I Never Knew That About London

by Christopher Winn

  Waterloo Station

  Biggest Station

  NAMED AFTER WATERLOO Bridge, WATERLOO STATION was opened in 1848 and is BRITAIN’S LARGEST STATION, covering an area of 25 acres (10 ha). In 1854, in response to a devastating cholera epidemic in the city, the LONDON NECROPOLIS COMPANY began to operate a daily ‘funeral service’ to the world’s biggest burial ground, Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, which departed from the Necropolis Station adjacent to Waterloo’s main terminal. The station featured separate platforms for Anglican and Nonconformist corpses and even had a bar, complete with a sign saying ‘spirits served here’. The Necropolis Station was bombed during the Blitz and not rebuilt.

  The present station building is noted for its Victory Arch, which commemorates railway staff killed in the First World War. ‘Under the clock at Waterloo Station’ is a traditional rendezvous place and refers to the large four-faced clock that hangs in the centre of the main concourse.

  In April 2007 Hollywood star Matt Damon was mobbed at Waterloo Station while attempting to film scenes for the third film in the Bourne Conspiracy trilogy.

  Waterloo Station was THE FIRST LONDON TERMINUS FOR EUROSTAR TRAINS.

  Just outside Waterloo Station is one of London’s oldest theatres, the OLD VIC, which opened in 1818 and is known as the ‘actors’ theatre’. For 13 years, from 1963 until the opening of the new National Theatre building on the South Bank, the Old Vic housed the National Theatre, run by Sir Laurence Olivier. It is now a repertory theatre under the directorship of the American actor Kevin Spacey.

  Clapham

  Distinguished Residents

  IN 1700 THE diarist Samuel Pepys came to live at the Great House on the north side of Clapham Common, and he died there on 26 May 1703. The site of the house is now occupied by the Trinity Hospice.

  The explorer CAPTAIN COOK lived at No. 22 North Side, Clapham Common, and was often seen pacing his third-floor balcony, which became known as Captain Cook’s quarterdeck. His widow Elizabeth lived on there for another 40 years after Cook was killed by natives on Hawaii in 1779.

  Scientist HENRY CAVENDISH lived in Cavendish House, which stood on the corner of Cavendish Road at the southern tip of Clapham Common. It was in his laboratory here, right at the end of the 18th century, that he succeeded in calculating the mass of the Earth at around some 6,000,000,000,000 tons. He died at Cavendish House in 1810.

  The poet PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY would walk on Clapham Common hand in hand with Harriet Westbrook, a pupil at a Clapham school, before they eloped in September 1811.

  SIR CHARLES BARRY, architect of the Houses of Parliament, lived at The Elms on North Side, Clapham Common, and died there in 1860, while John Francis Bentley, who designed Westminster Cathedral, lived at No. 43 Clapham Old Town from 1876 to 1894.

  Well, I never knew this

  ABOUT

  LAMBETH

  In the 17th and 18th centuries STREATHAM was a spa town, whose waters were said to contain three times the mineral content of Epsom salts.

  The Queen’s dressmaker SIR NORMAN HARTNELL (1901–79) was born in Streatham, the son of the publican at the Crown and Sceptre on Streatham Hill.

  Comedy actress JUNE WHITFIELD (b.1925), former Mayor of London KEN LIVINGSTONE (b.1945) and supermodel NAOMI CAMPBELL (b.1970) were all born in Streatham.

  In the 1970s, cockney madam CYNTHIA PAYNE ran a brothel at her home in Ambleside Avenue, Streatham, catering for elderly professional men who were allowed to pay for their sexual entertainment with luncheon vouchers. The story of Cynthia Payne is told in the 1987 film Personal Services, starring Julie Walters.

  The NATIONAL MUSEUM OF TYPE AND COMMUNICATIONS at No. 100 Hackford Road, STOCKWELL, claims to possess THE LARGEST TYPOGRAPHIC COLLECTION IN THE WORLD.

  In 1890 Stockwell became the southern terminus for LONDON’S FIRST TUBE and THE WORLD’S FIRST ELECTRIC RAILWAY, THE CITY AND SOUTH LONDON RAILWAY. In July 2006 Stockwell Tube Station found world-wide notoriety as the scene of the shooting of an innocent, unarmed Brazilian electrician called JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES by the Metropolitan Police in the mistaken belief that he was a terrorist.

  BON MARCHÉ in Brixton was opened in 1877 as THE FIRST PURPOSE-BUILT DEPARTMENT STORE IN BRITAIN. The store was built by racehorse owner James Smith, who financed the venture with his winnings from the previous year, during which his horse Rosebery had won both the Cesarewitch and the Cambridgeshire.

  BRIXTON WINDMILL, in Windmill Gardens, is THE NEAREST WINDMILL TO CENTRAL LONDON. It was built in 1816, is 39 ft (12 m) tall and was last used in the 1920s. It is at present boarded up and closed to the public.

  THE FIRST VAUXHALL CAR was built in 1903 at a factory on Wandsworth Road where the Sainsbury’s petrol station now stands. The car company’s Griffin badge was adopted from the heraldic emblem of Falkes de Breaute, after whom Vauxhall is named (Falkes Hall). When Vauxhall Cars left Vauxhall in 1905 they maintained their connection with Falkes de Breaute, moving to the site of his country seat at Luton.

  The big yellow amphibious bus of LONDON DUCK TOURS enters the River Thames via a slipway beside the MI6 building at Vauxhall.

  Entertainer LILY SAVAGE began his career in the ROYAL VAUXHALL TAVERN, London’s leading pub for artists. Burly Australian cricket fans, keen to slake their thirst after a hard day watching cricket at the nearby Oval are often taken aback on entering the Tavern to be greeted by men in skirts …

  VAUXHALL CROSS BUS STATION is now LONDON’S SECOND BUSIEST BUS STATION after Victoria. Solar panels in the station roof provide 30 per cent of the energy for the station area.

  The illustrator ARTHUR RACKHAM was born in a house on South Lambeth Road in 1867. His best-loved works were the illustrations for Peter Pan and The Wind in the Willows.

  The IMAX theatre in the middle of the roundabout at the end of Waterloo Bridge boasts THE BIGGEST CINEMA SCREEN IN BRITAIN – 66 ft (20 m) by 85 ft (26 m).

  Not far from Waterloo Station on Kennington Road is the eye-catching steeple of CHRIST CHURCH, erected on the Centenary of the American Declaration of Independence as a memorial to President Lincoln, and displaying the Stars and Stripes in its stonework.

  LAMBETH WALK, celebrated in the musical Me and My Girl with the catchy song ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’, was badly bombed in the Blitz and is now a scruffy, nondescript shopping precinct. ‘Doing the Lambeth Walk’ was first sung at the Victoria Palace in 1937 and proved a huge hit. As The Times said in 1938, ‘While dictators rage and statesmen talk, all Europe dances – to the Lambeth Walk.’ Indeed, Mussolini was so taken with the song that he had a girl from London flown over to Italy to sing it to him.

  In 1948 the Ealing comedy PASSPORT TO PIMLICO was filmed in Lambeth’s Hercules Road, where William Blake lived at the end of the 18th century at No. 13 Hercules Buildings, now replaced by a horrid block of flats.

  ST THOMAS’S HOSPITAL, founded in the early 12th century in SOUTHWARK, moved to its present site opposite the Houses of Parliament in 1871. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE established her School of Nursing here, and to this day nurses of St Thomas’s are known as ‘Nightingales’.

  SOUTHWARK

  BANKSIDE – SOUTHWARK – BERMONDSEY – ROTHERHITHE

  Southwark Cathedral – the oldest cathedral in London

  Bankside

  Modern Art

  THE OXO TOWER building, originally part of a power station, was bought in the 1920s by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company as a home for the world’s largest meat packing and storage centre. Advertising restrictions meant they could not erect signs to publicise their product, but they got around this by adding a 220 ft (67 m) tower with OXO spelled out with glazing bars on the windows of all four sides. Since it was then the second highest commercial building in London, this proved very effective and still draws attention to the product even today. The OXO tower now houses apartments alongside small craft shops and a smart restaurant.

  BANKSIDE POWER STATION was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s second brick power station on the Thames in London
and, like Battersea, is an iconic landmark. Standing as it does opposite St Paul’s Cathedral, Scott intended Bankside to be a ‘cathedral of power’ and he built accordingly. The power station is made up of some 4½ million bricks and covers an area of 8½ acres (3.4 ha), with a river frontage 650 ft (198 m) long. The chimney was deliberately capped at 325 ft (99 m) high, just a little lower than the dome of St Paul’s which reaches 375 ft (114 m). It was completed in 1963 and closed less than 20 years later, in 1981.

  Unlike Battersea Power Station, Bankside has been successfully converted, in this case into Europe’s finest new modern art gallery, the TATE MODERN, which opened in May 2000. The architects were the virtually unknown Swiss practice of Herzog & de Meuron, and the brilliance of their scheme lay in leaving the wondrous brick shell of the building alone while utilising the grand space inside. The Turbine Hall, 500 ft (152 m) long and 115 ft (35 m) high, makes a truly spectacular entrance and exhibition space.

  Linking Tate Modern with the north bank and the City is the MILLENNIUM BRIDGE, designed by Sir Norman Foster and THE FIRST NEW BRIDGE PUT OVER THE THAMES IN LONDON FOR OVER 100 YEARS – since Tower Bridge, in fact, in 1894. It will be forever known as the WOBBLY BRIDGE, after it had to be closed within days of opening in 2001 because it wobbled sickeningly when too many people were walking across it at the same time. It turned out that a small initial wobble would cause pedestrians to step down in unison, which in turn would aggravate the wobble, a process known as ‘excitation’. The phenomenon was known to the builders of the Albert Bridge in 1873, who put signs on their bridge requesting that troops should ‘break step when marching over’. The builders of the Millennium Bridge improved the damping and this solved the problem. Walking the bridge is an exhilarating experience and it has since transformed Bankside by making the area easily accessible from the rest of London for the first time.

  Almost next to Tate Modern is a rare survivor of old Southwark, a row of crooked 17th-century houses, complete with tiny back gardens, and a stretch of cobbled street called Cardinal Cap’s Alley. No. 49, which exhibits a sporty red door, is supposed to be where Christopher Wren lived while St Paul’s was being built across the river.

  Globe Theatre

  Worth the Effort

  THE MODERN RECONSTRUCTION of the GLOBE THEATRE was given THE FIRST THATCHED ROOF SEEN IN THE CENTRE OF LONDON SINCE THE GREAT FIRE of 1666. The replica Globe was the brainchild of American actor SAM WANAMAKER, who had a longer and more difficult struggle to get it built than did the original owners. During a visit to London in the 1960s, he had attempted to locate the site of Shakespeare’s legendary Globe Theatre, but was horrified to find that the only record of it was a small plaque on the wall of the Anchor Brewery. So he founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust in 1970 and, after 26 years of battling against bureaucracy, his vision was finally realised in 1996 when the new Globe opened on a site very close to the original. Wanamaker died three years before the opening, but he did at least get to see his dream started, building work having commenced in 1987. The builders of the modern Globe used the same materials, construction techniques and layout as their Elizabethan counterparts, and Shakespeare’s plays are now staged in authentic surroundings during the summer months. Theatre-goers can choose to stand and mingle with the actors in the open-air auditorium, or sit and heckle from the encircling galleries. Attending a performance there is a lively and stimulating experience.

  The original Globe Theatre was constructed in 1599 by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a troupe of actors which included William Shakespeare as a shareholder. When they had failed to get the lease on Richard Burbage’s theatre in Shoreditch renewed, they dismantled the theatre overnight and smuggled the timbers across the river to Southwark, where they were free of the City of London’s strict laws pertaining to entertainment. Three of Shakespeare’s plays were premièred here, Henry V and Julius Caesar in 1599 and Cymbeline in 1611. In 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, sparks from the cannons being used on stage set fire to the thatch and the theatre burned down. It was rebuilt, but in 1644 it was finally closed for good by the Puritans and demolished.

  Not far away are the remnants of Bankside’s earliest theatre, the ROSE THEATRE, built in 1587. Uncovered in 1989 during excavations for a new office block, these are THE ONLY SUBSTANTIAL REMAINS OF AN ELIZABETHAN THEATRE EVER FOUND. The nearby street name Bear Gardens is a reminder that as well as theatres and brothels, bear-baiting was once a popular pastime on Bankside.

  Anchor Inn

  Beyond the Dreams of Avarice

  THE ANCHOR INN is an 18th-century pub, standing on the site of an earlier tavern that was patronised by Shakespeare when he was performing at the nearby Globe. The present building was once attached to the ANCHOR BREWERY, built on the site of the old Globe Theatre. It is a pleasant jumble of stairs, galleries and cubby-holes, with one room dedicated to Dr Johnson who used to drink here when it was owned, along with the brewery, by his friend Henry Thrale. When Dr Johnson, as executor of Henry Thrale’s will, was later trying to sell the Anchor Brewery, which then was THE LARGEST BREWERY IN THE WORLD, he remarked that it had the potential to make someone ‘rich beyond the dreams of avarice’ – and, indeed, it was sold to David Barclay, of Barclays Bank, who managed to stumble along all right with it. The Anchor Brewery was eventually taken over by Courage and finally closed in 1981.

  The Clink

  Prison

  MOST OF SOUTHWARK, known as the LIBERTY OF THE CLINK, was owned by the Bishops of Winchester, who profited mightily from the various enterprises that went on locally and had their own palace here from the 12th century. The brothels were particularly lucrative, and the women who worked in them became known as ‘Winchester geese’. Unsurprisingly, crime was rife and prisons were needed in which to incarcerate those who overstepped the mark. The most infamous of these was the prison put up in 1509 on Clink Street and known simply as THE CLINK. ‘In the clink’ became a generic expression for being in jail, although the original was burned down in the Gordon Riots in 1780. A museum celebrating the history of prisons now occupies the site, alongside Vinopolis, which celebrates the history of wine.

  The Clink was attached to the Bishop’s Palace, and a little way along Clink Street are the crumbling remains of the palace’s great hall, with a rose window picked out in stone, etched against the skyline of the surrounding warehouses, a rare and lovely survivor from 14th-century Southwark. James I of Scotland and Joan Beaufort had their wedding reception here in 1424, after their marriage in St Mary Overie, now Southwark Cathedral, and it was here, some 100 years later, that Henry VIII first met Catherine Howard.

  Southwark Cathedral

  And so over the fields to Southwarke. I spent half an hour in St Mary Overy’s church, where are fine monuments of great antiquity.

  SAMUEL PEPYS

  SOUTHWARK CATHEDRAL, OR the Cathedral Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie, became a cathedral in 1905. It used to be completely hidden from the river, but the demolition of a warehouse or two has opened up at least a partial view. Hemmed in by the approach to London Bridge, the dark viaduct of the London, Dover and Chatham Railway and the bustle of Borough Market, Southwark Cathedral is often unjustly overlooked, but this is a very historic and ancient place. Here in the 7th century, on the site of a Roman villa, a nunnery was founded by a ferryman made wealthy during the years when there was no bridge, in honour of his daughter Mary, hence ‘Mary of the ferry’, or possibly ‘Mary over the water’. Parts of the pavement from the Roman villa can be seen inside the church.

  St Swithun, Bishop of Winchester, converted the nunnery into a church and monastery in the middle of the 9th century, and both were rebuilt in 1106. At the end of the 12th century the canons at St Mary’s established a hospital here, dedicated to St Thomas of Canterbury, which grew into the famous St Thomas’s Hospital now by the river at Lambeth. A Norman arch survives from the 12th century, in the north aisle of the nave, but the rest of the Norman church burned down in 1212 and was replace
d around 1220 by LONDON’S EARLIEST EXAMPLE OF GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. The choir and heavenly retrochoir survive, and because all the other churches in the City, across the river, were consumed in the Great Fire, Southwark is THE OLDEST GOTHIC CHURCH IN LONDON.

  The 164 ft (50 m) high tower is 15th century, and it was from the top of the tower that WENCESLAS HOLLAR (1607–77) drew his famous view of London burning during the Great Fire.

  Inside, in the north aisle, is the colourful tomb of JOHN GOWER (1380–1408), THE FIRST ENGLISH POET, who was influential in persuading his friend Geoffrey Chaucer to write The Canterbury Tales in English.

  Being close to the theatres of Bankside, including the Rose and the Globe, St Mary Overie established numerous theatrical connections, and many of the actors who appear on the front of Shakespeare’s First Folio also appear on the church register. William Shakespeare’s younger brother EDMUND SHAKESPEARE (1580–1607), who followed William to London and became an actor at the Globe, is buried in the cathedral in an unmarked grave. There is a memorial to William Shakespeare too, and a service is held in the cathedral every year to mark the Bard’s birthday. There are also plaques commemorating lyricist OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN (1895–1960) for his contribution to English theatre and SAM WANAMAKER (1919–93) for his tenacity in fighting for the reconstructed Globe Theatre.

  Off the North Transept is the HARVARD MEMORIAL CHAPEL, named in memory of Southwark’s most celebrated emigrant JOHN HARVARD, founder of America’s most illustrious educational establishment, Harvard University. John Harvard was born in Southwark in 1607 and baptised in the cathedral. His father, a friend of Shakespeare through his wife, who was a Stratford woman, owned a butcher’s shop as well as one of Southwark’s many coaching inns, the Queen’s Head, in Queen’s Head Yard off Borough High Street. John inherited the Queen’s Head when he was 28, on his mother’s death, along with an extensive library built up by himself and various members of the family. With his parents and all his brothers and sisters gone, he decided to emigrate to America with his wife and make a new start. They settled in Boston, Massachusetts, but John died of consumption the following year, aged just 30, leaving half his estate and his library to the new college he was helping to set up in Boston, which was subsequently named Harvard after its main benefactor.