Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree

by Alan Brooke

  About one-third of the way along Oxford Street is the junction with Regent Street. This was part of an ambitious scheme by John Nash (1752–1835), the town planner and architect, and others, to connect what came to be called Regent’s Park with the official residence of the Regent, Carlton House. In the early part of the nineteenth century property speculators were keen to maximise the value of residential development planned for the Marylebone district by having easier road access from the Charing Cross and Strand areas. This would help to raise land values in run-down areas such as the Haymarket and Pall Mall through which any new road was likely to run. Nash wanted the proposed road to be part of a grandiose programme of improvements that would bring London’s architecture up to the standards of other European capital cities. Parliamentary approval was obtained in 1813 and work started quickly. Nash was severely frustrated in his attempt to place his own imprimatur throughout the scheme, individual developers using their own designs where it suited them. However, Nash was very successful in the work he undertook between Piccadilly and Oxford Street in the Quadrant. This part of Regent Street did represent something close to the model he had envisaged. For many years in the nineteenth century, along with Bond Street close by, Regent Street was the shopping resort of the very rich and fashionable but by 1900 they had tended to drift away and Regent Street was beginning to look somewhat down-at-heel. Many of the buildings were showing serious structural faults and it was evident that shortcuts had been taken when this part of Regent Street had originally been put up. Complete redevelopment was considered and the prominent architect Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) was asked to come up with suggestions. The shopkeepers, led by the managing director of Swan & Edgar, totally rejected these as too expensive and also because they thought that adding to the height of the buildings would make the street seem cavernous and off-putting. Eventually a new design for the Quadrant was accepted and rebuilding was completed in the 1920s.

  Today Regent Street remains one of the leading shopping areas of central London. Visible from Oxford Circus just down the east side of Regent Street is Liberty’s. This famous, highly idiosyncratic emporium traces its origins to Arthur Lasenby Liberty who started selling oriental fabrics and other goods in Regent Street in the 1870s. Liberty had an almost devotional enthusiasm for oriental art and design and was also fired by a passionate desire to encourage craftsmanship and to improve public taste. He became a fervent supporter of the Aesthetic Movement, a reaction to what was seen as the brash vulgarity of the standardised, mass-produced articles associated with the Industrial Revolution. Liberty was convinced that the beauties of oriental colour and design could be reproduced using the latest mechanical aids. It did not prove easy but Liberty was possessed of a persuasive missionary zeal. British manufacturers eventually managed to produce fabrics that displayed both original oriental and new designs and which often incorporated ancient dyeing techniques, again using new technology. For those occasions when designs could only be hand-printed, he established a printing works at Merton Abbey. His influence on taste and fashion was enormous and he came to hobnob with some of the leading artists, aesthetes and critics of his time such as William Morris, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Such was his success that he eventually occupied all the buildings from 140 to 150 Regent Street. However, redevelopment took place in the 1920s and the buildings we see now are highly eclectic, the result of the conservative agents of the Crown who own the land and the flamboyant Liberty reaching an uneasy compromise. Eastern and British motifs in curious juxtaposition adorn the Regent Street facade while that part of the building fronting on to Great Marlborough Street has a half-timbered Tudor appearance with an interior incorporating oak and teak timber work from three naval men-o’-war. There is high quality stained glass, linenfold panelling and also galleries with hammer-beam roofs.

  Just before the intersection of Oxford Street and Regent Street, Argyll Street comes in from the south. Close to Oxford Street are 8 and 10 Argyll Street. These display blue plaques commemorating Washington Irving and William Roy respectively. Washington Irving (1783–1859) was an American who was also something of an Anglophile and is perhaps best known for his American adaptation of German folk tales such as ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. At no. 10, Major General William Roy’s residence is remembered. He lived from 1726 to 1790 and was a skilled surveyor and cartographer whose work on mapping Scotland after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the battle of Culloden in 1746 provided the model for the development of the Ordnance Survey. Immediately after Argyll Street stands Oxford Circus Underground station. This has largely managed to retain the facade with glazed dark ruby red tiling which was so characteristic of the work of Leslie W. Green, appointed in 1903 as the architect of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. Close to Oxford Circus and running between Great Portland Street and Titchfield Street is Market Place, the name of which recalls the Oxford Market which served the affluent residential quarters nearby from around 1720 up to the late nineteenth century.

  On the north side of Oxford Street, Hollies Street gives access to Cavendish Square from which Harley Street runs up towards Regent’s Park. One interesting resident of 33 Harley Street was Jane Digby, who gained notoriety in the 1820s and 1830s. She came from a very privileged social background and was only seventeen when she married a peer twenty years her senior. Jane was a young woman of great beauty, being tall, well proportioned and having the most winsome eyes. She was also an accomplished linguist and painter. These qualities were combined with a rapacious appetite for amorous adventures. In the first two years of marriage she took a succession of lovers by one of whom – reputedly her cousin – she had a child. At the age of twenty-one she met the love of her life. There was little that was understated about this man, starting with his name. This was Prince Felix Ludwig Johann von Nepomuk Friederich zu Schwarzenburg, an attaché at the Austrian Embassy. Their relationship became the focus of much disapproving gossip but such was the Prince’s contempt for the mores of fashionable society that when Jane went to Brighton for a few days, he decided to make a surprise visit to her and did so in a garish yellow coach sporting his family arms. Divorce was inevitable and after the birth of a daughter by the Prince, Jane found a new theatre for her activities in the Mediterranean. Here she took a succession of eminent lovers. These included three kings, some princes and a German baron before she decided to go native. After frolicking with an Albanian brigand, she made for the deserts of Syria and enjoyed a number of Bedouin lovers, one of whom she ended up marrying. She died in 1881 and was buried in a Christian cemetery in Damascus.

  Moving westwards along Oxford Street, New Bond Street soon joins from the south. This was developed from the early 1700s and while few buildings of great architectural distinction are still to be seen, there are some fine Victorian shop-fronts because Bond Street became the place where the rich shopped for the expensive fripperies they regarded as essential to their lifestyle. Bond Street was the place to perambulate, to do a spot of window-gazing and shopping while also trying to see and be seen. The street was also a favoured residential area in early times and boasted many famous residents. These include Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), the cleric and satirical writer; Edward Gibbon (1737–94), author of the monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; William Pitt the Elder (1708–78), the Whig politician; and, by a neat coincidence, Horatio Nelson and Emma Hamilton, although not at the same time. New Bond Street has maintained its position as a location for fashionable and expensive shops.

  Duke Street crosses Oxford Street and on the north side leads across Wigmore Street into Manchester Square and then Manchester Street. Here at no. 38 there was a great deal of excitement in 1814. This stemmed from the announcement that a virgin woman of sixty-four had been impregnated by a divine partner and that she was going to give birth to the second Christ, the specific date for this event being 19 October in that yea
r. The woman concerned was Joanna Southcott (1750–1814), a farmer’s daughter from Devon. Born into the Anglican Church, she later converted to Methodism which she embraced with great ardour. She began to attract the limelight in 1792 when she declared that she had been divinely appointed to announce to the world the imminent Second Coming of Jesus. In that year she wrote a book of prophecies, the first of a series of writings which began to attract followers. In 1802 she started giving letters promising eternal life to those people she decided had divine favour. These included Mary Bateman who turned out to be a particularly brutal murderess. Joanna attracted a devoted following who showed their support by showering her with gifts in cash and kind. A chapel for her followers was opened in 1802. In 1813 she declared that she was pregnant and that the child, to be called ‘Shiloh’, would be the second Messiah. The nation was on tenterhooks when Joanna retired to bed to await her confinement. The promised date came and went but no baby arrived. With a great sense of anticlimax Christmas came and a few days later Joanna died. An autopsy showed that chronic flatulence and glandular swelling in the breasts had produced something of the appearance of pregnancy. She left a box of undisclosed ‘treasures’ which was only to be opened in the presence of twenty-four bishops at a time of national crisis. By the 1920s a number of these boxes had appeared, all vying with each other to be regarded as the genuine article. When one of them was opened in 1927, albeit with only one bishop present, it was found to contain nothing of significance. Some of Southcott’s supporters in the Panacea Society still aver that this box was not the real one.

  At the junction of Oxford Street and Marylebone Lane, opposite Bond Street underground station, a lamp-post bears a small black plaque which reads, ‘Marylebone Lane follows the course of the ancient Tyburn stream now underground’. There is a slight depression in Oxford Street where it crosses the small valley that the Tyburn has made. At the junction of Oxford Street and Edgware Road another lamp-post bears a plaque also erected by Westminster City Council which is inscribed with the legend, ‘Site of Tyburn Gallows. For four centuries [sic] Londoners celebrated executions on this spot with public hangings.’ Four centuries seems something of an underestimate. In the complex of roads and bedlam of traffic that surround Marble Arch, there is a short slip road, used only by buses, called Tyburn Way while closer to Marble Arch itself is a plaque which reads:

  The location is on an axis of two great Roman roads. One linked Colchester to the West Country, the other Watling Street (Edgware Road), linked with St Albans to the North. The Romans are thought to have built both these roads alongside the line of two older tracks which followed the high ground to avoid marshy land. Edgware Road is midway between the Tyburn and the Westbourne streams. For 600 years this crossroads was known as Tyburn. A plaque in the traffic island at the junction of Edgware Road and Bayswater Road marks the site of where the gallows is thought to have stood from 1571 to 1759. The gallows were known as the ‘Tyburn Tree’ but were replaced by a moveable gallows where a Toll House for the turnpike road was built on its site. In the eighteenth century Oxford Street was called Tyburn Road and Park Lane was called Tyburn Lane … the last execution was at Tyburn in 1783.

  This plaque can be found adjacent to Exit 3. The Triple Tree is reputed to have had each of its legs standing in adjoining parishes – those of St George, Hanover Square, St Marylebone and Paddington.

  Marble Arch itself was designed by John Nash reputedly using as an example the Arch of Constantine in Rome. It was erected in 1827 and placed in front of Buckingham Palace. Originally it was intended to top the arch with a colossal bronze representation of ‘Victory’ but this was superseded by a decision to erect instead a statue of George IV by the sculptor Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). In the event this was located in Trafalgar Square. Marble Arch was moved to its present site in 1851 and in 1908 marooned on an island in the middle of what even then was a maelstrom of traffic chaos. None but senior members of the royal family and the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery are allowed to pass through it. The panels of the arch represent the Spirit of England inspiring Youth, Valour and Virtue and Peace and Plenty. A room in the attic of Marble Arch was at one time used by the Metropolitan Police.

  To the west of Marble Arch a short way along the north side of Bayswater Road in Hyde Park Place is Tyburn Convent housing the Shrine of the Sacred Heart and the Tyburn Martyrs which contains relics recalling over a hundred Catholic martyrs who died at Tyburn. In the crypt is the Martyrs’ Altar over which stands a replica of Tyburn Tree. Stained glass windows commemorate other aspects of the life and works of those Catholics who died for their beliefs. On the external wall of the convent there is an image of the gallows with the inscription: ‘Tyburn Tree. The circular stone on the traffic island 300 paces east of this point marks the ancient gallows known as Tyburn Tree demolished in 1759.’ Above this stone is a green City of Westminster plaque which reads: ‘105 Catholic martyrs lost their lives at the Tyburn gallows near this site.’ Above this a further stone is inscribed: ‘To the glory of God and in honour of the sacred heart of Jesus, this stone was blessed and laid by Cardinal Godfrey, Archbishop of Westminster on 10 December 1961 in honour of the glorious martyrs who laid down their lives in defence of the Catholic faith here on Tyburn Hill 1535–1681.’ Another plaque reads: ‘In 1585 Gregory Gunne predicted that one day a religious house would be founded at Tyburn. His prediction was fulfilled when Tyburn Convent was established in 1903.’

  Just north of Marble Arch on the west side of Edgware Road is Connaught Place where a blue plaque at no. 2 commemorates Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–95). A descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, he was the father of Winston Churchill. His apparently precocious political abilities led to the prediction of a great future in the Conservative Party. At the age of thirty-seven, however, he was revealed as totally out of his depth when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his first and only budget was received with hostility and total derision. He resigned from political life and died while only in his mid-forties, almost certainly from the physical and mental effects of syphilis.

  At the junction of Edgware Road and Seymour Street there is (January 2003) a café-bar appropriately called the Hanging Tree. Further up Edgware Road at no. 195 is a branch of Lloyds Bank where a stone gatepost is on display in the window on which the words ‘Tyburn Gate’ can just be descried. This is from one of the Tyburn toll gates and there is a commemorative plaque bearing this legend:

  This stone … originally stood opposite the junction of Star Street and Edgware Road… . The stone is half a mile from the south end of Edgware Road where at the junction of that road with Oxford Street and Bayswater Road, Tyburn Turnpike house with three gates stood from about 1760 to 1829. Tyburn permanent triangular gallows stood from 1571 to 1759 in the position afterwards occupied by the Toll House. Tyburn was used as a place of execution from time immemorial until 1783. The first recorded execution took place in 1196.

  On the opposite side of Edgware Road a little further to the south is a lamp-post with a City of Westminster plaque which reads: ‘Cato Street. In 1820 a conspiracy to overthrow the government was foiled at nearby 6, Cato Street.’ The conspirators were hanged at Newgate and then decapitated, the last time this form of execution took place in Britain.

  In 1851 the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park. It was of course housed in the building that by popular acclaim became known as the Crystal Palace. The exhibition was an enormous success and Londoners took the Crystal Palace to their hearts. One of the conditions under which the exhibition had been staged was that the building had to be dismantled afterwards. This condition was very unpopular and all sorts of suggestions were put forward as to what use could be made of the building if only it was allowed to stay there. Arguably the most bizarre was that which proposed turning the Crystal Palace on its end to create a multi-storey glass tower 1,000 feet high. Had this ever happened, it would have created one of the most eye-catching features of London’s townscape and skyline in Victor
ian times.

  At the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park is Cumberland Gate which was erected about 1744 and took its name from the Duke of Cumberland, the same who later inflicted a bloody defeat at Culloden on the Scottish clansmen who had supported Bonnie Prince Charlie. At first it was called Tyburn Gate.

  Annually on the last Sunday in April, since 1910, a Roman Catholic bishop leads a silent procession along the route that has been described from Old Bailey to Tyburn in memory of the Catholic martyrs and it concludes with a Benediction close to the supposed location at which they died.