I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  THE MUSEUM OF LONDON at London Wall is THE LARGEST URBAN HISTORY MUSEUM IN THE WORLD.

  Located at 22–24 Bishopsgate, the BISHOPSGATE TOWER, also know as THE PINNACLE, at 945 ft (288 m) high is the TALLEST BUILDING IN THE CITY, and the second tallest building in Britain after the Shard of Glass (see Shard of Glass).

  EDWARD ALLEYN (1566–1626), acting contemporary of William Shakespeare and founder in 1619 of Dulwich College, was christened at ST BOTOLPH WITHOUT BISHOPSGATE in 1566. In 1795 the poet JOHN KEATS was christened there, having been born in a stable at the Swan and Hook pub off Moorgate, where his father was the chief ostler, or stable manager. The pub is now helpfully called The John Keats at Moorgate.

  THE BARBICAN, built in brutal brown concrete throughout the 1960s and 70s, is THE ONLY RESIDENTIAL ESTATE IN THE CITY. When completed, the residential tower blocks, at over 400 ft (120 m) high, were THE HIGHEST APARTMENT BLOCKS IN EUROPE.

  MILTON STREET, leading from the Barbican to Chiswell Street, was originally called Grub Street. Dr Johnson described it as ‘much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet’. Today the word is used as a term for impoverished authors or hacks and their work.

  Just around the corner from LIVERPOOL STREET station is one of the City’s prettiest and most unusual buildings, based on the 19th-century shrine at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It was built as a Turkish bath but is now an Indian restaurant and adds a touch of the exotic to the bland modern surroundings.

  THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO, written by Karl Marx, WAS FIRST PRINTED BY J. E. BURGHARD AT 46 LIVERPOOL STREET in 1848.

  DIRTY DICK’S at No. 202 Bishopsgate has been a pub since 1804. The name refers to the nickname of a previous owner, Nathaniel Bentley, who refused to wash or clean up after the death of his fiancée on the eve of their wedding, and for the rest of his life lived in squalor. The detritus, including the remnants of Bentley’s untouched wedding breakfast and his dead cats, were displayed in the pub until health and safety ordered their removal in the 1980s.

  Before the time of Shakespeare, plays were performed in the courtyard of the BULL INN in BISHOPSGATE. In 1574 one of the actors, JAMES BURBAGE (1531–97), became THE FIRST ENGLISHMAN TO OBTAIN A THEATRICAL LICENCE, from Elizabeth I, and in 1576 he built ‘The Theatre’, in Shoreditch, THE VERY FIRST ENGLISH THEATRE. This was the blueprint for the Globe Theatre which his son Richard would later build on the south bank.

  ST PAUL’S

  ST PAUL’S – OLD BAILEY – MANSION HOUSE – BLACKFRIARS

  St Paul’s Cathedral, England’s only domed cathedral

  St Paul’s Cathedral

  Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice

  ‘IF YOU SEEK his memorial, look around you.’ So reads Sir Christopher Wren’s epitaph in ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, his masterpiece and THE ONLY RENAISSANCE CATHEDRAL IN ENGLAND.

  This is the fifth cathedral to stand on top of Ludgate Hill, in domination over the City. Earlier still the Romans are said to have built a temple here, dedicated to Diana. The first cathedral, made of wood, was founded in 604 and dedicated to St Paul by England’s first Christian King, Ethelbert of Kent. This was rebuilt in stone but burned down by the Vikings in 962. The third Saxon cathedral was destroyed by fire in 1087 and was replaced by the Normans, over a 200-year period, with Old St Paul’s, over 600 ft (180 m) in length, THE LONGEST AND LARGEST CATHEDRAL IN ENGLAND. The spire, completed in 1315, was 489 ft (149 m) high, THE SECOND TALLEST SPIRE EVER BUILT at the time, after that of Lincoln Cathedral, which reached 525 ft (160 m) in 1307. In 1377 John Wycliffe was tried for heresy in St Paul’s, and Richard II lay in state there in 1400. HENRY V prayed at the High Altar before going to France in 1415, and on his return gave thanks there for victory at Agincourt. In 1501 Henry VII’s eldest son PRINCE ARTHUR married CATHERINE OF ARAGON in St Paul’s amid much pomp and ceremony.

  In 1561 the spire was felled by lightning and never replaced, and in the Great Fire of 1666 the entire cathedral was reduced to ashes. SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN was commissioned to build a new St Paul’s, and while picking through the ruins of the old church he came across part of a shattered tomb-stone, on which was carved the word Resurgam, meaning ‘I shall rise again’. On 21 June 1675 he placed that stone to mark the centre spot of the new dome, and on the pediment of the south door he had the word Resurgam sculpted underneath a phoenix rising from the flames.

  The new cathedral took 35 years to build, and in 1710, when Sir Christopher Wren was 78, he was there to watch as his son was raised in a basket to the summit of the dome to place the final stone.

  When making the dome, Wren had to overcome an architectural conundrum. If the dome was to be lofty enough to impress from the outside, it would then be too big for the interior. His solution was to build three domes: a smaller one to be seen from inside, a brick cone to support the ball and cross on top, and the famous outer dome, timber-framed and covered with lead.

  St Paul’s Cathedral is still THE ONLY DOMED CATHEDRAL IN ENGLAND. The tip of the golden cross over the dome stands 365 ft (111 m) above the city streets, and there are majestic views from the golden gallery just beneath, which involves a climb of 627 steps. The dome itself, with a span of 122 ft (37 m), is THE THIRD LARGEST CHURCH DOME IN THE WORLD, after Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence and St Peter’s in Rome, and is an iconic symbol of London, most memorably when seen rising above the smoke during the Blitz in a famous black-and-white photograph of the period. St Paul’s survived the Blitz owing to the heroics of the St Paul’s Watch, a band of men and women who stood by, night after night, to douse fires and ward off or defuse any incendiaries that came close.

  The inner cupola of the dome, 218 ft (66 m) above the floor, is decorated with monochrome frescoes telling the story of St Paul, painted by Sir James Thornhill. While working on the project Thornhill stepped back further and further to admire his work, and was only prevented from falling off the scaffolding by an apprentice who deliberately smudged the paintwork, provoking Thornhill to spring forward with a cry of rage.

  Running around the inside of the inner dome, 100 ft (30 m) above the cathedral floor, is a walkway known as the ‘WHISPERING GALLERY’, so named because a whisper on one side can be heard quite clearly on the other side, 112 ft (34 m) away.

  The only monument from Old St Paul’s to survive the fire was that of the poet JOHN DONNE, Dean of St Paul’s from 1621 until his death in 1631. It now stands in the south aisle.

  ‘Love built on beauty, soon as beauty, dies …’

  ‘No man is an island, entire of itself …’

  Quotes from John Donne

  The CRYPT of St Paul’s is unique in that it covers the same floor space as the main body of the cathedral and is consequently THE LARGEST CRYPT IN EUROPE. One of the first occupants was Sir Christopher Wren himself, his tomb marked by a plain black marble slab. Also lying in the same area, known as ‘Painters’ Corner’, are Lord Leighton (1830–96), Sir Edwin Landseer (1802–73), Sir John Millais (1829–96), J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) and William Holman Hunt (1827–1910).

  Placed immediately below the centre of the dome is the tomb of LORD NELSON, whose coffin is made from the mainmast of L’Orient, the French flagship at the Battle of the Nile. His sarcophagus of black-and-white marble was originally intended for Cardinal Wolsey, but was confiscated by Henry VIII and put in storage. Towards the east end of the crypt is the tomb of the DUKE OF WELLINGTON, victor of Waterloo, who was buried here in 1852.

  Upstairs in the apse, behind the altar at the east end of the cathedral is the AMERICAN MEMORIAL CHAPEL, commemorating members of the US forces based in Britain who died defending liberty during the Second World War. The American Roll of Honour, presented by General Eisenhower in 1951, contains 28,000 names.

  St Paul’s Cathedral is the seat of the Bishop of London but is also a venue for important national occasions. The state funerals of Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellin
gton and Sir Winston Churchill were held at St Paul’s, as were services to mark the end of the First and Second World Wars and the Falklands War and a service of commemoration for 9/11. St Paul’s also hosted Queen Victoria’s Jubilee celebrations, the wedding in 1981 of Charles, Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer and, most recently, thanksgiving services for both the Golden Jubilee and 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II.

  The two towers at the west end were added in 1707. The north-west tower contains THE SECOND LARGEST RING OF BELLS IN THE WORLD, while the south-west tower houses GREAT PAUL, THE BIGGEST BELL IN BRITAIN, which rings out over London at 1 p.m. every day. There is also a splendid Geometrical Staircase of 92 spiralling steps here, leading up to the cathedral library.

  Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral was built on coal, for, like most of the rebuilding of the City, the cathedral was funded by a specially introduced Coal Tax.

  St Paul’s Churchyard

  Little Goody Two Shoes

  ST PAUL’S CHURCHYARD, much of which is now laid out as a garden, was once home to ST PAUL’S SCHOOL, founded in 1509 by Dean Colet of St Paul’s, and at the time THE LARGEST SCHOOL IN ENGLAND. It provided free education for 153 pupils, which was the number of fishes caught by Peter in the ‘miraculous draught’ described in St John’s Gospel. St Paul’s scholars still on occasion wear silver fish in their buttonholes. Among those who attended St Paul’s before it moved to Hammersmith at the end of the 19th century, and then to Barnes, were John Milton, Samuel Pepys, Judge Jeffreys, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough and the astronomer Edmond Halley.

  In 1606 Guy Fawkes and some of his co-conspirators were hung, drawn and quartered in the churchyard for plotting to blow up James I and Parliament.

  St Paul’s churchyard was also a great market-place for booksellers and publishers, many of whom had shops or stalls in Paternoster Row, along the north side. A celebrated publisher who conducted business there in the first half of the 18th century, described in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield as ‘the philanthropic publisher of St Paul’s churchyard’, was JOHN NEWBERY, THE VERY FIRST PUBLISHER OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS. Among his ‘Juvenile Library’ was Little Goody Two Shoes, written anonymously by Goldsmith.

  During the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, when the city was full of masons, a number of masonic lodges established themselves around St Paul’s, and in 1717 four of these lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron in St Paul’s Churchyard to form THE FIRST GRAND LODGE. The Goose and Gridiron stood on the site of LONDON’S FIRST MUSIC-HALL, THE MITRE.

  Paternoster Square

  Temple Bar Returns

  TO THE NORTH of the cathedral is PATERNOSTER SQUARE, bombed in the Blitz and brutally fashioned during the 1960s into one of the great eyesores of London. It has since been more sympathetically redeveloped, and among the organisations who now occupy one of the swish new office blocks is the LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE, which moved there in 2004.

  That same year also saw the return to London of THE ONLY SURVIVING CITY GATE, TEMPLE BAR, which now stands at the entrance to Paternoster Square. Temple Bar was designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1672 and stood outside the Temple at the City boundary, where Fleet Street meets the Strand and where the monarch traditionally stops to ask permission to enter the City. In 1878 Temple Bar was taken down and re-erected in Hertfordshire as a gateway to Theobalds, the country estate of Sir Henry Meux, the brewer, and gradually fell into a state of neglect. In 2003 it was brought back to London and restored and was unveiled by the Lord Mayor on 10 November 2004.

  Old Bailey

  On Trial

  THE CENTRAL CRIMINAL Court, known as the OLD BAILEY from the street on which it stands, was built on the site of the Sessions House for the in famous NEWGATE PRISON, in 1907. The first murder trial heard here in that year was that of HORACE RAYNER, accused of murdering William Whiteley, the owner of Whiteley’s department store in Bayswater. Rayner claimed to be Whiteley’s illegitimate son, but when he confronted Whiteley at his office, the older man apparently denied all knowledge of Rayner, at which point Rayner shot him dead. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but was eventually released by public demand.

  Famous trials held here have included those of OSCAR WILDE (in the old Sessions House in 1895), DR CRIPPEN in 1910, WILLIAM JOYCE, ‘LORD HAW-HAW’, in 1945, JOHN CHRISTIE of 10 Rillington Place in 1953, and STEPHEN WARD, the osteopath at the centre of the Profumo affair, during whose trial Mandy Rice Davies, when told that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her, gave the now legendary reply, ‘Well he would, wouldn’t he?’

  Other notable trials have included those of the Kray twins in 1969 and Peter Sutcliffe, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, in 1981.

  St Mary-le-Bow

  Bow Bells

  ON THE CORNER of Bow Street and Cheapside stands the Wren church of ST MARY-LE-BOW, recorded in 1087 as one of the first stone churches in London. The crypt dates from 1090 and is THE OLDEST ECCLESIASTICAL STRUCTURE IN THE CITY. It is from the bow shape of the arches of the crypt that the church gets its name. Until 1847 this was one of 13 City ‘peculiars’, owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and beyond the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. Since the 13th century the COURT OF ARCHES, the Church of England’s highest court of appeal, has met here, again taking its name from the crypt’s arches.

  The tower of St Mary-le-Bow is 222 ft (68 m) high, THE SECOND HIGHEST OF WREN’S TOWERS after St Bride’s, and houses the famous BOW BELLS. In 1392 a disillusioned DICK WHITTINGTON was starting to climb Highgate Hill on his way to find his fortune elsewhere, when the sound of Bow Bells came floating across the fields, calling him to turn back and try his luck again in London. He did return and became Lord Mayor four times. In the 1990s tests were carried out to see if the bells really could be heard as far away as Highgate, and using wind and weather data it was proven that, before the days of traffic noise and high-rise buildings, the chimes would have been clearly audible from Dick Whittington’s stone at the bottom of Highgate Hill.

  ‘“I do not know,” says the Great Bell of Bow’ is the final, booming line from the nursery rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’, and in the 14th century the GREAT BELL OF BOW was used to sound the City curfew. This is the origin of the belief that only those born within the sound of Bow Bell can count themselves true Cockneys. Cockney comes from the Middle English word ‘cock-eney’ meaning ‘a cock’s egg’. This was a term used to describe a small, malformed egg as sometimes laid by younger hens, and hence applied to a simpleton or ignoramus, which is how country folk saw townspeople, ignorant as they were of country ways.

  During the Second World War the BBC World Service used a recording of Bow Bells during broadcasts to occupied Europe.

  In medieval times a gallery was set up on the St Mary’s church tower, from which prominent people could watch jousts and parades in Cheapside. In 1331, during celebrations to mark the birth of the Black Prince, the balustrade collapsed, sending Queen Philippa and her ladies tumbling into the crowd. Luckily she was not seriously hurt. When Wren rebuilt the church after the Great Fire, he added a balcony in memory of that old gallery, and this was retained by architect Laurence King when he reconstructed the tower in the late 1950s, after it had been badly damaged in the Blitz. At the same time the Bow Bells were recast from the original metal.

  St Mary Aldermary

  Only Fans

  A LITTLE FURTHER down Cannon Street is ST MARY ALDERMARY which, as the name suggests, is the oldest church of St Mary in the City. It boasts the most magnificent square tower, a Wren copy of the Tudor original of c.1520. It is THE ONLY SURVIVING WREN CHURCH IN THE CITY OF LONDON BUILT IN THE GOTHIC STYLE and was probably restored in its previous form at the request of the parishioners, who were rich enough not to have to rely on the Coal Tax. St Mary Aldermary is THE ONLY PARISH CHURCH IN ENGLAND TO POSSESS A COMPLETE FAN VAULT, and it is both unexpected and unbelievably gorgeous.

  John Milton was married to his third wife Elizabeth Minshull here in 1663. Commemorate
d by a tablet in the south-west corner, moved here from the demolished church of St Antholin, is a former Rector of that church, the Revd Richard Johnson (died 1827), who was THE FIRST CHAPLAIN TO NEW SOUTH WALES in Australia, and who built the colony’s first church with his own hands.

  St Stephen Walbrook

  ‘The pride of English architecture’

  SIR JOHN SUMMERSON

  ST STEPHEN WALBROOK is the loveliest Wren church in the City, ‘famous all over Europe and justly reputed the masterpiece of the celebrated Sir Christopher Wren’, according to the 1734 Critical Review of Publick Buildings. The interior is a rich, sublime, cream-coloured space that seamlessly knits square classical proportions and columns with BRITAIN’S FIRST AND MOST PERFECT ROMAN DOME, without doubt the prototype for the dome of St Paul’s.

  Nothing on the outside can prepare you for what is to come. The beauty of the interior draws you back again and again, just to see it one more time. (There is no place in London where it is more satisfying to sit and wonder.) At the centre of the church is a block of pale white Travertine stone, gently rounded by HENRY MOORE to form an altar. It somehow works, although there are those who prefer to call it the ‘Camembert’. HENRY PENDLETON, the flighty ‘Vicar of Bray’, was an incumbent of St Stephen’s, as was CHAD VARAH, who set up the SAMARITANS here in 1953. In a vault beneath the church lies SIR JOHN VANBRUGH (1664–1726), playwright and architect of Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.