Lost London (24 page)

The murderer, Williams, committed suicide before he could be brought to justice but to satisfy the public, his body was dragged through the streets on an open cart to the site of both sets of
murders, then on to the crossroads of New Road and Canon Street Road. There a hole was dug and his body cast in. Hundreds watched as a stake was driven through his heart before he was buried.

Ladbroke Grove

T
HIS HUMBLE SITE WAS NOT ONLY THE SCENE OF
a number of grisly murders but earned a notable place in British judicial history.

For No 10 Rillington Place was the home of John Reginald Christie and it was here that he murdered seven women, including his wife, and a baby.

Christie’s bizarre sexual murders shocked the nation upon their discovery in 1953 by new tenants who moved in to the premises after Christie had left. They found three bodies hidden in an
alcove in the kitchen, covered over with wallpaper. Christie’s wife was later found under the floorboards of the front room, while the bodies of two other
women were
unearthed in the tiny garden.

Adding to the horror of the situation was the knowledge that three years previously, Christie had given evidence at the murder trial of Timothy Evans, who was convicted of killing his daughter,
Geraldine Evans. It was a murder of which it would become apparent that Christie himself was guilty. The Evans family had shared the house with the Christies, who lived in the downstairs flat.

Claiming medical knowledge, Christie had offered to perform an abortion on Timothy’s wife, Beryl (abortions being illegal in the UK at the time). With her husband absent, Beryl was gassed,
raped and strangled by Christie. He told Timothy that his wife had died when the operation went wrong and persuaded Evans to abscond. The Evans’ young daughter, Geraldine, would be looked
after by a couple who lived nearby, Christie assured him. The troubled Evans soon surrendered himself to police in Wales and it was apparent that he had no knowledge yet that his daughter was also
dead.

A terrible miscarriage of justice was about to take place as police botched a search of Rillington Place. While they turned up the corpses of Evans’ wife and child, they failed, for
instance, to uncover the bodies of Ruth Fuerst and Muriel Eady buried in the garden, even though a thigh bone was propped up against the fence. Evans signed a ‘confession’ for the
murders of Beryl and Geraldine that he later retracted and which was almost certainly concocted by police. Despite this and worries about Evans’ mental capacities, he was convicted at the Old
Bailey of the murder of his baby daughter, the star witness for the prosecution being John Christie.

Three years passed before Christie murdered his own wife in December 1952, then three other women in January, February and March of 1953. He used the domestic gas supply to
ensure that they were unconscious before raping and strangling them with a rope. Despite the suspicions of his wife’s relatives, Christie sub-let his flat and took rooms in King’s Cross
under his own name. The bodies were discovered on 24 March and Christie was arrested on Putney Bridge a week later.

Confessing to the murders, he pleaded insanity but was found guilty and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 15 July. Following his execution, a campaign was started to clear Timothy Evans, who was
eventually posthumously pardoned in 1966 by Roy Jenkins, the then Home Secretary. His case contributed to the parliamentary campaign for the abolition of hanging in 1965.

As for Rillington Place, it was renamed Ruston Close, and No 10 was demolished in the 1970s as part of the Westway development scheme. The residents of Ruston Mews, W11, are often keen to point
out that their street is not the site of these terrible crimes.

The Neckinger
– a small stream in Bermondsey, close to the medieval abbey. It may have derived its name from being an ancient site of execution (‘the
Devil’s Neck Tie’ being a term for hangman’s noose). It formed part of the boundary of Jacob’s Island, immortalised as the home of Fagin in Dickens’s
Oliver
Twist
, and is still visible as it enters into the Thames at St Saviour’s Dock.

The Peck
– providing the root of the name Peckham, this river ran from Forest Hill and emptied into the Thames at Rotherhithe.

The Tyburn
– giving its name to London’s historical site of executions, this stream once provided water for the city’s populace via a three-mile tube
called the Great Conduit, which ran from Marble Arch to East Cheap. Its waters once filled the ponds in St James’s Park and its ancient course formed part of the boundary of Thorney
Island.

The Walbrook
(Walbrook Street, City of London) – thought to be the original source of water for the Roman city.

The Westbourne
– giving its name to Westbourne Park, this river used to flow into the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Now a sewer, it can be seen in a large pipe running
over the Circle and District Line platforms at Sloane Square Station.

It may relate to the habit of rooks of nesting in large and noisy communities called rookeries, or perhaps it is a play on words, with ‘rooking’ a slang term for
thieving that dates from the 16th century and which supposedly reflects another trait of the bird.

London’s most notorious Rookery was at St Giles, which spread from St Martin’s Lane up to where the Centre Point office block is today and included the area of Seven Dials. Irish
immigrants flocked to London seeking employment in the early part of the 1800s, with many of them settling in the squalid tenements of St Giles so that it became known as ‘Little
Dublin’ or ‘The Holy Land’. But holy it was not.

Poverty forced many families to share their rooms, with up to seventeen people per room sleeping in shifts. Although many of the residents were undoubtedly honest and hardworking, the
area’s run-down buildings and warren-like alleys encouraged a mood of lawlessness. Police hardly dared venture in and the Rookery served as a home for thieves, prostitutes and assorted
low-life for many years.

Charles Dickens visited one night in the interests of research (he was accompanied by five policemen) and used the experience to great effect in a number of his novels. For many Victorian
reformers, the Rookeries became something of an obsession, and Charles Booth’s Map of London Poverty describing the area, which he coloured black, as home to ‘the lowest class ...
street sellers, loafers and criminals’.

Aside from St Giles, the city’s other Rookeries included Westminster, Rosemary Lane (see entry below) and Jacob’s Island in Bermondsey. The improving Victorians,
desperate to rid the capital of these abominations, came up with plans that saw New Oxford Street and Victoria Street driven through the heart of these slum areas. Their schemes were successful to
a degree for the rookeries are no more. But even 150 years later, these new roads may still be said to lack – for want of a better word – soul, perhaps because they came at considerable
expense to the once thriving communities they destroyed by their construction.

Tower Hill

A
N ANCIENT STREET HARD BY THE
T
OWER OF
London, this was for centuries the home of the Rag Fair, an open market that specialized
in the selling of old clothes for the poor of London.

The area was a labyrinth of lanes and alleys, its cramped housing giving refuge to the poor and destitute. Henry Mayhew described it as the lowest part of London, inhabited by
‘dredgers, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, watermen, lumpers, &c., as well as the slop-workers and “sweaters” from the glassworks in the Minories’. Nonetheless, it was
to here that the majority of London’s labourers came to buy
their clothes. Indeed, George Godwin, writing in
London Shadows
(1852), found at the Rag Fair all the
items a bride might need for her wedding day: