Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (4 page)
Read Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London Online
Authors: Editors of David & Charles
The Abbey of St Dunstan
A HOLY TRINITY
Three London churches have borne the name of St Dunstan. The oldest is that of Stepney, built by Dunstan himself in the 10th century. It is sometimes known as the sailors’ church because it was the first church seen by ships entering the docks of London and it was the church where births at sea were registered. St Dunstan-in-the-East, in Great Tower Street, was built by Wren with a spectacular tower and spire which are all that survived the Blitz. The equally striking tower of St Dunstan-in-the-West dominates Fleet Street.
When originally built the abbey had stood on an island in the Thames called Thorney Island or the Island of Thorns. The island was formed by the delta of the River Tyburn which rises on Hampstead Heath and flows mostly underground before entering the Thames in two branches (hence the delta), one at Millbank and the other near Westminster underground Station.
Westminster Abbey owes its prominence to Edward the Confessor (reigned 1043-1066) who was a generous benefactor and chose it as the site of his tomb. By the time of his reign the abbey was a substantial building, occupied by monks who had first been introduced by St Dunstan, while Thorney Island itself had established royal associations. Canute created the first royal residence on Thorney Island to replace a dilapidated one at Aldermanbury in the City. Edward was crowned in Winchester, the capital of Wessex, but all subsequent coronations, beginning with that of the ill-fated Harold, took place at Westminster Abbey. From 1066 Westminster was the seat of government, which it remains to this day.
The Temple boundary
T
emple Bar, first mentioned in 1293 during the reign of King Edward I, marked the boundary between the cities of London and Westminster, taking its name from the Temple church which at the time belonged to the Knights Templar but which now serves two Inns of Court, the Inner Temple and Middle Temple. It has long been a custom that a monarch, newly enthroned, stops at Temple Bar before entering the City so that the Lord Mayor can offer the monarch the City’s sword of state as a token of loyalty. The sword is returned and carried before the sovereign’s carriage to signify that the monarch is in the City under the protection of the Lord Mayor. In 1669, as part of the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire, King Charles I commissioned Wren to design a fine arch of Portland stone which was opened in 1672 and used to display traitors’ heads impaled on spikes mounted on the top of the arch. A telescope was available at a halfpenny a time for those who wished to observe the heads more closely, and next to the Bar was a pillory. The many victims held in the pillory included Daniel Defoe, author of
Robinson Crusoe
, who was punished for a satirical pamphlet called
The Shortest Way with Dissenters
. Such was his popularity, however, that the crowds, instead of throwing harmful objects, garlanded him with flowers and protected him from his critics.
Daniel Defoe
By 1800 all the other gateways to London had been demolished as barriers to traffic but Temple Bar survived as an obstacle on one of London busiest thoroughfares, where the Strand joins Fleet Street. In 1878, however, the City Corporation dismantled the structure and sold it to the wealthy brewer Sir Henry Meux who bought it to please his wife Valerie, a former barmaid, and re-erected it at his home, Theobalds Park, near Cheshunt in Hertfordshire. The Bar was replaced by a plinth bearing a griffin in front of the Royal Courts of Justice to mark the City boundary. The griffin, a mythical beast with the body of a lion and the head and wings of a eagle, is a traditional symbol of the City. Although visitors to Theobalds Park, who were entertained by the banjo-playing Lady Meux in the room above the arch, included Edward VII and Winston Churchill the arch became dilapidated and in 1984 it was bought by the Temple Bar Trust for £1. After further vicissitudes it was re-erected as an entrance to the rebuilt Paternoster Square, adjacent to St Paul’s Cathedral where, restored, it was reopened to the public in 2004. Temple Bar is mentioned in many works of literature, notably
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens who referred to the 18th-century sight of severed heads ‘exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of Abyssinia’.
‘ALL SORTS OF BOOKS’
John Stow, chronicler of London, wrote in 1600 of Paternoster Square that it accommodated ‘stationers or text writers who dwelt there who wrote and sold all sorts of books’. It remained a home of publishers until World War II when it was wrecked by bombs, some six million books being destroyed. The area’s redevelopment in the 1980s aroused much controversy, the criticism being led by the architecture enthusiast the Prince of Wales.
The burning down of Parliament
I
n 1834 Parliament (‘The Palace of Westminster’) was still largely a medieval building, including the magnificent Westminster Hall, dating from the reign of William II (1087-1100) and extended by Richard II between 1397 and 1399. But in 1834 a well-meaning official of the Houses of Parliament drew attention to the large number of tally sticks, wooden receipts for tax payments dating from medieval times, stored in the cellars of the building. In an early and commendable example of recycling a decision was taken to use them as fuel in the central heating system. The ancient, rotting wood burned so merrily that most of the building was reduced to cinders though much of the stone-built Westminster Hall itself was preserved.
LYING-IN-STATE
Westminster Hall was at the heart of government in the Middle Ages and witnessed some of the most famous trials in English history, including those of Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, Guy Fawkes and Charles I. After conviction, prisoners were taken by boat to the Tower of London, entering by Traitors’ Gate. Westminster Hall was the home of the Law Courts until they moved to the Strand in 1882. Throughout history, deceased monarchs and great statesmen have been honoured with a period of lying-in-state here before burial.
Westminster Hall
Traitors’ Gate
When architect Charles Barry (1795-1860) won the competition to design the new Palace of Westminster he can have had little idea of the trouble he would face in building the Parliamentary Clock. While Barry was responsible for the building itself, Edmund Beckett Denison, first Baron Grimthorpe (1816-1905), was entrusted with designing the clockwork mechanism. Grimthorpe trained as a barrister but devoted his life to the restoration of churches in the Gothic style of which he approved, and to the design of clocks. Some idea of his talents and his temperament may be gleaned from the fact that, when he was elected as president of the Horological Institute in recognition of his expertise, it was stipulated that he be excluded from their dinners in order to avoid the arguments that would surely follow!
Charles Barry
When Charles Barry tried to extract from Grimthorpe information about the size of the bells and other mechanisms that he had to accommodate, Grimthorpe wrote a series of offensive letters to
The Times
with headings such as ‘The stupidity of Charles Barry’. The Great Bell, whose function is to sound the hours, was cast in 1856, weighed 16 tons and was hauled into place the same year. The foundry which cast the bell had specified that the clapper should not weigh more than 7 hundredweight. Grimthorpe, whose views left no room for those of others, insisted on a clapper weighing 13 hundredweight. Alas, this caused the bell to crack. It was immediately removed, recast at the Whitehapel foundry and reinstalled. It cracked again but was repaired in situ and remains cracked to this day. In the meantime the clock’s hands had been redesigned. The original hands were so heavy that they ran fast to half past the hour and struggled up the clockface in their journey back to twelve!
WHO WAS BIG BEN?
The Great Clock itself is housed in St Stephen’s Tower which also incorporates a prison cell to accommodate persons disrespectful to Parliament. The last occupant was the suffragette Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, who was confined there in 1902. Big Ben is the great bell in the tower which strikes the hour. The name quickly became attached to the clock but its origin is not clear. One contender is Sir Benjamin Hall, MP, Chief Commissioner of Works, who oversaw the last stages of the rebuilding of Parliament after the fire of 1834. Another tradition holds that the name was that of Ben Caunt, an 18-stone boxer known as ‘Big Ben’ who retired from the ring at the time the clock was completed.
Big Ben
From Roman trading post to world capital
T
he first reliable estimate of London’s population dates from the first annual census of 1801 when it was recorded as 949,310, the largest city in the world by a considerable margin. Contemporary records suggest that the population of London at the time of the rebellion of Boudicca (Boadicea) in AD 60 was about 30,000, by far the largest city in Britain, later growing to 50,000. The population declined after the Romans left and was probably about 25,000 in 1200. By the time of the Black Death in 1350 it had recovered to about 50,000, the same level as Roman London at its maximum and three times as large as Bristol or York, the next in size. By comparison, Paris at this time had about 200,000 inhabitants. The Black Death may have killed up to half of the population. The expansion of London gathered pace in the Tudor period, reaching 200,000 by 1600 and 600,000 by 1700. By that date London was the most populous city in Europe and probably in the world. Shortly after the dawn of the 19th century the population passed one million. By 1901 the population of Greater London was 6,501,889 and it was the principal trading and financial city of the world as well as the capital of the British Empire. The population peaked in 1939 at about 8.6 million.
