by Pip Granger
The well-heeled lived along both sides of the Strand, in the massive art deco block of the Adelphi, or in elegant eighteenth-century town houses, while Hollywood stars and other rich visitors stayed in the area’s fashionable hotels. Just a couple of hundred yards away, in narrow terraces of cramped Georgian dwelling houses or blocks of purpose-built, cold-water flats – many without bathrooms or electricity until well into the fifties – lived those characterized by the Victorian philanthropists who built the blocks as ‘the industrious poor’. Many were members of families whose roots in the area were several generations deep.
Like me, the people who lived and grew up in the West End during the period covered in this book, who experienced its seamy joys and everyday kindnesses, its bustling, life-filled streets and bleakly glamorous nightlife, and above all its warm and unquestioning embrace, are growing older. My parents, and most of their friends, are long gone, but others survive, and it is their testimony, woven with my own memories and the contemporary writings of those who were equally captivated by this remarkable time and place, that I present in this book, which is at once a history, a memorial and a love letter.
1
A Special Place
It is hard to imagine now, but before Henry VIII got his hands on it, the West End of London was a rural place well outside the city walls. The Abbey of St Peter at Westminster owned land in Soho, as did Abingdon Abbey in Berkshire. The monks of Westminster Abbey also owned a slice of Covent Garden, and they leased land to the powerful Mercers’ Company in both places, while some Carthusians had a stake in Bloomsbury. In the 1530s, Henry relieved all three religious foundations of their valuable real estate as part of his campaign to dissolve the monasteries and bring all church lands under the ownership of the Crown. He then parcelled out the same land as estates to his favourites in reward for their services and loyalty.
Although the area remained countrified under the new owners during Henry’s reign, things were already changing rapidly enough to alarm his younger daughter by the time she became Queen Elizabeth in 1558. She issued several edicts forbidding building on Soho Fields, and embargoes on unlicensed development throughout the area remained in place when the Stuarts came to power. Even in its gestation period, though, Sohoites showed a fine and customary disregard for the rules laid down by authority. Building carried on regardless, albeit relatively slowly. Soho continued to be used for hunting and for grazing livestock for a while, but was already coming under very serious pressure from a city that had long outgrown its walls, and whose population were keen to ‘go west’ to find more elbow room and fresh air, and to escape the regular epidemics of plague, smallpox and the bloody flux.
In her book, Soho (1989), Judith Summers likened the area’s name to ‘a short, wistful sigh’ and it certainly has that about it, but the name actually has a bloody provenance: ‘Soho’ was an old hunting cry. A jinking hare would hear the eerie cry ‘Soho, soho’ as the baying pack and braying hunters tore across the fields, determined not to let lunch get away. Soho was prime hunting country for the well-to-do who, thanks to Henry, had estates there. It was handily placed within easy riding distance of both the court at Whitehall, and the city, and the King and his courtiers regularly enjoyed hunting trips and visits to one or another of their newly enriched lordships.
Elizabeth, in her turn, was a version of our latter-day couch surfers, forever foisting herself on her subjects’ hospitality, except that she insisted on a four-poster bed and the best of everything. She made an absolute point of descending on her nobles one after the other, expecting free room and board for herself and her court. Such royal progresses served several purposes. They allowed her to see her country and her subjects and them to see her, which helped to strengthen the bonds of loyalty in both directions, while closing up her court for months on end saved the royal purse thousands of gold sovereigns. Finally, they got her out of harm’s way in the summer months, when the open sewers and crush of unwashed bodies set up a stomach-heaving stench, and London was usually in the grip of one life-threatening pestilence or another. The estates to the west were a good starting point for some of these trips, and they still provided sport in the form of hunting. Soho hare was certainly on the menu in 1562 when the Lord Mayor sallied forth on his annual inspection of the water conduits that brought the precious liquid across Soho Fields and in to the fetid and smelly city.
Funnily enough, Soho has remained synonymous with hunting of one sort or another ever since; only the nature of the quarry has changed. It has long been known as the place to go for a good time, whether you’re looking for entertainment, an exciting nightlife or the thrill of illicit sex. It has a worldwide reputation for so many other things besides the ‘ladies and gentlemen of the night’. It has provided excellent restaurants, a great market and its own quirky brand of retail therapy for centuries. Even today, while nearby Oxford Street and Regent Street supply the usual opportunities of high street shopping, Soho offers an array of small, specialist shops that will supply virtually anything you can think of, from first-rate produce to what one might (sometimes euphemistically) call niche requirements.
There are shops selling freshly roasted coffee, aromatic tea, rhinestone handcuffs, fabulous pastries, perfume, packets of Rizla, fine cheeses, tap dancing shoes, aged brandy, rubber catsuits, olives, titty tassels, cooking pots, excellent wine, violin strings, glittering theatrical fabrics, mouth-watering continental chocolates, bird’s nest soup, sequins, oil paints, the Times of India, jugged hare, greasepaint, ravioli, real hair wigs, a brace of plump partridge, fake mink knickers, studio pottery, strings of garlic, kinky boots, salami, chefs’ hats, chequered trousers and electric dildos. If you’re hunting for something tasty, useful, glamorous, wacky, wonderful or weird, chances are you’ll find it somewhere in Soho’s narrow streets.
In the fields of medieval Soho, lepers were nursed at St Giles hospital, well away from the city’s dense and terrified population. Lepers had been outcasts from biblical times, right up until modern medicine found an effective treatment for their disfiguring and contagious condition. They were required to ring a bell to warn of their approach, and the word ‘leper’ is still used to demean those deemed ‘unclean’, unwanted and beyond the pale. It seems appropriate that the despised lepers should find refuge in a place that was later to go on to welcome other kinds of outcasts from all over Britain and mainland Europe, as in the following centuries, wave after wave of political, economic and religious refugees found a home in Soho, along with our own home-grown bohemians, oddballs and social misfits.
The name of Covent Garden, immediately to the east of Soho, is a corruption of ‘convent garden’, and it was there that the monks of St Peter’s Abbey grew fruit, vegetables and barley for their tables. The Abbey assumed ownership of the area in the tenth century, and, although the garden wasn’t mentioned until around 1200, they must have been doing something with the land during the intervening time. The Abbey’s garden has often been seen as the beginning of Covent Garden’s long association with produce, which was to last until the sixties, but the area’s history as a market is now believed to go back even further, into the Saxon period. It is thought that the Venerable Bede, writing in 731, was describing it when he mentioned ‘a metropolis’ and ‘a mart of many peoples coming by land and sea’.
Archaeological digs in Covent Garden have revealed that it was settled by Saxons some two hundred years after the Romans upped sticks and abandoned Londinium, and Britain, at the beginning of the fifth century. They developed a port on the gravel banks of the Thames where, thanks to the intervention of Victorian engineering, the Strand now stands high and dry. It was here that the ‘many peoples’ gathered to trade. And, of course, although the produce has gone, people still come by land, sea and, nowadays, air to wander through a modern market that sells souvenirs, trinkets and handmade bits and pieces at bijou little shops and the odd market stall.
Henry VIII took Covent Garden from St Peter’s Abbey and gave it –
along with the title of first Earl of Bedford – to John Russell to reward his services as a soldier and a diplomat. It was not until the third Earl, Edward Russell, that the family built a mansion on the estate lands. Until then, like other gentry of the time, the Russells had a mansion on the Strand with fine river views and easy access to the Thames, which, in the absence of any roads better than rutted tracks and lanes, was the main thoroughfare for London and its environs.
Bloomsbury, north of Covent Garden, was yet another place that Henry VIII grabbed. This time he ousted some Carthusian monks. The area’s name is thought to derive from the name of one William Blemund, who had a manor house there in the early Middle Ages. Henry gave the property to the Earl of Southampton for services rendered. Later, a descendant married into the Russell family, and the properties were amalgamated.
There was originally a nunnery on the site of the parish church of St James at Clerkenwell, east of Bloomsbury, while the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem had their headquarters somewhere in the area. Oliver Cromwell lived in Clerkenwell Close, and in the seventeenth century the place became very fashionable. Before it was built up, it was a kind of resort, where Londoners disported themselves at tea gardens, Sadler’s Wells and health spas. Clerkenwell Green was the centre of the old village, before London outgrew its walls and crept out to meet it. The term ‘green’ is a little misleading, as there hasn’t been any grass here for three hundred years or more. It is dominated by the old courthouse, an imposing building that is now a Masonic hall. Clerkenwell has long had a mixture of housing, offices, pubs and flourishing workshops that have given it a particular character and identity.
In the 1880s, Clerkenwell witnessed a mass influx of Italians looking for work. Like others who came before and since, they brought their trades with them: making mosaics and terrazzos (mosaic floors), organ grinding, knife grinding and plasterwork, which included making plaster saints for churches and shrines. They also brought roasted chestnuts to our streets, a strong, tasty and fragrant memory from my own childhood.
When grinding barrel organs ceased to bring in a living wage, the grinders turned to catering. Many of the Italians who worked in Soho’s restaurants lived in Clerkenwell. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was known as ‘little Italy’ and the poorer workers lived in appalling slum conditions. There are still workshops in the area that continue some of the traditional trades brought to London from Italy, while St Peter’s at 136 Clerkenwell Road, ‘the Italian church’, still caters for Italian Catholics and keeps the language, culture and customs of Italy alive in the West End.
At St James’s, south-west of Soho, Henry VIII, having finally rid himself of his first wife and the Church of Rome, built a new palace for himself and his new consort, Anne Boleyn. Henry’s desire for a new queen has long been seen as the main catalyst for all this upheaval in Church and state, although modern scholarship suggests that the situation was far more complex than that. The Church of Rome was far too greedy, corrupt and ambitious for the Tudor king’s liking: it had to go. Anne was simply the spark that finally lit a fuse that had been laid for some time. Whatever the reason, getting shot of Rome’s influence resulted in the dissolution of the monasteries and Henry taking over ownership of their green and pleasant lands to the west of the city.
St James’s had once been very isolated: in the twelth century there was a leper hospital for women on the site, which later passed in to the hands of Eton College. By the sixteenth century though, it was a desirable location near the seat of government, which is why Henry wanted it. Before building commenced, the king, true to form, gave Eton its marching orders, coercing the provost into swapping the land for a bit of Suffolk. Eton College, however, stayed near Windsor.
It could be argued that, despite the six wives, Henry remained a bachelor at heart, always enjoying the pleasures of a single man, including gambling, fornicating, drinking, hunting and hanging out with the lads. In the decades after Henry’s death, St James’s became a kind of haven for well-to-do single men about town, where they could gamble, booze, swear and play. Pall Mall, St James’s main thoroughfare, began life as a court on which young bloods could play the game of pell mell – a cross between croquet and golf – and be as uncouth as only a bunch of young men can be, without the troublesome influence of their women to rein them in.
They all acted pretty much like old Henry, basically, although, rather than the nasty beheading thing he went in for when someone upset him, they had duels. The last duel of honour in London took place in St James’s. Once again, there’s a sort of eerie continuity about the fact that the place has long been associated with young (and not so young) men, from the days of Eton College ownership, through Henry and his pals and on to the foundation of many gentlemen’s clubs there, beginning in 1693 with White’s; several of these clubs survive to the present day. This preponderance of testosterone also explains the nature of the shops that St James’s has long been famous for: high-class tailors, Lock’s hatters, wine merchants, makers of monogrammed silk shirts, bespoke shoes and expensive guns, as well as art galleries.
That small area provided just about everything that a well-heeled chap from the top drawer of society could possibly have ever wanted, including the baths and bagnios they frequented to purchase sexual pleasure. By Regency times, the area was a favoured spot with dandies and beaux who would ogle any passing female. The ogling explains why there was a lack of upper-class women there, although there would certainly have been servants and prostitutes who simply had to put up with the leers and lechery.
Mayfair, west of Soho, is named after a fifteen-day fair that began in 1686 on the site of what is now Shepherd Market. By 1709, the local gentry had decided it lowered the tone of the place and had it suppressed. The area first became fashionable with the nobility because it was within such easy toadying distance of St James’s Palace and the monarch, and belonged chiefly to the Grosvenor, Berkeley and Burlington families, who all had estates there. Sir Richard Grosvenor, already very rich, decided to increase his stash of cash by developing his land, and began building in 1700. Grosvenor Square, where the American Embassy in London is now, was the centrepiece of his design, which included broad streets and large town houses suitable for his friends and peers. Berkeley Square followed in 1738. Mayfair’s third square, Hanover, honoured the new, German, royal family rather than a local landowner.
Mayfair started posh, and John Nash built Regent Street partly to make sure it remained that way. The famous street not only provided a link between the Prince Regent’s home at Carlton House and Marylebone Park, but also acted as an effective barrier between ‘the Nobility and Gentry’ and the hoi polloi who made up ‘the mechanics and trading part of the community’. Personally, I’ve always felt that keeping the lower orders at bay has done Mayfair no favours in terms of having a character and an identity of its own. Being the playground of the super-rich has made it, in modern parlance, a bit ‘up itself’, content to rest on its exclusive laurels. Even the prostitutes working from Shepherd Market and Park Lane have traditionally been seen as ‘a cut above’ those in Soho and Covent Garden, and consequently charged significantly more for their services.
Fitzrovia, the area immediately to the north of Soho, across Oxford Street was part of Lord Southampton’s estate. When he found he needed to make some quick money, buildings were thrown up rapidly and sold off to service industries as early as the 1700s. The residential property built there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was always let on short leases, which made for a shifting population. This is why the area has never had the same sense of community that both Soho and Covent Garden still enjoy. Neither did it have the snob appeal that Mayfair and St James’s had from their very inception, although some illustrious – and, it was rumoured, royal – names frequented gambling clubs and male brothels in Cleveland Street in the nineteenth century.
The name Fitzrovia was coined in the 1930s by the Bloomsbury Group, some of whom, such as Virginia
Woolf, lived in Fitzroy Square – as did George Bernard Shaw. The square itself was built and named for Charles Fitzroy, Lord Southampton, in the late eighteenth century and the Adam brothers were its architects. The area had a strong bohemian and artistic presence. Augustus John drank at the Fitzroy pub with his arty cronies, as did Dylan Thomas when he was in town. Nina Hamnett was quite a fixture there too. There was always a sense, in this regard, that Fitzrovia envied Soho: its loucher denizens even tried calling it ‘North Soho’ at one point, but the name never really caught on.
In the seventeenth century, those who owned acreage west of London began to see the development potential in land that was so near the King’s court and the growing mercantile centre of the city. There was serious money to be made, and Francis Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford, was one of the first to see it. He set about building the first planned development at Covent Garden. Charles I duly issued the necessary licence to build, despite the monarchy’s traditional reluctance to allow building so close to London. Money – perhaps as much as £2,000 – apparently changed hands between Bedford and the King, an early instance of corruption in the West End.
An ambitious plan was hatched to build town houses for the gentry and a large square in the Italian style. The great architect, Inigo Jones, probably played some part in the design, although how much is not entirely clear. When completed, the Piazza astonished Londoners. It was a large open space bounded on the west by the church of St Paul, on the north and east by arcaded houses and on the south by the wall of Bedford House. It served as a meeting place for all comers, rather than a private garden for those who lived around it, as was the case in the other West London squares that were built in its wake.
There were other innovations as well. The haphazard tangle of roads and lanes that had followed the long-gone field boundaries of medieval farms and smallholdings were swept aside in favour of a neat grid of streets lined with smart houses, at least in Covent Garden’s initial development. Things developed in a more haphazard fashion around and about, where there was no single landlord.