Up West (3 page)

In the fields of medieval Soho, lepers were nursed at St Giles hospital, well away from the city's dense and terrified population. Lepers had been outcasts from biblical times, right up until modern medicine found an effective treatment for their disfiguring and contagious condition. They were required to ring a bell to warn of their approach, and the word ‘leper' is still used to demean those deemed ‘unclean', unwanted and beyond the pale. It seems appropriate that the despised lepers should find refuge in a place that was later to go on to welcome other kinds of outcasts from all over Britain and mainland Europe, as in the following centuries, wave after wave of political, economic and religious refugees
found a home in Soho, along with our own home-grown bohemians, oddballs and social misfits.

The name of Covent Garden, immediately to the east of Soho, is a corruption of ‘convent garden', and it was there that the monks of St Peter's Abbey grew fruit, vegetables and barley for their tables. The Abbey assumed ownership of the area in the tenth century, and, although the garden wasn't mentioned until around 1200, they must have been doing something with the land during the intervening time. The Abbey's garden has often been seen as the beginning of Covent Garden's long association with produce, which was to last until the sixties, but the area's history as a market is now believed to go back even further, into the Saxon period. It is thought that the Venerable Bede, writing in 731, was describing it when he mentioned ‘a metropolis' and ‘a mart of many peoples coming by land and sea'.

Archaeological digs in Covent Garden have revealed that it was settled by Saxons some two hundred years after the Romans upped sticks and abandoned Londinium, and Britain, at the beginning of the fifth century. They developed a port on the gravel banks of the Thames where, thanks to the intervention of Victorian engineering, the Strand now stands high and dry. It was here that the ‘many peoples' gathered to trade. And, of course, although the produce has gone, people still come by land, sea and, nowadays, air to wander through a modern market that sells souvenirs, trinkets and handmade bits and pieces at bijou little shops and the odd market stall.

Henry VIII took Covent Garden from St Peter's Abbey
and gave it – along with the title of first Earl of Bedford – to John Russell to reward his services as a soldier and a diplomat. It was not until the third Earl, Edward Russell, that the family built a mansion on the estate lands. Until then, like other gentry of the time, the Russells had a mansion on the Strand with fine river views and easy access to the Thames, which, in the absence of any roads better than rutted tracks and lanes, was the main thoroughfare for London and its environs.

Bloomsbury, north of Covent Garden, was yet another place that Henry VIII grabbed. This time he ousted some Carthusian monks. The area's name is thought to derive from the name of one William Blemund, who had a manor house there in the early Middle Ages. Henry gave the property to the Earl of Southampton for services rendered. Later, a descendant married into the Russell family, and the properties were amalgamated.

There was originally a nunnery on the site of the parish church of St James at Clerkenwell, east of Bloomsbury, while the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem had their headquarters somewhere in the area. Oliver Cromwell lived in Clerkenwell Close, and in the seventeenth century the place became very fashionable. Before it was built up, it was a kind of resort, where Londoners disported themselves at tea gardens, Sadler's Wells and health spas. Clerkenwell Green was the centre of the old village, before London outgrew its walls and crept out to meet it. The term ‘green' is a little misleading, as there hasn't been any grass here for three hundred years
or more. It is dominated by the old courthouse, an imposing building that is now a Masonic hall. Clerkenwell has long had a mixture of housing, offices, pubs and flourishing workshops that have given it a particular character and identity.

In the 1880s, Clerkenwell witnessed a mass influx of Italians looking for work. Like others who came before and since, they brought their trades with them: making mosaics and terrazzos (mosaic floors), organ grinding, knife grinding and plasterwork, which included making plaster saints for churches and shrines. They also brought roasted chestnuts to our streets, a strong, tasty and fragrant memory from my own childhood.

When grinding barrel organs ceased to bring in a living wage, the grinders turned to catering. Many of the Italians who worked in Soho's restaurants lived in Clerkenwell. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was known as ‘little Italy' and the poorer workers lived in appalling slum conditions. There are still workshops in the area that continue some of the traditional trades brought to London from Italy, while St Peter's at 136 Clerkenwell Road, ‘the Italian church', still caters for Italian Catholics and keeps the language, culture and customs of Italy alive in the West End.

At St James's, south-west of Soho, Henry VIII, having finally rid himself of his first wife and the Church of Rome, built a new palace for himself and his new consort, Anne Boleyn. Henry's desire for a new queen has long been seen as the main catalyst for all this upheaval in Church and state, although modern scholarship suggests that the situation was
far more complex than that. The Church of Rome was far too greedy, corrupt and ambitious for the Tudor king's liking: it had to go. Anne was simply the spark that finally lit a fuse that had been laid for some time. Whatever the reason, getting shot of Rome's influence resulted in the dissolution of the monasteries and Henry taking over ownership of their green and pleasant lands to the west of the city.

St James's had once been very isolated: in the twelth century there was a leper hospital for women on the site, which later passed in to the hands of Eton College. By the sixteenth century though, it was a desirable location near the seat of government, which is why Henry wanted it. Before building commenced, the king, true to form, gave Eton its marching orders, coercing the provost into swapping the land for a bit of Suffolk. Eton College, however, stayed near Windsor.

It could be argued that, despite the six wives, Henry remained a bachelor at heart, always enjoying the pleasures of a single man, including gambling, fornicating, drinking, hunting and hanging out with the lads. In the decades after Henry's death, St James's became a kind of haven for well-to-do single men about town, where they could gamble, booze, swear and play. Pall Mall, St James's main thoroughfare, began life as a court on which young bloods could play the game of pell mell – a cross between croquet and golf – and be as uncouth as only a bunch of young men can be, without the troublesome influence of their women to rein them in.

They all acted pretty much like old Henry, basically,
although, rather than the nasty beheading thing he went in for when someone upset him, they had duels. The last duel of honour in London took place in St James's. Once again, there's a sort of eerie continuity about the fact that the place has long been associated with young (and not so young) men, from the days of Eton College ownership, through Henry and his pals and on to the foundation of many gentlemen's clubs there, beginning in 1693 with White's; several of these clubs survive to the present day. This preponderance of testosterone also explains the nature of the shops that St James's has long been famous for: high-class tailors, Lock's hatters, wine merchants, makers of monogrammed silk shirts, bespoke shoes and expensive guns, as well as art galleries.

That small area provided just about everything that a well-heeled chap from the top drawer of society could possibly have ever wanted, including the baths and bagnios they frequented to purchase sexual pleasure. By Regency times, the area was a favoured spot with dandies and beaux who would ogle any passing female. The ogling explains why there was a lack of upper-class women there, although there would certainly have been servants and prostitutes who simply had to put up with the leers and lechery.

Mayfair, west of Soho, is named after a fifteen-day fair that began in 1686 on the site of what is now Shepherd Market. By 1709, the local gentry had decided it lowered the tone of the place and had it suppressed. The area first became fashionable with the nobility because it was within such easy toadying distance of St James's Palace and the monarch, and
belonged chiefly to the Grosvenor, Berkeley and Burlington families, who all had estates there. Sir Richard Grosvenor, already very rich, decided to increase his stash of cash by developing his land, and began building in 1700. Grosvenor Square, where the American Embassy in London is now, was the centrepiece of his design, which included broad streets and large town houses suitable for his friends and peers. Berkeley Square followed in 1738. Mayfair's third square, Hanover, honoured the new, German, royal family rather than a local landowner.

Mayfair started posh, and John Nash built Regent Street partly to make sure it remained that way. The famous street not only provided a link between the Prince Regent's home at Carlton House and Marylebone Park, but also acted as an effective barrier between ‘the Nobility and Gentry' and the hoi polloi who made up ‘the mechanics and trading part of the community'. Personally, I've always felt that keeping the lower orders at bay has done Mayfair no favours in terms of having a character and an identity of its own. Being the playground of the super-rich has made it, in modern parlance, a bit ‘up itself', content to rest on its exclusive laurels. Even the prostitutes working from Shepherd Market and Park Lane have traditionally been seen as ‘a cut above' those in Soho and Covent Garden, and consequently charged significantly more for their services.

Fitzrovia, the area immediately to the north of Soho, across Oxford Street was part of Lord Southampton's estate. When he found he needed to make some quick money, buildings
were thrown up rapidly and sold off to service industries as early as the 1700s. The residential property built there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was always let on short leases, which made for a shifting population. This is why the area has never had the same sense of community that both Soho and Covent Garden still enjoy. Neither did it have the snob appeal that Mayfair and St James's had from their very inception, although some illustrious – and, it was rumoured, royal – names frequented gambling clubs and male brothels in Cleveland Street in the nineteenth century.

The name Fitzrovia was coined in the 1930s by the Bloomsbury Group, some of whom, such as Virginia Woolf, lived in Fitzroy Square – as did George Bernard Shaw. The square itself was built and named for Charles Fitzroy, Lord Southampton, in the late eighteenth century and the Adam brothers were its architects. The area had a strong bohemian and artistic presence. Augustus John drank at the Fitzroy pub with his arty cronies, as did Dylan Thomas when he was in town. Nina Hamnett was quite a fixture there too. There was always a sense, in this regard, that Fitzrovia envied Soho: its loucher denizens even tried calling it ‘North Soho' at one point, but the name never really caught on.

In the seventeenth century, those who owned acreage west of London began to see the development potential in land that was so near the King's court and the growing mercantile centre of the city. There was serious money to be made, and Francis Russell, the fourth Earl of Bedford, was one of the first to
see it. He set about building the first planned development at Covent Garden. Charles I duly issued the necessary licence to build, despite the monarchy's traditional reluctance to allow building so close to London. Money – perhaps as much as £2,000 – apparently changed hands between Bedford and the King, an early instance of corruption in the West End.

An ambitious plan was hatched to build town houses for the gentry and a large square in the Italian style. The great architect, Inigo Jones, probably played some part in the design, although how much is not entirely clear. When completed, the Piazza astonished Londoners. It was a large open space bounded on the west by the church of St Paul, on the north and east by arcaded houses and on the south by the wall of Bedford House. It served as a meeting place for all comers, rather than a private garden for those who lived around it, as was the case in the other West London squares that were built in its wake.

There were other innovations as well. The haphazard tangle of roads and lanes that had followed the long-gone field boundaries of medieval farms and smallholdings were swept aside in favour of a neat grid of streets lined with smart houses, at least in Covent Garden's initial development. Things developed in a more haphazard fashion around and about, where there was no single landlord.

Russell's plans for Covent Garden were, however, upset by the Civil War. The gentry did not take up tenancies as the Earl had hoped, as it was not safe for Royalists to linger in London. Less exalted tenants were sought and found for the
Piazza, and a bustling market developed on its south side. Property development virtually ceased in the nascent West End during the hostilities and the Commonwealth period that followed. When it finally resumed in the eighteenth century, the gentry preferred the exclusivity offered by the squares further to the west of Covent Garden's Piazza and its environs.

By 1776, an anonymous writer, referring to the Piazza, could declare that ‘One might imagine that all the prostitutes of the Kingdom had pitched upon this blessed neighbourhood'
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, which shows just how low the area had sunk when compared with the fourth Earl's lofty ambitions. And thank goodness for that, because it created a vibrant neighbourhood, rich in contrasts and interest, that never existed in snooty old Mayfair. Over the years, a whole variety of businesses would settle there and thrive, including the produce market, which soon took on a wholesale rather than retail character, publishing houses, printing works, saddlers, coach builders and so much more.

Theatres, coffee houses, taverns and other places of entertainment were built there, initiating the idea that Up West was where Londoners went for a good time and adding immeasurably to the colour of the place. By the nineteenth century, the burgeoning market, as well as the various commercial enterprises and factories that had moved there, required a large workforce, and this in turn created
a great demand for places to live. By the middle of the century, the ordered Piazza and the streets around it had long been surrounded by a hotchpotch of houses, narrow alleys and dingy courts that had grown organically over the previous century. When one hovel fell down – which they did remarkably frequently – another two were built on its footprint. The Covent Garden area contained dwellings for every station in life, from the great houses of the aristocracy along the Strand to truly miserable shacks, shanties and tenements for the lowly. The ‘rookeries' around Seven Dials and St Giles church were one of London's most notorious slum areas, where life expectancy was unusually low and infant mortality unusually high even for the times. This state of affairs lasted late in to Victoria's reign, when the slums were razed and new, wide streets, befitting the capital of the world's greatest empire were built.