A Dickens Walk

I haven’t read any Charles Dickens books since I read Oliver Twist at school,  but I’m hearing his name all the time now when out and about in London.

I did go to the Dickens exhibition at the Museum of London last year, which I found very interesting,  and in the run up to Christmas I decided to start reading his books, starting with A Christmas Carol  which I really enjoyed.  Since then I have read Oliver Twist and I’m now reading The Pickwick Papers on my Kindle.

I decided to find out more about Dickens’s London by going on a self-guided walk: a Corporation of London walk starting at the Dickens museum. The walk begins at the Charles Dickens museum at 48 Doughty Street and I arrived there shortly before opening time, so was one of the first ones in.  Dickens lived here between 1837 and 1839 early in his writing career,  writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby. The entrance fee was £8, but it’s all in a great cause and it’s well worth a visit.

On leaving Doughty Street, the walk went up to Farringdon Road,  through Clerkenwell to Smithfields Market through Holborn and into the City, pointing out places mentioned in his novels (eg Smithfields Market described in Oliver Twist) or which formed the basis of places in them (eg the One Tun as the Three Cripples).

Whilst I am something of a newbie to Dickens, I thoroughly enjoyed the walk, and this has further encouraged me to continue reading his novels.

48 Doughty Street

Dickens’s Study

The Betsy Trotwood pub in Farringdon

Clerkenwell Sessions House

The One Tun pub aka the Tree Cripples

Saffron Hill

Site of the Saracen’s Head Inn

Newgate Execution Bell

The Naughty Nuns of St Helen’s Bishopsgate

St Helen’s is an interesting church in that it is one of the only the mediæval monastic buildings in the City of London which is still standing, the other being St Bartholomew the Great. The others such as Holy Trinity, Blackfriars, Greyfriars, Austin Friars and the like are all long gone, have only small fragments of the mediæval structure remaining, or have been completely rebuilt. It is also unusual because it was initially a parish church which was converted to a monastic house, whereas other monastic houses at this time were typically built from scratch on greenfield sites.

The church was dedicated to Helena, the mother of Constantine, who was the first Christian emperor of Rome. Nobody knows when St Helen’s was established as a parish church, and the earliest reference dates from 1010, when the relics of King Edmund the Martyr were moved here from East Anglia, to prevent their desecration at the hands of the Danes.

In 1210, the Dean of St Paul’s gave permission for William Fitzwilliam, a goldsmith, to establish a Benedictine priory at St Helen’s. The priory was never rich. In mediæval times it was common for rich people to leave money to the church in return for the church praying for their souls after they had died, and the priory relied on these chantries as well as ‘papal indulgencies’, or money from the pope.

The Basing family was a prominent London family who were major benefactors in late 13th and early 14th centuries, and they funded much of the building of the new priory. Another generous benefactor was Adam Francis – a Mercer, and Lord Mayor of London 1352-1353, who left enough money for the building of two chantry chapels: Holy Cross and St Mary.

In the 15th Century, the priory leased a parcel of its land to Sir John Crosby, a wealthy merchant from the Grocers’ Company. He built Crosby Hall, a big mansion, which he rented to Richard III when he was Duke of Gloucester, who used this as his London home. When he died, Crosby left St Helen’s the sum of 500 marks, or £100, a huge sum of money at the time. Of this money, £60 was spent on some much needed improvements whilst the remaining £40 was used to clear debts run up by the naughty nuns!

So what did the naughty nuns get up to? Well – in 1385 John de Appleby, the Dean of St Paul’s, wasn’t happy: he thought the prioress owned too many dogs, so limited her to two; he caught some on the nuns “kissing secular persons”, so banned that; and he also pulled them up for wearing what he called “ostentatious veils”.

Nearly fifty years later, in 1432, things hadn’t improved when the Dean Reginald Kentwode paid a visit: he found that secular women had been sleeping in the crypt, so he banned that; the prioress was told to keep the keys to stop the “much coming and going at unlawful times”; the nuns would no longer be allowed to look out onto the street, speak to secular persons or receive gifts or letters from them without permission from the prioress; strangers should not be able to see the nuns or vice versa at the services in the church; and no dancing or revelling would be allowed except at Christmas and other suitable times, and then only in absence of seculars.

The same Dean also issued further injunctions after a visit seven years later, in 1439. The impression given by all these injunctions is that the priory was treated as a kind of boarding-house, and it seems likely that the rich City families saw the priory as a convenient place where they could place their unmarried daughters with an allowance, regardless of whether they had a religious vocation.

The priory was dissolved in 1537, and this was a bit of a non-event: the nuns and officers were pensioned off; the convent buildings were sold to the Leathersellers’ Company; and the partition between the two naves was removed.

St Helen’s is the final resting place of Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of the Royal Exchange, and there are also lots of interesting memorials and artefacts inside the church.  Some say that St Helen’s is the Westminster Abbey of the City

The church survived the Great Fire of London and the Blitz, but suffered extensive damage from the Baltic Exchange terrorist bombing in 1992, and Quinlan Terry was appointed to architect its restoration.  The church is definitely worth visiting.

 

Left: Sir Thomas Gresham’s Tomb (with the Nuns’ Squint to the left)
Right: the Shakespeare Window

 

Left: the Nuns’ Quire
Right: the Nave of the parish church

The two naves from outside the church

Postman’s Park and the GF Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice

Postman’s Park is one of those hidden gems, a small park connecting two busy main roads – St Martin’s Le Grand and King Edward Street – which many people walk straight past. To be fair, it does appear at first glance to be the churchyard of St Botolph’s Without Aldersgate (which it indeed once was) but it is now a City Park, maintained by the Corporation of London.

The graveyard of St Botolph’s was closed following the 1851 Burials Act, which prohibited any new burials in the old City churchyards, in an attempt to combat repeated outbreaks of cholera, and in 1858 it was decided that the churchyard would be converted into a public park, incorporating the adjacent burial grounds of Christ Church Greyfriars and St Leonard, Foster Lane. It took many years to clear these burial grounds, and the park did not open until 1880. Being situated right next to the General Post Office, the park was frequented by postal workers during their breaks, and so this inevitably became known as Postman’s Park.

In 1887 George Frederick Watts, a prominent artist, wrote to The Times suggesting a project to mark Queen Victoria’s Jubilee that year, which would celebrate people who had given their own lives whilst trying to save others. His idea was not taken up, and so he decided to create a memorial himself – the GF Watts Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice – which was located in Postman’s Park. The memorial takes the form of an open gallery with room for 120 painted ceramic plaques. There are 46 plaques in place, each recording an act of heroic self-sacrifice.

Probably the most famous plaque is for Alice Ayres: “Daughter of a bricklayer’s labourer who by intrepid conduct saved 3 children from a burning house in Union Street Borough at the cost of her own young life April 24, 1885”. In 1936 the local council renamed White Cross Street (off Union Street) after her, and the 1997 play called Closer featured a woman who assumed the identity of Alice. A Hollywood film based on the play was released in 2004, starring Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Jude Law and Clive Owen, featuring the Postman’s Park and the GF Watts Memorial.

Pediments

It’s very hard trying to get into the habit of looking at things you see every day through a fresh pair of eyes.  For example, I have walked past the Royal Exchange innumerable times over the years, and have never noticed the small statues in the gable to the front of the building until it was pointed out to me.

This is the third Royal Exchange: Sir Thomas Gresham’s one was burnt down in the Great Fire of London; and Edward Jarman’s replacement also went up in flames when a fire broke out in the Lloyd’s Coffee House at the Exchange in 1838.  This third Royal Exchange opened in 1844, and was designed by Sir William Tite; the pediment (the architectural term for the gable) was designed by Richard Westmacott (the younger).

At the centre is the crowned figure of Commerce, holding a scroll of the charter of the Exchange. The inscription beneath her says “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof” (Psalm 24.1) and was chosen by Prince Albert.  To her right there are three men – the Lord Mayor, an Alderman and a Common Councilman, representing the City; next to them two Asians – a Muslim and a Hindu; behind them a Greek man carrying a big amphora; and then  a Turkish merchant doing his accounts sat with an Armenian banker.  To her left are two British merchants with a Persian textile merchant, examining his wares; next to them a Chinese man, a sailor from the Levant and an African man; then a British sailor tying up a bale; and finally a “supercargo” or cargo-manager.  So the pediment reflects Britain’s commercial  activities across the globe in the mid-19th century.

From now on, I shall be looking out for pediments on my travels around the City, to see what stories they tell.  I might even write about one of them here!

A Docklands Walk

This is my first proper blog entry, and it’s about a walk along the Thames Path from Tower Bridge to Greenwich. I have walked the Thames Path the other way – from Tower Bridge to Westminster and beyond – loads of times, and I feel quite ashamed to say that I’ve never taken the path through the Docklands.

I stopped off by the old Royal Mint building at Tower Hill, but was disappointed to find that the Roman wall underneath Royal Mint Court was locked up, so not a good start. Crossing over the main road, I walked into St Katharine’s Dock. This site once belonged to the Cnihtengild back in the 10th century, when King Edgar gave a strip of land on the eastern boundary of the City to 13 brave knights, to protect against Viking raids. The docks were built in 1828, replacing a hospital and the mediæval St Katharine by the Tower church, after which the docks are named. Goods as diverse as tea, rubber, wool, marble, sugar, tallow, and ivory were all unloaded here. The dock had (and still has) a narrow entrance which made it difficult for larger ships to navigate, and so the docks fell into decline as ships became bigger. The docks were abandoned altogether after World War II, but were redeveloped in the 1970s. Nowadays it is a pleasant marina complex, overlooked by apartments, and home to the Dickens pub.

Leaving the dock to the south, I made my way onto a cobbled Wapping High Street. Buildings here are a mixture of new apartment complexes and old wharves and warehouses which have been converted into apartments.

It is said that there were once 36 pubs along this road, but today very few remain. The first pub I came across was the Town of Ramsgate. This inn claims to be the oldest pub on the River Thames, and it is a narrow but deep building. Unfortunately it was before midday and so hadn’t opened yet, but I went down the alley down the side of the pub to find Wapping Old Stairs. Luckily it was low tide and I was able to get down onto the foreshore and take some photos of the view. The pub is so called because the fishermen of Ramsgate used to land their catches here in preference to Billingsgate, to avoid the higher taxes there.

There are a couple of interesting historic buildings across the road from the pub, down Scandrett Street. The first is the Turk’s Head cafe. This was once a pub run by Mog Murphy, who kept the pub open at all hours during World War II so that service personnel could try to seek news of their loved ones. By the 1980’s this had become derelict, and a group of local ladies successfully campaigned to restore the building, and today this is a cafe.

Along the same street is what was once St John’s School – a charity school which was founded in 1695 to educate 50 girls and 60 boys. This building dates from 1760, and has a couple of wonderful statues of a schoolboy and a schoolgirl in their blue uniforms on the front of the building. Why blue uniforms? Because blue dye was cheap.

Further along Wapping High Street is the Captain Kidd pub. It was still before midday and so this was also closed. Captain Kidd the pirate was hung at Execution Dock in Wapping – thought to have been on the site of the nearby Wapping New Stairs.

Next stop was another pub – the famous Prospect of Whitby. I have heard many stories over the years about what a great pub this is, but I’ve never made it here until now. It was a few minutes before 12 and so I went down the side of the pub and onto the foreshore. I spent a few minutes mudlarking, and picked up several pieces of clay pipe. Another bloke was also on the foreshore, having a cigarette, and he asked what I was picking up. I showed him the pieces of pipe and explained that I’m no expert, but these pipes would be dated anywhere between the 16th and 19th centuries. He looked around and found a piece of pipe, and went off looking very pleased with himself. It was now opening time, so I went back up the stairs and into the pub – and what a fantastic pub it was. It has a nice long bar (the longest pewter topped one in the country apparently) incorporating  timbers from old ships and barrels, and there’s a superb flagstone floor which is the original one. Like many old London pubs, this is said to have once been frequented by Pepys and Dickens. If you like old pubs, with lots of character and history, and which also serve real ale, then I can fully recommend this one!

After a sandwich and a pint of Bombadier, I went for a wander around the pub before leaving, and it really is a tremendous place. If I hadn’t left when I did, I’d have stayed there all afternoon.

Opposite the pub is an old pumping station of the London Hydraulic Power Company, a charming red brick building which is now an arts centre.

Next stop was the rotunda of Brunel’s Thames Tunnel, the first tunnel under the Thames. The tunnel is now used by trains, with the rotunda serving as a ventilation shaft.

There’s a lovely account of the tunnel opening from the Illustrated London News here.

I continued on, past the Limehouse Marina, and on to Narrow Street and the Grapes pub. The pub is at the end of a row 18th century merchants houses, and is named as “The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters‟ in the Dickens‟ novel Our Mutual Friend.

I didn’t stop for a cheeky beer, though I was very tempted. I walked on to Canary Wharf and spent a good hour looking round the Museum of London Docklands. This was fascinating, but I hope to make another visit in the not too distant future, and so will write a blog entry for this another time. After leaving the museum I walked all the way along the path to Island Gardens, opposite Greenwich.

During the course of the day, I took quite a few photos of the river views, and these are my favourites:

“Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”
— Samuel Johnson