Georgian London: Into the Streets Read online

  On Tuesday, the garrison stationed at the Tower took decisive action and blew up all the houses on the eastern limit of the City, halting the spread of the fire in that direction. High on Ludgate Hill, St Paul’s began to burn. Evelyn reported ‘the melting lead [from the roof] running down the streets in a stream, and the very pavements glowing with fiery redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them’. He recalled how, throughout the City, ‘the fall of towers, houses and churches was like a hideous storm’. To the west, James and his men had hoped the Fleet Ditch would provide a natural firebreak. Yet the wind still blew hard and dry from the east and, as they watched, the fire leapt the ditch and arrived on Fleet Street. Then they ran.

  That evening the wind died abruptly. The firebreaks held. On Wednesday morning, Pepys roamed the city, seeing widespread devastation in Moorfields where he walked, his ‘feet ready to burn’, and watched people huddled amongst their possessions on the scrubland. On a much smaller scale, he observed the destruction of medieval London. He picked up, as a souvenir, ‘a piece of glasse of [the sixteenth century] Mercer’s Chappell in the streete … so melted and buckled with the heat of the fire like parchment’, and was upset to see ‘a poor cat taken out of a hole in the chimney, joyning to the wall of the Exchange; with, the hair all burned off the body, and yet alive’. That night, there were whispers that the French and Dutch were rising, to take over the enfeebled City, but nothing happened. For the first time since Sunday, Samuel lay down and ‘slept a good night’.

  On Thursday morning, the fire burned only in localized patches. Young William Taswell, equipped with his sword and helmet, walked into the City along the Strand and then Fleet Street. Number 55 now marks the westernmost limit of the fire. The ground almost scorched his shoes, the heat coming up from the pavements so fiercely. He stopped on the Fleet Bridge for a rest, so hot he was worried he might faint. He explored the ruins of St Paul’s, dodging falling masonry and putting twisted pieces of metal from the molten bells in his pockets. Against the east wall he found the corpse of a woman who had taken shelter there, ‘whole as to skin, meagre as to flesh, yellow as to colour’. The number of deaths recorded in the Great Fire was low, but there is no accurate figure which would take in people such as this woman, shackled prisoners, invalids and the elderly living alone.

  As the fire died, the need to find someone to blame became urgent. Frenchman Robert Hubert, ‘a poor distracted wretch’, was executed for starting it, but the culprit turned out to be baker Thomas Farynor of Pudding Lane who had failed to extinguish his oven properly. The fire had destroyed over 13,000 homes, 87 churches, a cathedral, and most of the City’s public buildings. Charles II invited plans for rebuilding. John Evelyn and Christopher Wren sent in designs featuring orderly streets and broad piazzas within a clearly delineated border. But it was too late for that; the citizens of London were already in a frenzy of rebuilding, sifting the charred remains of their homes, marking out boundaries and sourcing building materials.

  St Paul’s Cathedral destroyed by the Great Fire, engraving by Wenceslas Hollar, 1666

  The Great Fire shaped London like no other single event until the Blitz of 1941. Sisymbrium irio, a bright-yellow mustard plant, flowered everywhere over the blackened ruins of the city. It became known as London Rocket, and returned in 1941 to colonize the wreckage.

  After the Great Fire, many moved west and settled in the medieval streets off Holborn. Others began to build in the fields of Soho using brick, making the buildings less flammable. London was changing rapidly, transformed by private enterprise and the need for commerce. In two years, London had lost one in five of the population and over 400 acres of warehousing, shops and homes. The servants who had been cast aside as plague descended were now in demand, as were construction workers. Gideon Harvey estimated ‘in the four years after the Fire of London there was earned by tradesmen, relating to building only, the sum of four million, one million per annum’. Using relative earnings comparisons this equates to a total of approximately £7 billion today.

  London was changing – not only physically, but socially. Theatre and literature were becoming more bawdy, and libertines such as Charles Sedley and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, became the poster boys for a more relaxed sexual morality. Actresses appeared on stage for the first time, in both female and male roles. Their glamorous lifestyles, rich lovers and their defiance of previously strict gender ‘rules’ scandalized and inspired a city emerging from the grip of Puritanism.

  Whatever his personal feelings on religion, Charles II navigated a careful course around the subject. London was a staunchly Protestant city but, populated by practical and mercantile people, it accommodated many religions for the sake of commerce. Of these, only Catholicism was barely tolerated. Partly, this was a case of bitter experience: the burnings of Protestants in Smithfield in 1555 by Catholic Queen Mary Tudor had not yet faded from the collective memory. Ordinary Roman Catholics were banned from celebrating Mass, from taking public office and teaching children.

  In February 1685, Charles suffered a fit and a gradual decline. His brother, James, the Duke of York, was a Catholic who made no secret of his faith. Four days after Charles fell ill, when it had become clear he would not recover, James cleared the King’s bedroom of everyone but a few sympathizers before bringing in Father John Huddleston. Huddleston had helped Charles escape from Cromwell’s Roundheads over thirty years before. The King, whose lucidity was questionable, was received into the Catholic Church. There is no evidence that this was against his will. His last words concerned his ‘Protestant whore’, Nell Gwynn, when he implored James, ‘Let not poor Nelly starve.’

  The Duke of York took the throne as James II. He ruled for only four years, a short reign filled with political strife during which he became increasingly dependent on his Catholic advisers. In 1688, his daughters, Anne and Mary, conspired with his son-in-law, the Dutch Prince William of Orange, to depose him.

  The crisis came when, in June 1688, James II’s wife gave birth to a son. The English throne now had a Catholic male heir. Meanwhile, Princess Anne wrote to her sister, Mary, wife of William of Orange, ‘the Church of England is, without all doubt, the only true Church’.

  In November, William, Prince of Orange, invaded England at Torbay and marched towards London. Anne fled in the middle of the night with her best friend, Sarah Churchill. James was shocked by the desertion of his daughter. He was also suffering from severe and debilitating nosebleeds, further undermining his authority and confidence. He had already sent his wife and infant heir to France and realized he too must flee. He took a boat from Westminster to Vauxhall. While crossing over he is alleged to have dumped the Great Seal of the Realm into the Thames, washing his hands symbolically of the responsibilities of the throne. It was recovered sometime later by a waterman.

  James only got as far as Faversham before being recognized by some sailors, who detained him until a company of guards from London arrived. They had no choice but to take him back to the city, however reluctant both sides were. Yet as William advanced from the west, James’s time was running out. William arrived outside London in December. He offered James the chance to leave, and the King took it (perhaps all too mindful of the fate of his father). He joined his wife and son in France and lived out his days as a guest of the Catholic Louis XIV. He died in 1701. His removal from the throne became known as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The ‘glory’ lay in its lack of bloodshed, and in the returning of a Protestant to the English throne.

  Parliament quickly curtailed the powers of the monarchy. William was a Protestant, but men were changeable and London had ‘found by experience that it is inconsistent with the safety and welfare of this Protestant kingdom to be governed by a papist prince’, as later expressed in the Bill of Rights, passed on 16 December 1689. The Catholic question would remain a constant flashpoint in Georgian London. There was an abiding suspicion, ignorance and prejudice, which often erupted into violence.

  Re
storation, Plague, Fire, Revolution. These four events set the stage for the transformation of London during the Georgian years. They created tremendous opportunity, prompted the arrival of waves of economic migrants, and enabled the making of a new city upon an ancient one. When Samuel Pepys ventured out into a smoking wasteland that Friday in September 1666, his London held only half a million people. This figure remained relatively steady until the end of the seventeenth century. Then, in the second decade of the eighteenth century, London began to grow. There was a building boom; coal imports and beer production rose. But it was followed by a sudden stall until the 1750s, when London emerged from stagnation and hurtled outwards in all directions. By 1831, the city had a population of 1,654,994. The landscape had solidified first into brick and then into stucco, as the outlying marshes and green fields were slowly eaten up by speculative builders in a ‘mad’ attempt to ‘roof all the county of Middlesex with tiles’. In little more than 150 years, London was to change from a charred medieval city to capital of the world. On a fine summer’s day in the reign of George IV, Cyrus Redding walked up Primrose Hill to contemplate the city and saw ‘royalty, legislation, nobility, learning, science, trade, and commerce, concentrated before me in a mightier whole than had ever before been in the history of the world; and its fame and glory had gone forth and been felt in the most remote corners of the earth’.

  This city, and the empire which it controlled, was founded by merchants, bankers, diplomats and eccentric aristocrats. It was consolidated by their sons and daughters on wharves and in shops. Artisans and artists furnished every type of house and public building. Traders kept one hand on their copie-books and their eyes on the ever-widening horizon. At the edges were the rent boys and hot-air balloonists, dognappers, immigrants, life models and journalists. Attendant on everyone were the hawkers, the prostitutes and the scavengers – London’s underclass. It was to each of these characters that the city belonged, and this book is a tour of their streets. It is set out in chapters which reflect each distinct area and tell the stories of the people and events which defined their character during the Georgian period. Some of these were villages now engulfed by the metropolis, such as Marylebone, and some were miniature housing estates, such as St James’s, south of Piccadilly. Many of these areas retain their Georgian personality. Even now, the City is still full of office workers, Mayfair remains muted and smart, Soho is still creative and Hackney can be dangerous after dark. Above all, this book is about Georgian Londoners, their occupations and preoccupations, secrets, peccadilloes, crimes and pastimes. Less has changed than you might think.

  1. The City

  Viewed from the circular Golden Gallery at the summit of St Paul’s Cathedral, London spreads in every direction, an endless suburbia spawned by the railways. From the same vantage point at the beginning of the Georgian period, the limits of London were clear.

  The cathedral sat at the heart of the rebuilt City, its dazzling white exterior already attracting a patina of dirt by the time the first service was held in December 1697. Around it, the shops and houses thrown up on the razed earth were low and neat, the ridges of their roofs orderly, built to the new post-fire regulations. They ranged from the solid palaces of merchant princes to the hastily erected cheap dwellings of Aldersgate and Cripplegate, packed with porters, day labourers and watermen. The streets were wider and cleaner than before the Great Fire. All around, the myriad spires of rebuilt parish churches poked up above the new tiles, echoed across the river by the many windmill sails rising from the mist of lowlying Southwark. Through the white haze over the water spiked a forest of masts, waiting to unload their cargoes. Warehouses lined the north bank. The names of their wharves are ancient and evocative: Puddle Dock, Broken Wharf, Queenhithe and the Oystergate.

  To the east, lions roared hungrily in the Tower menagerie. Beyond lay the shanty towns and marshlands of Wapping where, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the new docks began to form – over ninety acres of enclosed water which would transform east London. In the distance, the meadows of Hackney and Bethnal Green beckoned to Londoners on sunny days. To the west, the nave of the cathedral pointed down Ludgate Hill and over the Fleet River towards the court. Fleet Street was the main thoroughfare towards London’s second city, Westminster. The Fleet was little more than a broad and dirty ditch crossed by a flat bridge to Fleet Street on the other side and the Strand beyond. Today, the Strand is full of pub chains, coffee shops and dull outlets selling mediocre greetings cards. Then, it was taverns, shops full of bibles and pornography, and even the odd elephant. Covent Garden and Soho were visible as a cluster of chimneys and rooftops, some old, some new. Just further west, before the parks and palaces of the court, Charing Cross formed the transport hub for the West Country. Georgian Mayfair and Marylebone were still pleasant fields, but soon the builders were due to arrive. To the north are the hill villages of Hampstead and Highgate, twin peaks in the chalk and clay of the Thames Valley. Summer bolt-holes and weekend retreats, they were the sophisticated rural outposts of a busy metropolis.

  Three hundred and sixty-five feet below the Golden Gallery, the streets of the City still follow their medieval lines. Then, as now, this was where the wealth of London was generated. Wholesale warehouses held the precious cargoes brought in from the wharves, to be picked over by dealers. The City was an engine for the creation of wealth. From the moment rebuilding started, the Square Mile began to move from a medieval place of merchants and merchandise, to a place of moneymen and speculators, insurance offices and clerks. Money was the preoccupation of the City and those who worked within it, and here our story begins.

  ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL: THE HEART OF THE CITY

  When Gideon Harvey put an estimate of a million pounds per year on the rebuilding of the City after the Great Fire, it seemed a gargantuan sum. In all likelihood the true figure was far higher. The figures involved in the construction of the new St Paul’s Cathedral alone were huge. It was the longest ongoing project in the rebuilding, a masterpiece amongst the hastily constructed new housing and shops.

  A cathedral dedicated to St Paul has been the centre of the City of London since AD 604. On 27 August 1666, John Evelyn recorded in his diary how he and Dr Christopher Wren had attended a meeting of the clergy, City officials and ‘several expert workmen’ to discuss how the medieval St Paul’s might be rescued. They found it ‘ill-designed and ill-built from the beginning’ and the structure ‘much torn with age and neglect’. Wren and Evelyn favoured a new church altogether, with a ‘noble cupola, a form not as yet known in England, but of wonderful grace’. Just over a week later, the cathedral Wren had wished to rebuild was a burned-out shell. For Christopher Wren and the many men and women who would work upon both the church, and the rebuilding of the City, it was a peerless career opportunity.

  St Paul’s and surrounding area, detail from John Rocque’s map, 1745

  New building regulations were introduced in 1667, with Wren and Robert Hooke, amongst others, responsible for drawing up new construction guidelines. Private housing was restricted to a small number of types, constructed according to strict rules: grand merchants’ houses, buildings fronting the main roads and, finally, smaller shops and houses in alleys and courtyards. They were to be of stone, with wooden window frames recessed so that they would not catch fire easily. The plans for the new buildings were not beautiful, but they were sensible, ‘without hovels, without ill-planned, ill-executed temporary buildings, and without slums … jutties, bulks, projecting shopfronts and water-pipes gouting onto passersby’. The muddled old City would not be recreated.

  The City had become a vast builder’s yard, full of masons and scaffolders. New houses and shops were flung up by carpenters, bricklayers, even glaziers. By 1675, over 8,000 homes had been rebuilt. Often, they conformed to the new rules, but not to high standards of construction. Workmen flooded in from the countryside, ready to take advantage of the high wages offered by Londoners desperate to get their businesses operationa
l and a roof over their families’ heads. Strict rules governing apprenticeships and the right to work in the City meant that, in theory, an artisan had to be bound to a master in his trade for seven years before obtaining his ‘freedom’ to work. The Great Fire changed all that, and demand suddenly exceeded supply. Workers were drafted in from all the provinces of Britain and Europe.

  St Paul’s would benefit from some of these foreign workers, although the core building team remained English. Almost immediately, high walls were built around the St Paul’s site to keep out the curious. In September 1667, a group of masons were paid to abseil over the ruin, knocking down anything they thought might be in danger of falling. Against Wren’s advice the clergy spent the equivalent of half a million pounds shoring up the ruin and creating an ill-advised temporary choir in the unstable West End. Soon afterwards, it fell in.

  From then on, a core group of twenty to thirty labourers worked on the building under Wren’s supervision and that of his assistant, Edward Woodroffe, an experienced and highly capable surveyor. The men were expected on site at 6 a.m. in summer, clocking in at the Call Booth which stood roughly where the drinking fountain stands today on the south side of Cannon Street. They continued to work until noon and took their lunch on-site. An oversized hourglass sat in the yard, making sure they didn’t waste any time. The end of the afternoon shift at 6 p.m. was marked by the ringing of an old bell, rescued from the rubble and put in a frame for the purpose.