Lost London (4 page)

In 1815 alone the Guildhall heard forty-five cases of felony, misdemeanor and assault committed at Bartholomew and so the city embarked on a concerted effort to clean up the
event. Many of the raucous shows and booths were moved to Islington and by 1840 only the animal shows still remained. By 1849 the fair amounted to little more than a few gingerbread stalls and in
1850, Lord Mayor Musgrove turned up for the opening ceremony to find no one there. Five years later even this 700-year-old ceremony was abandoned and London’s greatest fair was consigned to
history.

Blackfriars

T
HE NAME REFERS TO TWO CASTLES THAT WERE
in roughly the same area, east of the current Blackfriars Bridge. The first was a Norman-built castle
demolished by King John in 1213 after he was jilted by its owner’s daughter.

Legend tells that the King took a fancy to Matilda Fitzwater (known as ‘the Fair’), daughter of the master of the house, but she would not consent to become his
mistress. Her father fled and she was carried off to the Tower of London, only to be poisoned with powder sprinkled on to her poached egg.

The second castle was built fifty years later and about a hundred yards east of the original. (Some other land from the Fitzwater estate was gifted to the Dominican order of monks, giving rise
to the area becoming known as Blackfriars). The new fortress eventually became a royal household, with Edward
IV
crowned there in 1452, followed by both Lady Jane Grey and
Mary
I
in 1553. During the reign of Henry
VIII
it served as the home to three of his wives – Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Anne of
Cleves.

Pepys wrote that Charles
II
stayed here in 1660 but the building, reportedly ‘one of the most interesting in London’, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666
and never rebuilt, although one tower remained until 1720. Excavation of the site in the 1970s revealed that much of the castle’s outer limits were built upon the remains of a Roman wall that
ran along the river bank, the existence of which had been disputed for many years.

Liverpool Street

T
HERE HAVE BEEN THREE SEPARATE SITES FOR
this most famous of mental hospitals. The first was at Bishopsgate, on the site of modern-day Liverpool Street
railway station. Established in 1329 as a regular hospital run by the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem, by 1377 it was taking in ‘distracted’ patients.

Treatment was unsophisticated and often cruel, with inmates commonly chained, beaten, whipped and ducked.

With the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry
VIII
, ‘Bedlam’ fell under the control of Bridewell, a local prison. The already deplorable conditions for
inmates continued to deteriorate. Eventually a grand new building was opened at Moorfields around 1675–76, designed by Robert Hook and with a front entrance adorned by two famous sculptures
of
Madness
and
Melancholy
by Caius Cibber. These figures are all that remains of the second Bedlam and now reside in the Victoria & Albert Museum. A version of them can also be
seen in the chilling final plate of Hogarth’s
The Rake’s Progress
.

Much of the Hospital’s income was derived from admitting visitors to view the ‘idiots’. It became a popular holiday destination for many city dwellers over the next 100 years,
until the practise was outlawed in 1770 as it ‘tended to disturb the equilibrium of the patients’. From then on, visitor numbers were controlled and sightseers had to buy a ticket in
advance to get in.

By 1800, Hook’s great building, once described as a match for the Tuileries Palace in Paris, was starting to decay, with the blame laid on cheap materials. So a new site for the hospital
was found in St George’s Fields, Southwark (above). Patients were moved there in 1815 and conditions gradually improved. In 1851 a resident doctor was appointed, although the habit of viewing
inmates remained ever popular. A balcony at the Grand Union pub on Brook Street was specially built to overlook the gardens and is still there to this day. The last patients left the institution in
1930 and the building was reopened in 1936 as the Imperial War Museum.

The others included Aldgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate – all of which were demolished to increase the flow of traffic in the period
1760–61. The only one that remains is Temple Bar.

Brixton

J
AMES
S
MITH
,
A PRINTER FROM
T
OOTING
,
WON
a fortune at
Newmarket races in 1877 and proceeded to reinvent himself as Rosebery Smith.

With his newfound riches he opened the city’s first purpose-built department store. Why he chose 442–444 Brixton Road is anyone’s guess, but the name he
decided upon was Bon Marché, after the famous store in Paris. Unfortunately, Smith was no great businessman and he soon went bankrupt. The store, however, went on for almost another 100 years,
declining only after the Second World War. It briefly became the Brixton Fair before closing for good in the 1970s.