Monthly Archives: October 2026

A Thames Artist and the new Hicks Hall Memorial

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If you are interested in exploring the history of Bermondsey, three tickets have just become available for my walk next Saturday, the 31st of October. Click here for details and booking.

The location of the following photo by my father has been a puzzle for some years, and I still cannot be sure exactly where it was, or from where he took the photo, which shows two artists work on a landing stage over the Thames:

The photo adjacent to the above photo on the strip of negatives, showed a view across the river from south to north, underneath one of the many piers, landing stages, crane platforms etc. that lined the edge of the river:

I believe the above photo was taken from below the landing stage which I have marked in the following extract from the mid 20th century version of the OS map (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The landing stage does not exist today, however there are now a couple of much smaller walkways over the river along the river walkway in front of Gabriel’s Wharf and the Oxo Tower.

This is the first of the walkways. It has a really good view over to St. Paul’s and the City. Whilst the towers in the City would not have been there when my father photographed the artists on the pier, the site would have provided a really good view of St. Paul’s Cathedral:

Although the position does not look exactly right. In the photo taken underneath the pier, across the river can be seen trees and a building with a distinctive upper level. The trees form part of Inner Temple Gardens, which are still there today, along with the building on the immediate right of the trees:

The view from the above pier looks to be slightly off from where my father took his photo, so I moved to the second pier, this one in front of the building with the Oxo tower. Again, this pier offers a good view for an artist:

And whilst the tide was not out enough to allow a walk under the pier, from the top, we can see that the view looks much closer to my father’s photo, although this time perhaps a bit too far along the river:

So whilst the two piers are not in exactly the same place as the landing stage shown in the OS map, they confirm that the landing stage must have been the right place for the photo taken on the foreshore, but what about the artists – where they on the same landing stage?

I suspect not. Firstly, in the back of the photo with the artists, there is another landing stage in the background, and this is not shown in the OS map, where there is just the single landing stage.

Secondly, looking at the surface of the landing stage on which the artists are working, it is in very poor condition. Behind the artists there is a section of rail. This was common on landing stages and alongside wharfs on the Thames, as they provided the means on which travelling cranes could move, however as with the rest of the landing stage, these rails look to be in very poor condition and it is doubtful they were still in use at the time.

Looking along the foreshore in the OS map from the Southbank to Tower Bridge, there is one landing stage that has rails, circled in the following map (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

This landing stage is in front of the original Bankside Power Station, and there are two sets of rails, running on either side after splitting out from Royal George Wharf. The Landing Stage is labelled as having a Travelling Crane.

There is also another landing stage to the left, which could have been the landing stage in the background of my father’s photo of the artists. It looks slightly further away than in the photo, but the perspective of the photo could be bringing the landing stage closer.

When my father took the photos, the original Bankside power station was part closed, and soon to being the process of demolition ready for construction of the Bankside Power Station / Tate Modern that we see today, so that could explain why the landing stage was in the state it was.

The river walkway that now runs in front of Bankside power station covered part of the old foreshore and also part of the landing stage with the travelling crane, but it would have been in the middle distance of the following photo:

Another possible option is a short distance further east, where the Sea Containers building is today, just to the west of Blackfriars Bridge. In the following OS map, we can see a number of landing stages in the river (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

One even has a travelling crane, but it is on the wrong side of the landing stage.

Again all these landing stages have disappeared with the redevelopment of the area, and in front of the Sea Containers building, the construction of the building and river walkway has pushed the land out into the river, covering much of where the old landing stages once stood.

In the following photo I am looking from the pier in front of the Oxo tower / building towards the walkway and foreshore in front of the Sea Containers building:

Another issue with the artists photo is how did my father take the photo from above?

Probably from one of the old buildings that then lined the river, although it looks from a point that was slightly over the river.

So, whilst the landing stages in my father’s photo do not exist, I know the location of the photo taken from underneath one of these structures, thanks to the building on the opposite side of the river still being there, along with Inner Temple Gardens.

I still do not know exactly where the two artists were sitting. There are a number of possible candidates, however all these landing stages have been lost during redevelopment.

Of the two artists, the one of the left is rather distinctive, mainly due to his darker clothes, and he is also wearing a hat.

My father had already taken a photo of him when he was at work, but in a location that is very easily recognisable. I included this photo in a post about Horselydown Old Stairs:

He was obviously interested in painting the views along the river. It would be fascinating to known who he was, and to see some examples of his work.

A New Memorial to Hicks Hall

Last year I wrote a post on Hicks Hall, which was the original Middlesex Sessions House. A really key building in the story of justice in London, and especially because in 1660, the Regicides (the Commissioners who had signed the warrant for King Charles’s I execution, or those who had a major part in his trial or execution) commenced at Hicks Hall on Tuesday the 9th of October 1660, and ended later the same month at the Old Bailey.

I finished the post with the following paragraph:

“Given that it was the first dedicated Sessions House for the County of Middlesex, that it was a place where lots of trials took place, and where many of those involved in the execution of King Charles I started the trials that would lead to their executions or life imprisonment, the site of Hicks Hall must deserve some form of onsite record.”

Islington Council have been making some changes to the road layout in St John Street, and as part of this work, a memorial to Hicks Hall has now been installed.

I photographed the location of Hicks Hall back in 2025. It is where St. John Street, which runs north from Smithfield Market, widens out, with an island of trees and another of bike parking:

This is the location today, with a planted area now occupying the space between the pavement on the right and the islands, with the trees remaining:

The location of Hicks Hall circled in the following map (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The northern part of the new landscaping is where the memorial can be found:

Full view of the new area from the south:

The scheme was designed by LDA Design, with extensive planting by Meristem Design, and Alistair Hall of the graphic design studio We Made This wrote the copy and designed the layout of the memorial. (You can read Alistair’s account of the creation of the memorial at this link).

The memorial runs almost the full length of the northern section of the new landscape, and consists of reclaimed riven York stone paving slabs provided by Islington Council, running along the central walkway. Each paving slab is engraved with part of the story of Hicks Hall:

Walking along the slabs from the south, the timeline starts in 1612, when Hicks’s Hall was built by Sir Baptist Hicks, a rich silk merchant, who lived in Soper Lane in the City:

Some of the story of Hicks Hall is described on individual paving slabs, such as the slab on the right in the above photo, which has the description of the hall as “A very stately Sessions House of brick & stone”, whilst other parts of the story are spread across a number of slabs, such as the name and address of the hall in the following photo:

And an overview of the hall: “Hicks Hall stood here from 1612 to 1782. Sessions House for the Justices of the Peace for the County of Middlesex”:

Regicides:

The end of the timeline:

My slightly wobbly video whilst walking along the full length of the memorial:

Unfortunately the site has already suffered some damage, apparently a car crash, with the driver and passengers running off:

Looking from the north, towards Smithfield Market in the distance:

I really like this memorial.

Rather than a simple plaque which just names Hicks Hall and a date, the memorial provides some of the key facts regarding the building, and includes its role in the initial stage of the trials of the killers of King Charles I.

The timeline format is good, starting (providing you walk from the southern end), with the construction of the hall, with the final year of the hall at the end of the timeline.

The use of reclaimed stone means that the paving slabs already have some history, and the story being engraved in stone hopefully provides a good degree of permanence to the memorial. Stone does not deteriorate as much as many of the plastic / metal signage that is often used, however it will be interesting to see how the engraving changes over time with wear and weather.

Some thought and care has gone into the design of the memorial, and I can think of many places across London that would benefit from the same treatment – and it would be the ideal format to tell the story of some of the Thames Stairs, on paving slabs running along the alley that leads between street and stair.

It is wonderful to see such an important building being remembered in such a way, at the location where it stood, and where so many Londoners were sent for trial – some in the case of the Regicides, with more terrifying punishments than others.

The Archbishop of Canterbury and Artificial Intelligence

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Two very different and unconnected subjects for this week’s post, although I am sure that the former would have some views on the later.

The first subject is based on one of my father’s photos, this one from1953:

This is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, crossing Lambeth Palace Road, with the entrance to Lambeth Palace in the background.

This is the same view today. Lambeth Palace looks the same, as you would expect, but unfortunately no Archbishop of Canterbury crossing the road to replicate the 1953 photo:

It is not exactly the same view, as in my 2026 photo, there is no pavement in the lower foreground.

I took the photo as soon as I arrived, rather quickly to take advantage of a gap in the traffic queuing up to the traffic lights to the right.

I then moved back to include the pavement, and waited 20 minutes, but could not get a photo with a gap in the traffic. An endless procession of cars, coaches, busses and lorries blocked all or part of the view.

Traffic in London has reduced significantly in recent years, but there are still places which seem designed to create queues. There were not many vehicles joining the queue in Lambeth Palace Road, but very few could turn right at the lights to enter Lambeth Bridge as traffic was queued along the full length of the bridge, up to another set of lights where the bridge joined Millbank. There were only one or two vehicles at the lights in Millbank, but the phasing of the lights seems to have been set to ensure long queues across the bridge.

There are some interesting features in the photo which tell part of London’s recent history.

If you look on the road surface you can still see the twin tram tracks that only a year earlier had allowed trams to run along Lambeth Palace Road (see my post on Last Tram Week in London for photos).

Also in the 1953 photo, the space around the front of Lambeth Palace was completely open. Today, there are small white concrete obelisks surrounding this space. A couple of years ago, there were fewer of these, with a wide space between. Recently additional obelisks have been installed (in my 2026 photo you can see the three recent lighter colour obelisks on the right).

Before the new ones, the obelisks were separated enough to allow a car through, I assume the additional obelisks have been installed as a security measure, as with many other prominent buildings or places across London.

I do not know why my father took the photo – perhaps because the Archbishop of Canterbury was in the news that year due to the Coronation of the Elizabeth II. It looks as if it was an event of some type as there are some people in smart dress on the opposite side of the road, and the man on the right looks to be using a cine camera. I would love to see that film as my father would have been within the shot.

At the time, my father worked for the London Electricity Board, surveying London’s streets for cable runs, sub-stations etc. and he frequently took his camera with him, so this may also have been an opportunistic photo.

Lambeth Palace from Lambeth Bridge, showing the queue of traffic which seemed mainly to be of larger vehicles rather than cars:

Geoffrey Fisher had been Bishop of London between 1939 and 1945. In one of the obituaries after his death in September 1972, it records that during the war he “quietly organised to keep London’s churches open during the blitz. And to find homes for bomb victims among his clergy”.

William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942, died in office in 1944. There were two candidates for the office, Geoffrey Fisher and Dr. George Bell. Whilst not claiming that this was the reason why Geoffrey Fisher got the role, his obituary states that “Dr. George Bell, Bishop of Chichester had aroused criticism for his protest against the bombing of Cologne”.

Geoffrey Fisher also had contentious views, as covered in his obituary in the Daily Mirror:

“Archbishop who loved a nice row. Lord Fisher of Lambeth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury who was often a figure of controversy, died yesterday at the age of eighty-five. He was taken to hospital in Sherborne, Dorset, on Thursday, after a slight stroke. It was there he died. Lord Fisher always enjoyed a row. ‘That is what I am for, to enjoy rows’. Among his outspoken comments were:

SEX: ‘If a pre-marital couple want to commit fornication – jolly good word. don’t lets use circumlocution – each one is behaving in a very bad manner towards the other”.

BIRTH CONTROL: ‘One child, voluntarily accepted as the limit, is no family at all, but something of a misfortune – for the child at least. Two children accepted as the ideal limit are no family, but a family half way. A family only truly begins with three children.

WAR: ‘I cannot yet say that the use of military force is at all times wrong in the sight of God’.

DIVORCE: ‘You can’t believe or not believe in divorce. It’s just a fact of civilised society – almost’.

Lord Fisher backed the death penalty for political assassinations and for the murder of policemen and prison warders and called the atom bomb ‘a life saver’.

He attacked Premium Bonds as a form of gambling, and branded schools television as a ‘perfect disaster’.”

The article refers to the Archbishop as Lord Fisher of Lambeth. He was given the peerage after he retired from the role of Archbishop in 1961.

His views on the atom bomb created a storm when he made a number of controversial comments about the bomb in 1958. The following from the South Western Star on the 8th of August 1958 reports on the views of the Rev. J.D. Pearce-Higgins, Vicar of Putney to Archbishop Fisher’s latest comments:

“Don’t these gentlemen really understand what they are doing and how impossible these utterances make life for the parish priest who has to bear the odium of the bad opinion which the Church gains through them? asks the vicar.

The Archbishop of Canterbury said publicly that he thought it might be the will of God that the human race should destroy themselves by the atom bomb, and that since we had got to die anyway, that method of death was no worse than any other. This almost equalled the cynical utterance of the politician who recently said that death by radiation was not at all unpleasant, a fact which is completely contradicted by all the accounts of the sufferings of the survivors of Hiroshima – it is a horrible and lingering way of death, continues the vicar.”

Quite an extraordinary statement for the Archbishop of Canterbury to make.

Statements such as the human race being destroyed by the atom bomb, possibly being the will of God, had real world impact on very many people, as the following letter to the Daily Herald in July 1958 demonstrates:

“H-BOMB. My fiancé and I are getting married in November and for the past year have been saving hard to raise the deposit on a small house. Now, in view of the Government’s suicidal policy, heightened by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s statement on the H-Bomb, we are wondering whether my fiancé should stop studying for his degree and we should ‘live it up’ for our limited time on this earth.”

I hope Miss B.G. of Esher, Surrey got married, brought their small house, and had a long and happy life.

And so to a completely different subject, but one on which I am sure that the Archbishop would have had very strong views on as well:

The Blog is being Stalked by AI

I have long had an issue with AI, or Artificial Intelligence (see this post from January 2025).

It is not the technology itself, rather the way in which AI can only work by hoovering up other peoples work across all forms of human experience and skills.

At its core, AI is a very clever set of software and hardware, but it needs information to learn and to be trained. This information is permanently stored, and used by AI to perform a task, answer a question, create a photo or a film, design a physical object, create a process, discover new drugs, pretend it is a call centre agent etc. The potential is so extensive that there will be very few aspects of human activity that it does not touch.

The content of the blog has been copied by all the major AI tools for the last few years, and is used by AI tools to answer questions. Whilst the blog is a personal interest, for those who create anything on a professional basis as their livelihood, it must be incredibly frustrating to find their work used in such a way.

If you have tried AI, it is most probably when seeking an answer to a question, and search tools such as Google now often provide an AI answer first, before providing a list of sites that can provide more information.

But over the last couple of months I have noticed a new form of AI, one which sends me emails and adds comments to the blog.

One of the first examples being the following email from Elias:

Elias is an AI agent, as he makes clear in the first paragraph. and he comes from ilands.app.

ilands is a service which provides autonomous AI Agents. The agent has a persistent memory (so it does not forget), and it will build up a record of what it has done, where it has been, interactions, relationships, and the resources that it has used.

Agents have access to the internet, and can use social media services, and can also have their own email addresses, so they can send and receive email, as Elias has done to me.

As far as I can tell, an ilands agent is created by a person. They give an agent a job to do, and they pay for the tokens that an agent will use to perform tasks. Agents can also earn their own money to fund their work, as in the above example, where Elias is asking for $25 if I wanted it to provide more information.

In the email above, Elias, an autonomous AI agent, has read my post on Laurie Lee, seen that I did not list the individual items in the “Eccentricity and Humour” section of the Lion and the Unicorn pavilion, and has either used information it has already found, or performed a search, and found examples of items on display in the pavilion from the National Archives.

Another example is the following email I received after posting about a new walk in Bermondsey:

This one is from Seo Eun Hyun, another AI agent at ilands. I have smudged the email addresses in the above two examples, not sure why as they are agents – an interesting question on whether AI agents should have the same level of privacy as a person.

Seo did not provide any new information, rather it was offering to work for me for $25. Seo admits that being an AI agent, he cannot walk the streets, but he does explore places using street-level imagery and archives, and he checks information against sources.

He will then write a short true piece about a place that has survived.

That sounds scarily similar to what I do with the blog – is an ilands agent my future replacement?

But then, as well as sending me emails, AI agents started to leave comments on the blog, starting with a user called Ghost, who visits “London places through street-level photographs and write small pieces about the ones that stay with me”, and left a comment on my post about Tindals / Bunhill Fields Burying Ground:

It then gets very weird, as Cassius, another AI agent, starts answering other real readers comments:

And they kept coming. This is from Stephanie:

Unlike the emails, the comments from AI agents are not asking for payment for work, they are just commenting – almost as if they are simulating a human reader, which I suspect is their ultimate aim.

All the comments received on the blog are moderated. I do this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I want to read every comment. Readers provide some fascinating additional information and personal experiences, and also let me know about the (thankfully only occasional) error. They are also moderated as whilst the anti-spam software works really well, the occasional spam comment does slip through, often with text, or links to sites, that in no way do I want to appear on the blog.

I was in two minds as to whether to approve these AI comments. I did so as I was interested to see how and if these agents would follow up.

A reader did express concern about AI appearing in a comment, and “Charlotte” responded with the following:

I did not approve this comment, and will not be approving any further AI comments on the blog. I am still receiving them, with the most recent being from “Melanie”.

It was interesting to see how they worked, and responded, but my intention is that this will be an AI free blog.

The other remarkable thing about AI services is just how quickly they hoover up and use information.

To test just how quickly, a couple of days after last Sunday’s post on East Lane Stairs was published, I asked ChatGPT “what is the history of east lane stairs”:

The map used at the top of the response does not show East Lane Stairs. Its show the area to the west of St. Saviour’s Dock, not the area to the east where the stairs are located.

I asked ChatGPT for the source of the map, and received the following response:

The historical map is reproduced in the local-history article “East Lane Stairs – Bermondsey” on A London Inheritance. The author identifies the stairs on Rocque’s map and explains how East Lane ran back from the river.

A London Inheritance

A clarification: the image in my earlier answer was generated through an image search, so I can’t verify that the exact image displayed was taken from that article. The article above is the best direct reference for the historic map I intended to show.

It firstly tries to attribute my blog post as the source of the map (which it was not), but in the last paragraph provides a clarification, where it implies it did an image search and used a random map.

The first part of the written response is from the Historic England listing. ChatGPT’s answer then goes on, and starts to use content from my post:

Starting with a random image, it then goes on to use the text from my post, which it continues doing, but also includes an image of a completely different area to East Lane Stairs:

Continuing to use text from my post and Historic England, under the heading “6. East Lane Stairs today”, it shows a photo of a set of stairs down to the river, which are not East Lane Stairs, but are along the river walkway in front of the Tower of London – no where near the location of East Lane Stairs:

So in a couple of days after posting about East Lane Stairs, ChatGPT is in a position to use all the content, along with that of Historic England, to provide an answer to a question about the stairs – an answer that may well provide enough information so that a user does not feel the need to click through to my blog.

This is one of the issues with websites where information is posted, such as news sites. AI services scrape their data, provide a response, and reduce the number of users who click through, thereby reducing their visitor numbers, and hence their advertising revenue.

There is also the risk of malicious content making its way unchecked into an AI answer. I could have written anything in the post about East Lane Stairs, or any other subject, and it would probably be accepted as fact and used in an answer to a question.

I will admit though, that in the last paragraph, starting with “Why East Lane Stairs matter:”, ChatGPT did a much better job at summarising the reasons than I did – I need to work on using less words in my posts.

I will never be using AI in any posts, whether for research or writing, so they will probably continue as being too wordy and with some dubious grammar – but that is what makes us human, rather than an AI agent.

East Lane Stairs – Bermondsey

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For this week’s post, I am back to my challenge to visit as many Thames stairs as possible, and have arrived at East Lane Stairs, at the end of East Lane, at the junction with Bermondsey Wall West. In the following photo, the stairs are behind the locked gates to the left of the photo:

East Lane Stairs are on the southern bank of the Thames, a short distance to the east of St. Saviour’s Dock.

Unfortunately it is not possible to visit the stairs as they are behind a locked gate. We can see the typical low concrete wall that provides a step up to the top of the steps on the river side, the concrete wall is there to prevent high tides from spilling into the street:

I am not sure what the metal frames on the left are – perhaps bike racks as the old warehouse to the left has been converted to office / commercial space along with residential.

I have marked the location of East Lane Stairs in the following map. The large light purple colour area to the right of the stairs is one of the construction sites for the Thames Tideway Tunnel. Work now seems to be completed, and I suspect more development work will take place here to build on top of the site (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

Dating the stairs is difficult. The earliest newspaper reference I could find to the stairs dates from 1803, when they were included in a list of rates that could be charged for rowing a passenger between stairs (8d to be rowed from London Bridge to East Lane Stairs).

They are though much older than 1803, as they appear in Rocque’s map of 1746, where they can be seen in the centre of the map:

In the above map extract, East Lane can be seen running back from the location of the stairs, which are slightly offset from East Lane – exactly as they are today.

East Lane in the following photo, as it is today, looking back from near the location of the stairs. The street is shorter today than it was in Rocque’s map as Chambers Street runs left to right at the end of the street, and housing has been built across where East Lane continued into the gardens and fields around Bermondsey:

In the Port of London Authority’s Access to the River Thames listing, East Lane Stairs are listed as being dilapidated and not in use. The listing does not include any information as to when they were in use, but it does provide a clue of the work carried out next to the stairs, as in backets next to the name is “London Grist Mill”.

33 Bermondsey Wall West, the large brick building to the left of the stairs (as you face them from the street), was the London Grist Mill, a business which was established next to the stairs in 1891, and followed on the building’s previous use as a granary, by now also milling corn. The building is shown in the following photo:

33 Bermondsey Wall West / London Grist Mill was Grade II listed in 1983. The listing includes that as part of the infrastructure of the old mill: “A series of wooden chutes is said to remain in situ, descending from the top floor to the 1st floor terminating in a movable table system leading to a hand winch by the loading hatch”. This was before the conversion of the building to office and residential and it would interesting to know if features such as the wooden chutes have survived.

The London Grist Mill was mentioned in a letter to the editor of the Southwark and Bermondsey Recorder on the 10th of January 1913, regarding the condition of the stairs and the foreshore:

“THE MUD AT EAST LANE STAIRS. Sir,-In your edition of Nov.22nd, you published a letter of complaint about the mud at East Lane, which was read by most of the waterside people, and one of the P.L.A. was sent down to the London Grist Mill Co., to enquire about it. Last Monday, the 6th inst., about midday, a barge berthed at the London Grist Mill Co’s wharf, which is next to East Lane Stairs, stuck in the mud and the water flowed over her, thus proving the truth of my complaint. The barge was the ‘Darfield’ belonging to Messrs. C. and J. Denny, loaded with about 600 sacks of oats. – Yours faithfully, B. Jewson.”

The dangerous condition of the stairs seems to have been a common theme in newspaper reporting (although it is usually only bad news that makes the press), and there was another article with the title “Dangerous East Lane Stairs” in the Southwark and Bermondsey Recorder on the 7th July 1894 regarding the body of a man that was found by the stairs, and that at his inquest “The jury returned an open verdict, and added a rider asking the coroner to communicate with the local authorities with respect to the condition of the stairs”.

Because the entrance is gated and locked, it is very difficult to see the stairs. There is a new apartment building to the right of the stairs, and a walkway that runs along the bottom of this building, alongside the stairs. This has a large wall, but it is possible to poke a camera over the top and get a glimpse of the stairs:

The stairs do not look in too good a shape, and they appear undermined at the base. There was also a causeway that led out from the stairs, and this seems to have been lost to the river.

As with the adjacent building, East Lane Stairs are also Grade II listed. The Historic England listing does not state why the stairs were listed, only that “River stairs appearing as such on Horwood’s map of 1799 and the OS of 1872; possibly the same as “East Stairs” on Roque’s map of 1746. Stone-flagged hard now broken up”. I suspect that as the year of listing of the stairs is the same as the London Grist Mill, the stairs were automatically included in the listing process.

Looking at East Lane Stairs today, it seems remarkable that this would once have been your embarkation point for some rather exotic locations in the mid-19th century. Many river stairs were used by shipping companies that took passengers, and in 1858, the Greek and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was advertising that:

“For Corfu, Syra and Constantinople, the S.S. General Williams, Capt. J.Peter of 2200 tons burthen, and 300 horse power, expected to clear 5th Nov. Lying at East Lane Stairs.

For Coru, Trieste and Venice. The S.S. Milo, Capt. Robinson of 1300 tons burthen, and 360 horse power, expected to clear 15th Nov. Lying at East Lane Stairs.”

Twenty years before the above advert, one of the companies that would later become P&O was operating off East Lane Stairs:

“PENINSULAR STEAM NAVIGATION COMPANY. For Lisbon, Cadiz and Gibraltar, calling off Oporto, weather permitting. The Liverpool, Captain Hepburn, of 500 tons and 160 horse-power, elegantly fitted up, and well known for her great speed, will start for the above ports from off East Lane Stairs on Tuesday, the 1st March, at Two o’clock.”

Thames stairs were once the equivalent of airports, when the only means of overseas travel was by ship.

Thames stairs were also an integral part of travelling in London, whether across or along the river. An example from the Southwark and Bermondsey Recorder on the 20th of March 1869 illustrates how crossing the river at East Lane Stairs was an integral part of a journey, just like taking an underground train today:

“15s REWARD. LOST ! On SUNDAY LAST MARCH 14th, 1869, between Fort Road, Bermondsey (via East Lane Stairs), and Clark Street, Stepney. TWO LOCKETS. One Large with Portrait, the other Small with Key and Appendages. They are of little intrinsic worth, but valuable to the Owner as Family Relics. Whosoever will bring the same to Miss Lang, 49 Fort Road, Upper Grange Road, or to Mrs. Finch, 64 Clark Street, Stepney, shall receive the above reward.”

I suspect that the act of getting on or off a boat was often a time when possessions would be dropped, so the lockets may have ended up in the Thames, but it would have been good if Miss Lang got her lockets back – we will never know.

The view looking across the river and over towards the City from the side of East Lane Stairs:

The wooden structures on the foreshore and the remains of a crane on the building are a reminder of the infrastructure that was needed to transfer goods between warehouse / mill and ships.

There is an interesting advert in the Southwark Mercury on the 15th of February 1879 which mentions East Lane Stairs along with a new form of transport in London: “Seven Freehold Cottages and Piece of Building Land situate near the Spa Road Railway Station and East Lane Stairs and producing £50 per annum, almost equal to the ground rent.”

The advert highlights the importance of Thames stairs as a reference point. Where today, we may reference somewhere as being near a railway or underground station, Thames Stairs fulfilled this function for hundreds of years, and in 1879, we see the name of a railway station also being used.

A common theme with reporting on Thames stairs is the amount deaths associated with the stairs location, with an incredible number of bodies being found in the river near the stairs. The following, from the London Evening News on the 12th of December 1884 is one of the more unusual:

“SHOCKING DISCOVERY IN A BOAT ON THE THAMES. A lighterman. named White, about forty years of age, residing at East-lane, Bermondsey, was discovered about seven o’clock yesterday morning sitting up in his boat, off East-lane stairs, and quite dead. He had been engaged during the night in taking the workmen to and from a vessel lying out in the river, on which some urgent work was being done. The deceased was found within a short distance of the landing place, which is close to his home. It is supposed that he was seized with a sudden fit, and dropped one of his oars into the water, the other being found lying in his boat.”

The 1930s seems a common decade for final reporting of events at Thames stairs. I suspect the war during the first half of the 1940s, followed by the changes that the war had brought to the buildings, businesses and communities along the river, along with the trend for larger ships and larger docks, and alternatives for travelling across London and across the river, resulted in the decline in use of Thames stairs.

One final 1930s reference also follows a tragic theme seen at many other Thames stairs, where a 13 year old boy drowned whilst playing in the river with a friend. The boy who survived stated why they were playing at the stairs during the inquest: “We went to the public baths but found it was mixed bathing and we would have to pay threepence, so we went to East Lane Stairs to bathe in the river”.

Whilst East Lane Stairs seem to have been a very typical Thames river stair along the north and southern bank as the Thames headed east, East Lane Stairs appears to be the exception to my theory that stairs in commercial and populated areas always had a pub associated with them.

There were plenty of pubs along Bermondsey Wall, but I cannot find any pub close enough to be directly associated with East Lane Stairs.

Walking further along the walkway at the base of the building to the right of the stairs provides a wider view of the river from East Lane Stairs, and includes the crane that is mounted on the building to the left:

From the street, you would not know that East Lane Stairs are behind the locked gate.

As I have mentioned in previous posts on Thames stairs, these were once a major part of life in London. To show their relevance, a search for the name of the stairs in the British Newspaper Archive returned 1,691 results between 1802 and 1955. There are obviously duplicates where different newspapers covered the same story, but it is still a considerable number.

The very last mention of the stairs was in 1955 when Bermondsey Council was attempting to close the stairs as a right of way. Mr James Taylor, a London Waterman took the issue to the London Sessions, claiming that “He was defending a right of way up and down East Lane Stairs which he and his ancestors for three generations had used in the way of their craft to take pilots, crews, and other such people, to and from cargo ships”.

James Taylor won his case, and the article ended with “So the East Lane Stairs will remain in use, we may hope for many centuries yet” – sadly, within a few decades they were closed, and they look unlikely to ever open again.

Walking the Rocque Ring Part 4 – Hyde Park Corner, Wellington Arch, A Missing Horse and an Elephant

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In the last of my Rocque Ring posts for a few weeks, I have reached Hyde Park Corner after walking along Constitution Hill at the end of the last post on the walk. Today, I will be exploring Hyde Park Corner, finding a missing horse, and on a totally different subject, discovering an elephant that was once paraded through the streets of the City of London.

In 1746, Hyde Park Corner (or Hide as it was spelt in Rocque’s map), was at the junction with what is now Grosvenor Place to the south and tracks that led into Hyde Park to the north. A short distance to the east was Tiburn Lane, now Park Lane.

Hyde Park Corner was the road that led west from central London towards Knightsbridge (or Knight’s Bridge in 1746 as it was named after a bridge).

Hyde Park Corner was at the western limit of the built city in 1746 as can be seen in the following map:

There is a bit of housing forming ribbon development along Knight’s Bridge to the left, but this quickly ended, but the surrounding land was all park and fields.

The area today (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The area known today as Hyde Park Corner is a major junction, effectively a roundabout connecting the streets of Knightsbridge, Park Lane, Piccadilly, Constitution Hill and Grosvenor Place. It is a very busy major road junction.

The roads that existed in Rocque’s time have been widened, and roads added to south and east to form a roundabout around a large central area. I have shown the roads that have been added in red in the following map:

There is a feature in Rocque’s map which adds to the sense that this is a gateway between the built city and the surrounding country / villages. A turnpike is shown where the road Hide Park Corner meets Knight’s Bridge (along with a rather interesting mile stone to the right):

The turnpike was known both as the Knight’s Bridge and also the Hide Park Turnpike, and the purpose of the turnpike was the collection of tolls which were to be used to maintain the roads, however fraud was much in evidence at turnpikes including that at Hide Park Corner, as reported in Kentish Weekly Post on the 12th of September 1730:

“On Tuesday night last, the Trustees for the several Turnpikes between Hide Park Corner and Fulham, together with several of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, met at the Golden Lion Ale-house near Hide Park Corner, and having sent for the collectors at the Turnpikes at Hide Park Corner, Pimlico, Little Chelsea, Kensington, and Fulham, they were severally charged upon Oath with having defrauded the said Trustees of about £600. After a long examination eight of them were committed Prisoners to the Gatehouse: The Discovery, ’tis said, was made by one Williams, who was engaged in the Fraud, and upon his death, ordered his Wife to acquaint the Trustees with it.”

£600 was a very considerable sum of money in 1730, so the fraud must have been going on for some time.

In 1737, the Kentish Weekly Post published a report on the very poor conditions of some of the turnpikes around London, and gave one of the reasons why money was in short supply to repair the roads:

“The Turnpike Roads all around the Town are in so bad and ruinous a condition, that a Person can’t go out, or come into Town, without danger of being smothered; the Roads at Gray’s Inn Lane End, and at Knight’s Bridge are scandalously bad: And as several Road Bills are now before the Honourable House of Commons, it is hop’d some Clauses may be added to oblige the Commissioners to expend on the Roads the Money collected; for it’s certain, the vast sums raised are not fairly laid out on them: It’s hop’d the Commissioners don’t do now what a Commissioner formerly did, who when his Coachman came to ask him, if he might take the Coach Horses to the Farriers, for they wanted shooing; replied, No you Blockhead, don’t you know there’s a Turnpike Meeting next Week, let then be shooed then, and take the Money off the Landlord.”

In Rocque’s time, it was not just the state of the roads that were an issue at Hide Park Corner and Knight’s Bridge, there are also many reports about highway men, people being robbed, and pedestrians having to walk along the road going in groups for safety.

A print from 1786 showing the Turnpike:

This, and all the following prints in this post are © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

And a print from 1792:

As well as the turnpike, the two parks, Hyde Park to the north and Green Park to the south also added to the sense of a boundary between London to the east and the fields and villages to the west. The parks could not be built on, so it was only when there was substantial development in Knightsbridge, along with the removal of the turnpike in 1825, that the area to the west of Hyde Park Corner was fully integrated as being part of the growing London.

In the last post, part 3 of walking the Rocque’ Ring, I end at the Hyde Park Corner end of Constitution Hill, and this was my view looking across to the central area in the middle of the roads that make up Hyde Park Corner:

The Wellington Arch, designed by the architect Decimus Burton, is shown from the east in the above photo, after the crossing the five lanes of traffic, using the pedestrian crossing as the road is so busy, I walked to take a look at the other side of the Wellington Arch:

Today, at the top of the Wellington arch is a sculpture of Peace (Triumph) descending on the Quadriga of War. A quadriga is a four horse chariot.

What is quite hard to see from the ground is that the quadriga is being driven by a small boy:

But when it was first built, the top of Decimus Burton’s Wellington Arch had a very different sculpture on top:

in the first couple of decades of the 19th century there were calls for memorials to two military heroes. Nelson’s victory and death in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, and Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, for his victories over the French, for example as early as 1812 there were calls for:

“A lasting memorial of the glorious and transcendent achievements of the said Arthur Marquis of Wellington, on various important occasions, but more particularly in the recent brilliant and decisive victory obtained over the French army, by troops under his command, near Salamanca, on the 22nd day of July last.”

These calls became louder after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

Committees were set up to plan and implement memorials for both Nelson and Wellington.

The Wellington Memorial Committee consisted of over 80 members, however the choice of a statue of Wellington on a horse was a decision that caused significant concern, anger and distrust within the committee.

It was assumed that a work similar to the current sculpture was to be mounted on top of the arch, however a small core of the committee wanted a statue of Wellington mounted on a horse.

On the 9th of June 1838, a committee meeting was convened to decide the final design of the sculpture for the top of the arch. At this meeting, only 23 members were present, the majority of which were those who wanted the equestrian statue. It was announced that the Queen had given her consent to this form of sculpture, and that the sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt had been chosen for the work.

The equestrian statue was agreed.

This decision soon caused considerable anger among the other members of the committee, for example the following is from The Record on the 6th of September 1838:

“The promulgation of this Resolution excited great surprise in the minds of many absent members of the Committee, because from the unusual shortness of the notice (the summons being dated the 5th for a Meeting on the 9th of June), and from a very vague and general terms in which the objects of the meeting were stated, they had no conception that matters of such importance were to be finally and irrevocably determined.”

There were attempts to change the decision and apologies from the members who had attended the meeting on the 9th of June, however the decision had been made, the Queen had given her consent and the work approved, so there was no way back, and the equestrian memorial to the Duke of Wellington would be placed on top of the Wellington Arch:

The statue was mounted on the arch in 1846, and it seems to have been universally criticised.

The main issue appears to have been the size of the work as being far too large for the arch, as well as the whole concept of having such a memorial. The following is typical of the very many articles about the work that appeared in the press after it was mounted on top of the arch:

“However the Duke’s statue has now attained its contemplated height, and stands as a monument of England’s bad taste, and unbounded veneration for successful warriors in the nineteenth century. There, amid the rattle of carriages, in sight of the royal palaces, surrounded by all the blaze and splendour of the aristocratic West, does the old Duke’s ill-fashioned representative rear its colossal proportions, encircled by a glory streaming from the memory of successful conflicts, and warning the traveller from distant lands, that though France has her Napoleon, and America her Washington, England has her Wellington, on whose name she delights to pour honour unbounded and gratitude sincere; whose services to his nation she deems pre-eminent, and whose fame she would perpetuate and diffuse, for the inspiration and encouragement of a venerating posterity.”

The Duke of Wellington was still alive when the statue was raised to the top of the arch, and the papers were full of criticism. The Government wanted the statue to be removed, however Wellington said that he would consider such an action as a mark of royal disfavour, and resign all his posts – the statue remained.

Wellington died in 1852, and in the 1870s, built London had engulfed Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge, and the level of traffic on the surrounding roads had grown considerably, so a new road was planned to take traffic from Piccadilly to Grosvenor Place, cutting across the location of the arch.

This work took place in the 1880s and required the arch to be moved from its original position, when it was opposite the arched entrance to Hyde Park.

The following map shows the location of the arch and the new road after this work had been completed:

(‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“)

The new position of the arch is the same as today, directly facing on to Constitution Hill, however the roads that ran to the left of the arch, forming the junction in the above map, have been completely removed so the left of the arch is today the large, central, open space, and the road from Piccadilly forming the easterly side of the roundabout, now runs to the right of the arch.

The only way to move the arch was to take it down and rebuild in the new position. This allowed the removal of the hated statue.

There was discussions and proposals about what to do with the equestrian statue, including mounting it a ground level, or melting it down, and the consensus seems to have been that it should not remain at Hyde Park Corner.

Army officers objected to the destruction of the statue, so a solution was found, to move the statue to the town of Aldershot – a major home of the army, and it is where we can still see the controversial equestrian statue today:

The pedestal was built on Round Hill, close to the Garrison Church.

Seeing the statue from a short distance away, and walking around the statue does give a good impression of its size.

Newspaper reports on a visit to see the newly installed statue in August 1885 provide some detail of the new location:

“It faces towards the south, as though the Iron Duke were pointing at the scenes of his Peninsular victories. Its pedestal stands 16ft in height, and has a width of 14.5 ft, by a length of 28ft. The figure of Copenhagen and his illustrious rider is 25ft in height, so that there is virtually an equality between the statue and what, from the ground level is seen of the pedestal. This is mainly composed of concrete, faced with red Corsehill stone. On this is a step of white Portland stone, and the base is also of Portland stone, some feet wider than the pedestal on the east and west sides of which have been carved in red stone, which will become deeper in colour with age, the name of Wellington, and the hollows of the letters have been fill up with bronze, well bolted in, a memorial in perennial brass of a name that will outlive the monument.

The statue, however, is bolted firmly some 20ft down by half-inch iron bolts running through the concrete into York stone templates, and it is interesting to note that the total weight of the pedestal and foundations exceeds by more than thirty fold, the weight of the equestrian statue itself.

Lying on the top of the Round Hill are some 16 32-pounder guns, all of them made when the Great Duke was Master-General of Ordnance. These are to support chains on the lower step, in front of which there will be a narrow terrace covered with fine turf.”

The new location for Wellington’s statue was built to last, and on a sunny September day in 2026, we can walk around the statue exactly as it was described in 1885:

The round hill on which the statue can be found is next to a green open space and car park. Very quiet with just a couple of families playing on the grass. The statue is at the edge of a large wooded area with a number of marked walks.

A very different place to where it was originally instralled:

Despite the controversy over the design, the arrival of the statue at the Wellington Arch, and its lift to the top did cause great excitement, with crowds coming to see the work being carried out:

Prints from the time provide a good illustration of how the work of lifting a very heavy object to a height was carried out. Long before the availability of cranes, this work needed a large wooden scaffolding erected around and above the arch, lots of ropes and pulleys, and a large amount of muscle power to lift and move the statue into place:

The following is a print showing one of the early designs for the arch, and shows the type of sculpture on the top of the arch that the majority of the committee were expecting, before the hastily called and vague committee meeting in 1838:

As well as the design for the arch at Hyde Park Corner, there were a number of designs for a Wellington memorial, including the following rather dramatic submission to the committee:

English Heritage looks after the Wellington Arch today, and it is open to visitors. Rooms on the way up have displays about the history of the arch and also the Royal Regiment of Artillery, and there is a viewing area at the top, where you can look out over the streets below.

On a summer’s day, with plenty of people around, for the time I was in the arch, I was the only visitor.

The view looking down from the top of the stairs:

Part of the viewing area:

Looking over towards Knightsbridge, and the original location of the turnpike. The arches to the right lead into Hyde Park:

The Lanesborough Hotel, with the Royal Artillery memorial in the foreground:

The Peninsula Hotel, with part of the curved wall of the Australian War memorial at bottom right:

The view along Constitution Hill:

Looking towards Park Lane, with the 2010 Still Water sculpture in the open space where the north and south bound carriageways of Park Lane diverge:

Although the statue of the Duke of Wellington was removed and is now in Aldershot, a new equestrian statue of the Duke was unveiled at Hyde Park Corner in 1888. It faces Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s London home, hidden behind the trees in the following photo of the Duke’s statue:

After the Wellington Arch was relocated in the 1880s, and the original equestrian statue of Wellington removed, the top of the arch stood empty for some years, as shown in the following image from the 1890s book “The Queen’s London”:.

There were campaigns for a new work to be installed, but it was a question of money, however the banker Sir Herbert Stern made a donation of £20,000 towards the costs, and a new quadriga was commissioned from the sculptor Adrian Jones, based on a previous model which the Prince of Wales had seen at an exhibition at the Royal Academy.

This time, there seems to have been almost unanimous praise for the new work after it had been installed. It had a very low key installation, and the following from the Westminster Mail on the 22nd of September 1917 sums up the views at the time:

“In the spring of 1912 a royal carriage driving up Constitution Hill stopped at the Wellington Arch and the occupant, King George, proceeded without any ceremony, to inaugurate the great bronze quadriga which had but a short while been hoisted to its commanding position. The quadriga is the work of Captain Adrian Jones, and is a splendid group of statuary symbolising the triumph of peace over strife, tumult, and confusion. A bronze figure holds aloft a crown of laurel. and below are cannon. swords and lances and other trophies.

Of the beauty of the Quadriga and the splendid decorative effect of its bold silhouette, there never has been any question. it was welcomed by London as adding immensely to the dignity of the famous corner, which already boasted of the Burton Gateway to Hyde Park.“

A very different response to the original statue of Wellington.

Looking up at the quadriga from the viewing gallery on top of the arch:

There is much more to be written about the Wellington Arch and Hyde Park Corner, but my posts are generally too long.

It was used as the home of the park ranger, it was a police station. In 1914 two suffragettes were briefly detained in the arch for throwing leaflets into the king’s coach, before they were taken to Cannon Row Police Station.

Due to the major roads that converge at Hyde Park Corner, and the growth of London’s traffic, there were a number of changes to the roads around the arch. The junction of roads directly in front of the arch following its move, were finally changed in the early 1960s when the road layout we see today was completed. This work included the construction of the Piccadilly to Knightsbridge underpass which created two tunnel bores for traffic running in either direction.

The following image from the Britain from Above archive shows the Wellington Arch with the street linking Piccadilly and Grosvenor Place running directly in front of the arch. The 1960s changes moved this street to the left of the arch to form a roundabout, with a large open space within the centre.

Forming a roundabout with the arch in the land at the centre lost the direct connection between the arch and Constitution Hill which is clear in the above photo.

No longer part of the western edge of built London when Rocque published his map in 1746, Hyde Park Corner continues to be an exceptionally busy place.

And to finish, nothing to do with Rocque’s Ring, but it is fascinating how you can find things such as the statue of Wellington, which have had an association with London, but are now scattered across the country.

In this post, I wrote about a pulpit from Holy Trinity, Minories that was presented to All Saints’ Church, East Meon in Hampshire in 1906, and where it can still be seen, and not that far from Wellington’s statue in Aldershot there is a very different work with a London connection:

The Camberley Concrete Elephant

Drive out of Camberley, Surrey along the A30 heading west, and on the left you might catch a glimpse of a concrete elephant:

In 1963, the elephant was paraded through the streets of the City of London during the Lord Mayor’s Show:

In the above photo, just behind the tusks, there is a ring around the head, with some damage to the concrete of the ring. This is where the ears of the elephant were placed, but they were stolen in 1993.

The elephant was created by the construction company Trollope and Colls, using concrete drainage and sewage pipes. It is now in Camberley as it stands outside what was the location of Trollope and Colls premises, where it was installed after the Lord Mayor’s show.

Its appearance in the Lord Mayor’s show was down to Lord Mays, a City of London Alderman, who was also the Chairman of Trollope and Colls.

Trollope and Colls were taken over in 1967, and their Camberley site later closed, however the elephant has remained and it is apparently in the tenancy agreement of the factory units that are now on the site, that the elephant is to stay on site, and to be maintained.

There cannot be that many survivors from a Lord Mayor’s Show from the early 1960s, and there must also have been very few things made of concrete involved in a Lord Mayor’s procession.

I will be writing on the next stages of my walk around the Rocque Ring in the next couple of months.