Lost London (9 page)

Piccadilly

B
UILT IN AN ORNATE
E
GYPTIAN STYLE BY
G F Robinson in 1812 at a cost of £16,000, the Hall housed a natural history museum
based on the collection of William Bullock, who spent thirty years travelling in South and Central America.

Even more popular was a collection of memorabilia it hosted celebrating Napoleon Bonaparte, including his bullet-proof carriage. It drew enormous crowds totalling 800,000 in
the course of a year, producing an income that could pay
the building costs twice over. When the exhibits were eventually sold off, Madame Tussaud bought many of them.

In 1820 the Hall was hired by the painter Benjamin Haydon to display his enormous canvas depicting Christ’s entry into Jerusalem. When it was later used to show artefacts from the tomb of
Seti
I
, it attracted 1800 visitors on the first day alone. As the century progressed, the Hall became ever less high-brow, coming to specialize in freak shows. Although
Turner showed his watercolours here in 1824, one was more likely to come across Claude Amboise Seurat, a Frenchman know as ‘the living skeleton’.

Later it would showcase Cheng and Eng (Siamese Twins), and in 1844 the American showman, Phineas T Barnum, took an impressive £125 a day showing off General Tom Thumb. Other highlights
included a family of Laplanders complete with sledges and dogs, a three-mile-long canvas panorama of the Mississippi River and the skeleton of a mammoth. From 1852–58, Albert Richard Smith
used the
Hall for over 2000 re-enactments of his ascent of Mont Blanc. The building was demolished in 1904, with an office block at Nos 170–173 now standing on the
site.

Near the Strand

O
PENED IN
1822,
THIS
B
APTIST CHAPEL BECAME
notorious for a scandal that erupted in 1844 when a sewer was
being constructed beneath it.

Having for many years charged cheap burial fees, the crypt beneath the chapel had long proved a popular choice among the local poor from whence to embark on the afterlife. With
the sewer requiring that the chapel undergo structural alterations, the Baptist minister took the opportunity to remove some of the ‘earth’ building up beneath his chapel. He had the
earth carried off to a new road being built on the south side of Waterloo Bridge and the alarm was raised when a human hand was discovered in one of the carts. It emerged that the church’s
worshippers had had only a few floor boards separating them from over 12,000 people interred in the crypt, covered by the merest scattering of earth.

The renovation works were halted and the chapel subsequently closed, to be taken over by a group of teetotallers who seemed content to hold dances and host a Sunday school just a matter of feet
and inches above the corpses. The affair
brought attention to the disgraceful state of many of the city’s burial grounds and a Parliamentary Select Committee was
established to deal with numerous overflowing sites from Aldgate to Soho. A worshipper from Enon Chapel was called to give evidence and told the committee:

At the time I attended it ... there were interments, and the place was in a very filthy state: the smell was most abominable and very injurious; I have frequently gone home with a severe
headache which I supposed to have been occasioned by the smell, more particularly in the summer time; also, there were insects ... I have seen them in the summertime hundreds of them flying about
the chapel; I have taken them home in my hat, and my wife has taken them home in her clothes; we always considered that they proceed from the dead bodies underneath.

The remains were finally removed in 1847 and reburied in a single pit in a cemetery in Norwood, but not before becoming something of a tourist attraction. In his 1878 work
London Old and
New
, Thornbury wrote:

The work of exhumation was then commenced, and a pyramid of human bones was exposed to view, separated from piles of coffin wood in various stages of decay. This ‘Golgotha’ was
visited by about 6000 persons, previous to its removal, and some idea may be formed of the horrid appearance of the scene, when it is stated that the quantity of remains comprised four upheaved van
loads.

The London School of Economics’ St Clement’s Building now sits atop the former charnel house.

Near the Strand

L
OCATED ON THE CURRENT
E
SSEX
S
TREET
,
SOUTH
of the Strand, Essex House was home
to the Bishops of Essex from the early 1300s.

In a history chequered with uprisings, the property witnessed Walter Stapleton holding out against the rebellious city populace here in 1326 until they stormed the gates,
plundering or burning the plate, money, jewellery and goods contained within. Bishop Stapleton rode out on his horse to seek sanctuary but was dragged from his saddle near St Paul’s and
hauled by the mob to Cheapside, where he was stripped and beheaded. His head was set on a pole and his body burnt in a pile of rubbish outside his own gates.

In the 16th century, Essex House became the property of Robert, Earl of Essex, one of Elizabeth
I
’s favourites. But after a failed military campaign in Ireland, he
foolishly attempted to rouse the city against the queen. Despite being personally popular, none of the citizenry joined his cause and while attempting to return home, he was met by a troop of
soldiers who promptly delivered him to the Tower of London. After being tried for treason, he was beheaded on 25 February 1601 on Tower Hill.

His son, Robert Devereux, achieved some success as a Parliamentarian general during the Civil War and received a delegation from the House of Commons at Essex House after his victory at the
First Battle of Newbury in 1643. When Pepys visited Devereux’s body as it lay in state in 1646, he set aside his admiration for the general to describe the mansion as ‘large but
ugly’. In a famous depiction of one of London’s 17th century ‘Frost Fairs’, parts of Essex House and its gardens can be seen in the background as Charles
II
and the royal family walk along the ice to view the sports on offer.

The building had been divided in two in 1640, with half sold to a speculator who demolished it and laid out Essex Street in its place. For a while the remaining half of the
property served as the Cotton Library of Manuscripts (now part of the British Library) but was finally demolished in 1777.

Costing over £30,000, the railway board attempted to publicly justify the expense: ‘The entrance to the London passenger station, opening immediately upon what will
necessarily become the Grand Avenue for travelling between the Midland and Northern parts of the Kingdom, the directors thought that it should receive some embellishment.’

A hundred years later, with the Victoria and Adelaide hotels having been built either side, the arch was recognized as a major landmark and ‘the most imposing entrance to a London
terminus’. Some contemporaries, though, were much less forgiving. In
Old and New London
, Thornbury described it as ‘a lofty and apparently meaningless Doric temple – for it
seems placed without reference to the courtyard it leads to ... and although handsome in itself, and possibly one of the largest porticoes in the world, it nevertheless falls far short in grandeur
to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Some of
the blocks of stone used in its construction weighed thirteen tons.’