I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  No. 37 Stepney Green

  There are also a good number of streets and squares full of fine 18th-century houses, and the lovely parish church of ST DUNSTAN’S, which dates back as far as the 10th century, although the present building is mainly 13th and 15th century. St Dunstan’s was originally the mother church for the whole of Middlesex east of the City, and with the port of London close by became known as the Church of the High Seas – the Red Ensign still flies from the tower. The church bells feature in the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ nursery rhyme: ‘“When will that be?” say the Bells of Stepney!’

  Opposite the church, in Stepney Way, is a small fragment of an early Congregational Chapel, one of the earliest independent churches in London, founded in 1644. There was an old moated manor house here in medieval times, owned by Henry de Waleis, where Parliament met in 1299 after a fire in West minster Hall. Later, Henry VIII’s Minister, Thomas Cromwell, occupied the house.

  Well, I never knew this

  ABOUT

  THE EAST END

  WHITECHAPEL is named after the 13th-century church of St Mary Matfelon, built out of white stones. The church was badly damaged by bombing in the Blitz and demolished in 1952. On the site, near Aldgate East station, there is now ALTAB ALI PARK, commemorating a young Bengali stabbed to death in a racial attack in 1978.

  THE FIRST ‘DOODLEBUG’ (V1 FLYING BOMB) TO FALL ON LONDON came down on the railway bridge over GROVE ROAD, 200 yards (61 m) north of Mile End Station, on 13 June 1944. Several houses were damaged, along with the bridge and railway track, and six people were killed. A blue plaque marks the spot.

  EDITH CAVELL (1865–1915), the wartime heroine who was executed by the Germans in 1915 for helping Allied soldiers to escape from occupied Belgium, worked as a nurse at the Royal London Hospital.

  THE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH IN ENGLAND was built in SPITALFIELDS in 1612.

  Standing at the end of Fournier Street in Spitalfields is the JAMME MASJID MOSQUE, THE ONLY BUILDING IN THE WORLD, OUTSIDE ISRAEL, TO HAVE BEEN A CHURCH, A SYNAGOGUE AND A MOSQUE. Mirroring the changing communities of the area, it started life in 1742 as a Huguenot chapel, became the Spitalfields Great Synagogue in 1898 and finally, in 1990, the Jamme Masjiid Mosque.

  BRICK LANE in Spitalfields boasts THE HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF CURRY HOUSES IN BRITAIN.

  Actor DAVID GARRICK made his debut as Richard III at the now vanished GOODMAN’S FIELDS THEATRE in Leman Street, Whitechapel, in 1741.

  Writer, theatre director and actor STEVEN BERKOFF was born in STEPNEY in 1937.

  Sixties actor and icon TERENCE STAMP, who dated Jean Shrimpton and Brigitte Bardot among others, was born in Stepney in 1939.

  STEVE MARRIOTT, lead singer with the 1960s pop band the Small Faces, was born in Stepney in 1947. Drummer Kenney Jones was also born in Stepney in 1948. Their most memorable song, ‘Itchycoo Park’, was the first British record to use phasing, a method of running multiple tracks together in sync, now widely used. In the 1970s, Steve Marriott went on to form the Faces with Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart. He died in a fire at his home in Arkesden, Essex, in 1991.

  West

  CHELSEA

  ROYAL HOSPITAL – CHEYNE WALK – BROMPTON – KING’S ROAD

  Chelsea Old Church – St Thomas More’s church

  Chelsea Manor

  Depository for Queens

  THE QUIET COUNTRY village of Chelsea started to become fashionable as far back as 1520, when Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor SIR THOMAS MORE moved here and created Beaufort House on the river front, near where Beaufort Street is today. When he visited Sir Thomas, Henry VIII was so taken with the place that later, in 1536, the year after he had had More executed, the King decided to acquire nearby Chelsea Manor, which he subsequently enlarged. The site of Chelsea Manor is now occupied by Nos. 19–26 Cheyne Walk.

  Chelsea Manor became something of a depository for queens. The day after Anne Boleyn was executed in 1536, Henry secretly married JANE SEYMOUR at Chelsea, and in 1543 he gave the house as a wedding gift to his last wife, CATHERINE PARR, who had among her retinue at Chelsea LADY JANE GREY (1537–54), later to become the ‘Nine-Day Queen’. The future Queen ELIZABETH I stayed at Chelsea as a 14-year-old after her father died, and had to fend off the advances of Catherine’s new husband Sir Thomas Seymour. ANNE OF CLEVES died in the house in 1557. Finally the manor was bought by SIR HANS SLOANE in 1712 and demolished after his death in 1753.

  Fashionable society, including the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury, naturally followed Henry VIII, and Chelsea became known as the ‘village of palaces’, prominent among them being Lyndsey House, Danvers House and Winchester House.

  Royal Hospital

  An Enviable Pension

  IN 1681 SIR Christopher Wren was commissioned by Charles II to build a hospital at Chelsea for the ‘succour and relief of veterans broken by age and war’, along the lines of the Hôtel des Invalides in Paris. A year later, in 1682, the King himself laid the foundation stone. There is a story that Charles was encouraged in the enterprise by his mistress Nell Gwynn, whose own father had been made destitute in the Civil War. In 1692 the hospital opened with a full complement of 476 Chelsea Pensioners in residence. There has been very little change to the building since, save for some remodelling of the interior by Robert Adam in 1776.

  In 1714 the Paymaster-General, Sir Robert Walpole, who would go on to be Britain’s first Prime Minister, built himself a house on the west side of the hospital near the stables and lived there until his death in 1745.

  In 1852 the Duke of Wellington lay in state in the Great Hall, drawing thousands of mourners, and in 1949 BRITAIN’S FIRST TELEVISED CHURCH SERVICE was broadcast from the hospital chapel.

  The Royal Hospital Founder’s Day is held on OAK APPLE DAY, 29 May, which is not only Charles II’s birthday but the date of his restoration as King in 1660. On that day the Grinling Gibbons bronze of Charles in Roman costume, situated in the south court, is garlanded with oak leaves, in remembrance of the days after the Battle of Worcester, in 1651, when the future King hid in the Boscobel Oak to evade capture by Parliamentary troops. The statue was regilded in 2002 for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee.

  Chelsea Royal Hospital is still home to some 400 pensioners, who receive board and lodging, a uniform and nursing care. Everyday uniform is navy blue, the famous red coat being kept for ceremonial occasions or for when acting as a guide for visitors to the hospital.

  Being set back from the busy embankment road, Chelsea Royal Hospital is often overlooked, but Wren’s glorious red-brick building is the loveliest façade on the Thames after Greenwich, and the grounds are some of the most delightful in London. In the old cemetery in one corner of the grounds lies DR BURNEY, chapel organist and father of author Fanny Burney. The grounds are open to the public, along with the Chapel, the Great Hall and the Museum, on most weekdays.

  Since 1913 the Royal Horticultural Society’s CHELSEA FLOWER SHOW has been held in the hospital grounds in May.

  Ranelagh Gardens

  For Pleasure Alone

  RICHARD JONES, THE Earl of Ranelagh, James II’s Paymaster-General from 1685 until 1702, redirected a substantial portion of the hospital funds to build himself a ‘small but lavish’ house beside the hospital, and also appropriated nearly half the grounds for his garden. After his death the estate remained with Ranelagh’s wife and daughter, and here in the summer of 1717 HANDEL’S WATER MUSIC was aired in public for the first time, when George I sailed up the river from Whitehall to picnic in the grounds with Lady Ranelagh.

  In 1739 the grounds were bought by a couple called Swift and Timbrell and opened in 1742 as the RANELAGH PLEASURE GARDENS, a rival to the gardens at Vauxhall. They quickly became the place to be seen. As Horace Walpole wrote in 1744, ‘You can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince or Duke of Cumberland.’ At the heart of the gardens was one of the most astonishing structures in London, a huge wooden Rotunda, 185 ft (56 m) across, with galleries and booths where people could sup tea
and coffee or drink wine. There was a massive fireplace in the middle, ‘large enough to roast half a score of people at once’, and after dark the whole place was lit by candle-light. An orchestra serenaded the quality as they paraded themselves about, and in 1761 a concert was given by ‘the celebrated and astonishing Master Mozart, a child of 7 years of age’. There were masked balls, dances, balloon ascents, fireworks and a variety of entertainments that, when the gardens were at their height, attracted thousands of revellers. Around the turn of the century, however, Ranelagh suddenly fell from favour. The Rotunda was demolished in 1805 and the grounds, which had closed in 1803, reverted back to the hospital.

  Physic Garden

  Secret Garden

  SWAN WALK LEADS to the river between delightful old houses and the exquisite CHELSEA PHYSIC GARDEN which is THE SECOND OLDEST BOTANIC GARDEN IN ENGLAND, after that of Oxford. The Physic Garden was first planted in 1673 as a nursery for trainee apothecaries, close to the warm microclimate of the river. In the middle stands a statue of SIR HANS SLOANE, who gave the land to the Society of Apothecaries on condition they maintained the garden and every year sent seeds or dried plants to the Royal Society. In 1732 cotton seed from the garden was sent to James Oglethorpe in Georgia, who used it to establish the American cotton industry. ENGLAND’S EARLIEST ROCK GARDEN is here, made up of old building stone from the Tower of London and lava brought back from Iceland by Sir Joseph Banks. THE FIRST CEDAR TREES IN ENGLAND were grown in the garden, and in 1681 ENGLAND’S FIRST GREEN-HOUSE AND STOVE were built here. Another feature is a 30 ft (9 m) high olive tree, THE BIGGEST OLIVE TREE IN BRITAIN.

  Sir Hans Sloane

  Cheyne Walk

  Physic Garden to Albert Bridge

  THE CELEBRATED CHEYNE Walk starts by the Physic Garden and continues beyond Battersea Bridge. Despite the ever busy road that separates Cheyne Walk from the river, its mix of glorious Queen Anne houses and artistic heritage has lured a galaxy of artists, writers and musicians to this Chelsea street. No. 3 Cheyne Walk was home to Admiral Smith, a founder of the Royal Society, and to Rolling Stone guitarist KEITH RICHARDS and his girlfriend ANITA PALLENBERG from 1969 to 1978. Their most prized piece of furniture was the bed used for the love scenes involving Mick Jagger and Anita in the 1970 film Performance. JAGGER himself lived with MARIANNE FAITHFULL at No. 48 Cheyne Walk from 1967 until 1978.

  Novelist GEORGE ELIOT moved into No. 4 in 1880 and died there a few weeks later. Pre-Raphaelite artist DANIEL GABRIEL ROSSETTI introduced a menagerie of zebras, kangaroos, wombats, wallabies and a racoon to the garden at No. 16 in 1862, to distract him from his wife Elizabeth’s death. The neighbours only started to complain when he brought in some peacocks. There is a memorial to him by Ford Madox Brown in the tiny garden across the way. Sir Paul Getty, the billionaire philanthropist, lived at No. 16 in the 1980s.

  Nos. 19–26, close to where Oakley Street meets the Embankment, is the site of Henry VIII’s Chelsea Manor. A plaque at the entrance to Cheyne Mews records that SIR HANS SLOANE (1660–1753) moved into the house in 1712. It was demolished after he died and he was buried in the churchyard of Chelsea Old Church. Sloane gave his collection of antiques and works of art to posterity, to form the nucleus of the British Museum. He gave his name to a square, a street and a type of upper-class girl who wears green Wellington Boots.

  Cheyne Row

  The Sage of Chelsea

  BEYOND THE ALBERT Bridge in a long narrow garden sits a splendid bronze by Boehm of THOMAS CARLYLE, known as ‘the Sage of Chelsea’. He lived at No. 24 (then called No. 5) CHEYNE ROW, a charming road of early 18th-century houses that comes down to meet the river here. Carlyle moved to unfashionable Chelsea from Scotland in 1834, and within a few years his house had become a meeting-place for writers such as Tennyson, Dickens and Browning. Dickens said of him, ‘I would go at all times farther to see Carlyle than any man alive.’ Carlyle had a room on the top floor sound-proofed and here he wrote perhaps his most famous work, The French Revolution. Carlyle died in the first-floor drawing-room in 1881, and in 1895 the house was bought by public subscription and administered by a memorial trust as LONDON’S FIRST LITERARY SHRINE. The National Trust took it over in 1936.

  Thomas Carlyle – ‘The Sage of Chelsea’

  A little further up, where Lawrence Street and Justice Walk converge, was the site of the CHELSEA PORCELAIN FACTORY, whose output was considered the equal of Sèvres. Dr Johnson came here twice a week to learn about making pottery but could never master the art and his work kept collapsing on the wheel. When the potters could take no more they presented him with a full Chelsea service and suggested he go back to his dictionary.

  Back in Cheyne Walk, between Cheyne Row and Lawrence Street, is CARLYLE MANSIONS, where T.S. Eliot lived with a bare light bulb and a crucifix over the bed, and where Henry James lodged from 1912 until his lonely death in 1916. James’s funeral was held in the More Chapel in Chelsea Old Church, where there is a memorial plaque to him.

  Chelsea Old Church

  Village Church

  CHELSEA OLD CHURCH doesn’t look particularly old, but there has been a church here certainly since Norman days. The present building, however, is a good replica of the medieval church that was badly damaged in the Blitz, and many of the fine monuments inside have been restored. In the More Chapel there is an impressive monument to Chelsea’s great patriarch, St Thomas More himself. The inscription, composed by More himself, commemorates his first wife and expresses the wish that he should be buried here with his second wife. In 1535 More was beheaded at the Tower and his head was sent to Canterbury. Some believe that his body was secretly brought back here and laid to rest by his daughter, Margaret Roper.

  Also in the More Chapel is the tomb of JANE, DUCHESS OF NORTHUMBERLAND, mother of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite Lord Leicester and mother-in-law of Lady Jane Grey.

  On the north side of the nave lies LADY JAYNE CHEYNE, who lived in the manor house built by Henry VIII, and whose husband gave his name to Cheyne Walk. Her monument is the work of Italian sculptor Paolo Bernini.

  Also thought to be buried here, but lost in the bombing, are the dramatist and Poet Laureate THOMAS SHADWELL (1640–92) and Elizabeth Smollett, the 15-year-old daughter of Scottish writer Tobias Smollett. She died during the time when they were living in Chelsea, and he was writing The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker, in a house on the site of the old Chelsea Manor. It is said that Smollett never recovered from his daughter’s death.

  The little garden across Old Church Street is dedicated to More’s daughter MARGARET ROPER, whose husband William wrote More’s biography. A stone carving by SIR JACOB EPSTEIN records the fact that this was the site of his studio from 1909 to 1914. OLD CHURCH STREET is Chelsea’s oldest road and retains some lovely old houses. JONATHAN SWIFT, author of Gulliver’s Travels, and RICHARD STEELE, founder of The Tatler, lived in this street, and CHARLES KINGSLEY, author of The Water Babies, grew up at the Old Rectory where his father was the rector.

  In Danvers Street is the noble 15th-century CROSBY HALL, all that survives of Crosby Place, which once stood in Bishopsgate and was owned at one time by St Thomas More. Threatened with demolition in 1908, the Great Hall was taken down stone by stone and stored by the City Corporation until 1926, when it was rebuilt here, as part of a complex that stood where St Thomas More’s garden was. Crosby Hall is now owned by a property tycoon and has been incorporated into a new Tudor-style mansion as part of a private residence.

  Crosby Hall

  Cheyne Walk

  Battersea Bridge to Lots Road

  NO. 92 WAS the home of thriller writer KEN FOLLETT and his wife BARBARA, once prominent New Labour cheerleaders. This was where they threw their notorious political soirées during the late 1990s before disillusionment set in.

  At No. 93 Cheyne Walk is a pretty house with a balcony where Elizabeth Stevenson, the future author MRS GASKELL, was born in 1810, the daughter of a Unitarian minister and a sickly mother who died a few weeks later. Elizabeth was
sent to live with her aunt in Knutsford, Cheshire.

  No. 96, which is part of the only remaining 17th-century aristocrat’s house in Chelsea, Lindsey House, is where JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER lived in 1871 and painted the immortal picture of his mother that hangs in the Louvre. Previous occupants of Lindsey House, at No. 98, were the engineers MARC BRUNEL and his son ISAMBARD KINGDOM BRUNEL. In 1972 Northern Ireland Secretary Willie Whitelaw secretly met here with the IRA’s Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, while publicly insisting that ministers ‘would never talk to terrorists’. The house belonged to Tory MP Paul Channon at the time.

  Set back a little from the bustle is No. 119 Cheyne Walk, where J.M.W. TURNER lived out his final years, from 1846 to 1852. He existed anonymously as Mr Booth and built himself a roof gallery from where he could watch the sunsets. Ian Fleming’s mother EVE came to live here in the 1920s, while Ian was still at Eton, and had a passionate affair with the painter AUGUSTUS JOHN, who lived next door. They had a child together in 1925.

  Cremorne Gardens

  Up, Up and Away

  BEYOND CHEYNE WALK, where the road turns north, a small patch of grass is all that remains of CREMORNE GARDENS, opened in 1845 as a down-market version of the Ranelagh Gardens. In 1845 MR CHARLES GREEN ascended from the gardens in a balloon, accompanied by his wife and Thomas Matthews, the Clown of Drury Lane Theatre, who was equipped in full theatrical costume and giving a fine rendition of the popular song ‘Hot Codlins’. He was still singing, it is said, when they came down in a Tottenham swamp two and a half hours later. It was from the gardens, in 1861, that ‘the FEMALE BLONDINI’, MADAME GENEVIEVE YOUNG, walked across the Thames on a tightrope. Cremorne Gardens were later made famous in paintings by Whistler.