Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Christopher Winn

Map of London

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

London’s River

City of London

EC3 SOUTH

EC3 NORTH

EC2

ST PAUL’S

FLEET STREET

EC1

City of Westminster

THE STRAND

THE WEST END

MAYFAIR & HYDE PARK

ST JAMES’S

WHITEHALL

WESTMINSTER

VICTORIA

East

TOWER

EAST END RIVERSIDE

POPLAR & THE ISLE OF DOGS

THE EAST END

West

CHELSEA

KENSINGTON

HAMMERSMITH & FULHAM

South

WANDSWORTH

LAMBETH

SOUTHWARK

GREENWICH

Gazetteer

Index of People

Index of Places

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Book

Discover hundreds of fascinating facts about London in this enthralling miscellany.

Travelling through the villages and districts that make up the world’s most dynamic metropolis, bestselling author Christopher Winn takes us on a captivating journey around London to unearth the hideen gems of legends, firsts, inventions, adventures and birthplaces that shape the city’s compelling, and at times, turbulent past.

Brimming with stories and snippets providing a spellbinding insight into what has shaped our capital, this beautifully illustrated gem of a book is guaranteed to infom and amuse in equal measure, and will have you exclaiming again and again: ‘Well, I never knew that!’

About the Author

Christopher Winn’s first book was the bestselling I Never Knew That About England. Volumes on Ireland, Scotland, Wales, London, the English, Irish and Scottish followed and he has recently published books on the Lake District, Yorkshire and the River Thames alongside an illustrated edition of I Never Knew That About England. A freelance writer and collector of trivia for over 20 years, he has worked with Terry Wogan and Jonathan Ross and sets quiz questions for television as well as for the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. He is married to artist Mai Osawa, who illustrates all the books in the series.

Also by Christopher Winn:

I Never Knew That About England

I Never Knew That About Ireland

I Never Knew That About Scotland

This book is for Ryoji and Akiko.

Preface

LONDON IS WHATEVER you want it to be.

It is one of the greatest cities on earth. It stands on the Prime Meridian and draws in the best from East and West. It sits at the centre of Time and the world sets its watch by London’s Big Ben.

London is built on commerce and trades with the world. It gave the world modern banking, the stock exchange and insurance and it remains the world’s financial hub. London is home to the Mother of Parliaments and has given sanctuary to ideas, to freedom of speech and thought, to religions and refugees from across the globe. London has the best theatre, the greatest concentration of museums, opera and art; a musical and literary heritage second to none. London has the first underwater tunnels, the first and biggest underground transport system, the first international exchange, the highest Ferris wheel, the biggest dome, the loftiest church. London has over 2,000 years of history. It has survived pestilence, fire and war. It has Roman walls, Norman towers, Tudor palaces, Renaissance splendour, Georgian loveliness, Victorian grandeur, breath-taking modern wonders.

There is pomp and ceremony and spectacle, and yet London is also intimate with quiet corners, crooked cobbled streets, winding alleyways and sunny squares. It is the most liveable-in of all cities with more green spaces than any comparable metropolis, and gardens everywhere.

London is its people and its characters who meet here from every corner of the planet. London cannot be tamed. All you can do is revel in its richness and enjoy the adventure.

I Never Knew That About London is like the city itself, packed, vibrant, disorganised, rambling, diverse, infuriating and endlessly fascinating. Treat this book as a fun companion, one who loves London and can tell you just some of its secrets, and you will soon discover, as Wordsworth did, that ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair …’

London’s River

I NEVER KNEW That About London follows the River Thames, that meandering silver thread of liquid history that runs through the heart of the city and gives it meaning and continuity.

The book begins where London began, on the north bank of the Thames where the Romans built their bridge, then follows the river to the east, to the west and to the south.

Villages merge. Boroughs change their names. Post codes are indistinct. The river is the one constant. It links the many diverse communities that line its banks and bestows a unique quality on them. The river makes London breathe and feel the breeze. It gave life to London and may one day take it away again.

City of London

EC3 SOUTH

MONUMENT – LONDON BRIDGE – BILLINGSGATE – FENCHURCH STREET

The Monument

Monumental

THE MONUMENT RISES above Fish Hill, close to where the Roman bridge came ashore and where London began. The view from the top is awe-inspiring. All around, a forest of spires and towers and turrets thrust upwards, striving for the light, a perfect metaphor for the struggle between God and Mammon. The godly spires more than hold their own, even as the towers of commerce grow ever higher and bolder.

The writer James Boswell came here in 1762 to climb the 311 steps to what was then the highest viewpoint in London. Half-way up he suffered a panic attack, but he persevered and made it to the top, where he found it ‘horrid to be so monstrous a way up in the air, so far above London and all its spires’. After a rash of suicides the viewing platform was caged in 1842.

The Monument commemorates the Great Fire of London and is THE TALLEST ISOLATED STONE COLUMN IN THE WORLD, 202 ft (62 m) high. It stands 202 ft (62 m) away from where the Great Fire started, at a baker’s shop in Pudding Lane, on 2 September 1666. The fire raged for five days and destroyed four-fifths of the City, including St Paul’s Cathedral and 87 churches.

SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN, as well as designing the new St Paul’s Cathedral also designed the Monument along with his friend Robert Hooke. Wren wanted to crown it with a statue of Charles II, but the king declined, pointing out, ‘I didn’t start the fire.’ So a flaming urn of gilt bronze was put there instead. The two architects used the hollow centre of the column to suspend a pendulum for scientific experiments, but the vibrations from the heavy traffic on Fish Hill made the conditions unsuitable.

The Monument stands on the site of St Margaret’s, Fish Street, the first church to be burned down by the Great Fire.

St Magnus the Martyr

Where fishermen lounge at noon

Where the walls of Magnus Martyr hold

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold

T.S. ELIOT

AT THE BOTTOM of Pudding Lane, down by the river, stands the church of ST MAGNUS THE MARTYR, blackened by grime on the outside but still rich with white and gold inside. It is dedicated to the gentle Norwegian Earl of Orkney, killed by his cousin Haakon in 1116. There has been a church here since at least as early as 1067 and St Magnus was the second church to be consumed by the Great Fire. It was rebuilt by Sir Christopher Wren in 1671–6, with the steeple, one of Wren’s finest, added in 1705. It is 185 ft (56 m) high but only just manages to peep above the massive concrete bulk of Adelaide House (see opposite), which sits hard up against the church. The approach to the old London Bridge ran by St Magnus’s, and when the bridge was widened in the 18th century the aisles of the church were shortened so that the pavement could pass directly underneath the tower, which then straddled the walkway. Some stones from Old London Bridge can be seen just inside the gates of the churchyard. Tucked in beside one of the tower’s pillars is a wooden post from the Roman wharf of the 1st century, found on Fish Hill and as solid today as it was nearly 2,000 years ago.

Inside, there is a memorial to MILES COVERDALE (1487–1569), who was Rector of St Magnus for a short while towards the end of his life, having previously been Bishop of Exeter. Miles Coverdale oversaw the production of THE FIRST COMPLETE BIBLE IN ENGLISH, published in 1535, which he dedicated to Henry VIII with the words ‘this poor translation unto the spirit of truth in your grace’. Four years later he was responsible for THE FIRST AUTHORISED VERSION, the GREAT BIBLE, which was printed in London. Coverdale was originally buried in St Bartholomew by the Exchange, but when that church was demolished in 1840 to make way for the new Royal Exchange, his monument and remains were moved to St Magnus.

The church organ was built by Abraham Jordan in 1712 and was THE FIRST ‘SWELL’ ORGAN IN THE WORLD. A swell organ uses pipes set apart in a box that can be opened and closed to alter the volume, a system now used for organs everywhere.

Just inside the west door there is a fascinating 13 ft (4 m) long model of Old London Bridge.

Adelaide House

Early Skyscraper

LOOMING OVER ST Magnus at the north end of the present London Bridge, and obliterating the view of Wren’s tower and the Monument from the river, is ADELAIDE HOUSE. When this was built in 1925 it was THE TALLEST OFFICE BLOCK IN LONDON, 148 ft (45 m) high. Named in honour of William IV’s wife Queen Adelaide, who performed the opening ceremony for Sir John Rennie’s London Bridge in 1831, Adelaide House was THE FIRST BUILDING IN THE CITY TO EMPLOY THE STEEL FRAME TECHNIQUE. This technique was pioneered, in iron, by the Ditherington Flax Mill outside Shrewsbury in Shropshire, and was later widely used for skyscrapers in New York and Chicago. The discreet Art Deco design of Adelaide House includes Egyptian influences, popular at the time after the recent discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Adelaide House was also THE FIRST OFFICE BLOCK IN BRITAIN TO HAVE CENTRAL VENTILATION and TELEPHONE AND ELECTRIC CONNECTIONS ON EVERY FLOOR. There used to be a golf course on the roof.

London Bridge

Where It All Began

LONDON BRIDGE IS where London began. The first bridge was built around AD 52 by the invading Roman army of the Emperor Claudius, somewhere near the site of the present bridge. About AD 80 a more permanent bridge, made of wood, was erected and Londinium began to develop at the northern end. After the Romans departed the bridge was left to rot and was replaced by a ferry and intermittently by a variety of makeshift wooden structures, until the middle of the 9th century when another more lasting wooden bridge was constructed. In 1014 the Danes held London and the Saxon King Ethelred the Unready, supported by King Olaf of Norway, sailed up the Thames, tied his boats to the bridge supports and rowed away, pulling the bridge down behind him and giving rise to the song ‘London Bridge is falling down …’

The first stone bridge was begun in 1176, in the reign of Henry II. It was masterminded by a churchman called Peter de Colechurch, paid for by a tax on wool and took 33 years to complete. When it was finished in 1209 it was 20 ft (6 m) wide, 900 ft (274 m) long and had 20 arches. There was a gatehouse at each end, a drawbridge near the Southwark end that could be raised to allow ships to pass, and a chapel in the middle, dedicated to St Thomas à Becket, where Peter de Colechurch was buried in 1205. King John decreed that houses and shops should be built on the bridge to provide rents for its upkeep. This bridge became one of the wonders of the world and was to last for over 600 years.

As the tide ebbed and flowed, the narrow arches of the bridge channelled the water into fast-running rapids, and ‘shooting the bridge’ became a dangerous and quite often fatal sport for young bucks. In 1212 fire broke out at both ends of the bridge, trapping thousands of sightseers and residents, and some 3,000 people died.

In 1305 a grisly custom was established when the head of Scottish hero William Wallace was stuck on a pole and placed above the southern gatehouse. Others who have met the same fate, their heads parboiled and dipped in tar to preserve them, include Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, St Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Bishop Fisher and Guy Fawkes.

By the 15th century, buildings lined the whole length of the bridge, some of them seven or eight storeys high and touching at the top, making the bridge into a tunnel.

In 1582 water from the Thames was pumped into the city by two water-wheels placed on the bridge arches to take advantage of the fast-running water. Pieter Morice, the builder of the water-wheels, gave a demonstration of their potential by shooting a column of water high over St Magnus’s steeple.

In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, prior to the building of the Victorian embankments, the river was shallower and the narrow arches of the bridge slowed the flow of water upstream so that the river froze, allowing Frost Fairs to be held on the Thames, most famously in 1683–4 when Charles II attended.

London Bridge escaped the Great Fire of London thanks to a gap between the buildings at the northern end, caused by a previous fire in 1633, that acted as a fire break.

As the narrow bridge road became more and more congested it became necessary to create some rules of the road to keep the traffic flowing smoothly. In 1722 the Lord Mayor ordered that bridge traffic should keep to the left, THE FIRST TIME THE RULE HAD OFFICIALLY BEEN MADE COMPULSORY IN BRITAIN.

By 1763 all the houses had been removed from the bridge and the two central arches were replaced with a single wide arch.

In 1831 the first completely new London Bridge in over 600 years was opened by William IV and Queen Adelaide, 180 ft (55 m) to the west of the original. It was built by Sir John Rennie to the designs of his father John Rennie (1761–1821), who had been responsible for Waterloo and Southwark bridges. When the old bridge was being demolished the bones of Peter de Colechurch were found and unceremoniously thrown into the river.

By the 1960s the bridge was no longer able to cope with modern traffic, and the Government let it be known that they were putting London Bridge up for sale. Robert McCulloch from Arizona in the USA bid $2,460,000 for it, apparently under the impression that he was buying the rather more picturesque Tower Bridge. If, as some claimed, he was bitterly disappointed, McCulloch didn’t show it. As Rennie’s bridge was dismantled section by section, the American had the pieces shipped across the Atlantic and transported to Arizona, where they were put back together at Lake Havasu City on the Colorado River. Sir John Rennie’s London Bridge opened in America in 1971, as THE LARGEST ANTIQUE EVER SOLD, according to The Guinness Book of Records.

Keep Left

The British custom of keeping to the left had developed from jousting when competitors needed to keep their javelin or sword hand free to meet the oncoming horseman. As most people were right-handed this meant passing each other on the left. The Continental custom of driving on the right was introduced by the Emperor Napoleon, who was left handed. Since it was he who established the first road system across most of Europe, right-hand drive was adopted on the Continent.

Its replacement in London was opened by the Queen in 1973. The latest London Bridge is made from concrete and is designed with hollow caissons suitable for carrying essential services across the river, making it THE ONLY HOLLOW BRIDGE OVER THE THAMES. The pavements are heated during cold spells to prevent icing.

Billingsgate

Something Fishy

A LOVELY RIVERSIDE path runs east from London Bridge past the long, yellow, French Renaissance façade of the building that once housed Billingsgate fish market. Dating from 1877, it was converted into smart offices by Sir Richard Rogers after the market moved to the Isle of Dogs in 1982, but still proclaims its heritage with a fish on top of the weather-vane at each end. This was the site of the Roman wharf and original port of London, and was a landing-place and market for all kinds of goods until 1699, when it was made a free market for fish. Passengers also used to pass through Billingsgate, heading for Gravesend where they would transfer on to ocean-going vessels, no doubt stopping their ears against the foul and abusive language for which Billingsgate was a byword. The writer George Orwell worked at Billingsgate in the 1930s, as did the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, in the 1950s.

Across Lower Thames Street from Billingsgate a modern office block now stands on the site of the old Coal Exchange. The Coal Exchange was one of the first cast-iron buildings in London and boasted a rotunda and 100 ft (30 m) high tower. When Prince Albert opened it in 1849, he came by river on THE LAST OCCASION THE STATE BARGE WAS EVER USED. During the excavations a complete Roman bath house was found with 3 ft (1 m) high walls still standing and all the different hot and cold rooms distinctly visible. Although the bath house is now hidden away in the basement of the new office block, it is sometimes possible to view the remains, which are among the best-preserved Roman remains in London.

In 1275 the first Custom House was built beside Billingsgate market to process the duties that Edward I imposed on exports of wool, leather and hides, a practice which laid the foundations of our modern customs system. Between 1379 and 1385, Geoffrey Chaucer worked here as Comptroller of Petty Customs for the Port of London. The imposing 1,190 ft (363 m) long façade of the present Custom House, designed in 1825 by Sir Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum, is best viewed from the river. As a young man, the poet and hymn writer WILLIAM COWPER (1731–1800) came to Custom House Quay to drown himself, while suffering from a severe bout of depression. Fortunately, the water was too low and he survived to write his inspirational poetry.

All Hallows by the Tower

Oldest Church

SHAMEFULLY ISOLATED ON Tower Hill, between a busy road and an appalling modern shopping precinct, is THE OLDEST CHURCH IN LONDON, All Hallows by the Tower. It was founded in 675, as a chapel of the Great Abbey of Barking, and hence is sometimes known as All Hallows Barking. Inside, a 7th-century Saxon arch containing recycled Roman tiles stands at the south-west corner, THE OLDEST SURVIVING PIECE OF CHURCH FABRIC IN LONDON.

Half-way down the stairs to the medieval Undercroft is a tiny, barrel-vaulted chapel of bare, crumbling stone, dedicated to St Clare. Though only yards away from the uproar of Tower Hill it is one of the most peaceful places in London to sit and think. On entering the Undercroft you can actually walk on a remarkably well-preserved section of tesselated Roman pavement laid down here in the 2nd century. At the east end in the Undercroft Chapel is an altar made of stones from the Templar church of Athlit, in Israel, and brought back from the Crusades. Recesses in the walls hold boxes filled with the ashes of the dead. Charles I’s Archbishop, William Laud, was buried in a vault in this chapel for over 20 years after his beheading in 1645. At the Restoration his body was moved to St John’s College, Oxford.

In 1535 the bodies of St Thomas More and Bishop Fisher were brought into the church after their execution at the Tower for refusing to sign Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy.

LANCELOT ANDREWES (1555–1626), the scholarly Bishop of Winchester, was baptised at All Hallows in 1555. He was the last occupant of Winchester Palace in Southwark and is buried in Southwark Cathedral.

In 1650 some barrels of gunpowder that were being stored in the churchyard exploded, destroying some 50 houses, badly damaging All Hallows and causing many fatalities. In 1658 the church tower was rebuilt, THE ONLY EXAMPLE OF WORK CARRIED OUT ON A CHURCH IN THE CITY DURING THE COMMONWEALTH (1649–60).

In 1644 WILLIAM PENN, the founder of Pennsylvania, was baptised at All Hallows. Twenty-two years later in 1666 Penn’s father, Admiral William Penn, saved All Hallows from the Great Fire of London by ordering his men from the nearby naval yards to blow up the surrounding houses as a fire break. Samuel Pepys climbed ‘up to the top of Barking steeple’ to watch the fire and there witnessed ‘the saddest sight of desolation’ before he ‘became afeard to stay there long and down again as fast as I could’.

The following year, 1667, JUDGE JEFFREYS, James II’s notorious ‘hanging judge’, was married at All Hallows. In 1797 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS, later to become 6th President of the United States, married Louisa Catherine Johnson, daughter of the US consul in London, in All Hallows.

From 1922 to 1962 the Vicar of All Hallows was the REVEREND PHILIP ‘TUBBY’ CLAYTON who, as an Army chaplain in 1915, ran a rest-house and sanctuary for soldiers of all ranks at Poperinge in Belgium. It was named Talbot House in memory of Lieutenant Gilbert Talbot, brother of Army chaplain the Revd Neville Talbot who had set up the rest-house. Talbot House became known by its signals code name of TOC H. After the war Clayton fostered the spirit and intent of Talbot House through the Toc H movement and encouraged the setting up of Toc H branches in cities across Britain.

Among the surviving treasures of All Hallows are a wonderful collection of medieval brasses, a rare 15th-century Flemish triptych and what many regard as THE FINEST WOOD CARVING IN LONDON, a font cover carved in lime-wood by Grinling Gibbons in 1682.

St Olave Hart Street

‘… a country church in the world of Seething Lane’

SIR JOHN BETJEMAN

ACROSS THE ROAD from All Hallows, at the top of Seething Lane, is the mainly 15th-century church of St Olave Hart Street, described by Samuel Pepys as ‘our own church’. In 1660 he had a gallery built on the south wall, with an outside stairway leading from the Navy Office in Seething Lane, where he worked, so that he could go to church without getting rained on. The gallery is gone but there is a memorial to Pepys marking where it used to be. Pepys’s home was also in Seething Lane, and it was while living here that he wrote his diaries. His next-door neighbour was Admiral William Penn (see All Hallows). In 1669 Pepys’s beloved wife Elizabeth died of a fever at the age of 29, and he commissioned a marble bust of her to be placed on the north wall of the sanctuary, where he could see it from his pew. On his own death in 1703 Pepys was buried alongside his wife in the nave.

In the tower there was a memorial, damaged in the blitz, to Monkhouse Davison and Abraham Newman, whose grocery business in Fenchurch Street sent out the tea that was seized and jettisoned in the Boston Tea Party in 1773, catalyst for the American War of Independence.

St Olave was the Norwegian King Olaf who helped Ethelred the Unready to pull down London Bridge in 1014. A church was built here in his memory not long after his death in 1025. The present St Olave’s dates mainly from 1450 and was one of the few London churches to escape the Great Fire in 1666. It was damaged in the Blitz, but sensitively restored in the 1950s.

A plaque in the churchyard informs us that MOTHER GOOSE was laid to rest there in 1586. In 1665 many of the victims of the Great Plague were buried in the churchyard, including Mary Ramsay, who is said to have brought the Plague to London. No doubt in reference to this, a set of skulls are carved in stone above the gateway to the churchyard, which inspired Charles Dickens to refer to St Olave’s in The Commercial Traveller as St Ghastly Grim.

Well, I never knew this

ABOUT

EC3 SOUTH

The heart of Richard I (the Lionheart) is said to be buried somewhere in the north part of the churchyard of All Hallows by the Tower, beneath a chapel built there by Richard in the 12th century. The chapel is long gone.

FENCHURCH STREET STATION, one of four stations to feature on the Monopoly board, opened in 1841, and was THE FIRST RAILWAY STATION TO BE LOCATED WITHIN THE CITY OF LONDON. It was the location of THE FIRST RAILWAY BOOKSTALL IN THE CITY, operated by William Marshall. Fenchurch Street Station is the only central London station not to have its own underground link. A clothing brand, Fenchurch is named after it.

ST MARGARET PATTENS on Eastcheap gets its name from ‘pattens’, a type of shoe that was made in the lane that runs by the side of the church. It was burned down in the Great Fire and rebuilt by Christopher Wren. Inside are THE ONLY TWO CANOPIED PEWS FOUND IN ANY WREN CHURCH. One of them has Wren’s initials ‘CW 1686’ carved on the ceiling of the canopy, indicating that this is where he sat when attending services here.

The main body of the church of ST DUNSTAN IN THE EAST on Idol Lane was destroyed in the Blitz, but the shell remains and has been turned into a charming garden, often described as the most beautiful public garden in the City, an oasis of peace for City workers wanting a quiet place to sit. The magnificent Gothic Wren tower of 1697 has survived hurricanes and bombs and now houses a small health clinic at the base. It is topped with a crown, similar to that above St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.

THE OLDEST ANNUALLY CONTESTED SPORTING EVENT IN BRITAIN, THE DOGGET’S COAT AND BADGE RACE, is a 4-mile (7.2 km) rowing race from London Bridge to Chelsea. It was established in 1715 by Thomas Doggett, an Irish actor and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, as an incentive for apprentice watermen. The contestants are drawn from the Watermen and Lightermen’s Company, and the prize is a scarlet coat, a silver badge and a special lunch held at the Fishmongers’ Hall in the winner’s honour.

EC3 NORTH

ALDGATE – ST HELEN’S – LEADENHALL – CORNHILL – ROYAL EXCHANGE

St Botolph Aldgate

Oldest Organ

ALDGATE WAS THE City’s easternmost gate, and Geoffrey Chaucer had lodgings above the gatehouse for several years while Comptroller of Customs in the 1370s and 80s.

Marooned on a traffic island nearby, at the end of Houndsditch, is St Botolph Aldgate, built in 1744 by George Dance, who built the Mansion House. There has been a church here for over 1,000 years, situated just outside the ‘ald’ gate. There are three other St Botolph’s in the City, all beside gates (Billingsgate, Aldersgate and Bishopsgate), because St Botolph was regarded as a saint for travellers. Botolph gave his name to Boston in Lincolnshire (Botolph’s Town) and hence Boston, Massachusetts.

If the environs of the church are uninspiring, the interior of St Botolph’s is breathtaking. Remodelled at the end of the 19th century by John Francis Bentley, architect of Westminster Cathedral, the plasterwork and carving on the ceiling and galleries are rich and decorative, and there are cornices of angels holding shields of city companies. The whole effect should be too much, but somehow it works, filling the church with light and energy.

The organ in the west gallery is by one of the two great 17th-century organ-builders, RENATUS HARRIS (the other was Father Smith), and was given to the church in 1676, making it THE OLDEST CHURCH ORGAN IN LONDON.

The most poignant and unexpected monument in the church is a wall tablet commemorating one of the world’s great inventors, WILLIAM SYMINGTON (1763–1831), the Scottish engineer who built the world’s first steamboat and took the poet Robert Burns for a ride in it, on Dalswinton Loch in Scotland in 1788. ‘Dying in want he was buried in the adjacent churchyard March 22nd 1831,’ says the tablet. It seems almost inconceivable that this brilliant man who contributed so much to the world should have died poor and alone so far from home.

DANIEL DEFOE was married at St Botolph’s in 1683.

St Helen’s, Bishopsgate

Westminster Abbey of the City

ST HELEN’S, THE largest surviving church in the City, stands in a quiet, shady courtyard far removed in both looks and atmosphere from the temples of commerce that surround it. One of the few City churches to survive the Great Fire and the Blitz, it retains a pleasingly medieval appearance on the outside, despite being damaged by IRA bombs in 1992 and 1993. At the west end there is a fine bell turret perched between two big windows, both 400 years old.

Helen was the mother of the Emperor Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, who is linked with the original church, built here in the 4th century on the site of a pagan temple. St Helen’s is unique in the City in that it possesses two parallel medieval naves, one belonging to the original parish church, the other, on the north side, to a Benedictine nunnery founded here in 1204 – this is THE ONLY BUILDING FROM A NUNNERY TO SURVIVE IN THE CITY.

The interior of the church is a medieval treasure trove, for St Helen’s contains MORE MONUMENTS THAN ANY OTHER CHURCH IN LONDON EXCEPT WESTMINSTER ABBEY – hence its title ‘the Westminster Abbey of the City’. The array includes the tomb chest of SIR THOMAS GRESHAM (c.1517–79), wealthiest of the Elizabethan merchants and founder of the Royal Exchange, and the altar tomb of SIR JOHN CROSBY, who was buried here in 1475. He was the owner of the tallest house in London, the magnificent Crosby Hall on Bishopsgate, which was demolished in 1908 and removed to Chelsea. There is also a depiction of William Shakespeare in one of the few surviving sections of stained glass. Shakespeare is recorded as living in the parish in 1597 and was obviously familiar with Crosby Hall as he uses it as a setting for the plottings of the hunchback Duke of Gloucester in Richard III.

After the IRA bombs of 1992 and 1993 St Helen’s was restored by the neo-classical architect QUINLAN TERRY.

St Helen’s Place

Try Saying Leathersellers Quickly Three Times

NEXT DOOR, REACHED from Bishopsgate through noble iron gates, is one of the most unusual and attractive office blocks in the City, ST HELEN’S PLACE. Redesigned in the 1920s for the HUDSON’S BAY COMPANY, who had their offices here, it consists of a short, cobbled street surrounded on three sides by smart, neo-classical style buildings reminiscent of Paris. Presiding over the grand Bishopsgate façade is a Hudson’s Bay Company beaver running along the copper weather-vane on top of a square turret and cupola. The whole block sits under the towering, futuristic bulk of the ‘Gherkin’, and the effect of this intriguing juxtaposition is quite startling.

ST HELEN’S PLACE is sited on nunnery land bought by the Leathersellers’ Company in 1543, at the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and on the north side of the courtyard is the LEATHERSELLERS’ HALL. In shape it is a near perfect 38 ft (11.6 m) cube and possesses THE LARGEST AND HEAVIEST CRYSTAL CHANDELIER COMMISSIONED SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

St Andrew Undershaft

Dance Around the Maypole

ST ANDREW UNDERSHAFT in St Mary Axe, a survivor of the Great Fire, is so called because of the maypole, taller than the steeple, that was put up outside the church in the 15th century. In 1517, on what became known as ‘Evil May Day’, City apprentices rioted against immigrants and foreign imports and the maypole was taken down and never used again.

The Hudson’s Bay Company

Founded on a charter from Prince Rupert in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company is THE OLDEST CHARTERED TRADING COMPANY IN THE WORLD. It was given territory amounting to some 40 per cent of Canada and, in return for settling and developing that territory, it was given a monopoly of the region’s natural resources. It was THE LARGEST LANDOWNER IN THE WORLD for much of the 17th and 18th centuries and controlled the fur trade throughout much of North America. In 1970, on the 300th anniversary of the founding of the company, its headquarters were moved from London to Winnipeg and then Toronto in Canada. Today the legacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company is a number of department and clothing stores across Canada operating under a variety of different banners.

Inside the church there is a monument to JOHN STOW (1525–1605), THE FATHER OF LONDON HISTORIANS, famed for his Survey of London which appeared in 1598. Every year a memorial service is attended by the Lord Mayor, who places a new quill into Stow’s hand and presents the old one to the child who has written the best essay on London. The artist HANS HOLBEIN, who drew the definitive portrait of Henry VIII, lived in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft and is buried here. In the south porch lobby there is a bell-shaped tablet commemorating FABIAN STEDMAN, the man who originated the art of change ringing and wrote the first ever book on the subject. He was buried here in 1715.

St Katharine Cree

A Stylish Mix

ST KATHARINE CREE in Leadenhall Street, another survivor of the Great Fire of 1666, is a 17th-century rebuilding of a 13th-century church and is unique among City churches in being a mixture of Gothic and classical styles. The vivid rose window at the east end is modelled on the one in old St Paul’s Cathedral and tells the story of St Katharine, an Egyptian princess who was martyred on a wheel at the age of just 18, early in the 4th century. The wheel was destroyed by a bolt of lightning from God and is the origin of the Katharine Wheel firework. Purcell, Wesley and Handel are all believed to have played on the Father Smith organ, since rebuilt by Willis in 1866 and Lewis in 1906. Father Smith (1630–1708) was one of the two leading organ-builders of the 17th century, along with Renatus Harris. There is a magnificent monument to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, after whom Throgmorton Street is named. The father-in-law of Sir Walter Raleigh, he died in 1570. Buried under the altar is SIR JOHN GAYER, a 17th-century Lord Mayor of London who survived an encounter with a lion in the Arabian desert and in gratitude endowed the Lion Sermon, which is still preached annually on 16 October.

Livery Companies

Most of London’s Livery Companies have their origins in the medieval City guilds, informal bodies made up of merchants or craftsmen, which were formed to look after the interests of their members and uphold the standards of their particular trade. They would apply for a Royal Charter which established the Company and enshrined its rights over trade, as well as allowing the privilege of wearing its own unique ceremonial robes known as a ‘livery’. Charters also gave the Companies the right to own property and many of them built Halls in which to conduct their business, where previously they would have met in taverns or private houses. There are 41 Livery Halls remaining in the City today, forming a remarkable heritage of historic architecture and tradition.

In 1516 the Lord Mayor decided to rank the 48 Livery Companies that existed then in order of preference. The most senior companies were known as the ‘Great Twelve’:

Mercers

Grocers

Clothworkers

Fishmongers

Goldsmiths

Skinners

Merchant Taylors

Haberdashers

Salters

Ironmongers

Vintners

Drapers

The Skinners and the Merchant Taylors could not agree on their ranking and still take turns to occupy sixth and seventh places, an arrangement that gave rise to the expression ‘at sixes and sevens’.

At the time of writing there are 107 London Livery Companies, although the number is growing all the time. Today they function primarily as charitable organisations.

Lloyd’s of London

From a Coffee Shop to a Coffee Machine

THE SILVER STEEL and glass LLOYD’S OF LONDON BUILDING at No. 1 Lime Street is perhaps the most controversial and talked-about structure in the City, even today, more than 20 years after its completion in 1986. It was designed by Richard Rogers in the ‘inside out’ style of his Pompidou Centre in Paris, with all the service pipes, ducts and lifts exposed on the outside, and broke new ground in the City by paying no regard to the traditional architecture of the buildings around it.

People either love it or hate it, but the design has many advantages, allowing a clear open space for the trading floors inside, with plenty of daylight flooding in through the glass atrium roof, and repair work on the services able to take place without disturbing the work going on inside.

Banks of escalators move people between the four open floors of the ‘Room’, where the underwriters do their business beneath the soaring rectangular 12-storey atrium. Offices occupy the floors above on either side. The wooden ‘boxes’ of the syndicates in the Room employ the same design as in previous Lloyd’s buildings, and in the middle, underneath the atrium, sits the rostrum from the old building containing the famous LUTINE BELL.

Displayed in a glass cabinet near the rostrum is the jewel of the company’s prized Nelson Collection, the original logbook of the frigate HMS Euralyus, an observer at the Battle of Trafalgar, opened at the page recording Nelson’s message to his fleet, ‘England expects that every man will do his duty’.

The Lutine Bell

The bell was salvaged in 1859 from a captured French frigate La Lutine (the Sprite) which sank off the Dutch coast in 1799 carrying a cargo of gold and silver bullion insured at Lloyd’s for £1 million. It was hung in the Lloyd’s underwriting room, then at the Royal Exchange, and was rung when news of overdue ships came in, so that everyone involved in the risk was made aware at the same time. Bad news was announced by one stroke of the bell, good news by two strokes. The Lutine Bell is no longer rung for this purpose, but is sounded on ceremonial occasions or for exceptional disasters such as the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001.

An exhilarating ride in one of the outside elevators, the first of their kind in Britain, takes you up to the 11th floor, where the Lloyd’s building hides its biggest surprise, the glorious blue and cream Adam Room, an early work of Robert Adam, designed in 1763 for Bowood House in Wiltshire. When a large part of Bowood House was demolished in 1956, Lloyd’s purchased the Adam Room and reassembled it in their previous premises, from where it was transferred to the present building and restored to its original proportions. Used for meetings of the Council of Lloyd’s and for receptions, the magnificent classical design provides a wondrous contrast to the stark modernism of rest of the building.

Lloyd’s of London is the world’s leading insurance market. It all began in 1688 in a coffee-house in Tower Street, run by Edward Lloyd and frequented by sailors, merchants and shipowners who would exchange information about their ships and cargoes and arrange insurance. Individuals would each take a share of the risk for payment of a premium and write their names on the policy, one under the other. Hence they were known as ‘underwriters’.

A few years later, around 1696, Edward Lloyd began to publish a news sheet containing all the shipping information he had gathered. Called Lloyd’s News, this was the forerunner of Lloyd’s List and LONDON’S FIRST DAILY NEWSPAPER.

As business grew it eventually became necessary to find new premises, and over the year Lloyd’s has operated out of many different City addresses, from the Royal Exchange and Leadenhall Street to its present ultra-modern home at No. 1 Lime Street. As one wag put it, Lloyd’s has gone from a coffee shop to a coffee machine.

Cornhill

Highest Point

CORNHILL IS THE highest point of the City and was the site of the huge basilica, one of the largest in the whole Roman empire, of Londinium. In medieval times it was a grain market and then the location of a pillory where the author Daniel Defoe, who had a hosier’s shop nearby, was placed in 1703 for writing a pamphlet satirising the government.

ST PETER UPON CORNHILL was founded in AD 179 by LUCIUS, THE FIRST CHRISTIAN KING OF BRITAIN, and is THE OLDEST CHRISTIAN SITE IN LONDON. It remained the Christian centre of England until Augustine arrived in Canterbury in 597. Burned down in the Great Fire, St Peter’s was rebuilt by Christopher Wren in 1781 and featured a Father Smith organ played by Mendelssohn in 1840. In the song ‘Oranges and Lemons’ the church appears in the line ‘Pancakes and fritters say the bells of St Peter’s’. The front of the church on Cornhill is rather unprepossessing, but St Peter’s Alley leads down the side to a small churchyard at the back, from where the view is rather more appealing. The church is now a Christian Aid centre.

Standing slightly back from the street, the elaborate carved doorway to ST MICHAEL, by Sir George Gilbert Scott, comes as a pleasing surprise. So does the beautiful 130 ft (40 m) high pale stone tower started by Christopher Wren and completed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, based on the tower of Magdalen College in Oxford. The poet THOMAS GRAY, author of the ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, was baptised at St Michael’s in 1716. He was born at what was No. 41 Cornhill, where his mother ran a milliner’s shop. It was burned down in 1748 and the site is now occupied by No. 39.

The door of No. 32 has a number of panels with reliefs showing local historical events. This was once No. 65 Cornhill, and the offices of the publishers Smith and Elder. In 1848 two of their authors arrived for a surprise visit and caused a certain amount of consternation, for the publishers had been under the impression that they had been dealing with a couple of gentleman authors called Acton and Currer Bell. In fact they turned out to be Anne and Charlotte Brontë. In 1859 the CORNHILL MAGAZINE was first published at No. 65, with Charlotte Brontë’s literary hero WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY as its first editor. The magazine continued until 1975.

On the corner of Lombard Street and Cornhill was the shop of bookseller and stationer THOMAS GUY (1644–1724), the founder of Guy’s Hospital. He made much of his fortune by selling out of South Sea Stock before it collapsed in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.

Coffee-Houses

The First Information Superhighway

BETWEEN CORNHILL AND Lombard Street there is a maze of narrow passageways and alleys created so that messengers could flit to and fro between all the different businesses that were based around here. And they were also home in the 17th and 18th centuries to dozens of coffee-houses and taverns where merchants, bankers and traders would meet to exchange news and ideas. This area was the original ‘information superhighway’. Many of London’s and the world’s great institutions originated in the coffee-houses of these alleyways: institutions such as Lloyd’s of London, the Baltic Exchange and the Stock Exchange. Today the alleys are dark, featureless and rather disappointing but various plaques high up on the white tile walls tell something of the momentous events and ideas that went out from here to challenge and change the world.

THE FIRST COFFEE-HOUSE IN LONDON was PASQUA ROSEE’S, opened in 1652 by Christopher Bowman and his Levantine partner Pasqua Rosee in St Michael’s Alley at the east end of Cornhill. It was burned down in the Great Fire and replaced by the Jamaica Coffee-House, now the Jamaica Wine House.

In Castle Court is the GEORGE AND VULTURE, several times rebuilt on the site of a tavern first recorded here in the 12th century. Jonathan Swift drank here, as did Charles Dickens, who mentions the pub in Pickwick Papers. In the 18th century the George and Vulture was a favourite haunt of the notorious Hellfire Club, led by Sir Francis Dashwood.

In COWPER’S COURT the JERUSALEM COFFEE-HOUSE for a while rivalled Lloyd’s as a meeting place for those in the business of shipping. Employees from the East India Company, whose headquarters were nearby in Leadenhall Street, met here so often that it became known as the Jerusalem and East India coffee-house. The writer Charles Lamb (1775–1834), the philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806–73) and the novelist Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866) all worked at the East India Company. When the Company ceased trading in 1873, Lloyd’s took over their headquarters, which was situated where the new Lloyd’s building now stands.

CHANGE ALLEY, which took its original name, Exchange Alley, from its position close to the Royal Exchange, was home to GARRAWAY’S coffee-house, opened in 1669 by THOMAS GARRAWAY, THE FIRST MAN TO IMPORT TEA INTO BRITAIN.

A few years later JONATHAN’S COFFEE-HOUSE opened up in Change Alley and became a favourite meeting-place for the stock dealers who had been expelled from the Royal Exchange for rowdiness. THE FIRST RECORDED ORGANISED TRADING IN MARKETABLE STOCKS took place at Jonathan’s in 1698, and this was the origin of the London Stock Exchange. Both Garraways’s and Jonathan’s were at the centre of the frantic activity of THE FIRST MAJOR STOCK MARKET CRASH, the SOUTH SEA BUBBLE of 1720.

Also in Change Alley, its site now marked with a blue plaque, was the KING’S ARMS TAVERN, where THE FIRST MEETING OF THE MARINE SOCIETY WAS HELD on 25 June 1756.

Further west, in POPE’S HEAD ALLEY, stood the Pope’s Head tavern, where the first edition of JOHN SPEED’S 1611 ATLAS OF BRITAIN was sold by JOHN SUDBURY and GEORGE HUMBLE, THE FIRST LONDON PRINT-SELLERS. In 1627 George Humble went on to sell Speed’s The Prospect of the World, THE FIRST WORLD ATLAS BY AN ENGLISHMAN.

St Mary Woolnoth

Amazing Grace

BAROQUE ST MARY Woolnoth fills the angle between Lombard Street and King William Street and sits on the site of the Roman temple to Concord. The name Woolnoth comes from the church’s Saxon founder, a noble called Wulfnoth. St Mary was damaged by the Great Fire and half-heartedly restored by Christopher Wren, but what we see today is the work of Nicolas Hawksmoor – his only City church, completed in 1727.

The interior, based on the Egyptian Hall of Vitruvius, is considered to be Hawksmoor’s finest. This is one of the busiest corners in Britain, a heartbeat from the financial centre of the world, with Bank underground station occupying the crypt, and yet as you enter the church the roar and hot breath of commerce fade and a sense of space and calm descends – somehow Hawksmoor has achieved a Tardis effect, with the inside of the church appearing to be much more spacious than it looks from outside.

On the wall there is a plaque to the reformed slave trader JOHN NEWTON that speaks for itself.

JOHN NEWTON

ONCE AN INFIDEL AND

LIBERTINE

A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN

AFRICA

WAS

BY THE RICH MERCY

OF OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR

JESUS CHRIST

PRESERVED, RESTORED,

PARDONED

AND APPOINTED TO PREACH

THE FAITH

HE HAD LONG LABOURED

TO DESTROY

John Newton was Rector here for 28 years and wrote the hymns ‘How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds’ and ‘Amazing Grace’. He died in 1807, the year his dream was realised, with the introduction of the Slave Trade Act that abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. William Wilberforce declared his inspiration to be the sermons John Newton gave from the pulpit of St Mary Woolnoth.

Edward Lloyd, whose coffee-house in Lombard Street was the origin of Lloyd’s of London insurance market, was buried here in 1713.

In the west gallery is a 17th-century Father Smith organ, THE ONLY UNRESTORED EXAMPLE OF ITS KIND LEFT IN LONDON.

St Mary Woolnoth was THE ONLY CITY CHURCH TO SURVIVE THE BLITZ UNSCATHED.

Royal Exchange

A Place to Meet

THE ORIGINAL EXCHANGE was built by Elizabethan merchant Sir Thomas Gresham in 1535, and opened as the Royal Exchange by Elizabeth I in 1571. It was intended as a true market-place, modelled on the Bourse in Antwerp, with a trading floor, offices and shops set around an open courtyard where traders could meet and do business. It was THE FIRST SPECIALIST COMMERCIAL BUILDING IN BRITAIN. The complex was destroyed by fire in 1666 and again in 1838. The present building, with its noble Corinthian portico of eight pillars, was designed by Sir William Tite and opened by Queen Victoria in 1844. The inner courtyard was roofed over, and in 1892 scenes from London’s history were painted on the walls of the Ambulatory by leading artists of the day such as Sir Frederick Leighton and Sir Frank Brangwyn. You can see them by climbing up to the first-floor gallery.

After being occupied by the Guardian Royal Exchange and the London International Financial Futures Exchange, the Royal Exchange has been redeveloped as a luxury shopping centre and has returned to its original role as a place for City workers to meet and discuss business over coffee.

In Royal Exchange Buildings at the back of the Exchange there is a statue of a seated GEORGE PEABODY (1795–1869), a grocer from Massachusetts who spent his fortune building houses for the poor of London. Peabody Buildings can still be found all across the capital.

PAUL JULIUS REUTER set up his news agency at No. 1 Royal Exchange Buildings in 1851. The agency later moved to Fleet Street and is now at Blackwall (see Tower Hamlets).

Well, I never knew this

ABOUT

EC3 NORTH

The SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE SYNAGOGUE in Bevis Marks, built in 1701, is THE OLDEST SYNAGOGUE IN BRITAIN. The sumptuous galleried interior has since inspired the design of many of Britain’s subsequent synagogues. In the synagogue’s register of births there is an entry from 1804 in the name of BENJAMIN D’ISRAELI. After an argument with the synagogue’s elders D’Israeli’s father took his son to be baptised at St Andrew’s Church in Holborn, a gesture that would later allow Disraeli, as he became, to become a Member of Parliament and eventually BRITAIN’S FIRST JEWISH-BORN PRIME MINISTER.

LOMBARD STREETALEXANDER POPE