I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  Riverside

  Wine and Fish

  THE IMPRESSIVE FISHMONGERS’ Hall stands on the north bank of the Thames immediately to the west of London Bridge. It was built in 1831 at the same time as Rennie’s London Bridge, a noble Greek Revival building that is a prominent riverside landmark. Among its treasures are Annigoni’s 1954 portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, and the dagger with which Sir William Walworth, head of the Fishmongers’ Company and Lord Mayor of London, stabbed Wat Tyler, the leader of the Peasant’s Revolt, at Smithfield in 1381.

  Immediately to the west of Southwark Bridge is the VINTNERS HALL on a site they have occupied since 1446. It is not too much wine that causes the Vintners to give five cheers for the Queen, instead of three, but rather their commemoration of the ‘Feasting of Five Kings’ when the Kings of England, Scotland, Denmark, France and Cyprus were entertained by the Vintners in 1363. Giving the lie to the myth that the Queen owns all the swans on the Thames, the Vintners also own some of them, along with the Dyers. A representative of the Vintners observes the annual ‘swan-upping’ in July, when all the swans on the river are counted and marked – cygnets belonging to the Vintners are marked with two nicks on the beak. Swans are no longer served at the Vintners’ traditional ‘Swan Feast’, turkey being the preferred substitute.

  Queen Victoria Street

  Family History

  TUCKED AWAY AMONG the office blocks to the west of the wobbly bridge off Queen Victoria Street is a hidden gem, the exquisite little Wren church of ST BENET PAUL’S WHARF, where INIGO JONES (1573–1652), the man who did so much to make London beautiful, is buried with his mother and father. HENRY FIELDING, author of Tom Jones, was married here in 1747, to his first wife’s maid. St Benet’s is the home of the Metropolitan Welsh Church, and services here are often held in Welsh. St Benet’s is also the church of the nearby College of Arms.

  Fishmonger’s Hall

  The COLLEGE OF ARMS occupies an attractive, rambling, 17th-century house that enfolds three sides of a courtyard, and is one of the few historic buildings in the area to have survived the Blitz. Properly called the Corporation of Kings, Heralds and Pursuivants of Arms, it was founded in 1484 by Richard III and is THE OLDEST COLLEGE OF ARMS IN THE WORLD. Anyone wishing to trace their ancestors, or enquire about a coat of arms, can come here and consult the Officer of Waiting.

  St Benet Paul’s Wharf

  Still looming large over the west of the City is the FARADAY BUILDING, once home of THE WORLD’S BIGGEST INTERNATIONAL TELEPHONE EXCHANGE and known as the ‘Citadel’ from the huge concrete buttresses added for protection during the Second World War. Completed in 1932, it was the first building to break the London Building Act’s height restrictions, opening the way for the skyscrapers to follow.

  Blackfriars

  The Play’s the Thing

  BLACKFRIARS IS AN attractive maze of winding cobbled lanes and courtyards, with street names that recall its past. The Blackfriars were Dominican monks who established an important monastery here in the 13th century. After the monastery was closed at the Dissolution, some of the buildings were taken over by the actor James Burbage and his son Richard, and converted into London’s first covered theatre called the BLACKFRIARS PLAYHOUSE, situated where PLAYHOUSE YARD is now. William Shakespeare was a shareholder and no doubt appeared there, and in 1613 the Bard bought himself a house next door, in IRELAND YARD. The theatre was closed down by the Puritans during the Commonwealth and it was to be another 300 years before a new theatre was opened in the City. Playhouse Yard used to be overlooked by the Printing House Square office of THE FIRST DAILY NEWSPAPER IN THE WORLD TO BE PRINTED BY STEAM, The Times.

  In 1959 the actor Bernard Miles and ‘other poor players of London’ were granted the lease of a delapidated Victorian warehouse at Puddle Dock, just across the road from Playhouse Yard, and here established the MERMAID THEATRE. The Mermaid served as a theatre for over 40 years, until the new Millennium, when it was converted into a BBC concert hall and recording studio. PUDDLE DOCK was the birthplace in 1343 of GEOFFREY CHAUCER, author of the first great work in the English language, The Canterbury Tales.

  Blackfriars Bridge

  Left Hanging

  WHEN BLACKFRIARS BRIDGE opened in 1769 it was named William Pitt Bridge, after William Pitt the Elder, but the name never caught on and it has always been referred to as Blackfriars Bridge. The present structure was built in 1869, with the piers designed to resemble pulpits, reflecting the monastic origins of the area. A slightly less salubrious religious connection dates from June 1982, when the body of ROBERTO CALVI, former chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, the Banco Ambrosiano, was found hanging beneath the bridge with five bricks and $14,000 in his pockets. Calvi, known as ‘God’s Banker’ because the Vatican Bank had shares in Banco Ambrosiano, was on the run from Italy accused of embezzling funds, probably in order to pay off the Mafia, to whom he was in some way indebted. After an initial verdict of suicide, a second inquest decided that Calvi had been murdered by the Mafia. In 2005 five suspected members of the Mafia were put on trial in Rome for the murder of Calvi, but all five were acquitted for lack of evidence.

  Well, I never knew this

  ABOUT

  ST PAUL’S

  In 1569 THE FIRST STATE LOTTERY TO BE HELD IN ENGLAND was drawn at the west door of St Paul’s.

  In the 14th century many items at the markets in and around St Paul’s were sold by the ‘St Paul’s foot’, a measurement based on the length of the foot of St Algar, carved on the base of one of the columns near the cathedral entrance. This soon became a standard measurement and was the origin of one ‘foot’ (12 inches or 30.48 cm).

  On a raised platform in Queen Victoria Street are the remains of the 2nd-century Roman TEMPLE OF MITHRAS, dedicated to a Persian god popular with soldiers. This temple, 60 ft (18 m) long and 26 ft (8 m) wide was discovered by the Walbrook in 1954, during excavations for a new office block, and was moved here out of the way. Mithraea were usually built underground to simulate the cave in which Mithras slew the primordial bull, unleashing powers of strength and wisdom into the world.

  The 17th-century font in ST MARTIN WITHIN LUDGATE, half-way up Ludgate Hill on the north side, is carved with a Greek palindrome, Niyon anomhma mh monan oyin, meaning ‘cleanse my sin and not only my face’.

  AMEN COURT is a quite unexpected little enclave of loveliness squeezed in between the Old Bailey and the darkening cliffs of Paternoster Square. A short terrace of creeper-covered 17th-century houses inhabited by the fortunate canons of St Paul’s, Amen Court was the birthplace, in January 1958, of the CAMPAIGN FOR NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT, founded by CANON JOHN COLLINS at his flat there. Present at the occasion were the Labour MPs MICHAEL FOOT and DENIS HEALEY.

  In 1882 the amateur football team CORINTHIANS was founded in the Paternoster Row office of N.I. Jackson, Assistant Honorary Secretary of the Football Association. The aim was to develop a club side that could challenge Scotland at international level, and four years later England drew 1–1 with Scotland with a team that included nine Corinthians. The club dominated the England team for some years thereafter, and in 1894 and 1895 Corinthians twice fielded the full England team. In 1900 they defeated the then Football League Champions Aston Villa 2–1 to lift the Sheriff of London Shield, and in 1904 inflicted Manchester United’s worst ever defeat, 11–3. Real Madrid’s white strip was adopted from the Corinthian strip.

  In 1939 Corinthians merged with the casuals to become Corinthian Casuals.

  The MANSION HOUSE, designed by George Dance the Elder and enlarged by his son George Dance the Younger, has been the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London since 1752. Every year the Chancellor of the Exchequer gives the MANSION HOUSE SPEECH in the vast EGYPTIAN BANQUETING HALL, and this is the only time most people get to see inside what is described as ‘the grandest Georgian palace in London’. Gordon Brown, Labour Chancellor between 1997 and 2007, shocked the City when he displayed his Puritan tendencies by giving the Mansion Hou
se Speech dressed in a casual suit. In 1936 the Mansion House was presented with the one millionth telephone ever made – this one in gold.

  CANNON STREET STATION was opened in 1866 as the new terminus for the South-Eastern Railway, on the site of the Roman Governor’s palace. Covering the platforms was a huge single-span arch, 680 ft (207 m) long and 103 ft (31 m) high. Between the station and the street was the Cannon Street Hotel, where the BRITISH COMMUNIST PARTY was founded on 31 July 1920. In 1931 Labour Party activist Oswald Mosley launched his New (Labour) Party at the same hotel. The following year he disbanded it to found the British Union of Fascists. The hotel was destroyed in the Blitz, along with the great arched roof, and the station was remodelled in the 1960s. All that is left of the original station today are the two brick towers on the river front, which contain water tanks to power the hydraulic lifts in the station.

  Set inconspicuously behind a grill in the wall of 111 Cannon Street, once the site of St Swithun’s Church, is a block of pale limestone known as the LONDON STONE. Most Londoners pass it by, unaware that they are inches from London’s oldest treasure. This nondescript tomb is a sad fate for what was once London’s great talisman. The London Stone sat at the heart of the Roman city. It was where distances were measured from, where Londoners would assemble for important proclamations and events. It was once a common belief that London’s prosperity depended on its safe-keeping, and it just may be the stone from which Arthur drew Excalibur. In any other city such a stone would be celebrated, raised in its own temple and guarded with flaming torches, priestesses and square-jawed warriors. In modern London such reverence is kept for hedge fund managers and the Chairman of Goldman Sachs.

  Moored just upstream of Blackfriars Bridge is HMS PRESIDENT, THE ONLY SURVIVING ‘Q-SHIP’. These were armed vessels constructed by the Royal Navy in the First World War to look like merchant ships and so lure German U-boats to the surface. The Q-ship would then throw back the covers to reveal its guns and try to sink the U-boat before it could dive. HMS President is now used as a venue for events and entertainment.

  FLEET STREET

  TEMPLE – FLEET STREET

  Temple Church, one of only four round churches in England

  Temple

  Rule of Law

  MIDDLE TEMPLE AND Inner Temple where, according to Wordsworth, lawyers ‘look out on waters, walks and gardens green’ are two of the four Inns of Court. The name Temple comes from the Knights Templar, a group of nobles who formed a brotherhood to protect pilgrims travelling to the Holy Land and who established their English headquarters here in the 12th century. The Templars acquired land and wealth throughout Europe so quickly that they attracted the envy of the King of France and the Pope. In 1312 his Holiness decreed that the Templars should be disbanded and their possessions handed over to the less threatening Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John. They in turn leased the ‘inns’, or hostels, to various groups of lawyers needing somewhere to set up their practices. The lawyers were eventually granted the estate in perpetuity by James I.

  Temple Church

  Round Church

  LOST AMID A maze of alleyways and courtyards is the TEMPLE CHURCH, built by the Knights Templar in 1185, in the round style of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. It is ONE OF ONLY FOUR ROUND CHURCHES IN ENGLAND, the others being at Cambridge, Northampton and Little Maplestead in Essex. The west door is one of the finest pieces of Norman work in London, but is rather overshadowed by being hard up against the next-door office block, and is easily missed.

  In 1240 a spacious rectangular choir, described by Pevsner as ‘one of the most perfectly and classically proportioned buildings of the 13th century in England’, was added to the round nave. The Temple Church is also THE ONLY COMPLETE EARLY GOTHIC CHURCH IN THE CITY, having survived the Great Fire. It was damaged in the Blitz but has been sensitively restored.

  On the floor of the round nave is a splendid collection of medieval effigies, no doubt of Knights Templar, whose slumbers in the last few years have been cruelly disturbed by fans of the novel The Da Vinci Code, who regularly besiege the church looking for secret signs and hidden chambers. In 2005 Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou filmed scenes from the movie version of the book here.

  The writer OLIVER GOLDSMITH (1730–74) is buried in the churchyard, and although his tombstone was destroyed in the Blitz, a memorial stone on the north side of the church marks the approximate position of his grave.

  Fleet Street

  News as History

  FLEET STREET GETS its name from the River Fleet, which rises on Hampstead Heath and flows into the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge, most of its journey having been underground. The street’s association with printing began in 1500, when William Caxton’s apprentice WYNKYN DE WORDE brought his press here from Westminster Abbey, and set up shop at the sign of the Sun, just off Shoe Lane. It was a sensible move, as the proximity of St Paul’s Cathedral and Blackfriars monastery meant that there were plenty of book-binders and other essential services already established here. Other printers followed and in 1702 THE WORLD’S FIRST DAILY NEWSPAPER, the DAILY COURANT, was printed in a workshop next door to the King’s Arms Tavern at Fleet Bridge.

  The area to the south of Fleet Street, between Blackfriars and the Temple, once served as a sanctuary for villains on the run, and became infamous for lawlessness and violence. It was known as ALSATIA, after Alsace in Europe, the disputed no man’s land between France and Germany. Daniel Defoe hid out here when, shortly after he had written some seditious pamphlets satirising the government, he spotted ‘wanted’ posters of himself in the taverns of Fleet Street. In the late 19th century, in an attempt to clean the area up, the City authorities started to sell off freehold parcels of land, and this attracted companies wanting to build their own factories, particularly newspaper companies, drawn by Fleet Street’s printing experience. In quick succession, the Evening News, Daily Mirror, News of the World, Daily Mail, News Chronicle, Observer and the Sun all moved into the area, establishing Fleet Street as the home of Britain’s newspaper industry. And so it remained for 100 years until the 1980s, when Rupert Murdoch began the exodus to Docklands, and Fleet Street was left to ponder its future. The last big news agency to leave was Reuters, in 2005.

  Fleet Street has rather lost its allure since the newspapers left, even though the name lives on as a generic term for the national press. Some interesting buildings remain, however, and there are plenty of intriguing alleyways and passages to explore.

  Prince Henry’s Room

  A Noble Ceiling

  ONE OF THE few structures in Fleet Street to survive the Great Fire is a beautiful half-timbered house over the gateway to the Temple, built around 1600 as a tavern. On the first floor is PRINCE HENRY’S ROOM, with one of the finest Jacobean carved ceilings in London. It is decorated with the Prince of Wales’s feathers, probably those of Prince Henry, the son of James I, who was created Prince of Wales in 1610, at the age of 16, but died of typhoid in 1612. Had he lived, there would have been no Charles I and possibly no Civil War. The house now belongs to the Corporation of London and is largely leased as offices, but Prince Henry’s Room is used for exhibitions and is often open to the public.

  Sweeney Todd

  Pie Anyone?

  OPPOSITE, AT NO. 186, SWEENEY TODD, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, had his barber shop. His career as a serial murderer was dramatised by George Dibdin Pitt in 1842, in what is regarded as the first true crime drama, later put to music by Stephen Sondheim. The character of Sweeney Todd is based on the account of a brutal murder in the Daily Courant in 1785, when a young gentleman had his throat cut after being seen talking to a man dressed as a barber. Todd’s victims were shown to a revolving chair poised above a trapdoor, and dispatched with a razor while they were being shaved. The body was then tipped into the cellar where it was cut up and put into the meat pies cooked and sold by Todd’s lover Margery Lovett at her ‘fancy’ pie shop next door.

  Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese />
  Spit and Sawdust

  YE OLDE CHESHIRE Cheese in Wine Office Court, off Fleet Street, was the first new building to open in the area after the Great Fire, and was given the name of the favourite cheese of the time. A cosy warren of dark snugs, it has hardly changed since the 17th century, with sawdust still sprinkled on the floor and ale served through wooden hatches.

  DR JOHNSON was a frequent visitor to the Cheshire Cheese while he was living round the corner at NO. 17 GOUGH SQUARE, a glorious 18th-century red-brick house, where he compiled most of THE FIRST ENGLISH DICTIONARY over nine years from 1746 to 1755. The house is now a museum in his memory and contains his ‘gout chair’ and a first edition of his English Dictionary. In nearby Crane Court the Royal Society had its home from 1710 until 1780.

  St Dunstan in the West

  American Links

  ALMOST UNNOTICED ON the north side of Fleet Street is the grimy façade of the church of ST DUNSTAN IN THE WEST, founded c.1100. WILLIAM TYNDALE (1494–1536), whose unauthorised New Testament was THE FIRST TO BE PRINTED IN ENGLISH and formed the basis of the King James Bible, used to preach here. JOHN DONNE, the poet Dean of St Paul’s, was vicar here, and IZAAK WALTON, author of The Compleat Angler, was a sidesman. Like many of the churches in and around Fleet Street, St Dunstan’s housed a number of publishers in its churchyard, and The Compleat Angler was printed here, as was John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

  St Dunstan’s is THE ONLY CHURCH IN BRITAIN TO POSSESS A CHAPEL OR SHRINE TO SEVEN DIFFERENT CHURCHES OF CHRISTENDOM: the Old Catholics, the Holy Roman and Catholic Church, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Oriental churches, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches and the Anglican Church.