Category Archives: London Buildings

The Ring and a Junction on Blackfriars Road

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At the end of the last war, there were a range of booklets published by local authorities, postal and transport organisations, police, fire service etc. documenting London at war and their participation in the six years during which the destruction of the city would be at a level not seen since the Great Fire of London. These were published quickly, and reading them they have a common theme of wanting to set on record the challenges of the last six years before the country quickly moved on to what was hoped to be a period of reconstruction and prosperity.

My father bought a large number of these as they were published, one of which was titled “Hitler Passed This Way”, which showed bomb damage throughout the city using before and after photos.

I wrote about the booklet ten years ago (link at the end of today’s post), and today I want to look in detail at one of the sites recorded in the booklet.

This is The Ring on Blackfriars Road, at the junction with Charlotte Street (now Union Street):

At the time of the above photo, the Ring was an indoor boxing venue, but it had an earlier history before boxing. The building dated from 1783 and was the creation of the Reverend Rowland Hill, a rather eccentric churchman.

Rowland Hill was born in August 1744. He was the son of Sir Rowland Hill and brother of Sir Richard Hill, and he came from an influential Shropshire family.

He went to Eton and then to St. John’s College, Cambridge, and then started preaching across the country, and in London at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in the Elephant and Castle and at the Tottenham Court Road Chapel.

He seems to have had a rather complex view of religion and in his obituary he was described as “theoretically a Churchman and practically a Dissenter. A Dissenter within the Church, a Churchman among Dissenters – necessarily involved him, especially in the early part of his career, in continual polemic skirmishing. His very Catholicism sometimes put on an aggressive form.”

There were many anecdotes about his life, including one where he was riding with his wife in a carriage “somewhere near London”, when they were attacked by three men who violently demanded money. They had earlier attacked his assistant who had gone on before them. When he was held up he stood up and, “set up such a tremendous unearthly shout that one of them cried out ‘We have stopped the devil by mistake and had better be off’, on which they ran away, and left him and his lady in peaceable possession of the road.” When telling this story he said that he had “made all the outrageous noises I could think of, and frightened the fellows out of their wits”.

The building opened as the Surrey Chapel opened in 1783, and the Rev Rowland Hill was the first to preach in the chapel, although rather than a successful opening, newspapers reported that “There was the greatest confusion imaginable last Sunday in the Rev. Rowland Hill’s new Chapel in which he preached that day for the first time. Near the conclusion of his sermon a man loudly proclaimed that the ‘chapel was falling’. The consequence was too dreadful to be described. In the struggle to escape, many individuals were exceedingly hurt; and others had their clothes torn from their backs. The man was taken into custody.”

Rowland Hill preached at the Surrey Chapel for much of his life, almost to the very day of his death in April 1833, when at the age of 89, he died in his house next to the Surrey Chapel in Charlotte Street, (now Union Street).

The chapel was an unusual shape, not the traditional rectangle of a church of chapel, but a multi-sided part circle, as the Rev. Rowland Hill wanted a chapel in which “there were no corners for the devil to hide”.

In the following extract from the 1892 OS map, I have circled the Surrey Chapel:

By the time of the above map, extensions had been added to the chapel at top right in the map, which part obscured its original shape.

Blackfriars Road runs from top to bottom in the centre of the map. Great Charlotte Street is today The Cut, Charlotte Street is Union Street, and Southwark Underground Station on the Jubilee Line is today on the upper corner of Great Charlotte Street and Blackfriars Road.

The Surrey Chapel was always well attended with between 1,000 and 2,000 people attending services and meetings.

One meeting held in April 1845 demonstrated that even 300 years after the break with Rome, the Catholic faith continued to be a contentious issue.

1,500 people attended a meeting to oppose a grant that the Government proposed to make to the Roman Catholic College of Maynooth in County Kildare in Ireland, a seminary founded in 1795 for the education of priests, and an institution that by 1850 had become the largest seminary in the world. The meeting in the Surrey Chapel believed that “the Reformation from Popery was the greatest blessing and honour that England ever possessed, and therefore, views with alarm, the determination of Her Majesty’s Ministers to endow the popish college of Maynooth with £26,000 per annum.”

The Surrey Chapel was also home to a number of societies, including:

  • The Auxiliary Bible Society – formed to distribute bibles and holy scriptures, for example to the Southwark Sunday School Society
  • The Dorcas Society – which assisted poor married women during their period of confinement, including the provision of money, coals, soap, clothing for the infant and the loan of suitable linen for the mother
  • The Female Clothing Society – the object of the society was to furnish, at half price, the most necessary and useful articles of female clothing; and many needy but decent families have therefore been enabled, by their small savings to procure comfortable apparel
  • The Female Missionary Working Association – the object of which is the promotion of a missionary spirit among its member, to assist those ladies who, with their husband, are labouring abroad in connection with the London Missionary Society

Just a sample of the societies that were meeting the chapel in Blackfriars Road.

The word Missionary usually conjures images of people travelling across the world to convert other populations to the Christian church, however the Surrey Chapel was also involved in extensive missionary work across London. The following is from the London City Mission Magazine on the 1st of December 1841:

“London affords the opportunity of carrying on Missionary work among many distinct classes of people. As to birth, we have the Irishman, the Welshman, the German, the Italian, and the Jew, both British and foreign, in great numbers, and all of these want missionaries.

As to employment, there are many classes greatly neglected which either want missionaries or the special and direct attention of the clergy and or other ministers of the Gospel. There are two police forces of about 4,000 men; there are also omnibus drivers and conductors, coach and cabmen, and cattle drovers. There are also soldiers at various barracks, who spiritual advantages are very few, and whose spiritual state is sadly neglected, and there are firemen who, from the peculiar duties, seldom know the enjoyment of a Sabbath.”

The article had a special mention for the work of the Surrey Chapel after the loss of the lives of two firemen at a fire in Blackfriars Road, following a service where the reverend of the chapel preached directly to the firemen assembled in the chapel. This action resulted in a letter of thanks from James Braidwood, the Superintendent of the London fire service.

After the death of the Rev. Rowland Hill, he was buried under the Pulpit of the Surrey Chapel, and it continued as a religious chapel until 1876 when the congregation moved to Christ Church in Westminster Bridge Road. This included the move of Rowland Hill’s body from Surrey Chapel to Christ Church.

Following the move of the chapel’s congregation, the building took on the role of a factory, before becoming a centre for boxing, which I will cover after the next two photos.

The Surrey Chapel / The Ring was severely damaged by bombing in 1940, and in December 1944 a V2 rocket landed next to the building, and what remained was demolished to the leave the site of the building as shown in the following photo from “Hitler Passed This Way”:

I took the following photo of the site today, in August 2026, showing a very different building:

The current building on the site is 197 Blackfriars Road, a building which also has the name Palestra, which is a rather nice reference to the history of the site, as Palestra in ancient Greece and Rome was a place for training in boxing and wrestling. It is an office block used by Transport for London.

After the move of the congregation of the Surrey Chapel, and the building’s brief life as a factory manufacturing electric motors and as a general engineering works, in early 1910 it was reported that the building was being converted to “an electric theatre for kinomategraph exhibitions” – presumably a cinema, however later in the same year it would take on a very different use, as reported in the South London Press on the 30th of May, 1910:

“BOXING RING FOR SOUTHWARK – With its exterior brightened by countless rows of electric bulbs, old Surrey Chapel has been reopened as The Ring. The announcement that an up-to-date boxing ring would be opened there, under the sole direction of Mr. Dick Burge, has been enthusiastically welcomed. At the opening on Saturday night, the building was filled with a big audience of those interested in boxing. The construction of the old place is peculiarly suitable and the reseating, redecorating, and the erection of a twelve feet enclosure have been caried out judiciously, and on up-to-date lines.

Several local heroes fought bouts in a 10st. novice competition, which was preceded with on Whit-Monday, and champions and ex-champions gave exhibitions of skill. The timekeeper was a clergyman – the Rev. Thomas Collins.”

The boxing ring was on the site of the old pulpit, and as King Edward VII had just died, the ring was “draped in purple and black crape, as were the pillars supporting the gallery”.

Dick Burge had taken over the ring with his wife Bella. He had been a boxer in the last few decades of the 19th century, and for six years had been the British lightweight champion. After retiring from boxing, he had financial difficulties and ended up being involved with some conmen, with the result that he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released a couple of years before the end of his sentence after helping a prison guard who was being violently attacked.

Not long after opening The Ring, the First World War started, and Dick Burge joined the 1st Surrey Rifles, being promoted to Sergeant in 1915. He had joined up as “an example to English sportsmen”.

In March 1918, he fell victim to pneumonia after just a week’s illness. His obituary stated that he was instrumental in obtaining a large number of recruits, that he was a generous man, whose chief joy in life was extending a helping hand to those who needed it.

As well as Dick Burge’s example of joining up, the Ring was also involved in the drive for recruits, and the hunt for those who were dodging the call-up, as described in the following report, which was carried by numerous newspapers on the 5th of September 1916:

“BOXING RING RAIDED BY POLICE AND MILITARY – A crowd of spectators were present at the Ring, Blackfriars-road yesterday afternoon to witness the boxing contests. Three thousand had paid for admission. Suddenly a force of police officers and military with fixed bayonets entered. Each exit was guarded, and as the spectators left the building there was a challenge by the police. Eligible looking men were asked to show their papers and explain why they were not in khaki. Instantly the shirkers and dodgers amongst the crowd vainly attempted to elude the police. With great promptitude 50 arrests were carried out, and the prisoners were marched away in custody. They made a striking procession along Blackfriars-road to a chorus of loud applause from wounded soldiers in the vicinity.”

After Dick’s death, his widow Bella took on the running of the Ring, and made a considerable success of the venue. It was a place well known for bringing on boxers at the start of their careers, as well as more established and famous boxers.

Bella had a real interest in boxing, and how the sport was developing. In 1924 she wrote to the London Evening News:

“Mrs. Bella Burge writes from The Ring: During the fifteen years that The Ring has been open, everyone will admit that practically every British boxer with anything appertaining to fame has been brought out at this venue.

With this many years experience, it appears to me that British boxing at the present time is in a state of chaos, and I think that something should be done, especially with regard to the heavy-weight championship. I feel sure that Mr. Bettinson and the members of the National Sporting Club will coincide with my views.

The fabulous salaries being paid to some boxers at the present time will ultimately mean ruin to all concerned. The public have stood by with wonderful patience, which will eventually be exhausted.

In an effort to revive public interest I once again offer Frank Goddard (the present champion) and Jack Bloomfield a purse of £1,000, and an additional £100 each for training expenses, for a contest under championship conditions, to be held at the Ring.”

Bella was quite a woman. Born in New York, by the age of twelve, she was on stage at the Pavilion Theatre in London, and until marrying Dick Burge, and getting involved in boxing, she was a music hall artist, working with Rosie Lloyds, the sister of the artist Marie Lloyd.

Bella must have been a formidable woman as she was known for being the boss of the Ring, a place which was often called the “roughest and toughest arena in the whole rough and tough boxing world”. There was often plenty of trouble at the Ring, with the cheap standing area at the back of the balcony a place where the “tough lads used to gather, armed with knuckle-dusters and hob-nailed boots”.

She dealt with these trouble makers as with all trouble makers, and when she told them to get out and not come back, they knew that she meant it. There was also a system of suspensions to keep out trouble makers.

Bella was also against the fixing of fights, and it was claimed that “there were no fixed fights when Bella was watching”.

In the final years of the 1930s, other boxing halls were starting to draw greater crowds than the Ring, and Bella often had to pay the fighters from her own personal savings.

After the Ring was bombed, she ended her role in the boxing profession and lived quietly in Bloomsbury, until her death aged 84 in 1962.

Bella Burge in 1910:

Source and attribution: Unknown (1910), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Whilst today there is no trace of the Ring, the name of the building on the site today is an obscure reference to the sport, but the pub across the road junction has taken on the job of maintaining the name:

The pub was originally the Railway Tavern and seems to date from the mid 19th century. I am not sure when the name changed to the Ring, but the last reference I can find to the name Railway Tavern was in 1951.

The pub did for a number of years have a boxing ring in one of the upper floors, and walking in today, photos and memorabilia of the sport of boxing covers almost every bit of free space across the walls:

They have Adnams Broadside on handpumps (£6 a pint if you track London beer prices), so with one of these, I sat alongside one of the windows so I could look out across to the location of the place that gave the pub its name:

Photos of boxers fill the pub – a bit difficult to photo as I did not want to include other customers in the photo:

There is much else to find at this road junction. In the photos of the Ring as well as the map, a railway running across a brick viaduct and bridge across Blackfriars Road can be seen just behind the Ring.

This is the view of the eastern side of the bridge today:

Under the bridge, and in the eastern side of the bridge is what appears to be an old entrance, with signs stating Charing Cross Railway and Blackfriars Station:

There is a plaque on the wall to the right which states that this is the entrance to the former Blackfriars Station, commenced by the Charing Cross Railway Company on a line from London Bridge to Charing Cross, and that it was taken over by the South Eastern Railway Company before opening in January 1864.

This is from a time when railway construction was taking place across much of London. Small companies were merging to form larger compnaies, temporary stations opened whist other major construction work was completed, and this appears to have been the story for this first Blackfriars Station.

The plaque states it was opened in January 1864, and a news report in the London Evening Standard from December 1863 is titled “Opening of the Charing Cross Railway”, and includes a brief description of the station during an official inspection of the route by Captain Tyler of the Royal Engineers on the 31st of December:

“About twelve o’clock, the train, consisting of a fine locomotive and two of the new first-class carriages belonging to the South-Eastern Railway, left the Charing-cross end of the line and proceeded gently along the down rail to the junction at the Waterloo-road, where a minute scrutiny of the signals (Saxby’s patent) and the points were made by the inspector.

After some time had been spent at this point the train proceeded on its way to London bridge, passing the new Blackfriars Station; which is provided with two side and one central platforms lighted by globular lamps similar to those on the Metropolitan Railway. The whole of the signals, points, stations and permanent way were carefully examined by Captain Tyler, who, we believe, expressed satisfaction at many of the arrangements, and on the arrival of the train at London Bridge.”

Not sure when the station closed, but it was part of the ever expanding story for London’s rail network.

The glazed bricks on the side of the bridge close to the location of the Ring still have damage sustained during the bombing which destroyed the Ring:

This road junction continues to play a part in the story of London transport networks, as directly opposite the location of the Ring, and as with the original Blackfriars Station, also next to the railway viaduct, is Southwark Station on the Jubilee Line. The station opened in November 1999 as part of the Jubilee Line extension:

I have now covered three corners of the junction, and there is more to discover on the fourth corner, where looking across, there is a housing block:

This is Rowland Hill House, named after the Reverend Rowland Hill, founder of the Surrey Chapel:

And in the corner, between Rowland Hill House and the road junction, there is a black post with a golden dog licking a pot on the top:

The reason why the golden dog and pot is here is down to a quote from Charles Dickens. The following extract from the Norwood Press and Dulwich Advertiser on the 26th of May 1933 provides some background:

“While Dickens himself was lodging in Lant-street and drudging in Warren’s blacking warehouse down by Hungerford-stairs, he tells us ‘My usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge and down that turning in the Blackfriars-road which has Rowland Hill’s chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot, over a shop door on the other’. Rowland Hill’s once famous chapel is very well known to present patrons of ‘ the noble art’ as The Ring, but alas the golden dog is no more, He was sold only a year or two since, and so has taken his place in the honourable and ever-increasing company of vanished landmarks of old South London.”

The South London Press is a wonderful local newspaper for research, not only for news articles from the past, but the paper also had a regular series of articles on Southwark’s Past, and one article on the 6th of June 1913 included a section on old signs that once hung above shops and businesses, including the following on the dog and pot (and apologies for the language in the verse at the end):

“One is to be seen on the premises of Messrs. Cunningham and Co., the well-known iron merchants at the cornet of Charlotte-st. It is referred to by Charles Dickens as the ‘likeness of a golden dog licking a pot’. I am sorry that I cannot give you a copy of the original parchment document, as Mr. Cunningham tells me one day, some rascal or other stepped in and prigged it.

This time honoured survival dates from 1533 and the house is generally known as the ‘Dog and Porridge Pot’. In the Magazine of Commerce of September 1903, it is thus described:- ‘The dog is in the act of licking out a three legged iron pot, which it has over turned, and is said to indicate a slovenly housewife. There are woodcuts extant representing the customs of those days, in which two old women, in a disorderly kitchen, are to be seen wiping a plate with the bushy tail of a dog, whose head is buried in a pot, doing his duty at the washing-out process. Then follows this classic:-

All sluts behold, take view of me, Your own good housewifery to see, It is (methinks) a cleanly care, My dishcloth in this sort to spare, Whilst dog, you see, doth lick the pot, His tail for dishcloth I have got.”

The article from the Norwood Press states that the original dog and pot was sold, and this appears to have been to the Cumin Museum, where the collection of the Cumin family was held. They had collected objects from across the world, and left them to the borough of Southwark in 1902.

The Cumin collection is now held by the Southwark Heritage Centre, where apparently a selection are on display. There are also 145 pages of on line shows artifacts in the collection. I got half way through but could not find the dog and pot. I will email the heritage centre.

The shop on which the dog and pot was mounted was destroyed during the last war.

The Dickens Fellowship on their website report that two copies of the dog and pot were created in wood by carver Mike Painter. One was held by the Dickens Museum and the other put on display at the road junction where it was unveiled in 2013.

Being wood, it suffered from exposure to weather and environment, and developed a large split.

The second copy was taken out of storage, and to prevent the same thing happening again, was covered in gilding by Woodwork London, and unveiled on the 7th of February 2026.

So on this one south London road junction, there is:

  • On the south-east corner – the Rowland Hill building named after the founder of the Surrey Chapel and a gilded dog and pot recalling an earlier version on an iron mongers, that was based on an old story, and seen by Dickens on his route home
  • On the south-west corner – the Ring pub. Once the Railway Tavern, now named after the centre of boxing opposite, and covered with photos and boxing memorabilia
  • On the north-west corner – Southwark Station, a relatievly recent station and part of the continued expansion on London’s transport network
  • And on the north-east corner – where today Transport for London work on the management of London’s transport network, on the site of one of London’s major boxing venues managed by Dick Burge, with his wife Bella taking over the business after his death, and where police and soldiers with fixed bayonets in the First World War searched for those dodging conscription, which had been introduced in January 1916 for all single men aged between 18 and 41, and where in 1783, the Reverend Rowland Hill opened the Surrey Chapel, attracting congregations of over 1,500, and from where missionaries were supported both across the world, and to the immigrants and workers of London

It continues to amaze me just how much history there is to discover in every part of London, not just of the buildings, but of the people who once called the city their home.

The before and after photos of the Ring came from the copy of Hitler Passed This Way, purchased by my father when it was published. Click here for my 2016 post with many more photos from the booklet.

Apologies to Charles and George Dance, and exploring St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster

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Thankfully, I do not make that many mistakes in my posts, but when I do, readers always find them, which is really brilliant as some are very embarrassing, and I want the posts to be as factually correct as possible.

I have made a couple of mistakes in the last two posts. In my post on Basing House, I brought the siege forward from 1643 to 1943 in a couple of places in the text, but the most embarrassing was in last week’s post, when I confused the late 18th – early 19th century architect, George Dance the Younger, with the contemporary actor, Charles Dance.

When I wrote the post, I had the Pevsner guide in front of me, clearly stating George Dance the Younger, but there was obviously some disconnect between my eyes and brain, and my fingers as I typed. I still did not pick this up when reading through the final version of the post.

I have no idea if Charles Dance is a descendant of George Dance, although according to his Wikipedia entry, Charles Dance attended the Plymouth Drawing School and studied Graphic Design and Photography at Leicester College of Arts, so he may have similar talents to George Dance.

As a penance for making this embarrassing mistake, I decided to find out more about George Dance the Younger and to track down a couple of his remaining works in London.

Later in the post, I will also be exploring St. Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, after reading a brilliant book about this medieval chapel, and original home of the House of Commons.

George Dance the Younger

George Dance the Younger was born in Chiswell Street in 1741, the fifth and youngest son of George Dance senior (for simplicity, all future references to George Dance the Younger will be as George Dance).

George Dance by George Henry Harlow in 1814:

Source and attribution: George Dance by George Henry Harlow pencil and chalk, 1814 9 1/4 in. x 7 3/4 in. (235 mm x 197 mm) Purchased, 1936 Primary Collection NPG 2812

To add to my earlier comments about mistakes and trying to be factually correct, the National Portrait Gallery record with the above image does not make clear this this is “the Younger”, but does give the dates of life of the sitter as 1741-1825, which coincides the life span of George Dance the Younger.

The portrait is also dated 1814, and his father, George Dance the Elder, had died much earlier in 1768.

At the age of 17, George Dance went to Italy with his older brother Nathaniel (later Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland who was a painter, member of Parliament and member of the Royal Academy), and whilst in Italy, George studied in a number of cities including Florence, Rome and Naples.

In 1765 he returned to England, and took over his father’s role, by purchase, as the Clerk of Works to the City of London.

My first stop in my search for locations connected with George Dance was the house where he lived during the later part of his life, and where he died in 1825.

To the left of centre of this terrace in Gower Street is a blue plaque:

The house with the plaque:

Which confirms that George Dance the Younger lived there:

In addition to St Bartholomew the Less featured in last week’s post, George Dance was responsible for a number of works across London, however the majority have been demolished. These include:

  • Repairs and alterations of Newgate Prison after damage sustained during the Gordon Riots
  • St. Luke’s Hospital, Old Street
  • The Giltspur Street Comptor, also known as the City House of Correction
  • The Shakespeare Gallery in Pall Mall
  • At the Mansion House in the City, he added a potico to the west door, which was later removed, and he also lowered the roof of the Egyptian Hall
  • At the Guildhall, he rebuilt the southern front in a Gothic Style, but this was later demolished, and the Chamberlain’s Court, also demolished

Between 1806 and 1813 he was responsible for the home of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, however the building was rebuilt by Charles Barry between 1836 and 1837, but Barry did keep Dance’s original portico, which we can still see on the front of the building:

The Royal College of Surgeons does look as if it was the product of a single design, however the portico is from George Dance’s original building (1806 – 1813), the lower part of the building behind is by Charles Barry (1837 – 1837), and the attic storeys and the wings are by Stephen Salter (1888 – 1889):

My next stop was in London Wall to find the church of All Hallows on the Wall, which was rebuilt between 1765 and 1767 by George Dance:

Which is recorded on a plaque next to the entrance to the church:

As a town planner, George Dance worked on a transformation of part of the Minories, which included the original layout of America Square in 1728. My father photographed part of America Square in 1949, when it looked very different to Dance’s original plans:

His work on America Square extended south to include the construction of the Crescent:

The original buildings of the Crescent were badly damaged by bombing during the last war. The damage started with total destruction on the right and progressively reducing along the buildings to the left.

Pevsner’s guide to the City of London explains that there were originally 11 houses, and only numbers 6 to 11 can be seen today. Numbers 6 and 7 (the two on the left of the terrace) retain their original doorcases. The facades were extensively restored in 1985-6 when replicas of numbers 8 to 11 (the houses to the right) were built.

Although only two originals survive (with much restoration), it is good to see that George Dance’s crescent design can still be seen, having avoided being replaced by yet another glass and steel block.

Dance was also responsible for the original layout of Finsbury Square in 1777.

A number of his plans and proposals were not carried out, including improvements to the Port of London and for the layout of the Camden estate in St. Pancras.

George Dance also worked on a number of projects outside of London, including::

  • The Theatre Royal, Bath
  • Ashburnham Place, Sussex
  • Wilderness Park near Sevenoaks in Kent for the Marquis of Camden
  • Alterations to Kidbrook near East Grinstead for Charles Abbot, the Speaker of the House of Commns

As well as an architect, George Dance was also an artist, and perhaps one of his most touching works is a portrait of his son, also George, dating from 1793, when his son was around the age of 15. He would later die of a liver complaint and fever whilst in India in 1813:

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

As well as his brother Nathaniel, George Dance was also a founding member of the Royal Academy.

Sir John Soane and William Mountague were pupils of George Dance, and when Dance retired from his position of Clerk of Works to the City of London in 1815, William Mountague took on the role.

George Dance died in Gower Street on the 14th of January, 1825, aged 84, and he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, close to where Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Joshua Reynolds were also buried. At the time of his death, George Dance was the last of the 40 founding members of the Royal Academy.

In May of 1825, the Royal Academy held an exhibition of sculpture, and one of the items on display was a bust of George Dance, described as “An animated and expressive head of one, who, in the later stages of life, still had a very vigorous bearing, that repelled the infirmities of decay. The likeness is very accurate, and bold; the character of the mind speaks through it. At present it is but a model that is to be executed in marble.”

Despite much having been demolished, traces of George Dance’s work can still be seen across London. As well as an architect, he was an accomplished artist and one of the founding members of the Royal Academy, where he was also on the Council and was elected a Fellow.

And definitely not a contemporary actor.

St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster

A couple of week’s ago, my post was about the siege of Basing House, after reading a brilliant book about the subject and which encouraged a follow-up visit to what remains of the site. For this week, I have another random find when browsing the shelves of a bookshop. This is The Lost Chapel of Westminster by John Cooper:

The Lost Chapel in the title is St Stephen’s, a chapel that had been at the heart of royal, religious and political life from the time construction began in 1292 under Edward I, until it was destroyed in 1834, during the fire which devasted much of the Palace of Westminster.

The chapel was one of the most significant building projects of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, and took a significant time to complete, under the reigns of Edward I, Edward II and Edward III, finally being completed in 1348, with internal decoration continuing for a couple more decades.

St Stephen’s Chapel had two primary roles. As the private chapel for the King and the royal family whilst they were resident in Westminster. Secondly, the chapel maintained a daily routine to pray for the dead, including monarchs who had died as well as those who had left money and lands to the chapel. During this period in medieval history, the belief in purgatory was common, with the associated belief that the prayers of the living would hasten the purification of the souls of the dead, and speed their transition through purgatory.

The location of the chapel is shown within the red oval in the map of the Palace of Westminster prior to the 1834 fire:

(Unless stated, all prints in this section of the 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.)

The building to the upper right of the chapel is Westminster Hall, so as this structure is still there, we can locate where St Stephen’s Chapel was, on a plan of the site today, where the 19th century structure on the footprint of the old chapel is now called St Stephen’s Hall:

Source and Attribution: It is probably an original drawing produced by Charles Barry’s office., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the above plan, to the right of the yellow oval there is the outline of a surviving medieval structure. These are the old cloisters of St Stephen’s Chapel / College, which did survive and can be seen today in the centre of the following Google map, just above the St. Stephen’s Hall label (this map will probably not appear if you receive this post via email, just the way custom HTML is handled. Click here to see the map on Google Maps)

Another medieval survivor is the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft. This was also built in the same sequence by Edwards I, II and III, and whilst the chapel was used by the monarch and members of the monarch’s family, the undercroft was used by the Royal Household.

Being below ground level, St Mary Undercroft survived the 1834 fire, and today it is available for use by members of the House of Commons and the Lords.

St Stephen’s Chapel survived as a chapel until the Reformation.

Up until the middle of the 16th century, the Commons did not have their own, permanent home. Debates would be held at different locations, with the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey being one of the places in use.

St Stephen’s Chapel became the long term home of the House of Commons in 1547 when Edward VI gave the chapel for use as their debating chamber.

The pews were removed and replaced by benches along either side of the old chapel. A speakers chair was installed, along with a table and raised platform in front of the speaker.

And so it remained until it was destroyed by the 1834 fire. The key challenge during the almost 300 years of use by the Commons was to accommodate the ever growing number of MPs.

Prints of St Stephen’s Chapel provide an idea of how impressive the chapel, and later home of the Commons was, within the overall Palace of Westminster:

The view from the Thames:

Inside St Stephen’s Chapel during it’s time as the House of Commons:

In the above print, we can see the changes made over the centuries to accommodate the growing number of MPs, with benches running around the back of the speaker’s chair, and upper galleries on either side.

St Stephen’s Chapel / House of Commons after the fire:

Another view of the destruction caused by the fire:

During the chapel’s use as the House of Commons, wooden panelling had been put up along the walls, which hid the medieval decoration. The original chapel was known to have been incredibly well decorated.

In the years before the fire, antiquaries had spent time looking behind the panneling, and also after the fire there was work to record as much of the chapel as remained.

The following illustration gives an idea of how richly decorated the chapel was:

The above print shows the remains of the paintings discovered on the wall adjoining the site of the altar, and the print below illustrates some of the other wall paintings:

The following print shows specimens of sculpture from St Stephen’s Chapel:

Although St Stephen’s Chapel was lost during the 1834 fire, when the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt, the new home for the House of Commons was moved to a new location within the overall site, but retained the same layout as the original House of Commons, as shown in the print above, with the opposing benches, and the Speakers Chair and central table.

The current House of Commons has the same problems as the original, as whilst the rebuilt structure is slightly larger, it still cannot accommodate all the MPs, which is why there is always a crowd of MPs standing at the entrance when there are the type of debates that the majority of members want to attend.

It is though remarkable, that the current House of Commons continues a format that was implemented in the 16th century to make use of the space of a medieval chapel.

Today, brass studs in the floor of St Stephen’s Hall mark the outline of the original chapel and the Speaker’s Chair.

Research by the University of York has been turned into a 3D visualisation of St Stephen’s Chapel, giving an idea of the impressive decoration. The home page of the project website is here:

https://www.virtualststephens.org.uk/

One of the 3D visualisations is of the 1360s medieval chapel, which can be found here:

https://www.virtualststephens.org.uk/sites/virtualststephens.org.uk/files/panoramas/1360s/tour.html

There is much to explore on the Virtual St Stephen’s website.

And again I highly recommend The Lost Chapel of Westminster by John Cooper for a comprehensive study of the origin of St Stephen’s Chapel, the medieval life of what was both a religious and royal establishment, the transformation into the first permanent home of the House of Commons, and how it developed until the fire of 1834.

Finding the book was one of the benefits of browsing and buying in a physical bookshop, rather than depending on the algorithms of online sellers.

I believe St Stephen’s Hall is still on the tours available of the Houses of Parliament, unfortunately the old cloisters are working offices, so not available for public access, and St Mary Undercroft does not appear to be publicly accessible. A real shame that these medieval survivors within the 19th century Palace of Westminster, are not available to visit.

Chiswell Street and Mr. Whitbread’s Brewery

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Two tickets have just become available for my walk next Saturday, the 13th of June, with the cheerful name of “Wapping – A Seething Mass of Misery”. Click here for details and booking.

Chiswell Street runs from Beech Street (which passes under part of the Barbican estate) to Finsbury Square.

It is an old street. Harben states in “A Dictionary of London” that the first mention of the street was between 1217 and 1243, when the name Chysel Strate was in use.

By the time of Rocque’s map of 1746, the name Chiswell Street was in use, and in the following extract, Chiswell Street can be seen running from White Cross Street on the left, to Finsbury and the open space of Moor Fields on the right:

In a few years after the above map was published, the western part of Chiswell Street would change significantly, and the small courts to the south of the street, including Swan Court and Boar Head Court would be lost under a major development – the Whitbread Brewery.

Samuel Whitbread was born in Cardington, Bedfordshire in 1720, and in 1736 he was in London and apprenticed to John Wightman who was the master of the Brewers Company.

By 1742, Whitbread was in partnership with Godfrey and Thomas Shewell, who ran the Goat Brewery, on the corner of Upper White Cross Street and Old Street.

In 1748, Whitbread and the Shewell’s purchased the King’s Head Brewhouse, which was on the southern side of Chiswell Street, and we can see the location of this business by looking in more detail at Rocque’s map:

The site of the King’s Head Brewhouse was soon cleared, and by 1750 the new brewery had been built, designed for the mass production of Porter – a beer which used brown malt and was very dark in appearance. The name is believed to have come from the popularity of the drink with porters (see my post on the Ticket Porter in Arthur Street).

Porter was also being marketed as a more healthy alternative to the cheap gin that was easily available and very popular during the first half of the 18th century, a drink that was causing considerable problems and large numbers of deaths across the city.

Hogarth’s prints of Beer Street and Gin Lane (1751) contrasted the benefits of drinking beer with the evil of gin drinking:

Attribution and source: William Hogarth, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

From 1750, the brewery gradually expanded as the business grew. There was a fire at the brewery in 1773 which destroyed the Porter Tun storage room (fires were a frequent occurrence across the city), and a new storage area was then built, which included large vaults below ground.

By 1761, Samuel Whitbread was the sole owner of the business, having brought out the share of the business held by the Shewell family.

This is the view looking east along Chiswell Street, from the junction with White Cross Street in the above map:

The Jugged Hare pub on the corner of Chiswell and Silk Streets is one of a pair of pubs that once stood at the western and eastern ends of Whitbread’s brewery on Chiswell Street. It is Grade II listed and dates from the late 19th century.

The eastern end of the street was badly bombed during the last war, and there was some bomb damage to the western end, however not as bad as the area now occupied by the Barbican and Golden Lane estates, and if you look in the opposite direction to the above photo, this is Beech Street, running through the Barbican – not a pre-war building in sight:

The following extract from the late 19th century OS map shows Chiswell Street, where I have marked some key features explored in today’s post (the red oval is around the Jugged Hare pub, photographed above):

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

The red arrow is pointing to the main entrance from Chiswell Street to the Whitbread Brewery, which occupied a large plot of land running south to Silk Street.

The green arrow is pointing to the courtyard in front of the Whitbread Brewery buildings on the northern side of Chiswell Street.

The blue arrow and the circles are around other features to be explored in the post.

This is the view of the western end of Chiswell Street, with the southern side occupied by the buildings of the old Whitbread Brewery:

These buildings are all Grade II listed, and according to the Historic England listing record date from the later half of the 19th century.

The main entrance from Chiswell Street into the brewery complex on the southern side of the street (red arrow in the OS map earlier in the post):

Throughout the later half of the 18th century, the brewery was expanding, both in terms of the area occupied as well as the technology used in the brewing process, which included the installation of a Boulton and Watt steam engine in 1785.

The scale and reputation of the brewery was such that the site hosted a royal visit, as recorded on a plaque on the buildings in Chiswell Street:

The visit was reported in numerous newspapers, and the following is one of the syndicated reports which gives a good idea of the scale of the brewery, as well as a bit of royal mansplaining, why you needed to provide two banquets for a royal visit, and how much such a visit would cost:

“Royal Visit to Mr. Whitbread’s Brewery. Saturday their Majesties, with the three Princesses, attended by the Duke of Montague, Lord Ailesbury, Lord Denbigh, Duchess of Ancaster, and Lady Harcourt, went to see Mr. Whitbread’s brewery in Chiswell-street. They arrived at a quarter before ten, and were received at the door by Mr. and Miss Whitbread; and politely declining the breakfast provided, immediately went over the works, which took up two hours.

The steam engine, lately erected by the Birmingham Bolton, and first applied by Mr. Whitbread to the purposes of the brewery, took up above half an hour. His Majesty, scientifically explained to the Queen and the Princesses the leading movements in the machinery. In the great store there were 3007 barrels of beer.

The stone cistern raised such wonder, that the Queen and Princesses would go into it, though through a small hole, with much difficulty and some disorder. The sight rewarded them; for the vessel is of such magnitude, as to hold 4000 barrels of beer. The great vessel at Heidelberg is nothing to it.

There were 200 men and 80 horses all in their places; the horse keeper, yielding to the harmless vanity of office, said, he would show his Majesty ‘the highest horse among his subjects’; and his Majesty kindly gave the man his way, was shown a horse 17 hands and 3 inches high.

The Cooperage was looked at from an adjoining room; and it was at this window, looking into the street, that the people without, who by this time had gathered into a great crowd, first seeing the King, gave breadth to their loyalty, and repeatedly huzzard. The Queen, whose worth, were it her sensibility alone, would be beyond our praise, paid the people with a tear! And then, tenderly turning to felicitate the King on the contentment of their people, took her daughters by the hand, and led them to the window. If the day could give emotions of more kindly energy than Mr. Whitbread’s – the rapture of this moment must be the object of envy.

In all that related to the brewery, and the passages through them – all that was necessary, was done; but, very properly, nothing more. Matting covered the way that was dirty, lamps lighted what would have been dark.

When everything was seen, the walk ended in the house. Their Majesties were led to a cold collation, as magnificent as affluence and arrangement could make it. The whole service was plate. there was every wine in the world; and there was also some fine PORTER. The Duchess of Ancaster and Lady Harcourt, sat at the table as well as the Princesses; but the Duke of Montague and Lord Ailesbury, finding in another room a second banquet, scarcely less sumptuous than the former – prepared for their attendants, had there been any – very heartily boarded there.

This being done, it became two o’clock; when the King and Queen, not more completely satisfied with the wonder of the works, than the good sense and elegance with which they had been shown, took leave of Mr. Whitbread and his daughter, and returned to Buckingham House.

It is supposed the preparations on the above occasion cost £1,500. The draymen and all the domestics were new clothed.”

I am sure that Samuel Whitbread was pleased with the expense of hosting the royal visit, as it must have given Whitbread a considerable amount of publicity, and some royal approval for his beers.

Samuel Whitbread (the print is dated 1797, a year after his death, but comparing with prints of his son, also Samuel, I am sure this is the Samuel Whitbread that founded the brewery):

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

As well as running the brewery, Samuel Whitbread was also an MP. His initial public service was as High Sheriff for Hertfordshire between 1767 and 1768, when he was elected as MP for Bedford.

He appears to have been active as an MP. One of the causes that he supported was the abolition of the slave trade.

In 1788 he was Chair of a Common’s committee looking into the salve trade, and on April 2nd, 1792, during a debate on a petition calling for the abolition of the slave trade, Whitbread was reported as being “upon his legs three hours and a quarter. He was uncommonly eloquent and animated”.

The motion was passed with a majority of 145, only after the word “gradual” was added to the call for the abolition of the slave trade.

There are also references to Whitbread donating sums of money to institutions and charitable causes in both London and Bedford. The following is from the Kentish Gazette on the 1st of July 1788:

“Samuel Whitbread, Esq. the Member for Bedford, and we may add the first brewer in the world, has lately given to the Governor and Trustees of St. Luke’s Hospital for lunatics, a rent charge on his brewery of one hundred pounds a year for ever, for the use of the hospital. A donation of this extent, and during the life time of the donor, does honour to the feelings of the individual, at the same that it adds to the pride of British commerce.”

The reference in the article to the “first brewer in the world” was probably down to the ever increasing size of the brewery business, and by 1796, the Whitbread business in Chiswell Street brewed over 200,000 barrels, which was reported as being a first for any brewery in the world.

Whitbread’s ambition, both in brewing and as an MP can be seen in his reaction to his loss of an election in Bedford in 1774, when he came third of four:

“The two first were declared duly elected. This defeat of the ministerial candidates greatly enraged Mr. Whitbread (Porter Brewer of London) and his mob, who that evening committed several outrages on the Mayor and Corporation, both as to their persons and their houses; the windows of which, and also of the Town Hall, were entirely destroyed. Mr. Whitbread also during the poll behaved in a very arrogant and insolent manner to the Mayor, and the voters against him; he likewise treated his opponents with ill manners.

Mr. Whitbread proposes making application to the House for an alteration to the return upon two points. The first is to set aside the voters of the honorary freemen who were made in the year 1769 and 70. The second is, to establish the votes of those who receive alms as good, which the Mayor rejected. In neither of these points we apprehend Mr. Whitbread can avail himself, it being already decided by the House of Commons, who are the legal electors for that town, as appears in the following extract from the Journals – Resolved. That the right of electing Burgesses to serve Parliament for the borough of Bedford is on the Burgesses, freemen and Inhabitants, being householders, not receiving alms.”

After this loss, he seems to have made it back to Parliament as the MP for Bedford in 1775, the following year to the above report.

Despite these political problems, the brewery was continually expanding and improving. A new Porter Tun store room was completed in 1784. It is now Grade II listed and survives as a conference and event space, and brewery buildings had also expanded to cover land on the northern side of Chiswell Street.

The following print dates from 1792 and shows “A view from the east-end of the brewery Chiswell Street”:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The expansion to the northern side of Chiswell Street can still be seen, although the buildings date from 1870, having been through several alterations and reconstructions:

The exception to the 1870 date is the terrace of houses on the left (also the blue arrow in the above OS map). These date from 1774 and are Grade II listed. There is a plaque on the terrace detailing their history. The terrace is Grade II listed:

The brewery buildings on the northern side of Chiswell Street now go by the name of Sundial Court:

Despite being the last rebuild and dating from 1870, the buildings around the yard are all Grade II listed:

The name of Sundial Court comes from a feature on the building at the far end of the yard:

Along the top of the Sundial is a similiar listing of dates as on the plaque on the terrace houses, just slightly different years: “Built 1753, Burnt 1773, Rebuilt 1774”.

Between the gnomon (the blade of the sundial that causes the shadow) are the words “Such is Life”, a rather pessimistic view that may be referring to the fire and rebuild in the series of dates above.

Wording at the bottom of the Sundial reads “The buildings from Chiswell Street to the Hop Loft with Vaults and Brewer’s House. Re-erected 1862. W & Co.”. A slightly earlier date to the Historic England listing, and a description which helps explain the function of some of these buildings.

At the eastern end of the brewery buildings in Chiswell Street is a former pub (green circle in the earlier OS map). This is now the Chiswell Street Dining Rooms, but was originally the St Paul’s Tavern Public House. Grade II listed and dating from mid to late 18th century, with mid to late 19th century public house frontage:

The pub sits on the corner of Chiswell Street and Milton Street, and we can see the brewery buildings extending down Milton Street:

fIn the above photo, there is an arched entrance to the interior of the complex, and as shown in the following photo, it is one of those example where it is difficult to know what is original and what is not. The brickwork around the arch looks very different to the rest of the building. I suspect this was down to conversion of the site from brewery to conference centre.

Samuel Whitbread died on the 11th of June 1796, aged 76 at his estate of Bedwell Park in Hertfordshire. There were brief obituaries in the papers, such as:

“By the death of Mr. Whitbread, the poor will lose a most valuable friend. Acts of charity and benevolence everywhere marked the traces of this worthy man, and will render his memory dear to hundreds who have partaken of his liberality. Mr. Whitbread, for some months previous to his dissolution, had been bending under the accumulated load of age and infirmity.”

He died a very wealthy man.

He left all his freehold estates and the brewery business to his son, also called Samuel, excpt for a small part which he left to his daughter.

He left £5,000 to his son in law and each of his nephews. To his three head clerks in the brewery business he left £500 each, along with £500 to his private clerk, and £100 to his butler.

To every servant and employee he left a sum ranging from £100 to £10, and he left £10 to old servants and widows of servants.

He left £15,000 to several hospitals, including St. Bartholomew’s, Bethlem, St. George’s Small Pox and St. Luke’s. To two charity schools in the parish of St. Luke’s he left £500 each.

He left further sums for various institutions and causes in Bedford.

His son, also Samuel, seems to have initially intended to sell the brewery, as there were newspaper reports that he was looking for a sum of £500,000, however the business stayed in the Whitbread family.

When the company became a limited liability company and sold shares, Whitbread’s continued as Chairmen, with the last family member being Sir Samuel Charles Whitbread who stepped down as Chair in 1992 and left the Board in 2001.

Brewing in Chiswell Street ended in 1976, and to the south, two acres of brewery buildings along Silk Street were demolished to be replaced with offices.

The brewery buildings that remain are now a conference and events venue.

The Whitbread company have gradually sold off all their brewing and pubs businesses, and now focus on hotels as they own the Premier Inn brand.

As well as the old Whitbread brewery, Chiswell Street also has a lovely pair of Victorian wall mounted letter boxes, which continue to be in use:

And opposite the brewery buildings is this building:

The more you look at the above building the stranger it seems, and a walk to the side reveals why. Just the street facing façade has been retained and a new building stands behind:

It must be strange living in the street side of the building as you are looking out at the rear of the old façade. It is an interesting discussion as to whether there is value in keeping just the façade. The original building looks to be a typical late 19th / early 20th century building occupied by either offices, a small factory or a warehouse (I need to check some street directories).

It may have been better to either retain and convert the whole of the original building, or to replace by a new building that has some architectural merit.

In the OS map shown earlier in the post, there is a blue oval around a Public House shown in this location, at the junction of Chiswell Street and Lamb’s Passage. The pub seems to have had a narrow side facing onto Chiswell Street, and a longer side along Lamb’s Passage, however it is long gone.

Whilst the building on the southern side of Chiswell Street retains the name the Brewery for the events and conference centre that occupies the site today, the name of the company’s founder, Samuel Whitbread, and the surname that would be associated with the brewery until its closure in 1976, is not that obvious. It is on the plaque recording the royal visit in 1787, and on the plaque recording the fire and rebuild dates of the terrace on the north side, but no where else. There is no blue plaque or any other form of plaque, or sign displaying the history of the buildings.

The buildings are listed, which helps with their preservation, but it would be good to have some signage so those walking along Chiswell Street have the opportunity to learn more about some of the buildings that line the city’s streets.

The Royal Festival Hall at 75

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I have recently released two new walk dates. These are, along with links for details and booking:

Two tickets have just become available for my walk exploring the Lost Streets of the Barbican, this Saturday, the 16th of May

Limehouse – A Sink of Iniquity and Degradation on the 6th of June

Wapping – A Seething Mass of Misery on the 13th of June

This is the post that should have appeared last Sunday, the 3rd of May, which was the 75th anniversary of the official opening of the Royal Festival Hall on the 3rd of May 1951.

Unfortunately, on Friday 1st of May, my web site went down again, coming back online on Sunday afternoon. I wont go into the issues with my current hosting provider (to keep my blood pressure down), but in the next couple of weeks I plan to move to an alternative, and hopefully better performing hosting platform.

So on the 75th (and one week) anniversary of the opening ceremony of the Royal Festival Hall, this post looks at the construction and opening of this South Bank icon.

If you attended the opening ceremony, then you may have purchased this souvenir programme of the event:

The foundation stone of the Royal Festival Hall had been laid on the 12th of October 1949 by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and less than two years later the building would host the King and Queen and other members of the Royal family, with the King unveiling a commemorative tablet in the foyer.

There was then a service of dedication led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, followed by the first of a short series of inaugural concerts.

The works performed on the 3rd of May 1951 are shown in the following page from the souvenir programme:

The London County Council had arranged the week of inaugural concerts, and for the coming months there was “a full programme of Festival concerts, ballet, song recitals and light orchestras throughout the summer season and autumn. A season of ballet from July 26 to September 1 will be presented by International Ballet, who are planning imaginative productions of both new and familiar ballets in settings devised specially for the hall”.

The souvenir programme was a comprehensive booklet on the inaugural concerts, with biographies of the conductors along with comprehensive programme notes, which included extracts from the musical score, taking the audience through some of the intricacies of the work, and how some of the instruments in the orchestra had key parts.

It was a programme written for an audience with a serious interest in classical music.

At the back of the souvenir programme were a number of pages of adverts, from companies who had some part in the design, construction and fitting out of the Royal Festival Hall.

Adverts were a common part of the guide books for each of the Festival of Britain locations, and today, looking through these adverts is a rather depressing experience, as they are a list of all the British industries and manufacturing companies that have either closed or been taken over during the last 75 years, however there is one company associated with the Royal Festival Hall that is still in operation:

Harrison and Harrison were Thomas Hugh Harrison, who was born in 1839, presumably in St. Pancras as he was the son of Thomas William Harrison of St. Pancras who had a company manufacturing parts for organ buildings.

The firm of Harrison and Harrison dates from 1872 when Thomas Hugh Harrison set up a manufacturing business in Durham, where the firm was based in 1951, and where it is still repairing and building organs today.

Regarding the Royal Festival Hall, on the website of the company, there is the following: “A hugely influential event was the building of the organ in The Royal Festival Hall in 1954. This landmark instrument, which was restored by H&H in time for its sixtieth anniversary, introduced the British organ world to the classical influence of the continental Organ Reform Movement”.

Their website can be found here, and it is brilliant to see that the company appears to be thriving.

The Festival of Britain on the South Bank opened on the day after the inaugural concert, and the site was already generating some excitement. The South Bank was lit up, and it must have been quite a sight after wartime blackouts and post war austerity, as this article from the May 2nd issue of the London Daily News indicates:

“London’s famous skyline shines bright for the Festival; London’s river picks up the gleam. On the South Bank floodlights and search lights on the exhibition buildings make a blaze of reds, blues and yellows. Against the shadowy Shot Tower is the brilliance of the Royal Festival Hall. Then the Skylon points its finger to the night sky. Above Hungerford Bridge are the illuminated flag-masts of the Bailey footbridge.”

The Skylon was already attracting unwanted interest, as at the start of May:

“Students using grappling irons and nylon ropes, scaled the 295 feet high Skylon on the London south bank exhibition site at midnight and tied to a pole 50 feet from the top, a University of London Air Squadron scarf.

One of them said that five students entered the site late last night and two climbed the Skylon with the nylon ropes 120 feet and 220 feet long and climbing equipment which they had specially made. It was intended to fix the scarf to the lightning conductor but the frailty of the structure at the top made this too hazardous.

The scarf was taken down by workmen.”

Getting within 50 feet of the top was an achievement, not sure I would have wanted to try such a climb:

As well as the souvenir programme, the London County Council had also been involved with the publication of the Official Record of the Royal Festival Hall:

Having the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank was part of the London County Council’s, 1943 County of London Plan, which proposed that the South Bank should become a cultural centre, with a river walkway, public space, offices and homes.

The state of the South Bank was described in the plan as follows:

“It is one of the great anomalies of the capital that while the river, from Westminster eastwards, is lined on the north side with magnificent buildings and possesses a spacious and attractive embankment road, the corresponding south bank, excepting St. Thomas Hospital and the County Hall, should present a depressing, semi-derelict appearance, lacking any sense of dignity and order appropriate to its location at the centre of London, and fronting on to the great waterway. This gloomy aspect is intensified to-day by war damage.”

So it was in need of serious improvement.

Across the Festival of Britain site, the London County Council were responsible for the Royal Festival Hall as well as the new river wall and walkway, and their funding, design and construction, was why they survived, whilst the rest of the festival site was demolished soon after the closure of the festival.

A paragraph in the Forward to the Official Record provides a view of the challenge and intentions:

“The Royal Festival Hall is the only building of such magnitude and importance to have been completed in London since war began in 1939; and it is the first new concert hall the capital has had for much longer than that. This building is of great size and complexity – for it is much more than a concert hall – built on difficult terrain and conditioned in its design by the need for utmost economy in the use of steel and other scarce materials, has had to be planned and produced to an inexorable time-schedule and with a vital and uncomfortably close completion date always in mind. Yet the Council has been at pains to provide a building which is everything that careful planning and anxious forethought could make it, and which has been designed to be worthy of the unique occasion of its inception as well as the longer term use for which it is mainly intended.”

There are a small number of photos in the book, and a large number of drawings, including the following view of the external and internal parts of the building:

The numbers refer to: 1 – Roof Garden, 2 – Choir, 3 – Boxes, 4 – Orchestra, 5 – Stalls, 6 – Grand Tier, 7 – Entrance Staircase, 8 – Side Promenade, 9 – Main Foyer, 10 – Restaurant, 11 – Terrace Restaurant, 12 – Escape Stairs, 13 – Terrace.

The paragraph from the forward hinted at the challenges of building on the South Bank. A major challenge was water, as the ground where the Royal Festival Hall was to be built was saturated, and ground water height varied with the tide in the Thames.

The options were either pumping or freezing the ground, and the solution taken was:

“To sink a sort of subterranean fence round the whole building site, some 350 steel pipes a yard apart , driven 20 feet down with their tops connected up to suction pumps. When the pumping began, water was thrown out at a rate of 150,000 gallons an hour, but when the general water level was reduced to that of the pipe ends, half that ejection rate served to keep all the excavations comfortable de-watered and workable down to 20 feet below the surface”.

A diagram from the book showing the layers of strata, with the excavation for the building on the right and the River Thames on the left:

The Official Record looked at the Auditorium:

“Heart and kernel of the whole concert hall building is of course the great auditorium itself, the vivifying principle that alone gives validity to the outer parts and members of its body that encircle it in protective, ordered complexity. So it is the auditorium that will here be more critically judged than anything else, more keenly discussed and therefore longest remembered.

All else is but accessory and ancillary to this one essential element; the elegant restaurants and terraces, the foyers and bars and all the rest – mere handmaidens in helpful, agreeable attendance.

Spatially the auditorium is immediately satisfying, probably partly because one unconsciously realises that it is so exactly shaped for its particular job. Nothing has been done in the way of embellishment to detract from this obvious functional fitness, and indeed one guesses – and again correctly – that such decoration as there is is all calculated to promote the prime purpose of the Hall: the hearing of good music.”

One of the features of the seats in the auditorium was the use of sound absorbing glass fibre in the pads of the seats, to eliminate the sound of a seat tipping as well as to create the effect where an empty seat had the same acoustic properties as an occupied seat.

Boxes lining the walls of the auditorium:

There was a considerable amount of research into the acoustic properties of the auditorium:

One of the unique features of the Royal Festival Hall is that when you enter the building and stand in the foyer, it is not immediately obvious where the auditorium is located. The foyer presents a wide open space, with thin columns supporting the structure above, with only bars and reception desks in view.

The auditorium is suspended above the foyer, a design that needed a clever means of support with four stairwells at each corner constructed within a bastion to support the auditorium. The following image from the book shows how the auditorium is almost a capsule suspended within the overall building:

The main foyer, with one of the bars to the left. The sloping floor of the auditorium forms the ceiling:

One of the themes of the Festival of Britain was the use of new designs for even the most basic of functions, and in the restaurants of the Royal Festival Hall, this included newly designed chairs, with a rubber cushioned seat, and a dumb waiter made out of tubular metal, timber and aluminium:

The auditorium was by far the most important feature, but restaurants were also an important part of the overall visitor experience, and for those dining in the restaurant with a window seat: “At night a new prospect is revealed as the lights shine across the river”:

Design of the terraces and gardens around the hall were just as important as the interior, and long before the large terrace that we see today was built in front of the hall, there was a lower and smaller upper terrace “from which there is a magnificent view of the river and the northern embankment”:

As with the souvenir programmes, in the official record of the Royal Festival Hall, there were a number of adverts for companies involved in many aspects of the building, including Cox & Co of Watford, who were responsible for the auditorium seating:

One of the aims with the design of the Royal Festival Hall was to make use of the latest technologies available for building such a concert hall. As well as theatre and sound technologies, this also included air conditioning and heating systems, and the following photo from the book shows heating pipes which threaded through the building:

One of the challenges with designing and building so quickly, along with the use of new technologies was that the design had to change as construction progressed.

The installation of air conditioning, heating pipes and electrical cables required the drilling of unplanned holes in the buttresses of the hall that gave support to the auditorium as well as many of the walls.

As well as the design of the interior, the importance of the auditorium, and the use of the latest technologies, one of the other key features of the Royal Festival Hall was its location on the South Bank, directly overlooking the Thames, and the building was intended to present an impressive view:

As mentioned earlier in the post, the South Bank was in a dismal state, and the LCC plan proposed significant new buildings along the South Bank which would mirror the buildings along the North Bank, and the above image shows how the Royal Festival Hall was intended to be the first part of this.

This is an issue I have with the South Bank today. The walkway is lined with trees and especially when they are in leaf, they do obscure much of the view of the Royal Festival Hall from the north bank.

Trees are key in the built environment. Not only do they improve the visual aspect, they also provide shade, have a cooling effect etc. however, for the short space of the walkway in front of the hall, removing the trees would restore the view of the Royal Festival Hall as was intended by the designers and developers.

My father took a whole series of photos of the South Bank showing the area before it was cleared ready for the build of the festival, and then construction.

The first of his photos is from 1947 and shows the site prior to demolition. The Royal Festival Hall would be built on the site of the lion Brewery, which is to the right, with the Coade Stone Lion on the top:

A view on the South Bank. The large building is the Lion Brewery after the Lion had been removed:

Building the foundations of the Royal Festival Hall:

The Shot Tower is the tall tower in both photos:

Looking across the site, the tall houses in the background were in Howley Street, which has long gone, replaced by the slip road that runs between Belvedere Road and the roundabout at the southern end of Waterloo Bridge:

The above image gives an indication of the depth of the foundations.

One of the objections to the Festival of Britain was the impact it would have on both materials and workers, who were also desperately needed for post war reconstruction of the homes, offices and factories that has been destroyed by bombing, and general deterioration since the 1930s.

There was a wonderful book published specially for the Festival of Britain by the Association of Consulting Engineers. The book is a comprehensive exploration of many large infrastructure and construction projects in which the association’s members were involved. The book included a section on the Royal Festival Hall, with a detailed description of the design, construction and challenges.

The following image from the book shows the Royal Festival Hall in the foreground, with the build of the Dome of Discovery in the background, with the rest of the site being built around. The image provides an idea of the sheer scale of the construction of the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank:

Back to my father’s photos, and this one shows the build of the Royal Festival Hall well underway:

And finally it has been completed:

Photo showing detail of the terraces at the front of the building, much the same as the print from the official record shown earlier in the post:

The Royal Festival Hall on the 3rd of May 2026, on the 75th anniversary of the opening ceremony:

The large yellow object on the left is a work called Pin Drop by Carson McColl and Gareth Pugh, created as part of the 75th anniversary and is “reimagining the iconic Skylon for the digital age”.

The Royal Festival Hall is a result of a 1943 LCC plan, as well as using the South Bank for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

A wonderful building, but what I find really remarkable is the speed at which it was built. Just over three years from design to the opening ceremony.

The Festival of Britain, which opened to the public on the 4th of May 1951, was though much more than just the South Bank.

If you would like to explore the festival in more detail, you may be interested in the following posts:

An overview of the South Bank festival is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/the-festival-of-britain-south-bank-exhibition/

A walk around the upstream circuit of the site is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/walk-round-festival-britain-upstream-circuit/

And a walk around the downstream circuit is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/festival_of_britain_downstream_circuit/

The Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea are explored here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/the-festival-of-britain-pleasure-gardens-battersea-park/

The Festival Of Britain – Maps, Football, Guidebooks. Science And Abram Games is a look at some of the publications that went with the festival as well as the Exhibition of Science at South Kensington: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/abram_games/

An Optimistic View Of The Future is a look at some of the adverts from the 1951 Festival Of Britain: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/an-optimistic-view-of-the-future-adverts-from-the-1951-festival-of-britain/

The Exhibition of Architecture at Poplar is explored here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/lansbury-exhibition-of-architecture/

and here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/exhibition-of-architecture/

The strange story of the Festival of Britain and the Atomic Bomb is here: https://alondoninheritance.com/eventsandceremonies/the-festival-of-britain-and-the-atomic-bomb/

Hopefully the site will be up and stable if you would like to read these, and all being well will be on a far more stable hosting platform in the next couple of weeks.

The View from the Garden at 120

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Back in October, in a post on two London churches and a Battersea Gas Holder (no connection between them – just some random features of London), I wrote about All Hallows Staining and the 50 Fenchurch development. I was rather frustrated that you could not get a view of the tower of the church on stilts as the main development went on around the ancient remains of All Hallows Staining.

A comment from a reader (thanks Brian J) informed that a view of the building site and the church was available from the viewing area at 120 Fenchurch Street – one of the new public viewing spaces on top of a recent City development.

The Garden at 120, to give the space its correct name, has been on my list of places to visit, but stupidly I had not made the connection between the viewing area and the building site directly in front.

I fixed that last week, with a visit to explore another view across the City.

The Garden at 120 is free, does not require a ticket and following a very brief wait in a small queue, the inevitable security check, then the lift took me to the 15th floor, which leads directly out to the viewing area:

The above view is of the south facing part of the viewing area, which also runs around all four sides.

The weather was superb, however I immediately found some problems with taking photos through glass panels looking south, with the sun shining directly into the panels – lots of reflections and strange optical effects, which can be seen in the following photo looking directly down onto the tower of All Hallows Staining:

It is just possible to see the tower, standing isolated in the middle of an extensive building site, with the large round metal excavation support struts supporting the retaining walls around the excavation. A view from another angle:

The development in front of 120 Fenchurch Street is Fifty Fenchurch, and when complete will be a 36-storey building, so will be much taller than 120 Fenchurch Street and will block part of the view to the south from the 15th floor garden.

As with almost all new towers in the City, Fifty Fenchurch will also include a public viewing gallery, but strangely this will be at level 10 rather than the roof or upper floors of the building, so the viewing gallery will be lower than the Garden at 120.

The current upper level of Fifty Fenchurch – the inner concrete core, which still has someway to go:

If you have a head for heights, then a job as a crane operator must provide some fascinating views of both construction sites and the wider area, although I would not fancy the climb up the ladders within the central frame to reach the cabin:

Tower Bridge:

Immediately to the west of 120 Fenchurch Street is Fountain House:

Fountain House was built between 1954 and 1958 to a design by W.H.Rogers and Sir Howard Robertson (Consulting). It was the first London building constructed to the tower and podium formula where a large podium occupies the full area of the plot of land, with a much small central space occupied by a tower block. I have written about the building in this post.

It will probably not be there for much longer, as the City of London Corporation has approved a new development with two new towers, one of 31 storeys and the other with 34, and on the 17th floor there will be a publicly accessible external garden terrace, so there will be three public viewing terraces all next to each other, so visitors to one, will be able to look across to visitors at the other two.

The development replacing Fountain House will also be much taller than 120 Fenchurch Street, so with Fifty Fenchurch to the south, Garden at 120 will be slowly surrounded by higher blocks.

Another building, also with a public viewing gallery is the Walkie Talkie, or more officially. 20 Fenchurch Street. The plan for the replacement of Fountain House implies that the following view of the Walkie Talkie will be obscured from the Garden at 120:

In a few years, you will be able to spend an entire day out visiting the four public viewing terraces all within a short distance along Fenchurch Street.

View towards the west with a small stretch of the Thames from Blackfriars Railway Bridge up to Waterloo Bridge:

There is another viewing gallery in the above photo, just to the left of the yellow crane, is the Blavatnik Building of Tate Modern, and on the 10th floor is a viewing gallery:

The following photo illustrates how the scale of the modern City has grown exponentially from the historic City, and how historic buildings are reduced to filling in the ever decreasing gaps.

The Lloyd’s of London building is on the right, with the blue cranes along the roof, and the tall tower in the centre is the recently completed One Leadenhall:

If you look to the lower left of One Leadenhall and the Lloyd’s of London building, you will see a very different structure – the roof of Leadenhall Market:

Although a market has been at the site for centuries, the current market buildings date from 1881, and the height and footprint of buildings in the City has grown so much in the following 145 years, at a scale that, whilst Victorian architects and builders were ambitious, would probably have been beyond their imagining.

There is a brief sequence early on in the 2013 Star Trek film – Into Darkness, where a bomb explodes in an underground facility in the City, and the CGI generated view of the City still shows St. Paul’s Cathedral, but it is surrounded by incredibly tall towers, much higher than we see in the City today.

The film is based in 2259, in 233 years time, and based on the rate of growth since the current Leadenhall Market buildings were completed, the CGI in Star Trek will probably be an accurate vision of the future London.

More of the Lloyd’s of London building – watching the blue crane along the top slowly moving along the roof line was interesting:

St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Post Office / BT Tower:

St. Paul’s Cathedral also has a couple of viewing galleries, including the Golden Gallery at the top of the dome, and from the Garden at 120 you can look across at other people enjoying the view of the city:

Because The Garden at 120 is on the 15th floor of, by recent standards, a relatively modest building, as you walk to the north of the garden you are looking between gaps in much taller buildings, although this does provide some interesting compositions, where other buildings are framed between towers, including this view of the Gherkin – 30 St. Mary Axe, a building which does not have a viewing gallery at the top, although it did have a bar at the top, which offered good views across London. The bar closed at the start of the year for renovations:

Through another gap we can see Christ Church Spitalfields and the chimney of the old Truman brewery:

The Whitechapel building stands out on the corner of Whitechapel High Street (the road to the left of the building), and Mansell Street:

Looking down to a very small part of Fenchurch Street, at the junction with Fenchurch Place, we can see a small part of a terrace of 19th / early 20th century offices, with the distinctive brick built East India Arms pub on the corner:

View to the east:

The office and residential towers of Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs:

On the horizon, looking to the south, there are two tall radio masts. The one on the left is at Crystal Palace. The mast to the right is at Beaulieu Heights, next to South Norwood Hill:

I find it fascinating to see how far you can see from height, and zooming in between these two masts is the following view:

I have no idea what the shadows are on the distant horizon. I did wonder if it was Croydon, however checking on a map, and Croydon is further to the right, and following the line between the two masts from Fenchurch Street, there are no significant clusters of buildings, so I have idea what they are.

I have not mentioned the Garden part of the name of the Garden at 120.

The garden is around the central core of the roof space, with a walkway around the perimeter.

The garden was designed by landscape architects Latz+Partner, and does consist of a good amount and variety of plants. View along the walkway on the eastern side of the roof, with planting on the left:

Having various forms of planting seems to be a core part of the majority of proposals for new towers in the City.

Fifty Fenchurch will include a public roof garden and winter garden at level 10, whilst the Fountain House replacement will have an external garden terrace.

Whilst this may be viewed as greenwashing, it does follow the approach of Fred Cleary, who campaigned and worked for much more planting, flowers and gardens as part of the post war redevelopment of the City, and as described in his 1969 book “The Flowering City”.

The southern side of the Garden at 120, with the main viewing area looking south and planting to the right:

Back on ground level, I walked across to the east of the Fifty Fenchurch building site, next to the tower of All Hallows Staining and looked back at the building with the Garden at 120 on the roof:

There are a growing number of places across London to look across the city from above, and each offers a different perspective of an ever changing city.

It is also interesting to visit these places across the years to see the rapid change taking place, and the view from the Garden at 120 will change significantly in the coming years when Fifty Fenchurch and the Fountain House site developments are completed.

Cumberland Terrace in 1948 and a Snowy Day in 2026

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In 1948, my father took a couple of photos of repair work underway to the rather impressive Cumberland Terrace to the east of Regent’s Park:

Bomb damage seems to have been rather superficial to the terrace, with the main damage being to the rear of the buildings, and I suspect that the scaffolding was there due to urgently needed repair and refurbishment work, as the buildings had deteriorated significantly during the first decades of the 20th century, which was not helped by lack of maintenance during the war.

The central building in the terrace has a large sculptural pediment, which can be seen above the scaffolding in the above photo.

Walking past the central building, and the northern section of the terrace (which mirrors the southern section), can be seen, where three large blocks with Ionic columns, project towards the street:

Cumberland Terrace is the most impressive of the terraces and large houses along the eastern edge of Regent’s Park.

Regent’s Park was originally part of a Royal hunting ground created by Henry VIII, when he took the land formerly known as Marylebone Park, which was part of the large mix of common and forest land to the north and west of London.

During the Civil War in the mid 17th century, much of the land was sold off to tenant farmers, and by the end of the 18th century, the growth of London was such, that as with much of west and north London, the land which is today now occupied by Regent’s Park was becoming a valuable area for building.

Luckily, the Prince Regent (the future King George IV) was looking for a site to build a summer palace, along with extensive gardens, and to provide space for this, much of the old tenant farming land was partitioned off to become Regent’s Park.

The Prince Regent commissioned the architect John Nash to design the new park, the summer palace and the surroundings of the park.

Nash was one of the major architects of the late 18th / early 19th century. Born in Lambeth, and probably the son of engineer and millwright William Nash, his first experience within the architectural profession was with Sir Robert Taylor where he became an assistant draughtsman.

By 1777, he was an architect and speculative builder in London, but was better at architecture than finance as he soon went bankrupt.

He then joined another partnership in Wales working on small projects, and by 1796, he had returned to London, where he formed a partnership with the landscape gardener Humphrey Repton (who was responsible for the original design of Russell Square).

The partnership with Repton had been dissolved by 1802, and by this time, Nash was considered a fashionable architect, and was responsible for a large number of projects across the country.

His involvement with the planning of Regent’s Park came about because of his appointment in 1806 as architect to the Department of Woods and Forests, the department responsible for the development of the land that was to become Regent’s Park, which had recently reverted to Crown ownership.

The plan for the Regent’s Park was that it would be a landscaped open space with the Prince Regent’s summer palace, a small number of private villas and surrounded by handsome terraces.

This approach would mean that Regent’s Park was not just a new park, but was also a new fashionable residential area for London.

The following map shows Regent’s Park as it is today. The arrow points to Cumberland Terrace:

The Regent’s Canal runs along the northern boundary of the park (Nash also had some involvement with the canal). London Zoo is at the north of the park. Terraces and large houses occupy much of the eastern boundary of the park, there are a number of villas to the north, and more terraces and houses along the western boundary.

The Prince Regent’s planned summer palace did not get built, he appears to have lost interest, and there were not as many of the large, individual villas as originally planned, however as designed by Nash, the park and the surrounding buildings are an impressive example of Regency architecture from the start of the early 19th century.

It is some time since I last walked through the terraces that line the eastern boundary of Regent’s Park, so last week I planned a visit. The weather on Monday was clear and bright, but I was not free for a day of walking. Tuesday though looked good, the forecast showing a mix of light cloud and sunny intervals, but such is the nature of weather forecasts that when I reached the Outer Circle (the road that forms the boundary to the central park), it had started snowing:

The walk up from Euston Road to find Cumberland Terrace, along the eastern boundary took me through and past a number of very impressive houses and terraces.

The first is the Grade I listed Chester Terrace, where the entrance to the road that runs in front of the terrace has a triumphal arch proclaiming the name of the terrace:

Chester Terrace, designed by Nash and built by James Burton is around 280 metres in length and is the longest unbroken façade in the Regent’s Park development.

The terrace consists of 37 houses and 5 semi-detached houses, and is at a raised level to the Outer Circle, and is separated from this street by private gardens. Chester Terrace dates from around 1825:

Given that the terraces to the east of Regent’s Park are around two hundred years old, and provided what must have been highly desirable homes in an equally desirable part of London, there are very few blue plaques across the terraces.

Chester Terrace has two, the first to the architect Charles Robert Cockerell, who was responsible for a large number of works across the country, and in London he worked on the Sun Fire Office in Threadneedle Street, the London and Westminster Bank in Lothbury, the Westminster Insurance Company’s offices in the Strand, the Hanover Chapel in Regent Street, the 1821 new ball and cross on St. Paul’s Cathedral, and many more:

Looking back to the southern arch to Chester Terrace, Cockerell’s blue plaque can just be seen on the left:

Looking along Chester Terrace, building works were taking place on the road and boundary wall to the gardens on the left:

In the above photo, there is a building with 8 free-standing, fluted Corinthian columns, then a building undergoing work and covered in scaffolding.

(A comment on Ionic and Corinthian Columns as I use both terms in this post. With my limited architectural understanding, the easiest way of confirming the type of column is that Corinthian have decorated work at the top of the column, while Ionic have a more simple finish, often looking rather like a scroll at the top of the column. As always, more informed feedback than I can provide is appreciated in the comments to the post).

Walk past the building with scaffolding, and there is another building with Corinthian columns, although with 6 rather than 8, and not projecting as far from the façade of the building. The pattern of columns alternates along the terrace, starting with from the south, 8, then 6 then 8, then 6, then finally 8 at the northern end of the terrace:

In the above photo there is another blue plaque, to Sir John Maitland Salmond, Marshal of the Royal Air Force. Salmond was one of the early pilots of the Royal Flying Corp, and in the Register on the 14th of March 1914, it was reported that: “For a flight 13,140 feet high in a B.E. (government built) biplane, Captain J.M. Salmond of the Royal Flying Corp has been granted by the Royal Aero Club the British altitude record”:

The thought of flying at over 13,000 feet in a government built biplane is a rather scary one.

At the end of Chester Terrace is another triumphal arch, and through this we can see one of the large houses that are also part of the development along the eastern boundary of Regent’s Park:

Walking to the end of Chester Terrace, and looking to the right, there is another arch that leads away from the Nash developments down towards Albany Street:

My father would have known this area well, as he lived a very short distance away. Not in one of the Nash buildings, but in what is still a Peabody estate, Bagshot House in the Cumberland Market estate – see this post.

Cumberland Place, which leads round to Cumberland Terrace:

The full length of Cumberland Terrace from the southern end:

Cumberland Terrace was the work of John Nash and James Thomson. It is difficult to know who was exactly responsible for what, and how much of the design was down to Nash or Thomson, however the overall design was certainly down to Nash, as the terrace was part of his vision for grand terraces along the boundary of Regent’s Park.

The terrace consist of 59 houses and was completed in around 1827. If differs from Chester Terrace in that it is not a continuous row of houses and there are two triumphal arches which lead into courtyards, not over the entrance road, but within the terrace, as shown in the following photo:

Cumberland Terrace was intended to be the most impressive of all the terraces, and at the centre is the building that was planned to give the impression of being a palace, looking out from its elevated position, over Regent’s Park. Only just visible in the following photo, at the top of the central building, above the Ionic columns is a Tympanum full of sculpture. A tympanum is the triangular space within a pediment that is frequently decorated, as in Cumberland Terrace:

This central building was the one covered in scaffolding in my father’s photos, another of which is shown below:

There had been some limited bomb damage to Cumberland Terrace, mainly to the rear rather than the front of the buildings. The main reason for repair work was the poor condition of the buildings after a long period of relatively limited maintenance, and years of wartime deterioration.

There was a risk that the buildings were going to be demolished, however they found another immediate post-war use, as reported in the Daily London News in April 1946:

“The Nash Houses To Be Spared – Terraces of houses designed by John Nash in Regent’s Park, which it was feared might be demolished, are to become an annexe of Whitehall.

The News Chronicle recently reported a protest by three writers, Elizabeth Bowen, Cyril Connolly and H.G. Wells, who all live in the Nash terraces in the Park, against the possible demolition of these fine specimens of Georgian building.

Last year a committee under Lord Gorell was appointed by the Prime Minister to report on the future of these buildings. Now the Government has already decided to take over 200 houses in Sussex Place, Cornwall Terrace, York Terrace, Chester Terrace and Cumberland Terrace.

Various Ministries will move departments there, freeing their present premises for use as offices and flats.”

What the above article did not report, was that Lord Gorell’s committee had stated that the terraces were an important part of the Nation’s architectural and artistic heritage, that they should be preserved as far as was possible, and that they should be residential and not offices, and the Government occupation should cease at the earliest possible time.

This was reported in the Illustrated London News on the 24th of May 1947, which included concerns about the physical state of the terraces. They had been built at a time when “the contemporary quality of building was at a very low ebb from a structural point of view. The quality of the maintenance of the houses has varied greatly, but dry-rot is very extensive and some of the serious outbreaks were prior to 1939”,

A further article in April 1950 in the Illustrated London News confirmed that repairs to the terrace had been underway, and the scaffolding which my father photographed must have been part of this work.

Some of the photos in the Illustrated London News show much of the internal woodwork being exposed and removed due to dry-rot.

The northern part of Cumberland Terrace:

In the above photo, the gardens that separate Cumberland Terrace from the Outer Circle can be seen, as well as the drop in height from the terrace down to the gardens, the Outer Circle and the rest of the park, which gave the terrace an elevated view over the park, and also made the terrace look more impressive from the park.

The above view includes the area covered by another of my father’s photos:

At the end of the terrace, the road leads down to the Outer Circle, with another example of the houses that make up the estate as well as the terraces, at the far end of the road:

Although there are modern street names signs, the terraces and their surrounding streets are mainly a place of black painted name signs:

The names of all the terraces and other significant buildings around the park, as part of Nash’s development, all come from the Royal Family, so Cumberland Terrace is named after Ernest Augustus, the King of Hanover and Duke of Cumberland. He was the fifth son of George III.

Chester Terrace comes from George IV, as the Earl of Chester was one of his titles before he became king.

As far as I can tell, the majority of the Nash terraces and houses are still owned by the Crown Estate.

Following a quick search, I could not find any detailed listing of the properties owned by the Crown Estate, however they do state on their website that Regent’s Park is one of the areas where they hold a residential portfolio of properties.

In the following photo, I am looking along the Outer Circle, the road that forms the boundary to Regent’s Park. The gardens to the left provide privacy to the terrace, and Cumberland Terrace can be seen behind the gardens:

Cumberland Terrace is all Grade I listed, and the Historic England listing record describes the terrace as “Monumental palace-style terrace”, and from the Outer Circle we can see how the terrace, especially the central part of the terrace, was meant to be seen – an impressive, ornamental palace, overlooking the Prince Regent’s new park, and part of a fashionable new housing estate for London:

The following print dates from 1829, only a couple of years after completion of the terrace, and shows the central part of the terrace looking much the same as it does today:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The decoration within the pediment is hard to see when walking along Cumberland Terrace, and it is only from the Outer Circle and the park that this impressive work can be seen fully:

The Public Ledger on the 29th of September 1827 included the following description of the terrace and pediment soon after completion:

“Among the very numerous embellishments to our Metropolis which have so closely succeeded each other since the commencement of the Regency, and which will, when the whole in present progress, and these to which these must inevitably give rise, shall be completed, render it still more the wonder of foreigners, we view with peculiar pleasure the improvements in the Regent’s Park.

In that delightful spot, the Cumberland Terrace must ever be an object of admiration. The pediment to that long length of handsome dwellings is nearly finished, and we expect will be viewed with much admiration.

The subject is boldly conceived, and the work is, we think, well executed. Britannia appears crowned by Fame. She is seated on her throne, supported by the emblems of Valour and of Wisdom. On one side, Literature, Genius, Manufacture, Agriculture and Prudence. On the other Navy surmounted by Victory, and attended by Navigation, Commerce and Freedom, extends blessings to the world; and the interesting group is surrounded by the symbols of Plenty.

Not only will the pediment be attractive, but over the 32 columns there are to be as many statues with a quantum sufficit of sphynxes, vases and other decorations.”

And the many statues listed in the article, as well as the sphynxes and vases are still to be seen:

And here:

Cumberland Terrace is a very impressive example of Nash’s work around Regent’s Park, and Cumberland Terrace was often used as an example of quality design.

In the second half of the 1940s, the luxury car brand Lagonda was advertising that “Cumberland Terrace, Regent’s Park, by John Nash characterises a flourishing period of design. As with this noble early 19th century building, so with the new 2 litre Lagonda designed by W.O. Bentley. Lasting merit has been achieved through time and genius expended on conception and construction”.

Large house facing onto the Outer Circle:

The above photo shows that it was not just the terraces that had features such as Corinthian or Ionic columns and pediments. Other buildings facing towards Regent’s Park had many of the same features, to give the impression of the park being surrounded by large and small palaces or stately homes.

London has always had a housing shortage, and there was an interesting proposal for Cumberland Terrace in 1959 (from the Holloway Press):

“Tory Cllr, says FLATS NOT SUITABLE – Cumberland Terrace. Although Cllr, Miss I.C. Mansel maintained that flats in Cumberland Terrace would be unsuitable for council tenants, St. Pancras Borough Council agreed on Wednesday to a housing management committee recommendation that the Crown Estate Commissioners be asked to receive a council deputation to discuss the future of the flats.

Previously the council had asked the Lord Privy Seal to place the flats at the disposal of the council for housing families on the waiting list. The council were then told that it was proposed to let the flats at the best rates obtainable.

Cllr. Miss Mansel said the Conservative group were against the recommendation. ‘I feel these flats would be quite unsuitable for council tenants’.

The committee chairman, Cllr. Mrs Peggy Duff said there was a desperate shortage of housing accommodation and she had no doubt people would be glad to have one of these flats.”

The principle of the “best rates obtainable” still stands, as for example, there is a three bedroom, leasehold apartment in Cumberland Terrace currently on sale for £7,500,000. You can see the listing on Rightmove by clicking here.

View south along the Outer Circle, with another large house with Corinthian columns – a standard feature throughout the estate:

The road in the above photo is again the Outer Circle, the road that circles the boundary of Regent’s Park.

The Outer Circle, or Outer Drive as it was also known, was laid out as defined in Nash’s plans, between 1811 and 1812.

The two mile long road was described as a “fine broad gravel road”, and was one of the first features of the park, forming the boundary between the open parkland, and the land that would be developed into the terraces and houses covered in this post.

The following map shows Regent’s Park in around 1815, before the terraces and houses were built. The Outer Circle is in place, however it is named in sections, with some of the names that the future terraces would take, so for example, the section of Outer Ring in front of the future Chester and Cumberland Terraces is called Chester Street.

The land just outside the Outer Ring is labelled as “Building Ground”, and this would go on to be developed in the 1820s as shown by the photos in the post.

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

The Outer Circle was open to the public until ten in the evening, when it was closed to the public, but continued to provide access for residents. The road was designed so as you passed along the road on your horse, in your carriage, or on foot, you passed a changing series of views, of both the open parkland on one side, and the large houses and terraces on the other side, which must have seemed extraordinary and magnificent to the average Londoner.

In 1831, the artist Richard Morris created a panorama of the view around the Outer Circle.

The Yale Centre for British Art have the full panorama available on line (click here), and fortunately it has a Creative Commons Public Domain classification, so as an example of the panorama, below is the section showing Cumberland Terrace, with people enjoying the ride and walk around the Outer Circle:

An interesting part of the overall development is much further south, along Park Square East, which connects Marylebone Road to the Outer Circle, where we find this terrace:

The following print from 1829 shows the above terrace. Park Square is to the right, and the mounted soldiers are travelling along the southern section of the Outer Circle:

(© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.)

In the centre of the terrace shown in the above print and photo is a slightly larger building, with a sign along the roof line. This was the Regent’s Park Diorama, and the building survives to this day:

Again, Grade I listed, and by John Nash, the central Diorama was one of a number operating in London in the early 19th century.

A Diorama consists of a painting, drawings or models which are so arranged and lit, that they give the viewer the impression that they are looking at the real life scene.

Flemings Weekly Express on the 2nd of November 1823 had a description of the Regent’s Park Diorama, as follows:

“On entering the place of exhibition, you find yourself in a small circular theatre, fitted up with balconies, seats and a kind of parterre in the centre; and hung round with rich draperies; and overhead is a transparent ceiling superbly painted in arabesque, which lets in a ‘dim, religious light’.

The theatre or apartment in which you stand, is enclosed on all sides, with the exception of what seems to be about one-fourth of the circle; and this space, from the ceiling to nearly the floor, is entirely open, as if into the air. it is through this opening that you see, at what appears to be a considerable distance, the scenes which are the objects of exhibition.

One of them consists of a lovely valley in Switzerland; and it really is no exaggeration to say, that, seen from the open window of an apartment in its immediate neighbourhood, the scene itself could not produce a more enchanting effect. It is true, the feeling of being able to leave the room, and walk into it is wanting; but perhaps this is nearly compensated for by the indistinct pleasure arising from the sentiment alluded to, that what you behold is a pure creation of human art and ingenuity.”

To keep customers returning, the Diorama would provide a continually changing programme of views, with natural landscapes from Britain and the wider world, city scenes, battles, historical events etc.

By 1852, the Diorama had closed. The contents of the building were sold off the following year, and in May 1855, the building opened as a Baptist Chapel, with the first “solemn services” held to convert the space into a chapel.

The façade of the building hides the structure of the Diorama which was behind, and remarkably this structure still exists today.

The following link is to Google Maps, where the structure of the Diorama is still clearly visible behind the terrace:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/jkeNxsd76SeBaEJk8

The Nash terraces are one of the things that make walking around London so fascinating – the considerable diversity of architectural style and landscape planning. It is important to consider the terraces and large houses as part of the overall design of Regent’s Park, and with Cumberland Terrace, it is clear that the terrace was designed to provide the impression of a palace overlooking the park.

London’s changeable weather also makes walking interesting, and whilst these terraces look magnificent in the sun of a summer’s day, they look just as good in the light of a dull January day, with a dusting of snow across the streets and pavement.

Fountain House and Bastion House – Two Soon To Be Lost Podium Towers

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The inspiration for this week’s post came from a tweet (if that is still the correct term for a post on X or what was Twitter), from the City of London, stating that the “Planning Committee has unanimously approved plans for a 31-storey officer tower at 130 Fenchurch Street”.

The post can be seen by clicking here, where there are images of the new building that will be on the site.

130 Fenchurch Street is better known as Fountain House, a rather unique building in the City of London, and one I wrote a bit about in 2018 when demolition was expected in the next couple of years, however I suspect that Covid delayed any work, and seven years later it looks as if Fountain House will finally become one of the many City buildings that become a memory for those that worked in the building, or remember the building from walks along Fenchurch Street:

This section of Fenchurch Street is changing rapidly. Fountain House is on the left of the above photo, and will soon be replaced by the building shown in the City of London’s tweet, also in the project’s website, here: https://130fenchurchstreet.co.uk/

Where the crane can be seen on the right of the above photo is where the development I featured in last week’s post at All Hallows Staining and 50 Fenchurch is taking place. Two large and transformative developments in a small section of Fenchurch Street.

Fountain House was constructed between 1954 and 1958 to a design by W.H.Rogers and Sir Howard Robertson (Consulting). It was the first London building constructed to the tower and podium formula where a large podium occupies the full area of the plot of land, with a much small central space occupied by a tower block.

The lower podium block is occupied by a central entrance foyer and around the street level of the podium there is space for a range of retail units.

The corners of the podium are almost triangular in shape to fit within the surrounding streets. As the central tower only occupies a small percentage of the overall plot of land, today’s developers would no doubt consider this to be wasted space and the modern replacement will see a glass and steel tower occupying the full width and depth of the land available.

The view looking up at the tower of Fountain House rising above the Podium, with what was the main entrance to the building:

Wider view showing a section of the podium. The entrance to the building is in the middle, retail units to left and right along the street level of the podium:

The Pevsner guide describes Fountain House as:

“The first office tower in London to repeat the motif of Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House, New York (1952), that is a low horizontal block with a tall tower above, here set end-on to the street. With its podium curving to the street and lower return wing along Cullum Street, the composition is tentative compared with later versions of the formula.”

When Fountain House opened in the 1950s, it must have been viewed as the most modern of office blocks, and a symbol of the City of London’s post war transformation from mainly Victorian and early 20th century office buildings, to the very latest architectural designs, mirroring what was happening in places such as New York, and offering a new format for office work, and the growing trend for retail along the streets of the City.

The ground floor of the podium today, along with the main entrance, is covered with advertising about the local area:

This advertising display’s one of my pet hates about the way parts of London are often rebranded, as apparently the area surrounding Fountain House is now “Eastern City”:

Eastern City is a BID or Business Improvement District.

A BID is a business led and funded (through a levy of the business rates) organisation, set-up to provide improvements within the local area, and the services delivered in that area.

The concept of a BID is good one. Local businesses working together to improve their local area. I just find the almost arbitrary renaming of a local area rather frustrating. A name not rooted in any history of the area and not really defining the key aspects of an area. For example, in the above photo, Eastern City is defined as:

“Connected across the capital and the world’s time zones, the Eastern City is where chance encounters and longstanding relationships lead to progress”

The above slogan could equally apply to the whole of the City of London and nothing in the slogan is unique to “Eastern City” (I assume the rest of the City of London would argue that it is connected the the world’s time zones).

There are currently five BIDs within the City of London, with each having a defined term of operation. They are:

These are not just within the City. Across the wider London area, there are over 70 BIDs.

In another panel, there is a description of the Eastern City BID and a map showing the area, with “iconic tall towers and historic streets”:

Map from the above photo showing the area of the Eastern City – again I have no issues with the concept and work of a BID, it is just the arbitrary boundaries and name to define the area:

The BIDs overlap an existing structure within the City, which, for very many centuries, has been divided into Wards with an Alderman and a number of Common Councillors.

Fountain House is within Langbourn Ward, and never one to pass an opportunity to include an old map, the following map is of Langbourn Ward, and I have marked the area of the Fountain House redevelopment with a red rectangle, and a red circle is around the church of All Hallows Staining, which is a small part of the redevelopment on the opposite side of Fenchurch Street  (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.):

More from the panels around the street level of Fountain House:

And some history:

I wonder how many City workers have glanced up at the clock on the corner of the Fountain House podium to check the time:

Another, similar tower and podium building that may well soon be demolished is Bastion House (140 London Wall), which sits on top of the old Museum of London site. The photo below shows the building, and also highlights how the office block is suspended above an open space, with only a few central support columns, along with the wider blocks at the two sides of the structure for additional support, lifts and services, for the 17 storeys of the building above:

Bastion House was part of the redevelopment of the area, which included forming the new London Wall street, as a dual carriageway between the junction with Aldersgate Street to the west and with Moorgate to the east, following a slightly more southern route than the original street by the name of London Wall.

The new developments included several almost identical office tower blocks along either side of London Wall, along with raised pedestrian walkways and the dual carriageway with a long car park below.

These office Towers were built between 1961 and 1976, with Bastion House being one of the last to be completed.

Bastion House was designed by the partnership of Philip Powell and Hildago Moya, the same architects who had designed the Skylon for the Festival of Britain.

The last update on the future of Bastion house on the City of London website is that the “City Corporation resolves to grant permission for London Wall West development proposals” and that timescales currently are that demolition begins in 2028, with completion of the new development on site being in late 2033.

The site was to have included a Centre for Music and Concert Hall by the American architectural practice of Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, however post Covid, funds for such a building seem to have dried up, so the focus of the site will now be commercial, with the City of London identifying the ongoing need for new office space across the City as one of the justifications for the development.

Diller, Scofidio & Renfro still have their original proposals for the site on their website. Click here to visit.

Diller, Scofidio & Renfro are also responsible for the significant redesigned plans for the site, and these can be found by clicking here.

Bastion House and the old Museum of London below, seen from the west:

The Museum of London building was also by Philip Powell and Hildago Moya, so with overall demolition, two of their buildings will be lost.

This will leave one remaining office tower from those that once lined London Wall, and this is further to the east on the southern side of London Wall and is shown in the photo below:

This block is now called City Tower, but the original name when completed in 1964 was Britannic House (although I am not sure if there is some confusion with another Britannic House, built as the head office of BP in 1967 next to Ropemaker Street, which has also changed name and is now City Point).

There is work on the ground floors of City Tower, however I cannot find any plans to demolish this building, so after the demolition of Bastion House, this will be the one remaining office block of the identical towers that once lined both sides of London Wall.

The proposed demolition of Fountain House and Bastion House follow the centuries long tradition of how the City of London has redeveloped and renewed, adapting to changing models of commerce, ways of working, demands for space, changing architectural designs, use of new materials etc.

So the loss of these two buildings follow this process, however I cannot help thinking that in their own way, they are unique, and their loss would result in the further loss of architectural variety across the City.

There are also arguments about the impact of demolition and rebuild with environmental factors such as the CO2 embedded in the existing building, and that generated by a new build.

Both proposals aim to maximise the amount of office space. The replacement to Bastion House and the Museum of London site will consist of three new blocks, the highest being of a similar height to Bastion House. Proximity of this development to the Barbican will probably have a significant impact on the view towards the south west from the estate.

All part of a changing City, and how familiar streets and views can be totally transformed in the space of a couple of years, but how we decide what is worth preserving and what justifies demolition is an important discussion.

On a totally different, but vaguely related subject on preservation of old things, I have long suspected that in the future, despite the enormous number of photos we take today, there will be some form of a digital dark age.

With my father’s photos from over 70 years ago, and my photos from the 1970s, 80, and 90s, it is a matter of basically shining a light through the negative and scanning the view to bring these photos back to life, but with the digital format of photos, will the media still be available and readable, will Cloud based storage still be accessible decades in the future, and who will know your Facebook, Instagram, Apple, Flickr etc. userids and passwords to access, if these services are still available in the future.

The subject of a digital dark age came to mind again when reading a BBC article on a project to rescue the data stored on old floppy disks, the article can be found here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20251009-rescuing-knowledge-trapped-on-old-floppy-disks

So unless we take care to preserve digital media, it may not just be buildings that we loose, but also photos of them.

There is Something Missing on the Southbank and Resources

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I was going to continue my journey along the Limehouse Cut in today’s post. However, it is the first post of a new month, when I feature a Resources section in the post, looking at resources to help with researching and exploring London, so to keep the post to a reasonable size, I am starting with a different subject.

Also, the problems with the blog that I mentioned a few weeks ago have been reoccurring, with the site occasionally going off line, and also with very slow performance. I hope to be able to bring in some additional technical support to try and get this resolved this coming week, but if the blog and posts disappear for a while, it will be back.

Last weekend I was walking across the footbridge alongside Hungerford Bridge, looking over at the very familiar view towards Waterloo Bridge, the City and along the Southbank, when I noticed that there was something missing:

For those of a certain age, the following clip may offer a clue:

The missing feature is the white, square tower seen in the following photo, behind the right hand yellow crane, covered in scaffolding ready for demolition:

The tower was Kent House / the Southbank Television Centre / the London Studios, the original home of London Weekend Television, and in recent decades of ITV, with much of their national and local output coming from the studios that clustered around the base of the tower.

The building dates from a time when there were two independent TV stations covering London and the surrounding Home Counties. Thames Television broadcast from Monday to Friday, when on Friday evening Thames would handover to London Weekend Television who would broadcast until the following Monday morning.

London Weekend Television (LWT) took over the franchise for providing London’s weekend television service from ATV in 1968, with LWT’s first studios being at Wembley at facilities rented from Rediffusion.

LWT’s intention had been to have their own, purpose built, modern television studios along with space for offices so the company could be located in one place.

A site on the Southbank was available close to the National Theatre, and development of the new studios would continue the westward development of the south bank, and followed the 1944 Abercrombie plan for London which had proposed cultural, offices, residential and open space to replace the old industrial sprawl alongside the river.

The first transmission of TV programmes from the new studios was in 1972, with the site being fully complete two years later.

The tower block was mainly offices, although there was a studio higher up the tower for a number of years, when use was made of the view over London as a backdrop for programmes.

Surrounding the base of the tower were a number of studios used for the production of LWT and wider ITV national output as providing space which other broadcasters could use.

If you have watched almost any ITV live productions, game shows, dramas such as Upstairs, Downstairs, ITV’s World of Sport, BBC shows such as Have I Got News For You, QI, the Graham Norton Show, they were all filmed in the studios at the base of the tower on the Southbank.

The studios were also used by many other production companies and broadcasters.

The tower has been a feature of many of my photos, dating back to the late 1970s. This is a photo from 2017 when it was still occupied by ITV:

This photo from 2022 shows the tower standing in isolation on the Southbank (the Shard is hidden behind the tower):

As the local independent television regions went through a period of change and consolidation, LWT was taken over by Granada in 1994. Carlton Communications had previously won the franchise for the London weekday service from Thames Television, and by 2004 Granada and Carlton merged all their operations which included the many regional operators they had taken over such as LWT, to form ITV as a public limited company.

The studio complex also went through some changes from the South Bank Television Centre to The London Studios.

in 2018, ITV announced that the studios were to be closed allowing the buildings to be demolished to make way for new office and production facilities. ITV’s live broadcasts, mainly their daytime programmes would temporarily move to the old BBC Television Centre at White City as the BBC had moved out with the centre “donut” of offices being converted to apartments, and some of the studios remaining, and available for hire.

Later in the same year, it became clear that ITV would not be returning to any refurbished site, and they would use the studios at White City as a long term resource.

ITV had earlier purchased the freehold of the site from the properties division of the Coal Pension Fund, and I suspect they realised that the site was far more valuable if sold to developers, rather than the costs of refurbished studios and remaining on the South Bank.

The site was sold to Mitsubishi Estate, the Japanese property developer, and owner of a number of buildings across London.

The view as was of the tower and the studios from the Embankment walkway:

The view now that the tower and studios have been demolished:

My first photo of the LWT tower and studio complex was in 1980, from the old walkway that ran alongside Hungerford Bridge:

In the above photo, the tower is towards the back of the complex, with the lower studios surrounding the tower and facing on to the river.

The Embankment wall and walkway was being extended in front of both the LWT studios and the new IBM building which was under construction just to the right of the ITV studios.

A different angle to the above view, further along the walkway, with the studios as the white building, and to the right, the IBM building under construction, a building designed by Denys Lasdun, who had also designed the National Theatre, seen to the right of the photo:

The tower to the left of the above two photos is Kings Reach Tower, formerly the home of IPC Magazines / IPC Media, now extended upwards and known as the Southbank Tower and converted to residential.

There is a bit of a mystery in the above two photos which I will come to later in the post.

In 1980 I also took the following photo from the Shell Centre viewing gallery looking down on the LWT tower and studios:

As can be seen in the above photo, the tower is a distance back from the river, with low rise studios between the tower and river. The tower faces onto the street Upper Ground, and this was the view from the street of the base of the tower a couple of years ago, with the first scaffolding that would eventually cover the tower:

A look up at the tower from Upper Ground (personally, I think it was a really well designed and visually pleasing building):

Demolition and development of the site had been delayed due to a large number of objections. Michael Gove approved the proposals at the start of 2024, and the High Court upheld Gove’s decision in December 2024, and the owners of the site then moved quickly to award a £500 million contract to Multiplex to redevelop the site, with demolition of the tower and studios being the first stage.,

A walk along Upper Ground last weekend showed that demolition is now almost complete:

The south west corner of the complex was the only part remaining, and I suspect that by the time you read this, this remaining section will have gone.

In the following photo, the main entrance was underneath the “Thame” lettering. A couple of years ago this was the name Thames Television, as one of the last productions filmed in the building was a recreation of the infamous Bill Grundy interview with the Sex Pistols in December 1976, which had been filmed in a Thames Television studio next to Euston Tower. This was for the 2022 TV mini series on the band.

The remaining section looks almost like the ruins of a medieval castle. When I worked in the area in the late 1990s, it was common to see a queue of audience participants lining up along the base of the left of the building in the following photo, waiting to see what ever was being filmed that evening:

The new development will be very different, and will consist of a 25 storey office building, which will be connected to two further buildings of 14 and 6 storeys.

The space will provide offices and workspace, along with space “tailored to the needs of Lambeth’s emerging creative industries”. There will also be the obligatory open space, cafes, restaurants and a “cultural venue”.

See the page at the following link on the Matrix website (the company responsible for the development) to see an image of what the site will look like after completion, currently planned for 2029:

https://www.multiplex.global/uk/news/construction-starts-at-72-upper-ground-with-appointment-of-multiplex

The image on the above page shows probably the most attractive view of the development, rather than the view looking across the river to the site where the new towers will dominate the area.

The image at the above page does not show the restaurants currently located at Gabriel’s Wharf, so whether these are hidden below the edge of new development, or whether the land will be included in the new development, I do not know.

In many ways, the new development does continue the intentions of the 1944 Abercrombie plan regarding the use of the South Bank. The key issue is the sheer size of the development. If you look along the South Bank there is a reasonably consistent building height from County Hall down to the old IBM building, which has recently been refurbished, and is Grade II listed.

Kent Tower, the tower block of the LWT studios complex was the first tower along this sectionion of the South Bank, and as shown in my 1980s photo, it did stand out. It was though, set back from the river and did not dominate the IBM and National Theatre buildings.

I suspect that the new development will be very different, as will the view from the walkway alongside Hungerford Bridge in 2029.

A Southbank Mystery

I mentioned earlier in the post that there is a mystery in two of my 1980s photos.

Despite looking at these photos a number of times, there is a feature I had not noticed, and I cannot remember it from the time.

There is something on the foreshore at the end of the red arrow:

On a raised platform above the foreshore is a helicopter, the platform looks to be towards the end of Old Barge House Stairs:

I cannot remember ever seeing or hearing about a helicopter here. The location looks rather precarious, and the platform appears to be below the high tide level.

I did wonder if it was a model, but it looks very realistic in these grainy extracts from my film photos.

Whether it was a one off, temporary, or provided a service for some time, again I just do not know, but it is always interesting to discover stuff I did not know.

An even grainer view of the helicopter from a different angle:

The southern side of the river has frequently been used for helicopter services.

The London Heliport at Battersea has been providing a helicopter service since 1959, and in the early 1950s, after the closure of the Festival of Britain, where the Jubilee Gardens is located today was the site of a helicopter service linking central London with Heathrow Airport.

You could check for your flight opposite Waterloo Station, board your helicopter, and be speeding above the traffic to the airport.

I found the following Pathe news film about the helicopter service from the South Bank:

Resources – Britain from Above

Continuing my monthly look at the resources available to research and explore London’s history, and for this month I am looking at the Britain from Above website, which can be found here:

https://britainfromabove.org.uk

Many of the resources I am covering are easy ways to get diverted and spend a whole evening looking at what is on the site, and Britain from Above is another example. There are very many photos covering the early to mid 20th century, not just of London but of the whole country.

The homepage:

The first thing to do is register, which is free. By registering, you are able to go full screen and zoom in to images at much greater detail.

The easiest way to then get started is to enter the name of a location in the Image Ref or Keywords box on the menu bar, and then click search.

This will bring up all photos which fit the search criteria.

To demonstrate, I searched for the Limehouse Cut, the subject of last Sunday’s post, and of the many images available, the following is an example from 1951, which shows the Limehouse Cut, on the left side of the photo, and highlights that this was a very straight canal through former rural land which in the following years had been surrounded by industry and housing. Zooming in allows detail of the industry along the side of the Limehouse Cut to be seen:

Searching for Limehouse Cut also brings up any images with the word Limehouse, and in the same search is this 1928 image of Regent’s Canal Dock. In 1928, the Limehouse Cut still used the original route into the Thames, and by zooming into the photo, this can still be seen, just to the north of the Regent’s Canal Dock (with the later redevelopment of the area, the Limehouse Cut would be diverted into the Regent’s Canal Dock, now known as the Limehouse Basin / Marina):

When searching, there are frequently some unusual photographic finds. In the same Limehouse Cut search is the following image of the Graf Zeppelin in flight over Limehouse in 1931, photographed through the wings of the biplane used by the photographer. The Limehouse Cut can be seen below and to the left of the wing. This must have been a remarkable sight for anyone on the ground at the time:

The archive covers much of the country, for example the following image is of St Mary’s Cathedral, Lincoln in 1921:

Land changes over the decades can be seen. The following image is of the Lighthouse at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast in 1951. All those building along the edge have since been lost to coastal erosion.

A few years ago, the Happisburgh lighthouse and the nearby Church of St Mary the Virgin, both had open days, when you could climb to the top of bother the lighthouse and the church tower. The following photo from the church tower shows the impact of coastal erosion on this part of the Norfolk coastline:

The Britain from Above archive is a wonderful archive of photos showing London and the rest of the country as it was. The use of photography helps provide an understanding of how places have changed. Aerial photos transforms maps into houses, industry, streets, fields, churches and cathedrals, canals and rivers, the coast, and even lighthouses.

Britain from Above allows reuse of the images, such to very reasonable rules of non-commercial use, no sale, no sub-licensing or use for advertising, making sure the link to the original image is shown and not clipped out of the image, which is really useful for a personal blog such as alondoninheritance.

An image from the site helped with the correct location of one of my father’s photos when I got the original location wrong in a post. Luckily there are readers who know far more about London than I do and provided an indication of the correct location.

An image from Britain from Above helped to confirm. See the post here: https://alondoninheritance.com/the-thames/st-katharines-way-ship-fires-thames/

Britain from Above is a really wonderful resource.

What I Am Reading – The Sun Rising by Anna Whitelock

The Sun Rising – James I and the Dawn of a Global Britain by Anna Whitelock was a speculative buy after seeing the book, which was published this year, on the shelfs of a bookshop.

The book focuses on the reign of James I, the first Stuart king after the Tudor dynasty came to an end with the death of Queen Elizabeth. A critical time in the country’s history as the Queen had not had any children.

What makes this book different is that it is not just an account of James I, but as the subtitle to the book highlights, it is about Great Britain starting to play catch up with other European powers such as the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, in establishing networks of world trade.

London does feature heavily in the book, not just with accounts of the processions through the City, but also as the place where many of the trading companies were established to further trade with the rest of the world.

The book does cover domestic events, such as the Gunpowder Plot, trying to unify England and Scotland, Protestant – Catholic conflict, and James’ attempts at trying to unify European Christian powers etc. but the clear emphasis is on Britain’s global trade.

There is the Virginia Company of London, trying to establish settlements in the US, the Plantation of Ulster, the Muscovy Company and the East India Company. Trade with the Shah or Persia, early trade with India.

William Adams from Gillingham, and apprenticed in Limehouse features as a key player in attempts to trade with Japan. See my post on Adams, here.

Pocahontas arrived in London from Virginia, and was taken seriously ill near Gravesend at the start of her return journey. She died in 1617 and was buried at Gravesend.

Although the British trading companies focus was trade, not taking land, we see the start of how this would develop with the first African slaves arriving in the Virginia Plantation in 1619 – the start of the triangular slave trade between Britain, Africa, the Caribbean and America.

We also see the failure in the management of the colony at Virginia by the Virginia Company of London leading the the take over of the land and colony by the Crown – again a sign of what would take place across the world in the coming centuries.

What I did not realise was just how far and how extensive, the network of trade was at the start of the 17th century. Attempts to trade in with Persia, India, the far East, to China, Japan and the Spice Islands.

Some of the horrors inflicted on indigenous populations in the name of trade are covered, including the Dutch massacre of thousands of Bandanese people (on one of the Banda Islands, now part of Indonesia and the source of large quantities of nutmeg, mace and cloves).

My fascination with Thames Stairs and the river includes the lives of people who have travelled out from the stairs and the river on journeys across the world, and this book is full of them – ambassadors, traders, explorers, and settlers – it is quite remarkable how extensive these journeys were in the early 1600s.

The book is a really good read, and helps to provide an understanding of how Britain’s early steps in global trade would develop over the following three hundred years, and many of the horrors that went with this expansion.

And at its root was money. King James I for the revenues that trade would bring to the Crown, and the London trading companies, for the profits of trade. It always comes down to money.

alondoninheritance.com

The Royal Mint – A Controversial Transformation

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Thanks for the feedback to last week’s post where I had used plaque rather than plague. I think I was being a bit too quick with a spelling check. All hopefully now corrected.

I do not usually cover topical issues in the blog, however today’s post looks at a site which could well have a controversial transformation in the coming years, as well as a bit of the history of the site.

This is the tree hidden view of the old Royal Mint building, looking across East Smithfield:

The 1890s book “The Queen’s London” has a much clearer view of the building. I assume the two trees we see in the following image will grow into the two we see today:

The story of the Royal Mint goes back many centuries, and for much of the time, the Royal Mint in London was based within the Tower of London. A suitably secure place for the minting of the nation’s coinage.

By the end of the 18th century, steam power was taking over many industrial processes, and with the country’s growing international commerce, much of it based around the London Docks, the demand for coinage was growing.

The Tower of London was far too small a site to accommodate the new steam technology that could be used for the manufacture of growing amounts of coinage.

In 1798, King George III appointed a committee of the Privy Council to look into the future of the Royal Mint and the committee decided that a new location and building was required. 

The site would, ideally, still be within central London and close to the Tower of London, and also where a sizeable amount of land was available.

One such location was just to the north east of the Tower of London, a site which consisted mainly of a Royal Navy Victualling Yard, along with a number of small side streets, courts, workshops and housing.

I have marked the area which would become the site of the Royal Mint on the following extract from Rocque’s 1746 map of London, where it can be seen that the Victualling Yard occupied a large amount of the future space of the Royal Mint. The map also shows the size of the future site compared to the Tower of London, the Mint’s original home where only a proportion of the space was available to the Mint:

It took a while to clear the site, plan the new Mint and complete the build, and it was finally complete in 1809, with the Royal Mint moving out of the Tower of London, where it had been since 1279 when a small Mint was first established within the secure walls of the Tower.

The new building was the work of surveyor James Johnson along with his successor Robert Smirke.

The new Royal Mint building, twenty one years after completion, drawn in 1830 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.):

The main Royal Mint building is Grade II* listed, the white entrance arches and lodge to either side are Grade II listed.

The early 19th century building is the main visible part of the complex (only just visible between the trees), and there is far more to the site as it expanded and adapted to post Royal Mint use over the years.

Looking through the railings, we can get a slightly better view:

I have a bit of a thing about the placement of some trees in London. Whilst I certainly believe that many more trees are needed across the city, there are some where they obscure the original view intended by the architects of a building. The Royal Mint building is a prime example, another is the Royal Festival Hall where the trees on the walkway in front of the building obscure the view of the Royal Festival Hall from across the river (see this post).

The Royal Mint was at Tower Hill until the Mint started to move out of the Tower Hill location in the late 1960s. Production of new decimal coinage along with a growing business producing coinage for other countries required a larger site, and in 1968, Queen Elizabeth II opened the new Royal Mint works at Llantrisant, South Wales, and the last coin was produced at Tower Hill in 1975.

Not everyone was happy to see the Royal Mint leave London, for example an H.J. Arlett of Peckham wrote to the London Evening News on the 1st of September, 1967:

“The business of producing coinage by the Royal Mint has now expanded to such an extent that it is proposed to move to a larger site in Glamorganshire. Why?

Why not keep this Chief Department appropriately enough in our Capital City? Subsidiary departments can always be opened in other areas should the need arise. Why should the defacement of this interesting capital of ours be allowed to continue and prove to the detriment of overseas visitors and our places of interest.

Which of our landmarks will be next, the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange, the Mansion House? How long before the Tower of London becomes another tower of Blackpool.

Let us keep our capital a centre of interest, not just blocks of offices.”

Questions about London’s purpose and future have probably been asked for as long as London has been the Capital City of the country.

Since the Royal Mint left the building, it has had a number of uses, including office space and I remember that a number of tech start-ups were based there in the late 1990s early 2000.

The controversial transformation I alluded to at the start of the post is the future use of the old Royal Mint site, with China planning that the whole site will become their new Embassy complex, having purchased the site in 2018 for £255 million.

The site is a considerable size of 2.10 hectares or over 5 acres. It comprises the original building that faces on to Tower Hill, as well as a complex of 1980s buildings onwards that were built around the site as it was used for office space. There is also the Grade II listed Seaman’s Registry, designed by James Johnson and built in 1805 as staff accommodation for the Royal Mint.

The site also contains some preserved remains of a Cistercian Abbey, the St. Mary of Graces monastery which date from the 14th century (which also illustrates how many religious establishments there once were in London, as just to the south, where St. Katherine Dock is now located, was the St. Katherine Hospital and Church, founded in the 12th century by Matilda, Countess of Boulogne, the wife of King Stephen who reigned from 1135 to 1154).

There is also a 14th century Black Death burial ground, many other archaeological remains as well as remains from the Royal Navy Victualling yard which occupied the site prior to the Royal Mint.

The overall scope of the site is shown in the map below where I have marked the planning application boundaries with the red line. The square indentation along the northern boundary is a BT telephone exchange. When three letter codes were used as part of the telephone number, this exchange was ROY for ROYal, due to the exchange’s location next to the Royal Mint.

The telephone exchange is apparently due to cease all operations in 2033 and to be empty the same year. Its future use will be interesting given the location of the building as being almost part of the proposed Chinese Embassy estate:

To add to the importance of the site, it is within the Tower of London Conservation Area and is also
within the boundary of the Tower of London UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The proposed embassy would not only be the largest embassy complex in the UK, but would also be China’s largest embassy in Europe, as well as being around 20% larger than their embassy in the US.

The proposed plans for the embassy complex include some very limited public access, as well as a small area for historical information and interpretation displays and exhibits.

The planning application has been turned down by Tower Hamlets Council, and the current status is that the application has been called in by the Government and is now under review by Angela Ryaner who oversees planning matters in her role as housing secretary.

The latest from early August is that Angela Raynor has asked the Chinese to explain why parts of the building plans are greyed out and marked “redacted for security reasons”.

The Grade II listed entrance arch and lodge:

There are very valid views on whether the site should be used as an embassy for China, and also why China needs such a large complex for their London embassy, but I also think that the future use of the building shows the lack of ambition (and money) that we have as a country, for the use and redevelopment of such an important site, at a very key location.

The clustering effect of the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, St, Katherine Docks and the old Royal Mint buildings would make the site ideal for redevelopment for cultural / historical use, even with the redevelopment of some of the buildings at the rear of the estate as residential to help fund, it would preserve the listed James Johnson and Robert Smirke building and the Seaman’s Registry for public use.

It would also have been aa brilliant location for the Museum of London (although the Smithfield site is equally good), and perhaps this shows the challenge of a City where too many historic sites such as Smithfield Market, the old Customs House in Lower Thame Street etc. are looking for a future use, and in reality is an embassy so very different to the site being redeveloped with apartment blocks and hotels, which would probably be the alternative.

This was part of the original intention for the site after client funds of two real estate investment companies had purchased the site from the Crown Estate in 2010, and who then received planning permission for new retail and leisure accommodation, 1.8 acres of landscaped public space, and a large amount of high specification office space.

The owners received an unsolicited offer from China in 2018, and it was probably too good an offer to refuse.

View looking along Mansell Street, the north western boundary to the site, with part of the brick Seaman’s Registry building visible along with 1980s additions:

The high brick wall seen in the above photo still surrounds much of the site, and was there to prevent access to a place where large amounts of coinage, gold and silver were being stored and processed.

Despite the walls intended to keep people out, much of the reported theft was by employees, and the following from the London Dailey Chronicle in November 1912 is typical of the small amounts of theft by employees of the Mint:

“THEFT FROM THE ROYAL MINT. A sad story of the downfall of a trusted employee at the Royal Mint was told at the Thames Police court yesterday, when Charles James, aged 55, a foreman packer, was sent for trial on a charge of stealing silver coins to the value of over £36.

James, it was said, had been 29 years at the Mint, and next year would have been entitled to retire on a pension. His salary was £2 a week, with 6s. extra for searching suspected persons.

He was seen by a packer to plunge his hand several times into bags of worn silver coins which were being emptied, and £36 3s 6d was found in his pockets. When accused James said, ‘I must have been mad’. He was stated to have recently been ill, and to have borne an excellent character. Bail was allowed.”

The following photo is along Royal Mint Street, along the northern boundary of the complex, and the tall brick building where the wall ends is the old Telephone Exchange:

The GR cypher on the arms on the building indicate that it was built in the reign of King George V, between 1910 and 1936:

The Royal Mint at Tower Hill was used for many other related purposes, not just for the production of coinage.

Go back to the end of the 18th century, and Britain was a country with a growing trade with the rest of the world. One of the problems with trade was knowing what you were actually buying from a producer in another country. France had only just started to use the metric system at the end of the 18th century, and the rest of the world used a number of different, localised systems.

In 1819, the Government tried to take the lead in establishing the relationship between weights and measures of different countries, and this work was to be done at the Royal Mint on Tower Hill. From the Morning Herald on the 6th of February 1819:

“The commercial world will learn with satisfaction that a plan has been commenced, under the auspices of the British Government, for determining the relative contents of the weights and measures of all trading countries. This important object is to be accomplished by procuring from abroad correct copies of Foreign standards, and comparing them with those of England at his Majesty’s Mint. Such a comparison, which could be effected only at a moment of universal peace, has never been attempted on a plan sufficiently general or systematic; and hence the errors and corrections which abound in Foreign tables of weights and measures, even in works of the highest authority.

In order, therefore to remedy and inconvenience so perplexing in commerce, Viscount Castlereagh, has, by recommendation of the Board of Trade, issued a circular directing all the British Consulates abroad to send home copies of the principal standards used within their respective consulates, verified by the proper authorities, and accompanied by explanatory papers and other documents relative to the subject. The dispatches and packages transmitted are deposited at the Royal Mint, where the standards are to be forthwith compared.”

Looking along East Smithfield, the street that forms the southern boundary to the Royal Mint estate, part of the upper floor of the James Johnson and Robert Smirke building can just be seen:

As well as the metals used for day to day coinage, the Royal Mint was responsible for measuring the quality of, and the production of gold and silver coins.

All coinage minted at the Royal Mint was sent to the Bank of England for distribution, and the Royal Mint issued an annual report on the quantity of types of coins and metals that they had produced, as well as coins that had been returned to the Royal Mint as worn or withdrawn. In the 1903 report, the Royal Mint stated that they had produced in the previous two years:

These numbers may not look large by today’s standards, however using the Bank of England inflation calculator, £7,993,701 as the total for 1902, would today be £851,292,858 (although this is not an easy comparison, as the value of different metals such as Gold have changed in a different way to inflation).

The report also includes details of the significant amounts of gold and silver that were being brought into the country as well as being exported.

There were complex rules for those involved with the smelting of precious metals such as Gold at the Royal Mint. These once included not allowing workers out of their work place for the entirety of their shift, and only releasing them to go home when the amount of gold had been checked against that at the start of the shift, with the worker then being issued with a certificate releasing them from their day’s work.

Whilst today Gold coins are not in common usage, they are still produced at the Royal Mint’s south Wales facility, although this is mainly for investment and collecting purposes.

You can today buy a quarter ounce Britannia Gold bullion coin (999.9 fine gold) for £680. The Royal Mint also produces Gold bullion bars, however if you sell, these are subject to Capital Gains Tax, whilst Gold Bullion coins are exempt from CGT due to their classification as legal British currency, although the £680 Britannia Gold bullion coin has a denomination of £25, so I doubt you will get one of these in your change, the value today being aligned with the metal of the coin rather than the denomination.

The view looking east along East Smithfield, the tall building on the left of the street is part of the Royal Mint estate, and is planned to be demolished, and replaced by a new building that runs along the eastern side of the estate:

Although a large site, the growth of the Royal Mint has raised questions about the location over many years. In 1881 there was the possibility of moving to a site on the Thames embankment, which had been completed in the previous decades. This proposal was turned down by the Select Committee on the London City Lands Bill who determined that the existing site and buildings were more than sufficient for the demands likely to made on the Royal Mint, with a few alterations made to the existing buildings.

To the east of the Royal Mint is the appropriately named Royal Mint Estate:

There are concerns about the impact of the embassy development on the Royal Mint estate, privacy, security, the potential impact of any demonstrations against the embassy etc.

In the above estate plan, Cartwright Street is the street along the right hand edge. There is a narrow row of flats along the right of this street, and then the existing buildings of the Royal Mint estate loom large, buildings that will be replaced by those of the Chinese Embassy.

The Royal Mint tells us a number of stories.

The move to south Wales after several hundreds of years in London was about the need for more space and the city being less of an attractive site for industrial processes. There was probably also a financial factor with the new site being cheaper, and less expensive than an update to the London site.

The Royal Mint continues to operate in south Wales, however the centuries of growth is now probably followed by decline with the growing reduction in the use of cash, and today the Royal Mint is now building on the demand for gold, a metal whose price has risen considerably over the last few years.

The future story of the Royal Mint, Tower Hill site also tells the story of changing global politics, the rise of China, and the decisions that the Government makes on the future of the site will show how we respond to changing global politics and how we make use of key, landmark historical sites in the city.

It will be interesting to see the decision making in the coming months and the eventual outcome for this historic site.

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Hicks’s Hall – The Original Middlesex Sessions House

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Two tickets remaining for my walk “The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain” on Sunday the 31st August. Click here for details and booking.

Charterhouse Street runs along the northern edge of Smithfield Market. St. John Street is one of the streets that turns off north from Charterhouse Street, and from the junction, we can look up St. John Street, to the point where the street widens out, and there is a tree in the centre:

We can see the way St. John Street widens out for a short distance in the following map extract  (map © OpenStreetMap contributors):

The following photo shows this relatively large area of open space, with the widened street passing either side of a central tree and bike racks:

I mentioned in the post on Blackfriars a couple of weeks ago how streets often retain the outline of what was there many years ago, and so it is with this space in St. John Street:

As it was in this space that Hicks’s Hall was built, and in Rocque’s 1746 map of London, we can see the building in the middle of the space, opposite Peter’s Lane and St. John’s Lane, showing that Hicks’s Hall was where the tree and bike rack are located today:

Hicks’s Hall was the first, dedicated Middlesex Sessions House. A place where a court sat, and criminal trials took place.

Hicks’s Hall was built in 1612 by Sir Baptist Hicks, a rich silk merchant, who lived in Soper Lane in the City, as well as having a house in Kensington.

There was a need for a dedicated Sessions House, as prior to the construction of Hicks’s Hall, Middlesex magistrates had used a number of local Inns, places which were not ideal to carry out a trial and to dispense justice.

An account of the opening of Hicks’s Hall reads: “Sir Baptist Hicks, Knight, one of the justices of the county builded a very stately Session House of brick and stone, with all offices thereunto belonging, at his own proper charge, and upon Wednesday, the 13th of January, this year, 1612, by which time this house was fully furnished, there assembled twenty-six justices of the county, being the first day of their meeting in that place, where they were all feasted by Sir Baptist Hicks, and then they all with one consent, gave it a proper name, and called it Hicks’s Hall, after the name of the founder, who then freely gave the house to them and their successors for ever. until this time, the Justices of Middlesex held their usual meeting in a common inn, called the Castle (Smithfield Bars).”

Numerous trials of many different types of criminal cases were held at Hicks’s Hall, and just a brief search of newspaper records reveals hundreds of reports. The following are a small example as crimes also illustrate life in the city. They are all from the 50 years from 1700 to 1750:

  • 24th January, 1723 – This Day, Mr. Ogden was tried at Hicks’s Hall for Cursing the King, which was plainly proved, but some of the evidence disposed that he was very much in Drink, and that he was esteemed a person very much effected to His Majesty, and often drank his Health. The Jury, after a short stay, brought him in Guilty
  • 21st October, 1727 – Two Men who had been convicted at Hicks’s Hall of a Misdemeanour in assaulting the Countess of Winchester in her Coach at Chelsea, with intent to Rob, and were sentenced to be whipt from Westminster Hall Gate to the end of Cabbage Lane in Petty France for the same (the sentence was not carried out as there appears to be a problem with the way the trial was carried out).
  • 15th April, 1730 – On Thursday at the Sessions at Hicks’s Hall, a Soldier having made Oath directly contrary to what he had sworn before, was taken into custody, and a Bill of Indictment for Perjury ordered to be brought against him
  • 24th May, 1733 – On Thursday at Hicks’s Hall, one Dwyer an Irishmen, and a Serjeant in the French Army, was convicted on several Indictments, for seducing Men to list themselves in the Service of the King of France; the Fact was proved very plain upon him, and the Court upon an Indictment sentenced him to pay a Fine of 1s and to suffer one year’s Imprisonment, and upon further Indictment a Fine of £50 and to find Sureties for his good behaviour for five years
  • 21st December, 1734 – Yesterday eight Butchers, who exposed to Sale on the Lord’s Day quantities of Beef and Mutton in a Place called Cow-Cross, near Smithfield, were by the Court of Justices at Hicks’s Hall fined 13s, 4d each, and some of them for a second offence, £1, 6s, 8d and were severely reprimanded by the Justices for such vile practices, and acquainted, that if they ever did so again, the Punishment would be more severe
  • 13th July, 1745 – Last Tuesday three Master Barbers were committed to Clerkenwell Bridewell by the Justices at Hicks’s Hall, for exercising their trades on the Lord’s Day and refusing to pay the fine

Hicks’s Hall from Old and New London. The print is recorded as being of the hall in 1750:

Thousands of cases were tried at Hicks’s Hall, and these were mainly of local crimes, however Hicks’s Hall was also used for trials of national importance and notoriety, for example when Hicks’s Hall played a prominent part in the actions of King Charles II against those who were responsible for the death of his father, King Charles I.

The trial of twenty nine of these Regicides (the Commissioners who had signed the warrant for the King’s execution, or who had a major part in his trial or execution) commenced at Hicks’s Hall on Tuesday the 9th of October 1669, and ended at the Old Bailey on Friday the 19th of October 1660.

Just ten days, including a weekend, which was not long for the trial of 29 people who were charged with crimes that carried some of the most extreme punishments, however I suspect there was little doubt as to the outcome.

The full account of the trial was published in a book which recorded the details of the trial, exchanges between prosecution and those charged, words of the Judge, background to the trial, a brief biography of those charged etc.

The long Preface to the books make an interesting read. It provides a whole range of justifications as to why the crimes committed by the Regicides were against the unity of the country, Christian religious principles, and the preface also tries to explain how those accused could have found themselves in such a position.

The following couple of paragraphs from the Preface are perhaps just as relevant today, as it was then:

“But let us examine a little into this Mystery of Enthusiasm and see by what means People arrive to this high Degree of Infatuation, and what are the several Steps which they take towards it.

The main Foundation of it is, no doubt, a large Stock of Pride, and a singular Fondness, which Men are apt to have for their own Sentiments and Opinions. Nothing is more common than for Men of this Spirit to run into Parties and Factions, and struggle hard for Superiority.”

To set the scene, the book also has a “Summary of the Dark Proceedings of the CABAL at Westminster, preparatory to the Murder of His Late Sacred Majesty, taken out of their own Journal-Book”.

The trial commenced at Hicks’s Hall on Tuesday the 9th of October 1660. The Court was directed by a large number of the great and the good, those who supported the restored Monarchy, including the Lord Mayor of the City of London, the Lord Chancellor of England, the Lord Treasurer of England, Dukes, Earls, Knights, Baronets and Justices.

A jury of 21 was sworn in consisting of Baronets, Knights, Esquires and Gentlemen.

To open the trail at Hicks’s Hall, the Lord Chief Baron, the head of His Majesty’s High Court of Exchequer spoke to the Jury.

Much of his speech was about the position of the King. That the Law Books describe the King as “the Lieutenant of God”, that the “King is immediate from God and hath no superior”, and that “If the King is immediate under God, he derives his authority from no body else; if the King has an Imperial Power, if the King ne Head of the Commonwealth, Head of the Body Politick, of the Body Politick owes him Obedience, truly I think it is an undenied consequence he must needs be Superior over them”.

Basically, although this was a trial, there could only be one outcome, and that those involved in the execution of King Charles I were automatically guilty, as only God was superior to the King.

The book also includes a brief biography of all those on trial. These are fascinating as they show the contempt in which the regicides were held. Below is a sample from the biographies from four of those on trial:

  • Colonel Thomas Harrison was the Son of a Butcher or Grasier at Newcastle-under-line in Staffordshire. After he had been educated in some Grammar Learning, he was placed with a Hulk, or Hulker, an Attorney in Clifford’s Inn, and when out of his Time became a kind of Petty-fogger. But finding little Profit arise from that, he took Arms for Parliament at the Breaking-out of Rebellious War, and by his Enthusiastical Preaching, and great Pretence to Piety, he so far recommended himself to the deluded Army, that he was advanced from one Post to another till he became a Major. He was Cromwell’s great Friend and Confident in all his Designs
  • Col. Adrian Scroop was descended of a Good family in Buckinghamshire. He was a great Puritan, and Stickler against Episcopacy, which made him take Arms against the King. Though he was no Parliament Man, yet he was drawn in, as he pretended by Oliver Cromwell, to be One in the Black List for Trying the King.
  • Mr. John Carew was born in Cornwell, of a very ancient family there, but had the Misfortune to be educated in Factious Principles, and was, like Harrison, a Fifth Monarchy Man, as appears in his trial. This made him an utter Enemy, not only to the King, but to all Government as a single Person, so that Oliver’s Usurpation was as hateful to him as the Royal Sovereignty, which he had destroyed
  • Gregory Clement is hardly worth mentioning. He was at first a Merchant, but failing in that, he sought to thrive by a New Trade in Bishops Lands, wherein he got a considerable Estate. He was turned out of the Rump-Parliament for lying with his Maid at Greenwich, but was taken in again when they were restored after Oliver’s Interruption. His guilty Conscience, and his Ignorance, would not suffer him to make any Plea at the Bar, or any Speech or Prayer at the Gallows

Poor old Gregory Clement seems to have been singled out for special contempt.

John Carew was considered especially dangerous as he was described as a Fifth Monarchy Man. Fifth Monarchists were a non-conformist religious sect that believed the killing of King Charles I marked the end of the fourth monarchy (the rule by kings), and would herald in the fifth monarchy when rule would be by Saints and by those “saved”, and would lead to the Second Coming.

The above four examples of those on trial were all found guilty and were all executed along with other Regicides during three very bloody days at Charing Cross::

  • Colonel Thomas Harrison was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on the 13th of October, 1660
  • Col. Adrian Scroop was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on the 17th of October, 1660
  • Mr. John Carew was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on the 15th of October, 1660
  • Gregory Clement was hanged, drawn and quartered at Charing Cross on the 17th of October, 1660

Others on trial at Hicks’s Hall and then at the old Bailey had a mix of sentences ranging from execution, life imprisonment down to a limited term of imprisonment.

Hicks’s Hall is also shown in William Morgan’s 1682 Map of London:

But why was there an open space in St. John Street allowing Hicks’s Hall to be built in 1612?

I suspect to answer that question, we need to go much further back in history, to the founding of the Priory of the Order of St John of Jerusalem in 1144 when 10 acres of land was granted to Jordan de Bricet in Clerkenwell. The following map from my post on the Priory and St. John’s Gate shows the boundary of the Priory.

The green oval is around the location of the space where Hicks’s Hall was built, and the blue rectangle is where a southern gatehouse was believed to have been built at the main entrance to the overall Priory complex. Research and excavations by the Museum of London Archaeology Service found mentions of tenements and possible evidence of a timber gatehouse at the site  (map © OpenStreetMap contributors):

So if there was a gatehouse here, there would probably have been some degree of open space in front of the gatehouse, and this would have been where Hicks’s Hall was built centuries later, and is still a wider open space in the street today, with a tree in the centre.

Looking back at the location of Hicks’s Hall, and the possible location of a Gatehouse to the Priory of the Order of St John of Jerusalem is to the right of the tree:

Hicks’s Hall was used as a Session House until the late 1789s. By which time it was in a very poor state, was a bit on the small side for the work being conducted in the building, and the location of the building in the middle of St. John Street was not ideal, given the increase in traffic along the street since the building had originally been constructed.

Hicks’s Hall had been an important building in London, for as well as being a place where criminal cases were tried, it was also one of the places in the city from where distances were measured, and Hicks’s Hall was the measuring point for many places to the north of the city.

There is an interesting story from 1773 which shows how Hicks’s Hall was an important landmark, and also a staggering example of endurance and long distance travel.

On Monday the 29th of November 1773, Mr Foster Powell set off from Hicks’s Hall to deliver a letter to a Mr. Clarke, a watchmaker in York. Rather than travel on a horse, Foster Powell walked the entire route, including the return.

Staring at Hicks’s Hall, on the first day he covered the 88 miles to Stamford, on the second the 72 miles to Doncaster. On day three, Wednesday he set off from Doncaster and arrived in York in the afternoon where he delivered the letter. He then went to the Golden Anchor for some refreshment and an hour and a half of sleep, then later the same afternoon he set off for the return journey.

He reached Hicks’s Hall on the Saturday at four in the morning, having covered 394 miles in slightly over 5 days.

Foster Powell was known for his long distance walks, and it was reported that on many of these, locals would try and keep up with him on the route, but no one could for anything more than a couple of minutes. Off his other walks, one was a bet that he could not walk from London to Canterbury and back within 24 hours. He manged the return journey in 23 hours, 53 minutes, winning a bet of 100 Guineas.

At some point in the 1780s, Hicks’s Hall was demolished. It was because of the state of repair, size and location, and also because a new Middlesex Sessions House had recently been completed, and to find this building we need to take St. John’s Lane, the street opposite the location of Hicks’s Hall.

Walk down this street, and through St. John’s Gate:

Turn left on reaching Clerkenwell Road, and a short distance along, the following building can be seen on the northern side of the street:

The building is the Grade II* listed Old Sessions House, and a walk up from Clerkenwell Road to Clerkenwell Green provides a view of the front of the building. A far more impressive and substantial building than its predecessor, Hicks’s Hall, appears to have been:

Following my post on Archway last week, where the Arms of the old county of Middlesex can still be seen on the bridge, the Arms can also be seen on the pediment above the columns at the front of the Middlesex Sessions House:

Although the Sessions House at Clerkenwell Green was a completely new building, for some years after the transfer to the new building, it was also known as Hicks’s Hall, as this image from 1805 shows by the title of the print:

Credit: London Museum. Used under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

The use of the name Hicks’s Hall for the new Middlesex Sessions House seems to have been common until the late 1840s, with the last newspaper report I could find of a trial using the name Hicks’s Hall being in 1848.

Many reports from the time recorded that the new building included a “fine Jacobean chimney piece” from the old Hicks’s Hall. The following inscription was apparently on the chimney piece: “Sir Baptist Hicks of Kensington in the county of Middlesex, knight, one of the justices of the peace of this county of Middlesex of his worthy disposition and at his own proper charge built this session house in the year of our Lord 1612 and gave it to the justices of the peace of this county and their successors for the sessions house for ever, 1618”.

The new building is Grade II* listed, and I can find no reference to the chimney piece in the listing.

I find it strange that, although the space occupied by the original Hicks’s Hall remains, I could not find any plaque recording that the building once stood in St. John Street.

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 executions and life imprisonment for many, the site of Hicks’s Hall must deserve some form of site record.

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