Lost London (7 page)

Chelsea

A 12-
ACRE SITE BETWEEN
T
HE
K
ING
’
S
R
OAD AND
the
River Thames, Cremorne was a Victorian revival of an earlier pleasure gardens.

It was originally opened as Cremorne Stadium in 1832 by Charles Random de Berenger, who styled himself Baron de Beaufain or Baron de Berenger (depending on
how the mood took him). His aristocratic heritage was entirely fictitious and he had in fact only recently been released from King’s Bench Prison for stockmarket fraud.

Promising ‘manly exercise’ including boxing, swimming, fencing, rowing and shooting, the venture was not the success that the ‘Baron’ had hoped. Having changed hands, it
reopened in 1840 as a pleasure garden, complete with banqueting hall, theatre, bowling, grottoes and lavender bowers, and enough space to accommodate 1,500 people.

With a grand entrance on King’s Road, the entry fee of one shilling permitted guests fifteen hours of entertainment, including fireworks shows, circuses and side shows. But
Cremorne’s speciality was balloon ascents, which became increasingly daring and dangerous and thoroughly captured the public imagination. One exponent, Charles Green, memorably made one
flight in the company of a leopard. Another, ‘The Flying Man’ Goddard, rose to 5,000ft in his Montgolfier Fire Balloon in 1864, before drifting into the spire of St Luke’s Church
on nearby Sydney Street with fatal results.

By the 1870s Cremorne Gardens had acquired a poor reputation and the local Baptist minister issued a pamphlet calling it a ‘nursery of every kind of vice’. Despite successfully suing
for libel, the owner, John Baum, was awarded only a farthing in damages. Ruined both in health and pocket, Baum’s licence was withdrawn in 1877. Lots Road power station later came to cover
much of the site.

He gives over almost thirty pages to the now defunct work of the crossing sweeper; who kept busy street crossings free from rubbish and horse dung in the hope of eliciting a
few pence from those traversing the highway.

Many turned to this business as its start-up costs were minimal – one merely needed a broom. It provided a job that meant the sweeper would avoid being charged with begging, and if they
could establish a regular pitch, they might earn the sympathy of local householders and shopkeepers and begin to make a regular income from them.

Mayhew lists a number of banks and businesses that employed crossing sweepers to keep their customers’ feet clean en route to their premises. He interviewed many of them and categorized
them thus:

Able-bodied Crossing Sweepers

The Aristocratic Crossing Sweeper

The Bearded Crossing Sweeper at the Exchange

The Sweeper in Portland Square

A Regent Street Crossing Sweeper

A Tradesman Crossing Sweeper

An Old Woman

The Crossing Sweeper who had been a Serving Maid

The Sunday Crossing Sweeper

One-Legged Crossing Sweeper of Chancery Lane

The Most Severely Inflicted of all the Crossing Sweepers

The Negro Crossing Sweeper who has lost both his legs

Boy Crossing Sweepers

Gander The ‘Captain’ of the Crossing Sweepers

The King of the Tumbler Boy Crossing Sweepers

(And finally) The Girl Crossing Sweeper sent out by her Father.

Fleet Streeet

A
PUBLIC HOUSE
,
DATING BACK TO THE
16
TH
century, whose sign depicted St Dunstan tweaking the nose of the
devil, was the site of the Apollo Club, home to wits, writers and poets presided over by the playwright, Ben Jonson.

The rules of the club, most likely written by Jonson himself, stated:

Let none but guests or clubbers hither come;

Let dunces, fools, and sordid men keep home;

Let learned, civil, merry men b’ invited,

And modest, too; nor be choice liquor slighted.

Let nothing in the treat offend the guest:

More for delight than cost prepare the feast.

During Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Devil became the favourite roost of ‘Mull Sack’ – so named because his chosen drink was spiced sherry. Mull Sack’s real name was
John Cottington, a sweep turned highwayman and cutpurse, who reputedly had stolen from both the Lord Protector
Cromwell and Charles
II
and who was
immortalized in popular ballads of the time.

In 1746 the Royal Society held its annual dinner here and during the 1750s concerts were regularly hosted. Eventually the Devil was incorporated into Child’s Bank, which stands at No 1
Fleet Street.

The most famous diorama opened in 1823 at Nos 9–10 Park Square East, Camden. In a darkened auditorium, 200 seated visitors were treated to a series of vast trompe
l’oeils painted by Jacques Daguerre, inventor of the first successful photographic technique. The entire seating could be rotated through nearly ninety degrees by a boy operating a ram
engine, allowing parts of a scene to be displayed while other parts were prepared off-stage and out of sight. Measuring seventy feet wide and forty feet high, the giant paintings included the
interior of Canterbury Cathedral. One visitor described the experience of seeing the former thus: ‘The organ
peels from under some distant vaults. Then the daylight slowly
returns, the congregation disperses, the candles are extinguished and the church with its chairs appears as at the beginning. This was magic.’

Although hailed as an artistic triumph, the venture was a commercial failure and in 1848 the building, its machinery and paintings were sold for £3000. The site was later converted into a
Baptist chapel, though the original frontage survives.

Southwark

A
FAMOUS PUBLIC HOUSE, NAMED AFTER EITHER
the shape of the nearby ponds or the habit of allowing dogs to chase the ducks that lived on them.

The pub gained a reputation not only for its sporting contests but also for its health-giving waters. Sold at 4d a gallon and recommended by no less a figure than Dr Johnson to
his friend Mrs Thrale, the waters were advertised in 1731 as being a cure for ‘rheumatism, stone, gravel, fistula, ulcers, cancers, eye sores, and in all kinds of scorbutic cases whatever,
and the restoring of lost appetite’.

If healthy competition was more your thing, in 1711 the pub hosted a ‘grinning match’ in which contestants, to the accompaniment of music, competed for a gold-laced hat.
The Dog and Duck was much enlarged over time to include a bowling alley and an organ for popular concerts. But in contrast to the nearby Vauxhall Gardens, it gained a poor reputation,
attracting as it did ‘riff-raff and the scum of the town’.

Numerous highwaymen of the 18th century made mention of the pub and in 1787 it was refused a licence until the Mayor of Southwark intervened. It was again refused one in 1796, at which stage it
changed from a public house into a vintners, which needed no licence to operate. It closed down altogether three years later. With the pub demolished, the site became home to St Bethlehem when it
moved from Moorfield in 1811. A stone plaque from the Dog and Duck, portraying a sitting dog with a duck in its mouth and bearing the date 1617, was incorporated into its walls but was later moved
to the Cuming Museum in Lambeth.