I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  The solid, brown fortress-like building immediately to the south of the Arch is the Citadel, a bomb-proof bunker built for the Admiralty during the Second World War, and running beneath the Mall is a network of tunnels connecting Buckingham Palace to the Foreign Office and the great departments of State, including No. 10 Downing Street. The Prime Minister of the day can visit the Palace in total secret, should this prove necessary. Look for the extractor fan outside the Institute of Contemporary Art.

  The INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, at the foot of the Duke of York’s steps, was founded in 1947 along the lines of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The Institute moved here in 1968 and DAMIEN HIRST’S FIRST EXHIBITION was staged here in 1992.

  CLARENCE HOUSE was rebuilt by John Nash for William, Duke of Clarence, who became William IV in 1830. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, lived there for nearly 50 years from 1953 until her death in 2002. It is now the home of Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Duchess of Cornwall.

  LANCASTER HOUSE was originally built by Benjamin Wyatt for George III’s second son Frederick, Duke of York, in 1825. After passing through many hands, including those of the Duke of Sutherland, it eventually became the home of 1st Viscount Leverhulme, who named it Lancaster House after his home county. Between 1913 and 1946 it was the home of the London Museum but is now run as a government conference centre.

  Buckingham Palace

  Largest Royal Palace

  BUCKINGHAM PALACE SITS where James I once had a mulberry garden. In 1703 John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham, built Buckingham House on the site and this was acquired by George III in 1762 as a private residence where he could get away from the court at St James’s. George IV commissioned John Nash to enlarge Buckingham House into a palace but died before the work was completed, as did his brother William IV. Queen Victoria was the first monarch to use Buckingham Palace as an official residence. In 1847 Edward Blore enclosed the courtyard with the east front, facing the Mall, and this required the removal of the Marble Arch. The 610 ft (186 m) east front was refaced with Portland stone in 1913 as part of Sir Aston Webb’s improvements.

  When the Queen is in residence, the Royal Standard flies from the palace flagpole. She certainly was in residence in July 1982 when she woke up to find a confused labourer called Michael Fagan sitting on the end of her bed. He accidentally wandered into the royal bedroom, he later said, while looking for his father ‘Rudolf Hess’, after having broken in at four o’clock in the morning and wandered the empty corridors, trying out various thrones for size and breakfasting on the royal corgis’ dog food. The Queen, having rung her alarm bell, sat up in bed and chatted to Fagan for 30 minutes before the police finally put in an appearnace.

  Buckingham Palace is THE LARGEST ROYAL PALACE IN BRITAIN and the gardens, where there is still a descendant of one of James I’s mulberry trees, are THE LARGEST PRIVATE GARDENS IN LONDON.

  St James’s Park

  A Noble View

  ST JAMES’S PARK was laid out as a deer park by Henry VIII in 1532 and was THE FIRST ROYAL PARK IN LONDON. James I kept a menagerie here which included camels, crocodiles, elephants and an aviary of exotic birds along what is now called Birdcage Walk. Charles II, on his return from exile in France, had the park designed in a more formal French style and opened to the public. It remains THE ONLY LARGE LONDON PARK NOT TO BE ENCLOSED BY RAILINGS. In 1664 the Russian Ambassador presented Charles with a pair of pelicans whose descendants are still a popular attraction in the park today. In 1837 the Ornithological Society of London gave some birds to the park and put up a cottage for the birdkeeper on an island at the east end of the lake. The ornate little house remains, almost hidden under shrubs and flowers, and is still used by the birdkeeper.

  The view east from the bridge across the lake is one of the most romantic and unusual in London, an almost Oriental vista of the domes and pinnacles and turrets that never fails to astonish and delight. To the west, Buckingham Palace peeps out through the trees. At one time the lake was bridged here by one of London’s earliest suspension bridges, built in 1857, but it was pulled down and replaced with the present concrete structure in 1957.

  Waterloo Place

  Grand Old Duke of York

  WATERLOO PLACE GIVES a good view over the gardens of some of the palatial Gentlemen’s Clubs that line Pall Mall.

  The mounting block in Waterloo Place was put there for the Duke of Wellington. He would often ride over to visit his favourite club, the United Service Club, which was LONDON’S FIRST SERVICE CLUB, founded after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. It closed down in 1976 and the premises, on the corner of Waterloo Place and Pall Mall, is now the headquarters of the Institute of Directors.

  High up on his column, at the end of Waterloo Place, stands the ‘GRAND OLD DUKE OF YORK’, who ‘had 10,000 men, and marched them up to the top of the hill and marched them down again’. He was the second son of George III, and when he was six months old his father arranged for him to become the Bishop of Osnabrück, making him THE YOUNGEST BISHOP EVER. He was Commander-in-Chief of the Army throughout the Napoleonic Wars and remained so until 1827, but died £2 million in debt, so his column had to be paid for by docking a day’s pay from every officer and soldier in the Army. The column is 124 ft (38 m) tall – high enough, it was said, for the Duke to escape his creditors. Inside, a flight of 169 steps leads up to a viewing platform, but this is not open to the public.

  Carlton House Terrace

  A Little Patch of Nazi Germany

  CARLTON HOUSE TERRACE was built in 1832 by John Nash on the site of the Prince Regent’s Carlton House, which had been described by Horace Walpole as ‘the most perfect palace’ in Europe. No. 5 is the clubhouse of the Turf Club, while No. 2 is where the Tories founded the Carlton Club in 1832 after their hammering at the General Election in that year.

  Behind some railings in a small space next to the Duke of York steps is a tombstone bearing the inscription Giro: ein treuer Begleiter! meaning ‘Giro: a faithful companion!’ This area was formerly the front garden of the German Embassy at No. 9 CARLTON HOUSE TERRACE, and the grave is that of an Alsatian dog belonging to DR LEOPOLD VON HOESCH, German Ambassador from 1932–5. Hoesch died in office, and as a last representative of the Weimar Republic he was accorded a full diplomatic funeral. His coffin was borne by Grenadier Guards, there was a 19-gun salute in St James’s Park, and the terrace outside No. 9 was crowded with Embassy staff giving the Nazi salute.

  The new Ambassador was Hitler’s trusted friend JOACHIM RIBBENTROP, who arrived in 1936, and for the next few years the Nazi swastika flew above Carlton House Terrace. Ribbentrop immediately set about modernising the premises, knocking Nos. 8 and 9 into a single house and converting No. 7 into offices for his military attachés. Much of the work was supervised by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, who twice visited London to oversee the project, and by the end of it all the German Embassy was the biggest and most magnificent diplomatic property in London. Inside is a marble staircase given by Mussolini.

  Since 1967, Nos. 6–9 Carlton House Terrace have been occupied by THE WORLD’S OLDEST SCIENTIFIC SOCIETY, the ROYAL SOCIETY which, in large part, emerged partly from a group of philosophers, scientists and academics brought together by a German called Theodore Haak, at the Bull’s Head Tavern in Cheapside in the early 17th century. At first, the political climate was such that the society had to remain secret, but after the Restoration in 1660 it was given royal approval by Charles II and in 1661 became the Royal Society. The architect Sir Christopher Wren gave the first recorded lecture to the society, on ‘Physico-Mathe-maticall Experimentall Learning’.

  Further west, No. 1 CARLTON GARDENS is now the official residence of the Foreign Secretary. No. 3 houses a branch of MI6, and this is where double agent GEORGE BLAKE worked from while passing secrets to the Soviets after the Second World War. Blake was put on trial in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison, but escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and lived out the rest of his life in Moscow.

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  Clubland

  LONDON HAS MORE clubs than any other city in the world and is sometimes called the ‘mother city’ of clubs. A number of the more famous clubs are situated in the dog-leg formed by Pall Mall and St James’s Street.

  On the corner of Waterloo Place at No. 107 Pall Mall is THE ATHENAEUM, founded in 1824 by JOHN CROCKER, the first man to coin the term ‘Conservative’. Many writers have been members of the Athenaeum. Rudyard Kipling described it as like ‘a cathedral between services’, while Henry James thought it ‘the last word of a high civilisation’. William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens were reconciled by a handshake on the staircase here, after a long and bitter estrangement that began over the blackballing of another member.

  The Athenaeum

  THE TRAVELLERS CLUB, at No. 106 Pall Mall, was founded in 1819 as a reunion club for gentlemen who had travelled abroad. To qualify you had to have travelled at least 500 miles (800 km) away from London in a straight line. One or two applicants rather exaggerated the extent of their travels, and a list of qualifying destinations was consequently drawn up. All foreign ambassadors are invited to take advantage of the club’s hospitality during their time at the Court of St James’s. There have been two suicides at the Travellers’, after one of which the Chairman was heard to declare, ‘I’ll take damn good care he never gets into any other club I have anything to do with!’

  THE REFORM CLUB, at Nos. 104–5 Pall Mall, was founded in 1836 by radical supporters of the 1832 Reform Bill. It was here that Phineas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne’s novel, took on the bet and set off to go ‘around the world in eighty days’.

  The RAC, at No. 89 Pall Mall, known as the ‘Chaffeurs Arms’, was founded in 1897 ‘for the Protection, Encouragement and Development of Automobilism’. The RAC is a huge place where privacy and anonymity are much prized, which is probably why, in June 1951, double agents GUY BURGESS and DONALD MACLEAN met here for lunch before defecting to the Soviet Union. The club’s biggest crisis occurred in the early 1990s when it was revealed that the new Jubilee Line tunnel between Green Park and Westminster would run just 15 ft (4.6 m) below the club’s splendid swimming pool. As one alarmed member told The Sunday Times, ‘The prospect of diving into the pool and ending up in Neasden is not one I relish.’ The RAC is THE ONLY CLUB WITH ITS OWN POST OFFICE.

  Opposite, at No. 36, is the ARMY AND NAVY CLUB, founded in 1837 and moved to this site in 1851. The Army and Navy is better known as ‘the Rag’, after a certain Captain Billy Duff called the bill of fare ‘a rag and famish affair’.

  Over the road again at Nos. 80–82 is SCHOMBERG HOUSE, constructed in 1698 for the 3rd Duke of Schomberg, son of William III’s general who died at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. In 1781 Scottish doctor JAMES GRAHAM moved his Temple of Health and Hymen here from the Adelphi Terrace, but within a few years he was, alas, confined to a lunatic asylum. The painter THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH lived in the west wing from 1774 until his death there in 1788.

  Marlborough House

  Arch Behaviour

  MARLBOROUGH HOUSE WAS built for Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, in 1711 while the Duke was waging war abroad, and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren and his son. In 1733 the Duchess set about opening up a new driveway from her front door to Pall Mall, but she had so annoyed the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole by interfering in the affairs of state that he bought up the houses standing in the way and foiled her. The blocked-up archway can still be seen today. Edward VII lived at Marlborough House for 40 years as Prince of Wales, with his wife Alexandra, and George V was born here in 1865. The house is now the home of the Commonwealth Secretariat.

  Set into the garden wall in Marlborough Road, looking across at St James’s Palace, is a memorial to Queen Alexandra, the last great work of SIR ALFRED GILBERT (1854–1934), who designed the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. Next to it is the exquisite QUEEN’S CHAPEL, built by Inigo Jones in 1623 for the intended marriage of Charles I to the Infanta of Castile. When the marriage didn’t happen, work stopped, but was resumed in time for Charles to marry Henrietta Maria there in 1627. It was THE FIRST CLASSICAL CHURCH IN ENGLAND. George III married Charlotte Mecklenburg-Strelitz in the chapel in 1761. It is not open to the public.

  St James’s Palace

  Court of St James

  ST JAMES’S PALACE was built for Henry VIII in 1536 on the site of a leper hospital. His eldest daughter Queen Mary died there and her sister Elizabeth I held court there, as did James I. Charles II and James II were born in St James’s Palace, and their father Charles I spent his last night there, in the guard room. On 30 January 1649, after taking Holy Communion in the Chapel Royal, the doomed King was escorted across St James’s Park to the scaffold, his faithful dog Rogue bounding after him. At Spring Gardens, where Admiralty Arch now stands, he turned to his companion and remarked, ‘I remember my brother Henry planting a tree here.’ If his elder brother Henry had lived, England might not have descended into Civil War and Charles would have been spared the dreadful fate about to befall him.

  James II’s son James Francis Edward Stuart, later the Old Pretender, was born at St James’s Palace in 1688, causing a lot of trouble. James II was desperate to have a son to assure the succession, and many observers suspected that the king had substituted a foundling after his wife, Mary of Modena, had given birth to a girl. The fact that the Catholic James now had a male heir alarmed the Protestants, and James was forced to flee the country, while his wife escaped across the Thames on the Lambeth horse ferry, disguised as a washerwoman, with the infant James in her arms (see Lambeth).

  After Whitehall Palace burned down in 1698, St James’s Palace became the monarch’s official residence in London, and Queen Anne gave birth to nearly all of her 17 children here. From the time of William and Mary monarchs had preferred to live at Kensington Palace and George III eventually occupied Buckingham House, but St James’s Palace remained the official royal residence, and to this day foreign ambassadors and high commissioners are assigned to the Court of St James’s.

  The CHAPEL ROYAL, which commemorates Henry VIII’s brief marriage to Anne of Cleves, is one of the two surviving parts of the original palace. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert married here in 1840, as did George V and Princess Mary of Teck in 1893. In 1997 the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, was placed before the altar in the Chapel Royal so that her family could pay their respects before the funeral in Westminster Abbey.

  The other surviving part of the 16th-century palace is the magnificent gatehouse, one of London’s most familiar Tudor landmarks, which looks north up St James’s Street.

  St James’s Street

  Shops

  AT NO. 3 St James’s Street is BRITAIN’S OLDEST WINE MERCHANT, BERRY BROS AND RUDD, established nearby as a grocery store in 1698 by the Widow Bourne to take advantage of the Royal Court moving to St James’s Palace. It moved to No. 3 in 1731. The business descended by marriage to the Berry and Rudd families who still own and operate it today. In the 18th century the store supplied the fashionable coffee-houses that were springing up in the area and started a tradition of weighing customers on giant coffee scales. They have records of the weights of, among others, Lord Byron, William Pitt and the Aga Khan. George III was the first monarch to patronise Berry Bros and Rudd, and the firm now holds two Royal Warrants for the Queen and the Prince of Wales. Rudds are the makers of THE FIRST NATURALLY COLOURED SCOTCH, Cutty Sark whisky, created in 1923.

  A tiny, oak-panelled passageway alongside Berry Bros and Rudd leads to the delightful little Georgian square of PICKERING PLACE, THE SMALLEST PUBLIC SQUARE IN BRITAIN. Located here was THE LAST TEXAN EMBASSY IN LONDON and a plaque on the wall states: ‘In this building was the Legation for the Ministers from the Republic of Texas to the Court of St James, 1842–1845.’ In 1845 Texas became the 28th State in the Union. The square was a popular place for duels, and local residents and hoteliers are convinced that THE LAST DUEL IN ENGLAND WAS FOUGHT HERE, but no one seems to know who w
as involved. It is known that Beau Brummell participated in a duel here.

  Back in St James’s Street, at No. 6, is LOCK’S the Hatters, where it has been since 1764, and where Lord Nelson ordered a hat with a specially built-in eye shade and the Duke of Wellington purchased the plumed hat he wore at Waterloo. The BOWLER hat originated here, but if you ask to see one they will look at you blankly because in Lock’s a Bowler is a Coke (pronounced ‘Cook’). The idea for a hard hat was first thought up by William Coke of Holkham Hall in Norfolk, who asked Lock’s if they could supply some sort of headgear that would protect his head from overhead branches while he was out on his estate. The order was given to hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler and hence took their name, but to the proprietors of Lock’s the hat will always be known by the name of the customer whose idea it was.

  At No. 9, and still run by a Lobb, is JOHN LOBB, BRITAIN’S OLDEST BOOT-MAKER and, since 1911, bootmaker to the Crown.

  At No. 71 are TRUEFITT & HILL, BRITAIN’S OLDEST BARBERS, but relative newcomers to St James’s Street. They were established in Long Acre in 1805 and only moved here in 1994.

  At No. 54 are BRITAIN’S OLDEST ROYAL WARRANT HOLDERS, SWAINE, ADENEY & BRIGG, suppliers of equestrian clothing, leather goods and umbrellas since 1750. They have held a Royal Warrant since the days of George III in 1798.

  St James’s Street

  Clubs

  NO. 61 IS Brooks’s, founded in 1764 as a gaming club by 27 young dandies known as ‘Macaronies’ – they had all been on the Grand Tour in Italy and had introduced macaroni cheese to Britain. In 1778 they moved into their present noble building, which was designed by Henry Holland as a London country house, and described by one wag as ‘like a Duke’s house … with the Duke lying dead upstairs’. It was called Brooks’s after the wine merchant William Brooks who ran the club, and who was reputedly buried under the floorboards by the members when he died so that his creditors wouldn’t find him. During the 18th century Brooks’s was known as a popular club for Whigs.