Lost London (25 page)

Much of the hodge-podge of housing that made up Rosemary Lane was destroyed during the coming of the railways and what remained was renamed Royal Mint Street.

Southwark

S
T
G
EORGE
’
S
F
IELDS WAS A LARGE AREA OF OPEN LAND
south of the river
between Lambeth and Southwark, which was once the destination of choice for London’s working people who couldn’t afford the more salubrious resorts at Ranelagh or Vauxhall
Gardens.

Often flooded when the Thames tide was at its highest, the Romans had started to ditch and drain the land as far back as the 3rd century. The diarists Samuel Pepys and John
Evelyn both described how city-dwellers camped out here with what remained of their property after the Great Fire in 1666. But the area is most famous for the St George’s Field’s
Massacre, which occurred on 10 May 1768. When a crowd of Londoners came to free a radical MP, John Wilkes, from King’s Bench Prison, troops opened fire on them, killing seven. Then twelve
years later, in 1780, a reported 50,000 people gathered here at the beginning of what became known as the Gordon Riots, which lasted for nearly a week and cost 850 lives. In 1812, James Smith wrote
the following lines about the locality:

Saint George’s fields are fields no more;

The trowel supersedes the plough;

Swamps huge and inundate of yore,

Are changed to civic villas now
.

Today the fields are completely built over, with St
George’s Circus, which leads to the Elephant and Castle, the only reminder of these vast meadows where Londoners
used to collect herbs and watercress.

It was rumoured that it had been built on an ancient Roman temple to Diana, though the theory was disproved by Wren when he was digging the foundations for his cathedral.
Although he unearthed the remains of a Roman burial site at a depth of 18 feet; it was the Roman custom to bury their dead outside of their city walls, effectively ruling out the presence of a
temple at this location.

A second wooden church burnt down here in 962 and a stone one was built to replace it, but fire struck again and razed that building in 1087. It was then that the building of ‘Old St
Paul’s’ began. This project was also beset by blazes – another fire destroyed much work in 1136 – and the church was not completed until 1314. Once finished, it was the
third largest cathedral in Europe, with a spire rising 149 metres.

Like many religious buildings of the time, it contained a collection of holy relics purportedly including the arms of Mellitus (which were of different sizes), some hair from Mary
Magdalene, the blood of St Paul, the milk of the Virgin, the hand of St John, pieces of the skull of Thomas à Becket, and the head and jaw of King Ethelbert.

During a great storm in 1561, the spire was struck by lightning and caught alight. The flames burned furiously downwards for four hours and the bells melted, lead poured down in torrents and the
roof fell in. The cathedral stood in ruins but within a month a false roof was erected and by the end of the year, the aisles were leaded in. The spire, however, was never re-erected.

As London’s mother church, St Paul’s was always at the centre of life in the metropolis, although not always in a way that the faithful appreciated. For instance, the Catholic Queen
Mary issued an act that forbade the carrying of beer casks and baskets of bread, fish, flesh, or fruit, or leading mules or horses through the cathedral, under pain of fines and imprisonment.
Later, Elizabeth
I
issued a proclamation forbidding affray or the drawing of swords in the church, or shooting a hand-gun within the church or churchyard, under threat of
two months’ imprisonment. Soon afterwards, a man who provoked an affray here was set in the pillory in the churchyard and had his ears nailed to a post before they were cut off.

Others met even more severe fates in the church grounds, including four of the Gunpowder Plotters (Digby, Winter, Grant and Bates), who were hung, drawn and quartered here in January 1606. By
that time, the building was in a sorry state of repair. Charles
I
would commission Inigo Jones to carry out extensive repairs but balked at the estimated £22,000 costs,
then unwisely allowed his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, to take the stone collected for rebuilding to raise his own palace on the Strand.

St Paul’s was further degraded when Parliamentary soldiers were billeted here. Treating it with little respect, they had to be banned from playing skittles inside,
except between the hours of 6 and 9pm. After the Restoration, Wren was invited to submit plans for its rebuilding even before the Great Fire occurred. But the 1666 conflagration completely gutted
the dilapidated structure, melting the six acres of lead that covered the roof. John Evelyn’s diary records stones falling from the walls in great cascades and although parts of the structure
were considered salvageable, the remains were eventually demolished. Starting from a blank canvas, Wren built the beautiful edifice we have today. Wren once said ‘I build for eternity’
and we must hope that is the case, given the cathedral’s fiery history.

Fleet Street

O
RIGINALLY SITED AT
T
HE
G
OLDEN
B
ALL ON
St Martin’s Le Grand, Mrs
Salmon’s Waxworks – a precursor to Madame Tussauds, which opened in 1702 – moved to Fleet Street in 1711.

William Hogarth was a regular visitor, as was James Boswell. The collection, which filled six rooms, included likenesses of the kings and queens of England as well as galleries
of horrors, myths and the fantastic.

An advertisement for Mrs Salmon’s Waxworks ran in
Tatler
and specified such attractions as ‘the Turkish Seraglio in wax-work’, ‘the Fatal Sisters that spin, reel,
and cut the thread of man’s life’ and ‘an Old Woman flying from Time, who shakes his head and hour-glass with sorrow at seeing age so unwilling to die’. ‘Nothing but
life can exceed the motions of the heads, hands, eyes, etc. of these figures,’ the ad assured the reader.

Following Mrs Salmon’s death, the exhibition was run by a surgeon named Clarke. Some of the exhibits were especially grotesque, such as that depicting the execution of Charles
I
and another showing ‘Margaret, Countess of Heninburgh, lying on a bed of State, with her Three Hundred and Sixty Five Children, all born at one birth’.

Moving to the south side of Fleet Street in 1795, the attraction survived well into the Victorian era. Its last location
on Fleet Street can still be seen, though today it
is the Prince Henry’s Room museum at No 17.

West Ham

19 J
ANUARY
1917
SAW THE BIGGEST EXPLOSION IN
London’s history at the Brunner Mond chemical factory at Silvertown, on the
northern bank of the Thames in West Ham.

The factory had manufactured caustic soda since it opened in 1893 but with Britain’s Great War effort hampered by a shortage of high explosives, the government ordered
Brunner Mond to start making and refining trinitrotoluene (TNT), despite the factory being in a heavily built-up area. Production started in 1915 and by the time of the accident, the factory was
processing 9 tons a day.

At 6.52, a small fire broke out, which ignited 50 tons of TNT. The explosion wrought immense devastation, destroying the factory and surrounding warehouses, completely razing 900 houses to the
ground and damaging some 70,000 others. Across the river, at the site of today’s O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome), a gasometer containing 7 million cubic feet of gas ignited. The blaze was
seen as far away as Guildford and the blast was audible a hundred miles away in Sussex and Norfolk. Seventy-three people were killed in the disaster.