. The improving Victorians, desperate to rid the capital of these abominations, came up with plans that saw New Oxford Street and Victoria Street driven through the heart of these slum areas. Their schemes were successful to a degree for the rookeries are no more. But even 150 years later, these new roads may still be said to lack – for want of a better word – soul, perhaps because they came at considerable expense to the once thriving communities they destroyed by their construction.
Rosemary Lane
Tower Hill
AN ANCIENT STREET HARD BY THE TOWER OF London, this was for centuries the home of the Rag Fair, an open market that specialized in the selling of old clothes for the poor of London.
The area was a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, its cramped housing giving refuge to the poor and destitute. Henry Mayhew described it as the lowest part of London, inhabited by ‘dredgers, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, watermen, lumpers, &c., as well as the slop-workers and “sweaters” from the glassworks in the Minories’. Nonetheless, it was to here that the majority of London’s labourers came to buy their clothes. Indeed, George Godwin, writing in London Shadows (1852), found at the Rag Fair all the items a bride might need for her wedding day:
A shift.....1d
A pair of stays..... 2d
A flannel petticoat.....4d
A black Orleans ditto.....4d
A pair of white cotton stockings.....1d
A very good light-coloured cotton gown.....10d
A pair of single-soled slippers, with spring heels.....2d
A double-dyed bonnet, including a neat cap.....2d
A pair of white cotton gloves.....1d
A lady’s green silk paletot, lined with crimson silk, trimmed with black.....10d
[Total] .....3s. 1d.
Among Rosemary Lane’s most famous residents was Richard Brandon, the executioner of Charles I, who lived and died here. The area also birthed a religion in the 1650s, of which the artist William Blake was reportedly a follower. Muggletonianism was founded by two tailors, John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton, who claimed to be the last prophets from the Book of Revelations. Despite the two being whipped and pilloried on the orders of Oliver Cromwell, their religion survived until at least the 1970s, when the group’s last trustee, Philip Noakes, died and bequeathed its archive to the British Library.
Much of the hodge-podge of housing that made up Rosemary Lane was destroyed during the coming of the railways and what remained was renamed Royal Mint Street.
St George’s Fields
Southwark
ST GEORGE’S FIELDS WAS A LARGE AREA OF OPEN LAND south of the river between Lambeth and Southwark, which was once the destination of choice for London’s working people who couldn’t afford the more salubrious resorts at Ranelagh or Vauxhall Gardens.
Often flooded when the Thames tide was at its highest, the Romans had started to ditch and drain the land as far back as the 3rd century. The diarists Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn both described how city-dwellers camped out here with what remained of their property after the Great Fire in 1666. But the area is most famous for the St George’s Field’s Massacre, which occurred on 10 May 1768. When a crowd of Londoners came to free a radical MP, John Wilkes, from King’s Bench Prison, troops opened fire on them, killing seven. Then twelve years later, in 1780, a reported 50,000 people gathered here at the beginning of what became known as the Gordon Riots, which lasted for nearly a week and cost 850 lives. In 1812, James Smith wrote the following lines about the locality:
Saint George’s fields are fields no more;
The trowel supersedes the plough;
Swamps huge and inundate of yore,
Are changed to civic villas now.
Today the fields are completely built over, with St George’s Circus, which leads to the Elephant and Castle, the only reminder of these vast meadows where Londoners used to collect herbs and watercress.
St Paul’s Cathedral
SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN’S ICONIC BUILDING WAS actually the fifth church to be built on this site. The original was constructed in 604 AD by Mellitus, with permission from Ethelbert, King of Kent.
It was rumoured that it had been built on an ancient Roman temple to Diana, though the theory was disproved by Wren when he was digging the foundations for his cathedral. Although he unearthed the remains of a Roman burial site at a depth of 18 feet; it was the Roman custom to bury their dead outside of their city walls, effectively ruling out the presence of a temple at this location.
A second wooden church burnt down here in 962 and a stone one was built to replace it, but fire struck again and razed that building in 1087. It was then that the building of ‘Old St Paul’s’ began. This project was also beset by blazes – another fire destroyed much work in 1136 – and the church was not completed until 1314. Once finished, it was the third largest cathedral in Europe, with a spire rising 149 metres.
Like many religious buildings of the time, it contained a collection of holy relics purportedly including the arms of Mellitus (which were of different sizes), some hair from Mary Magdalene, the blood of St Paul, the milk of the Virgin, the hand of St John, pieces of the skull of Thomas à Becket, and the head and jaw of King Ethelbert.
During a great storm in 1561, the spire was struck by lightning and caught alight. The flames burned furiously downwards for four hours and the bells melted, lead poured down in torrents and the roof fell in. The cathedral stood in ruins but within a month a false roof was erected and by the end of the year, the aisles were leaded in. The spire, however, was never re-erected.
As London’s mother church, St Paul’s was always at the centre of life in the metropolis, although not always in a way that the faithful appreciated. For instance, the Catholic Queen Mary issued an act that forbade the carrying of beer casks and baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit, or leading mules or horses through the cathedral, under pain of fines and imprisonment. Later, Elizabeth I issued a proclamation forbidding affray or the drawing of swords in the church, or shooting a hand-gun within the church or churchyard, under threat of two months’ imprisonment. Soon afterwards, a man who provoked an affray here was set in the pillory in the churchyard and had his ears nailed to a post before they were cut off.
Others met even more severe fates in the church grounds, including four of the Gunpowder Plotters (Digby, Winter, Grant and Bates), who were hung, drawn and quartered here in January 1606. By that time, the building was in a sorry state of repair. Charles I would commission Inigo Jones to carry out extensive repairs but balked at the estimated £22,000 costs, then unwisely allowed his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, to take the stone collected for rebuilding to raise his own palace on the Strand.
St Paul’s was further degraded when Parliamentary soldiers were billeted here. Treating it with little respect, they had to be banned from playing skittles inside, except between the hours of 6 and 9pm. After the Restoration, Wren was invited to submit plans for its rebuilding even before the Great Fire occurred. But the 1666 conflagration completely gutted the dilapidated structure, melting the six acres of lead that covered the roof. John Evelyn’s diary records stones falling from the walls in great cascades and although parts of the structure were considered salvageable, the remains were eventually demolished. Starting from a blank canvas, Wren built the beautiful edifice we have today. Wren once said ‘I build for eternity’ and we must hope that is the case, given the cathedral’s fiery history.
Salmon’s Waxworks
Fleet Street
ORIGINALLY SITED AT THE GOLDEN BALL ON St Martin’s Le Grand, Mrs Salmon’s Waxworks – a precursor to Madame Tussauds, which opened in 1702 – moved to Fleet Street in 1711.
William Hogarth was a regular visitor, as was James Boswell. The collection, which filled six rooms, included likenesses of the kings and queens of England as well as galleries of horrors, myths and the fantastic.
An advertisement for Mrs Salmon’s Waxworks ran in Tatler and specified such attractions as ‘the Turkish Seraglio in wax-work’, ‘the Fatal Sisters that spin, reel, and cut the thread of man’s life’ and ‘an Old Woman flying from Time, who shakes his head and hour-glass with sorrow at seeing age so unwilling to die’. ‘Nothing but life can exceed the motions of the heads, hands, eyes, etc. of these figures,’ the ad assured the reader.
Following Mrs Salmon’s death, the exhibition was run by a surgeon named Clarke. Some of the exhibits were especially grotesque, such as that depicting the execution of Charles I and another showing ‘Margaret, Countess of Heninburgh, lying on a bed of State, with her Three Hundred and Sixty Five Children, all born at one birth’.
Moving to the south side of Fleet Street in 1795, the attraction survived well into the Victorian era. Its last location on Fleet Street can still be seen, though today it is the Prince Henry’s Room museum at No 17.
Silvertown Explosives Factory
West Ham
19 JANUARY 1917 SAW THE BIGGEST EXPLOSION IN London’s history at the Brunner Mond chemical factory at Silvertown, on the northern bank of the Thames in West Ham.
The factory had manufactured caustic soda since it opened in 1893 but with Britain’s Great War effort hampered by a shortage of high explosives, the government ordered Brunner Mond to start making and refining trinitrotoluene (TNT), despite the factory being in a heavily built-up area. Production started in 1915 and by the time of the accident, the factory was processing 9 tons a day.
At 6.52, a small fire broke out, which ignited 50 tons of TNT. The explosion wrought immense devastation, destroying the factory and surrounding warehouses, completely razing 900 houses to the ground and damaging some 70,000 others. Across the river, at the site of today’s O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome), a gasometer containing 7 million cubic feet of gas ignited. The blaze was seen as far away as Guildford and the blast was audible a hundred miles away in Sussex and Norfolk. Seventy-three people were killed in the disaster.
Slang
LONDONERS HAVE ALWAYS HAD A WAY WITH WORDS. We owe a great debt for some wonderful phrases and words that are no longer in common use, and which also tell us much of the habits, street life and prejudices of the times.
Academy A brothel
Acorn The Gallows, from ‘riding the horse sired from an acorn’
Apple dumpling shop A woman’s breasts
Beggar’s bullets Stones, for throwing at the wealthy
Blindman’s holiday Night or darkness
Blue skin Mixed race
Botch A tailor
To box a Jesuit To masturbate
Catch Fart A footman, catching his master’s farts
Dead Chelsea By God! A soldier would shout this after receiving a wound in battle, a reference to the military hospital there.
Chummage Paid by rich prisoners to make their roommates sleep elsewhere, for example, on the stairs
City college Newgate Prison
Clapham A sexually transmitted disease, ‘he went out by Had’em, and came round by Clapham home’
Corinthians Those who visit brothels
Covent Garden Ague Sexually Transmitted Disease
Covent Garden Nun A prostitute
Deadly Nevergreen The gallows, bearing grisly fruit all year round
Derrick The hangman, sometime thought to have given his name to modern-day derricks, lifting mechanisms used at ports etc
Dick During the reign of Queen Dick, that is never
Doll A Bartholomew doll – a slutty over-dressed woman, like the toys sold at Bartholomew Fair
Drury Lane Vestal A prostitute, after the area, formally a major location of the sex trade
Earth Bath The grave
English Burgundy Porter – a stout invented in London
Execution day The day you do the washing
Farting Crackers Trousers
Feague To feague a horse was to stick ginger, or a live eel, up its rectum to make it appear fris
ky before selling it
Friday face During Cromwell’s time it was compulsory to fast on Fridays, a habit that continued after the reformation – hence Friday face
St Giles’ Greek The language of thieves and gypsies, who were mainly said to live in the St Giles area of London
Greenwich barbers The men who dig sand in Greenwich, from their habit of shaving off the sandbanks
Hasty pudding A poor road ‘The way through Wandsworth is quite a hasty pudding’
Holborn Hill Riding backwards up Holborn Hill, to go to the gallows, on the way to Tyburn
Hopping Giles Being disabled, St Giles was the patron saint of the disabled
Irish beauty A woman with two black eyes
Job’s Dock The ward for venereal disease at St Barts
Laystall Dunghills of human waste
Lily White Chimney sweeps
Lion Sending lads to see the lions washed at Tower ditch was a longstanding April fools joke for city dwellers. Sticking two fingers up someone’s nose and pulling was said to make a lion of them
Little Barbary The village of Wapping
Little ease An ancient prison cell in the Guildhall, being so low that a lad could not stand in it, hence little ease
Lost London Page 11