London Urban Legends

by Scott Wood

  The story is of a nineteenth-century vicar at St Peter upon Cornhill who noticed that the planned new building on 54-55 Cornhill impinged on the church’s land by 1ft. The vicar, or verger, disputed this and successfully stopped the building’s construction. The builder, or architect, had to re-draw their plans and, as his revenge, he raised three devils (there’s a smaller one beneath the top demon) onto the building overlooking the church and street to glare down on churchgoers and passers-by. In her own retelling of the story, the Shady Old Lady blog says that ‘the devil closest to the street apparently bears more than a passing resemblance to the unlucky rector’ as an extra twist. The oldest versions of the legend I have found date back to 1950, about fifty-three years after the building’s construction. One, from 22 February of that year, is in Peter Jackson’s compilation of London Evening News cartoons of London history and ephemera, titled London is Stranger than Fiction. It says: ‘Crouching high up on an office building in Cornhill, stone devils glare down at the church of St Peter, below. They were put there by an architect who had just lost a dispute with the church authorities and erected them as a small token of his displeasure.’

  William Kent’s 1951 book, Walks in London, says: ‘If we look across the road at this point we shall see high up on No.54 a devil in stone. A legend says a builder had a feud with the Church and told them to go to the devil. A curse was laid upon him, but defiantly he erected this figure.’

  In 1988, estate agents Baker Harris Saunders published details of 54-55 Cornhill when letting it, which included this urban legend as a piece of local colour. ‘Legend has it that following a disagreement between the owner of the land and the adjacent church […] the owner sought retribution by adorning the building with a crouching devil and a chimera.’ The truth of the legend is fudged and the leaflet gets the church wrong, claiming the dispute was with nearby St Michael’s Cornhill and not neighbouring St Peter’s.

  The idea of a curse only appears in Kent’s book. And was it the landowner, builder or architect who had the devils erected? Is the story true at all? The position of St Peter’s is a strange one, with the entrance to the church squashed between offices and a sandwich shop for city workers. To our twenty-first century eyes, having places of commerce built into sacred places seems odd but it was common in the City in earlier times. An image of nearby St Ethelburga’s Church on Bishopsgate, held at Bishopsgate Institute, shows shops built into the front of the church. At present, St Stephen’s Walbrook and St Mary Woolnoth each have a Starbucks built into their flanks.

  The Builder is a trade magazine for the building industry and lists every legal dispute to a building project, but does not mention St Peters or 54-55 Cornhill in its index over that period. The 1889–90 vestry minute book of St Peter Cornhill does list interactions between the church authorities and the architects of the current, devil-infested building, Walker & Runtz. They had recently acquired 54-55 Cornhill on behalf of a client, Mr Hugh H. Gardener, and they had found the original building to be ‘somewhat shallow’. On October 1891 they wrote to St Peter’s requesting a lease for 578ft of land where the old vestry building and lavatories stood, into which they could extend 54-55 Cornhill in exchange for £290 per annum. Walker & Runtz suggested that this money could be used to build a new vestry on another part of the site. After considerable discussion, the request was passed to the rector and churchwarden, who were ‘of the opinion that no sufficient reason has been shown to justify them in recommending the scheme for the favourable consideration of the vestry’.

  On 19 April 1892, Walker & Runtz served St Peter’s with a party wall notice. Such a notice is given in a dispute over a boundary wall when it encroaches too far onto someone’s property. The vestry were concerned enough to consider the cost of moving their wall back. So a dispute took place before the current 54-55 Cornhill was constructed; so far so mythical.

  Walker & Runtz applied for the chance to buy 111.5ft of land to the west of the vestry, and this time the proposal was entertained. The money raised from the sale funded a new secure strong room for the church in which to keep their communion plate (before then a warden was taking it home to keep it safe) along with other improvements. After a meeting regarding the sale, the Ecclesiastical Commission made the decision to use the funds for the ‘aid of the living’.

  Pages 110–119 of the minute book have a report on the whole process of the sale, signed off by the rector on 25 October 1895. Once the Ecclesiastical Commission had approved the sale everything went smoothly: the Corporation of London approved it, and after the old building on 54-55 Cornhill had been demolished, the area of land was re-measured and sold. The report states that St Peter’s has benefitted from the sale of ground that was previously used to keep lumber with its new strong room, improved lavatories and cloisters, as well as a fund to aid the living.

  And that, as far as St Peter’s minute book is concerned, is that, until 9 April 1901 when they received £150 for an increase in height of 54-55 Cornhill. There is no further mention of 54-55 Cornhill, and no mention at all of its devilish decorations.

  Enter the Ceramicist

  The man who sculpted the demons was William James Neatby (1860–1910). Neatby was an architect who turned to ceramics, creating some amazing tiles and building façades. He is most famed for the tiles entitled The Chase, which depicts various hunting scenes in the meat hall in Harrods, including speared ducks and captured boars. He could also do symbolic images, such as the Spirit of Literature on the front of the Everard Building in Bristol, a former print works. The spirit, in the form of a woman, has Guttenberg and his successor, William Morris, on either side of her. A grotesque dragon hangs from one drainpipe.

  Neatby could also do the bizarre. The Turkey Cafe in Leicester is just that: his signature blending of Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts-style ceramics with a regal turkey perched at the top, its tail feathers radiating from its rear like sunbeams.

  Neatby is a fascinating and mostly forgotten figure, but he is often praised in architectural journals. In The Studio, J. Burnard enthuses about his ‘vivid imagination a handicraftsmen who has thoroughly mastered the ways and means of his materials’.

  Louise Irvine, writing in the Architectural Review in 1977, declared that ‘many terracotta buildings in London and elsewhere reveal his influence and could even be him but, as yet, the necessary documentary evidence has not yet come to light’.

  Neatby himself comes across as an enigmatic character; passionate but somehow severe. He could not see the point of impressionism and his style is a robust yet sensual combination of pre-Raphaelite, Art Nouveau, Art & Crafts and more. He used his first wife Emily, described as having ‘delicate features and slender figure’, as the model for his ‘almost burlesque’ tile decorations for the Winter Gardens in Blackpool. But Irvine twice tells, in different journals, the story that he was so jealous of other possible suitors for his wife that he kept her locked up at home with the blinds down.

  Rather than a jobbing ceramicist for building exteriors, Neatby is often called an artist who is unable to express himself through his commissions, though another article suggests that The Chase was created so quickly for Harrods that he could not have consulted the client too closely. The devils on 54-55 Cornhill follow his trademark images that stop anyone looking at them in their tracks. They also resemble the grotesques he created for the exterior of another London building, the Fox & Anchor pub on Charterhouse. There are foxes on this stunning building, described to me by a Blue Badge guide as London’s only Art Nouveau pub, but they have demonic faces and huge yowling maws. They are more similar to the hyena-like creature on Cornhill than a fox.

  If not revenge, then why are there three devils on 54-55 Cornhill? One could answer ‘why not’? Neatby was an eclectic and evocative artist who, like other designers, decided to put gargoyle-like creatures on one of the façades he was designing. This was his first large piece in London and it is possible that he would want to make a lasting impression. It is a credit t
o his talent that the impression he makes is still so shocking.

  Demonic Cornhill

  If that explanation does not suit some, then I can offer some speculation. Cornhill’s fame as the highest point in the City may have inspired Neatby, or the people who commissioned him, to represent the bible story of the Devil tempting Jesus by taking him up high and offering him the world. Perhaps the top demon on 54-55 Cornhill is the Devil waiting on the highest peak to tempt others.

  Cornhill has its own demonic history too. There is a satanic legend attached to the previously mentioned St Michael’s Cornhill, retold in the Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, of a stormy night in the sixteenth century and a group of bell-ringers who were horrified by an ‘ugly shapen sight’ that floated through one window and over to another. The bell-ringers fainted and awoke to find claw marks in the stonework which became known as the Devil’s claw-marks. This devilish calling card was annihilated in the Great Fire of London, but it may be that Neatby was referring to this legend with his sculptors. There are also rumours that the self-styled devil worshipping decadents of the Hellfire Club met in the nearby George & Vulture eating house. This side of Cornhill has enough satanic geography for any myth-maker or rogue Blue Badge guide to weave a spooky story.

  The problem in trying to prove that something did not happen is that evidence for a non-event is a tenuous and circumstantial thing to try and find. It’s like investigating a crime that may not have happened by looking for a gun that is not smoking. It is almost certainly true that the demons of Cornhill are a striking piece of decoration and nothing more; they were not put there as any sort of revenge. The nearest thing I have found to a non-smoking gun on this is an illustration of 54-55 Cornhill which appeared in 29 June 1894 issue of The Architect. It is an architect’s drawing of the building, giving it the name ‘Tudor Chambers’, published after its completion but not from life. The devils on the top and corner of the building are not the robust and grotesque creatures we have now, but winged, dragon-like beasts which are small and unimposing compared to Neatby’s devils. This would suggest that Runtz, the architect and so the person with the biggest axe to grind against St Peter’s Church, did not plan to have monsters gazing down on to the building. It was the talented ceramicist he employed for the façade that created the demons, for show rather than revenge.

  Satirical Stone Faces

  I have a friend who lives on Telegraph Hill, who is a keen local historian of south-east London. One night in the pub he told me that the stone faces carved over all the houses on the hill were representations of the German Royal Family. This did make some sense; the houses on the hill were almost all built between 1877 and 1899 when London had a large German community, many of whom were labourers. Perhaps when faced with hundreds of identical houses to erect, with space for an individual carving, a German stonemason or two couldn’t resist chiselling a caricature of the monarchs from home. My friend, known as Neil Transpontine after his blog, sipped his beer again and completed the tale: during the anti-German riots at the start of the First World War, many of these stone faces were defaced by the angry English mob. This is why some houses on Telegraph Hill are missing their royal heads.

  I left the story there, until a few years later I found a similar story in Peter Jackson’s London is Stranger than Fiction. The entry for 22 February described the southern turret of St Giles’ Church in Camberwell. St Giles’ is the parish church of Camberwell and the architect of the building was Gilbert Scott. The turret bore gargoyles that were said to represent the political figures Lord Randolph Churchill, Gladstone, Lord Salisbury and Lord John Russell, as well as the politician and abolitionist William Wilberforce. I used to live opposite St Giles’ but never noticed these carvings, so I went back to take a look. They may well have been public figures, but now time and rainfall have worn them, and their legend, away. I asked the vicar of St Giles’, the Revd Nick George, about them but he knew nothing of the carvings or their history. He did enjoy the interesting story though.

  Another stone grotesque with a story to tell is the ‘hideous head of an old woman’ on the right-hand side of the second window of the western outer wall of Mitcham parish church. The story, collected in James Clark’s Strange Mitcham, tells of how the mason carving the corbels to support the church’s windows had to do so with constant criticism from an old local woman. Eventually, the old woman found herself immortalised in stone by the mason.

  Author William Kent’s description of the urban myth origin of the Cornhill Devils is the second earliest after Peter Jackson’s. Kent wrote at least a dozen books on London and in The Lost Treasures of London, a 1947 walk through the post-Blitz streets, he recounts a similar story to the Cornhill Devils that is linked to St Luke’s Church on Old Street: ‘It has sometimes been known locally as “lousy St Luke’s” from a tradition regarding the weather vane. The story goes that the builder, peeved by “parsimonious treatment”, placed a representation of a louse on the top of the tower.’

  Kent went with a pair of field glasses and was ‘inclined to accept the story’. This does not make the whole story true, however. Returning after the war to the bomb-damaged church, he noted that the louse was now gone, and presumed it had been taken during the war for its metal. The website for the London Symphony Orchestra, who now use the renovated St Luke’s as a venue, has a contradictory quote about the weather vane from local resident John Mason: ‘On top of the church there’s a brass vane, and people in the area thought it was a louse, that’s why they call it Lousy St Luke’s … When they took it down I had a look at it; it had a beautiful red eye. After all these years the truth has come out – it’s a dragon.’

  The story of the revenge of the architect, stonemason or builder who hides an insult in the building he is designing or constructing has travelled across central and south London. It can be used to explain something strange or striking about buildings such as an extra-ugly stone carving, gargoyles with familiar faces or a weather vane that looks like an insect. That the story is best known around the Cornhill Devils is a testament to their visual power and their overbearing presence in such a bustling location.

  10

  THE MISADVENTURES OF BRANDY NAN

  * * *

  I suspect there are further legends of this kind.

  Jan Harold Brunvand, Curses! Broiled Again!

  * * *

  QUEEN ANNE (1665–1714), who reigned from 1702 to 1714, is best known for being the last Stuart monarch; the first monarch who had to deal with a two-party parliament system; being monarch during the Act of Union; lending her name to a style of table; and her romantic friendship with Sarah Jennings. In her own time she was known for a different perceived vice: she was known to love a drink and stories were spread of her hiding brandy in a teapot to disguise the amount she drank. She even gained the nickname ‘Brandy Nan’ for her love of the spirit. In 1712 a statue was erected of her, standing in front of the main entrance to St Paul’s Cathedral to commemorate its completion in the ninth year of her reign and, presumably, greet arrivals to St Paul’s. Grand intentions are often muddied by the irreverent and, according to the tale, the drink-loving queen’s statue was gazing across the road at a pub. A rhyme was composed and scrawled on the statue which went:

  Brandy Nan, Brandy Nan, they left you in the lurch,

  With your face to the gin shop, your back to the church.

  Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, a bronze statue was erected to Mormon pioneer Brigham Young, standing with his back to the Mormon temple and his hand stretched out toward a bank. In an essay on Mormon humour it is suggested this mistake, if it was a mistake and not another sly designer’s comment, provokes a sort of self-deprecating humour amongst Mormons who are required to tithe one tenth of their income to the Church. And that perhaps Young and other elders were more interested in the money of the Church of Latter-day Saints, and that LDS actually stands for ‘lay down your silver’. There is even a rhyme that goes with the st
atue:

  There stands Brigham, like a bird on a perch.

  His hand to the bank and his back to the church.

  In his book Curses! Broiled Again!, Jan Harold Brunvand repeated the Brigham Young song and also found a statue of Scottish poet Robert Burns in Dunedin, New Zealand, standing in The Octagon, the city centre plaza, with his back to St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral and facing the ‘commercial section of the city’. He correctly writes that he suspects there are more of the same legends elsewhere. I suppose it makes sense not to have a statue facing into a church with its back to arrivals, and with the famous figure looking outwards on to the material world, there is bound to be something inappropriate and unsuitable for their gaze to fall upon. I think it is human nature to comment on the juxtaposition between the two, but the rhyme that links Queen Anne and Brigham Young is a curious one, without pointing out that this must be the only thing linking these two historical figures. I would say the Salt Lake City rhyme follows the London one, though I have not found conclusive evidence for this, and I am sure any book on Salt Lake City urban legends may beg to differ. The Queen Anne statue is older, however: Brigham’s bronze went up in 1847 and I am inclined to think that this urban legend migrated from England to America in this instance and not the other way around.