Lost London (13 page)

A letter written by Sir Henry Wotton on 2 July 1613 gives a colourful description of the inferno that burnt the theatre to the ground:

The Kings Players had a new play, called
All is True
, representing some of the principal pieces of the reign of Henry
VIII
, which set forth with many
extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty even to the matting on the stage ... Now King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s House, certain canons being shot off at his entry,
some of the paper or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, it did light the thatch, where, being thought at first but idle smoak, and their eyes more
attentive to the
show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very ground. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabrick, wherein yet nothing
did perish but wood and straw, and only a few forsaken cloaks: only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would have broiled him, if he had not, by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out
with a bottle of ale.

And that was the end of Shakespeare’s Globe. A new theatre was built in 1614, on the same plans and with the aid of King James
I
, and survived until the Civil War,
at which point all plays were banned by the Puritan parliament. The theatre was thus demolished in 1644.

Whitechapel

T
HE NAME OF TWO INSTITUTIONS THAT HAD A
profound effect on 18th-century theatre.

The original was opened in 1727 by Thomas Odell, deputy Licenser of Plays and himself a playwright, in a converted shop in Leman Street, Whitechapel. He had hoped to draw
customers away from the West End but after a sermon was preached against him, Odell sold out to his leading actor, Henry Giffard. In 1732 Giffard opened a second premises under the same name, just
around the corner in Ayliffe Street.

Edward Sheppard, architect of the Royal Opera House, was the designer of what was reported to be ‘an entirely new, beautiful convenient theatre’ where
‘dramatic pieces were performed with the utmost elegance and propriety’. However, Giffard’s decision to stage
A Vision of The Golden Rump
directly led to the passing of the
1737 Licensing Act that banned any play criticizing the government or the crown. As a result, the theatre closed but Giffard came up with a ruse to get around the new legislation.

He hit upon staging musical concerts for which entry was charged, with plays performed during the interval. The theatre reopened in 1740 and, in January 1741, revived
The Winter’s
Tale
for the first time in a hundred years. Giffard’s next coup, and his most enduring contribution to English theatre, was to give the title role in
Richard
III
to David Garrick, spuriously claiming that it was Garrick’s stage debut. Despite that fib, Garrick was an instant hit, with Horace Walpole writing that ‘all the run
is after Garrick, at Goodman’s Fields’. But political pressure from the established theatres in Lincoln’s Inn and Covent Garden led to Goodman’s compulsory closure on 27 May
1742 – the very day after Walpole had written those words to a friend – and it was never to reopen.

Kensington

S
ITUATED ON THE SITE WHERE THE
Royal Albert Hall now resides, Gore House was built in the late 18th century.

It was once the home of the famous anti-slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, before the lease was taken over by the Countess of Blessington in the 1830s. The countess, an
Irish writer famed for her beauty and wit, worked with her son-in-law, Count d’Orsay, to develop the house into the leading literary salon of its day. With eminent visitors including
Disraeli, Wellington, Louis Napoleon, Walter Savage Landor and a youthful Charles Dickens, Blessington adopted an extravagant lifestyle that ultimately led to financial disaster. She and the Count
were ultimately forced to flee to Paris, where she died of apoplexy in 1849.

A subsequent sale of goods from Gore House lasted 12 days and attracted vast crowds of sightseers. H H Madden, one of Blessington’s friends, visited during the sale:

The well-known library saloon, in which the conversaziones took place, was crowded – but not with guests... People as they passed through the room poked the furniture, pulled apart the
precious objects of art and ornaments that lay on the table. And some made jests. It was the most signal ruin of an establishment I ever witnessed.

The house briefly became a flamboyant restaurant run by
the former Reform Club chef, Alexis Soyer, but the business failed after just five months and the building was bought
by the Royal Commission ahead of the 1851 Great Exhibition and demolished.

Leicester Square

M
AP
-
MAKER
,
GEOGRAPHER TO
Q
UEEN
V
ICTORIA
and MP for
Bodmin, James Wyld masterminded the Great Globe that stood in a building in Leicester Square Gardens from 1851 to 62.

Although originally conceived as part of the Great Exhibition, the Exhibition’s organizing committee ultimately deemed it too big to fit into the Crystal Palace in Hyde
Park. Nonetheless, after frantic negotiations with the landlord of the Leicester Square Gardens, Wyld’s scheme was hastily put into action and opened in time for the Exhibition in May
1851.

Once completed, the globe was the largest that had ever been constructed, measuring 40ft wide and 60ft high. Its interior walls featured a plaster-of-Paris scale relief of the world, with each
inch representing ten miles. It was lit by gas and could be viewed from any of four stages, while ‘the walls of the circular passages were hung with the finest maps, and atlases, globes and
geographical works’. It was
all housed in a grand, domed building in the centre of the gardens, which were once described by Charles Dickens as a ‘howling wasteland
... with broken railings, a receptacle for dead cats and every kind of abomination’. The attraction was an immediate success, with some 1.2 million people estimated to have visited in 1851
alone, including Prince Albert, the Duke of Wellington and the King of Belgium.

However, the closure of the Great Exhibition marked a sharp decline in both interest and visitor numbers. It further lost out to competing educational shows in Leicester Square, such as the
Panopticon of Science and Arts and Burford’s Panorama. By the late 1850s, Wyld himself was giving lectures inside the globe in a bid to keep it viable, but when his lease expired and he was
threatened with legal action, the globe was speedily demolished and sold for scrap. Wyld reneged on his promise to return the gardens to a decent state and it was several more years before
Leicester Square would lose its insalubrious reputation.

Mayfair

O
PENED IN
1757
AS THE
P
OT AND
P
INE
A
PPLE
by an Italian
pastry chef, Domenico Negri, at 7–8 Berkeley Square, this shop specialized in ‘making and selling all sorts of English, French and Italian wet and dry sweetmeats’.

Expanding to serve ice creams and sorbets too (said to be made from a secret recipe), it became a Mayfair institution and a favourite haunt of the
fashionable. It was taken over by Robert Gunter in 1799, who renamed it accordingly, and won a reputation as one of a few locations where a lady could meet a gentleman without a chaperone. In those
socially delicate times, coaches would park beneath the trees of Berkeley Square, the ladies sitting inside while their attentive gentlemen stood on the pavement. Waiters would take their orders
and bring the famed ices out to them, dodging the traffic as they did so.

Jane Carlyle, a Victorian lady of letters and wife of historian Thomas, was recommended to visit by Charles Darwin in August 1843. She reported that he told her that she ‘looked as if I
needed to go to Gunter’s and have an ice’, an experience that she confirmed left her ‘considerably revived’. The other house speciality was elaborately decorated,
multi-tiered wedding cakes, an essential for every society wedding.

Gunter founded a catering and sweet-selling empire that stayed in his family for many generations and funded the construction of a large family home in Earl’s Court, affectionately known
as ‘Currant Jelly Hall’. Redevelopment of Berkeley Square in 1936–7 saw the teashop move to Curzon Street, where it remained until 1956, the catering side of the business
eventually folding twenty years later.