Lost London (3 page)

In 1678 an Act of Parliament abolished the liberties of Alsatia and several other areas in the city, including The Minories, Salisbury Court, Mitre Court, Baldwins Gardens and Stepney. In 1723
London’s last two sanctuaries – at The Mint in Southwark and The Savoy – were finally abolished. However, the spirit of lawless autonomy lived on in many of these areas for years
to come and grew elsewhere, as in the notorious ‘Rookeries’ that survived until the late Victorian era.

Despite the decline of the longbow as a potent military weapon over the preceeding 300 years, both Henry
VIII
and Elizabeth
I
tried to re-establish the practice. In 1627 archery regiments were formed by the City of London and practised
annually in Finsbury, St George’s Fields and Moorfields. But
towards the end of the 18th century urban encroachment forced the archers further away, with the Royal Toxophilite Society (founded 1781) eventually being driven to move from its Regent’s
Park home to Buckinghamshire. Several parts of London maintain an association with the activity, such as the Archery Tavern, Bayswater, and Newington Butts at the Elephant and Castle.

Westminster Bridge Road

O
RIGINALLY CALLED
R
OYAL
G
ROVE
, A
STLEY
’
S WAS
London’s first circus. It was opened by a former cavalry officer, Philip Astley, who received a licence for his enterprise after he used his Herculean proportions to help George
III
subdue a runaway horse.

When his original site burned down in 1794, he rebuilt it as Astley’s Amphitheatre. Shows often featured clowns, acrobats and conjurers, and there were vast spectaculars
featuring, for instance, ‘several hundred performers and fifty-two horses, two lions, kangaroos, pelicans, reindeer and a chamois’. Other entertainments included sword fights and exotic
melodramas. The venue, though, was plagued by fires and had to be rebuilt in 1803, 1841 and 1862, when it reopened as the New Westminster Theatre. It was finally demolished in 1893. Charles Dickens
was an avid Astley’s fan as both a child and adult, writing of it fondly in
Sketches by Boz
.

South East London

1845
SAW THE OPENING OF A REMARKABLE
and revolutionary form of railway transport, powered not by steam but by compressed air.

Designed in Southwark by Samuel Clegg and the Samuda brothers, a line ran from Forest Hill to West Croydon with carriages driven by a piston connected to a pipe running between
the rails.

A pumping station at either end of the track provided the air. With the trains unable to pass over the tracks of the regular railway at Norwood, Clegg and the Samudas built the world’s
first railway flyover, which is still in use today.

The system was plagued by technical difficulties, mainly due to metal corrosion and wear and tear on leather seals. Indeed, passengers were frequently forced to push trains between stations when
the pressure failed. Another major problem stemmed from the quietness of the trains, which somewhat perversely unnerved passengers.

By 1846 the cost of breakdowns and repairs forced the London and Croydon Railway Company to abandon its
experiment and turn to the more reliable power of steam. But this
wasn’t the end of atmospheric and pneumatic transport in London. In 1863 the Post Office built two tunnels out of Euston Station, one running half a mile to a sorting office and the other to
St Paul’s in the City. Using pneumatic trains, the journey to St Paul’s took a mere nine minutes. The route ran until 1874 but high costs forced its closure. When the Tube system was
first conceived, pneumatic power was again considered, and construction of such a line between Whitehall and Waterloo even got under way until a financial crisis in 1866 halted work that was never
restarted.

EC2

N
AMED AFTER THE OUTER FORTIFICATIONS
of the city, the original Barbican was most likely a watch-tower, which the great historian of London, John Stow,
said was pulled down in the reign of Henry
III
. In the 16th and 17th centuries the area became well known for its market in new and used clothes.

Much of the locality was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and was again devastated in the Blitz during the Second World War, when thirty-two acres were completely razed. Six
major historic streets and numerous other courts and alley-ways were lost forever in the bombing. Amongst them
were Jewin Cresent and Jewin Street, which had been the site of a
Jewish enclave and burial ground until the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290.

John Milton was a resident here when he wrote
Paradise Lost
, while Redcross Street was formerly the home of the Abbot of Ramsey (as well as the site of a red cross that was still standing
in the 16th century during Stow’s lifetime). Other places of interest included Paper Street, replete with warehouses for paper, and Silver Street, a hub for the city’s silversmiths.
Elsewhere, Australia Avenue, built relatively recently in 1894 between Barbican and Jewin Crescent, was much used by those active in Antipodean trade. However, such was the destruction wrought
between 1939 and 1945 that it was decided to rebuild the entire area on a new plan, creating the Barbican Centre that we have today, the largest multi-arts venue in Europe.

Smithfield

O
F ALL THE GREAT CITY FAIRS
, Bartholomew Fair was the oldest and most famous. It was held at West Smithfield, the site of modern-day Smithfield
Market.

It was first celebrated in 1133 when Rahere, the founder of the local priory, was granted a charter to raise money for a new
hospital, the now famous St
Bartholomew. For the next 400 years Bartholomew was the primary cloth fair in the country, held over three days from each 24th August, the feast day of St Bartholomew. It was traditionally opened
by the Lord Mayor, who would ride from the Guildhall to Smithfield to read the opening proclamation at the Fair’s entrance – having stopped on his way for a jug of wine spiced with
nutmeg and sugar supplied by the keeper of Newgate. In 1688, one unfortunate Mayor, Sir John Shorter, closed his tankard lid with such violence that his horse bolted, dismounting the venerable
gent, who died of his injuries the next day.

The mood of the event began to change at the beginning of the 17th century, when the city’s cloth dealers began to explore national and international markets outside of London. The fair
evolved instead into an opportunity for general merriment and over the next century became increasingly rowdy, now less a trade fair than a joyous celebration and public holiday, complete with
plays, puppet shows, freak shows and exotic animals. Samuel Pepys wrote of the experience in his diary:

Thence away by coach to Bartholomew Fayre, with my wife, and showed her the monkeys dancing on the ropes, which was strange, but such dirty sport that I was not pleased with it. There was
also a horse with hoofs like rams hornes, a goose with four feet, and a cock with three. Thence to another place, and we saw a poor fellow, whose legs were tied behind his back, dance upon his
hands with his arse above his head, and also dance upon his crutches, without any legs upon the ground to help him, which he did with that pain that I was sorry to see it, and did pity him and give
him money after he had done.

The year 1817 witnessed the appearance of Toby, a ‘real learned pig’ who, with twenty handkerchiefs covering his eyes, could tell the time to the minute and pick out cards from a
pack. Meanwhile, Thomas Horne recorded seeing ‘four lively little crocodiles hatched from eggs at Peckham by steam’. But the drunken debauchery among visitors to the fair began to irk
the city authorities. In 1801, for instance, a gang of thieves surrounded a respectable lady and tore the clothes from her back, while a year later random victims were attacked with cudgels and
several windows were broken.