Lost London (11 page)

Both died from their resulting wounds and from that day forward, so the legend goes, no grass would grow in the footsteps where they trod, or on the tussock where the girl at
the centre of the dispute sat to watch the contest.

A letter addressed to the poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) from his friend John Walsh encouraged Southey to visit the Fields:

I think it would be worth your while to take a view of those wonderful marks of the Lord’s hatred to duelling called ‘The Brothers’ Steps.’ They are in a field about a
third of a mile northward from Montague house ... The prints of their feet are about the depth of three inches, and nothing will vegetate them so much as to disfigure them ... Mr. George Hall, who
was the Librarian of Lincoln’s Inn, first showed me these steps twenty-eight years ago ... he remembered them about thirty years, and the man who first showed them to him about thirty more,
which goes back to the year 1692 ... My mother well remembered their being ploughed up and corn sown to displace them, about fifty years ago, but all was labour in vain, for the prints returned in
a while to their pristine form.

The exact location of the site is debated, with some arguing for the car park behind Senate House on the west of Russell Square while others suggest an area in front of
Birkbeck College, slightly to the north. Fanciful visitors might still glimpse footprints in the grass newly laid there, though students taking short-cuts across the lawn might be a more logical
cause.

Many of the pubs nearby bore the sign of a happy couple holding hands, alongside a caption: ‘Marriages performed within’. Often the ceremonies were conducted by
clergymen incarcerated in the Fleet for debt. It was widely believed by the ruling classes that many of these marriages were forced and nothing but a sham. The image of a drunken son of the
aristocracy reeling down the street in the arms of a lady of ill-repute was much bandied about and angry voices were raised in Parliament on the matter.

Indeed, no doubt some illicit matches did take place, against the will of one or other of the parties. But judging from the number of unions made (estimated to be almost 250,000 in just sixty
years up to 1753), it seems more likely that the ability to marry without parental consent – that
is to say, to marry who you wanted, rather than who they wanted –
might well have been the commoner motivation. Records show that in the four months up to 12 February 1705 alone, almost 3,000 marriages took place.

The Liberties of the Fleet in many ways resembled Las Vegas of today, a notorious area famed for debauchery and where the reach of the law was restricted. A campaign led by Lord Hardwicke
eventually resulted in the Marriage Act of 1753, which finally put an end to the practise in England and Wales.

Blackfriars

S
TANDING ON THE EAST BANK OF THE
F
LEET
River on the site of the current Blackfriars Railway Station, this prison was first
recorded in 1171. The office of Keeper was a hereditary post handed down through the Leveland family from 1197 to 1538.

The job offered opportunity for hideous abuses, with the Keeper entitled to raise levies on prisoners for almost everything, from food and lodging to privileges. Inmates could
also pay to be released for short periods and many escaped.

Very unpopular among the public, the prison was burnt down during both the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the Gordon Riots of 1780. In between, it was ravaged by the 1666 Great Fire of
London. Although nominally a debtors’ prison, the Fleet was used in the 14th century to incarcerate those condemned by the King’s Council and the Court of Chancery, as well as those
convicted by the Court of the Star Chamber between Henry
VIII
’s reign and 1641.

In 1691 a prisoner named Moses Pitt wrote
Cry of the Oppressed
about his experiences at Fleet, in which he revealed the full extent of his degradations. Instead of the regulation 4s flat
fee, he was charged £2 4
S
6
D
to be housed in the ‘gentleman’s side’ and paid a further 8s a week for his room. Having run out
of money after sixteen months, he was thrown in a dungeon to sleep on the floor with twenty-seven other
inmates ‘so lowsie, that as they either walked or sat down, you
might have pick’d lice off from their outward garments’.

A Parliamentary inquiry in 1726 found the then Keeper, Thomas Bambridge, guilty ‘of great extortions, and the highest crimes and misdemeanours in the execution of his said office’,
treating prisoners ‘in a most barbarous and cruel manner’. New rules were imposed but in reality little changed for the unfortunates held at Fleet. Charles Dickens described in vivid
detail life within its walls in the 1830s in
The Pickwick Papers.
The prison was closed in 1842 and demolished four years later.

It rises in Hampstead Heath and fills the ponds from Kenwood House down through the heath towards Kentish Town (a name possibly derived from ‘Ken Ditch Town’). The
Fleet’s upper reaches were long famed for their health-giving waters, though the same could not be said for its lower reaches.

The river’s ancient valley followed the route of Kentish Town Road, then St Pancras Way, Kings Cross Road, Phoenix Place and Warner Street, before joining Farringdon Road and Farringdon
Street, then flowing into the Thames at Blackfriars. The Fleet marked the western limit of the Roman
city boundaries and was deep enough for navigation as far as Holbourne
Bridge until the 1500s, when it fell foul of rapid urban expansion and a population explosion.

The once-proud river turned into little more than a repellent ditch blocked with filth, offal and blood, though time and again the city authorities tried to restore the Fleet to its former
glory. Under Queen Elizabeth
I
and then Lord Protector Cromwell, it was scoured and cleaned. In the aftermath of the 1666 Great Fire it was able to be used for the
transportation of coal barges but by the early 1700s it was again in trouble. Jonathan Swift wrote of it:

Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,

Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,

Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.

The Fleet’s death knell sounded when it was turned into a sewer from Fleet Bridge (at the junction of Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street) all the way to Holbourne Bridge. Stretches of the sewer
remained uncovered until 1768, despite the death of a drunken Kentish barber in 1763 who was found stuck fast and frozen solid in its filthy waters. The northern part of the river was gradually
covered over as the surrounding land was given over to housing projects over the course of several years.

By 1850 the Fleet was one of London’s main sewers, moving 1,500,000 cubic feet of sewage per day. Its Thamesside entrance was a popular ingress into the sewer system for toshers, who made
their living by sifting the dirt for anything remotely useful or valuable. ‘A more dismal pursuit can scarcely be conceived’ wrote John Archer in 1851 in
Vestiges of Old London.
In 1855 the Fleet was incorporated into the city’s main sewage system and diverted to Barking Creek. Its name lives on in Fleet Street, Fleet Lane and in the notorious Fleet Prison.

There are numerous records of these events that describe how pretty much anything normally available to buy on the streets was for sale on the ice, too. One contemporary sketch
of an ice fair depicts signs for shops and stalls including ‘the Duke of York’s Coffee-house’, ‘the Tory booth’, ‘the Halfway House’, ‘the Bear
Gardenshire Booth’, ‘the Roast Beef Booth’, ‘the Music Booth’, ‘the Printing Booth’, ‘the Lottery Booth’ and ‘the Horn Tavern
Booth’.

Other attractions included football matches, skating, sledging and ice-based fairground games, such as a whirling-chair or a car drawn by several men using a long rope fastened to a stake fixed
in the ice. Bear- and bull-baiting were also commonplace, as was the sight of a whole ox roasting, a ritual carried out with some ceremony. In 1715, one Mr Hodgeson claimed the right to dispatch an
ox for the purpose – his father having performed the same task in 1684 – and arrived ‘dressed in a rich laced cambric apron, a silver steel, and a hat and feathers, to perform the
office’.

It is believed that there were ice fairs on the Thames in the following years: 1150, 1281, 1408, 1435, 1506, 1514, 1537, 1565, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635, 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1677, 1684, 1695,
1709, 1716, 1740, 1776, 1788,
1795 and 1814. The ice appealed to members of all classes, too. Elizabeth
I
was reported to have gone walking on the
impromptu rink one year, while Charles
II
even went fox hunting on it during the great frost of 1685–6.