Category Archives: London History

The Treachery of Sir George Downing

Along with streets and places such as Piccadilly, Leicester Square, and Oxford Street, Downing Street is probably one of the more recognisable London street names, not just in the United Kingdom, but across the world, given the number of tourists who peer through the gates that separate Downing Street from Whitehall.

Number 10 Downing Street has been home to the Prime Minister (or more correctly the First Lord of the Treasury) since 1735, when the house was given to Sir Robert Walpole.

There have been many gaps in occupancy by Prime Minsters, however a central London house was considered a benefit of the role. It was only in the early 20th century that it became a full time residence of Prime Ministers.

Security has long been an issue. It was not so long ago that the public could walk down the street, with the street finally being closed to the public in 1982, and in response to ever growing threats, security measures such as physical defences and armed police have been added and enhanced.

So today, this is the best view of the street for tourists and members of the public who do not have official business in any of the buildings and institutions that line Downing Street:

The street has seen so many Prime Ministers, newly elected, arrive in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and expectation, only to leave having been rejected either by the electorate, or through the actions of their former colleagues.

For a rejected Prime Minister, perhaps the most difficult way to leave is when you have been rejected by former colleagues. Those who once supported and worked with you, and with whom you had a shared vision of the future.

Whilst this must be incredibility frustrating, it is not as bad as the treachery of the person who was once the land owner and who gave his name to the street, who through his treachery, condemned former colleagues to the worst death penalty that the State could impose, convicted of being a traitor and being hung, drawn and quartered.

For this, we have to go back to the Civil War, Commonwealth and Restoration of the 1640s, 1650s and early 1660s to explore the work of Sir George Downing:

The source of the above paining is from the Harvard Art Museum, and the image title is “Portrait of a Man, probably Sir George Downing (1624-1684)”. It is often difficult to be absolutely certain of those depicted in paintings of some age (see my recent post on the Gresham’s).

The record for the painting states that on the stretcher is written “Sir George Downing Bart./ born August 1623–Embassador [sic]/ to the States General 1659-Son of/ Emmanuel Downing & Lucy Winthrop/ 4th daughter of Adam Winthrop-/ The nephew of John Winthrop/ Governor of Massachusetts–His/ diplomatic services…[illegible]… are well known to history.”, which does add some confidence that this is Sir George Downing.

George Downing was born in Dublin around 1623 or 1624, His father was Emanual Downing, a Barrister and Puritan, and his mother was Lucy Winthrop, the sister of John Winthrope who was the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, an English settlement on the east coast of America which had been founded in 1628.

This family relationship with Massachusetts resulted in the family moving to the colony in 1638, where they settled in Salem.

Harvard College had been founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony on the 18th of October 1636, and was the first college set-up in the American colonies.

The name Harvard comes from John Harvard who was an English Puritan minister and benefactor of the college, which included leaving his library of 400 books and half of his estate to the new college.

George Downing attended Harvard College, and was one of the first group of nine who graduated from the college in 1642.

After Harvard, Downing moved to the West Indies where he became a preacher, and in the early 1640s he returned to England, where he found the country in the middle of a Civil War, and he quickly aligned with the forces opposing King Charles I, joining the regiment of Colonel John Okey as a chaplain.

Downing was fully supportive of the actions of Cromwell and the New Model Army in the defeat of the Royalist cause, and he was recognised and promoted quickly to become Cromwell’s Scoutmaster General in Scotland, a role that was basically the head of a spying and intelligence operation, attempts to infiltrate Royalist plots and to turn Royalist supporters to the Republican cause.

During the years of the Commonwealth in the 1650’s, Downing’s skills became valuable in the diplomatic service, and he became the Commonwealth’s ambassador to the Netherlands, where he also developed a network of spies, and passed information on Royalist plots back to John Thurloe, who was Cromwell’s main spymaster.

The later part of the 1650s were a difficult time for the Commonwealth, the main issue being what would happen to the Commonwealth after the death of Oliver Cromwell. Who would succeed Cromwell, how would such a decision be made, could Cromwell take on the role of a monarch and make the head of the Commonwealth a hereditary title?

Downing supported and urged Cromwell to take on the role of a monarch along the lines of the old constitution that had existed before the execution of King Charles I.

To those holding senior positions in the army and the Commonwealth, it must have seemed that the Commonwealth was in a strong position, the country would remain a Republic. Monarchist plots and uprisings had been supressed, and the future King Charles II seemed to be in a weak position in exile on the Continent.

It was then surprising how quickly after Cromwell’s death, that the whole structure of the Commonwealth collapsed so rapidly, and King Charles II was restored as the monarch of the United Kingdom in 1661, just three years after the death of Oliver Cromwell.

George Downing had been watching how sentiments towards the monarchy were changing and started to plan how he would survive and prosper after the restoration.

This involved actions such as ingratiating himself within the court of the future Charles II, passing information on to the Royalists and claiming that he had been drawn in to the Republican cause rather than being an active initiator of the Civil War and the execution of King Charles I.

Whilst Downing had supported the trial and execution of the former king, he was not a judge or participant in the trial, and did not sign the execution warrant of the king:

Source: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Which is an important lesson if you are involved in any plotting or support of a controversial cause – never leave anything in writing.

Despite his involvement and support of the Republican cause, Downing’s efforts to show support for the monarchy were such that after the restoration of the monarchy, he was knighted, and continued in his role as the ambassador to the Netherlands, and it was in the following couple of years that he was to really show his ruthless streak and what he would do to further his own power, position and wealth.

Regicides

After the restoration, the monarchy turned their anger on those who had been involved in the trial of King Charles I, who had signed his execution warrant, or who had had a significant role in his execution.

Known as the Regicides, those who had been responsible in some way for the execution of the King were exempted from the Indemnity and Oblivion Act of 1660, an act that gave a general pardon for all those who had committed a crime during the Civil War and the Commonwealth (other than crimes such as murder, unless covered by a licence from the king, witchcraft and piracy were also not covered by the general pardon).

A number of the Regicides had already died, including Oliver Cromwell and Henry Ireton. Others gave themselves up in the hope of a fair trial and avoidance of a traitors death, whilst others fled abroad in fear of their lives.

Three of those who fled, and who would meet their deaths through the actions of George Downing, were:

John Okey

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist, published by John Thane line engraving, published 1794 NPG D27161© National Portrait Gallery, London

John Okey had been born in St. Giles, and like many others who were part of the Parliamentary / Republican / New Model Army forces opposing the king during the Civil war, Okey had enlisted in the army, rising through the ranks to become a major, then a colonel, of a regiment of dragoons (mounted infantry).

George Downing had joined Okey’s regiment as a chaplain, and was well known to Okey.

When Charles I was brought to trial, Okey was one of the 80 who were actively involved in the trial, and attended on most days, and the action that would infuriate the restored monarchy was that he was one of the 59 who had signed the warrant for the execution of the king.

Miles Corbet

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist, published by William Richardson
line engraving, published 1810 NPG D30024© National Portrait Gallery, London

Miles Cobet was the MP for Yarmouth and also a Lawyer.

The print of Corbet shown above has the abbreviation Coll. in front of his last name. This may have been an honorary titles, as he did not serve during any military actions during the Civil War. He was though one of the founders of the Eastern Association, which was a military alliance formed to defend East Anglia on behalf of the Parliamentary forces, and he also served as an army commissioner in Ireland, responsible for overseeing the affairs of the army, and with allocation of land within Ireland to soldiers as reward for their service, and often in lieu of wages.

His role in the trial of Charles I was as part of the High Court of Justice, and as one of those who signed the execution warrant.

John Barkstead

Creative Commons Licence – after Unknown artist line engraving, published 1810 NPG D9319© National Portrait Gallery, London

John Barkstead was originally a goldsmith in the Strand, but who joined the Parliamentary forces, becoming a captain of a foot company in the regiment of Colonel Venn. He was Governor of Reading for a short time, commanded a regiment at the siege of Colchester, and was appointed as one of the judges at the trial of Charles I.

He also signed the Warrant for the Execution of Charles I.

He was appointed Lieutenant of the Tower of London, but used this position to further his own wealth by extorting money from prisoners and generally running a cruel regime.

He was rumoured to have hidden a large sum of money in the Tower of London, and in 1662, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he was busy in a discovery for Lord Sandwich and Sir H. Bennett of the cellars of the Tower for this hidden money.

By signing the warrant for the execution of the King, Okey, Corbet and Barkstead had also signed their own death warrants, as this would be their fate – a public traitors death in London.

Escape and Capture

In fear of their lives, with the restoration of the monarchy, Okey, Corbet and Barkstead fled to Europe, with Okey and Barkstead making their way to Hanau in Germany, where they were accepted by the town and given a level of protection. Corbet had made his way to the Netherlands where he was in hiding.

For Barkstead, Hanau seemed a natural, long term home, as the town was well known for the manufacture of jewellery, and Barkstead’s background as a goldsmith in the Strand would come in use.

As Hanau seemed to be a long term home for Okey and Barkstead, they wanted their wives to join them, and a plan was put together for them to meet their wives in the Netherlands, from where they would all travel back to Hanau.

They believed that they would be safe in the Netherlands and had assurances that Downing had not been given any instructions to hunt for them. The Netherlands was also known for tolerance and for putting commerce before any other concern.

They travelled to Delft, and met up with Corbet, who was keen to meet with some friends after his time in hiding.

Downing meanwhile had been putting together plans for how he would find and capture any regicides that were living or passing through the Netherlands. He was worried about the repercussions of capturing any regicides and transporting them back to London without the approval of the Dutch, and he had problems with getting an arrest warrant from the Dutch authorities.

After much persuasion, Downing received a blank arrest warrant, which he would be able to use against any of the regicides that he could discover in the Netherlands, and it would soon be put into use.

Through Downing’s network of spies, he discovered that Okey, Corbet and Barkstead were all in Delft, and just as they were about to split up, Downing and his men pounced on the house, and found the three sitting around a fire, smoking pipes. and they quickly rounded up the three regicides. They had their hands and feet manacled and were thrown in a damp prison cell, whilst Downing finalised their transport back to England.

Whilst they were in captivity, the three were visited by Dutch politicians who assured the three that they would be freed, however Downing used his skills to threaten and bully the Dutch on the possible consequences of such actions, and the Dutch conceded, and let Downing continue to hold the three and arrange their transport.

Another challenge was the Bailiff of Delft who was not cooperative and threatened to derail Downing’s plans. Downing’s response to this was another indication that he would do anything to have his way. He made inquiries about the bailiff and learnt that “he was one who would do nothing without money”, so Downing offered him a bribe – a reward if he would keep the prisoners safe until they were finally in Downing’s hands.

There were other problems. The magistrates of Amsterdam sent a message to the authorities in Delft that they should “let the Gates of the prison be opened and so let them escape “.

The bailiff warned Downing that the “common people might go about to force the prison and let them out”, and the authorities in Delft made efforts to provide counsel for the regicides.

Downing finally received an order from the Dutch authorities addressed to the bailiff in Delft to release the prisoners to Downing. The bailiff was concerned that there would be a rising “if there were but the least notice of an intention to carry them away”.

Downing had already arranged for an English frigate to be available, and with the aid of some sailors from the frigate, and a small boat, he:

“resolved in the dead of the night to get a boate into a litle channell which came neare behinde the prison, and at the very first dawning of the day without so much as giving any notice to the seamen I had pro
vided . . . forthwith to slip them downe the backstaires . . . and so accordingly we did, and there was not the least notice in the Towne thereof, and before 5 in the morning the boate was without the Porto of
Delft, where I delivered them to Mr. Armerer . . . giving him direction not to put them a shoare in any place, but to go the whole way by water to the Blackamore Frigat at Helverdsluice.”

The Frigate Blackamore carried the three prisoners back to England, where they were imprisoned in the Tower awaiting a trial, which was not really a trial as in the view of Parliament and the Monarchy, they had demonstrated their guilt by fleeing the country. The trial was a formality to confirm they had the right people.

Having been found guilty of treason, on the 19th of April 1662, the three men were transported from the Tower to Tyburn, each tied to a separate sledge as they were drawn through the crowds, with much mocking abuse from Royalists. Barkstead left the Tower first, a place where he had once been the Lieutenant, and raised his hat to his wife who was waving from a window.

On arriving at Tyburn, each man gave a speech to the crowd, and were then put on a cart under the gallows. When they were ready, the cart was pulled away, and they hung for 15 minutes, before being taken down, and were then drawn and quartered, all in front of a large crowd.

Barkstead’s head was placed on a spike overlooking the Tower of London, mocking his former role at the Tower.

Before his death, Okey had sent a message of obedience to the restored monarchy, and as a reward for this, his family were allowed to bury his mutilated body in a vault in Stepney, however a large crowd gathered around Newgate where his body was being held, and fearing that this was a show of support for a traitor, the King swiftly changed his mind, and Okey’s body was hastily buried in the grounds of the Tower of London.

After the Regicides

Downing appears to have shown very little if any remorse or regret for his actions in the capture and execution of his three former colleagues, especially Okey, in whose regiment Downing had once served during the Civil War.

He acquired large estates and properties across the country and in London. He was one of the four Tellers of the Receipts of the Exchequer. He inspired the Navigation Act: “the foundation of our mercantile marine, and consequently of our navy, and consequently of our colonies and spheres of influence. He was also the direct cause of the Appropriation Act, an Act indispensable in every session, for government at home and one which has been appointed by all our self-governing colonies,” and he was instrumental in persuading the Dutch to exchange New Amsterdam, their colony on Long Island, for the British colony of Surinam in South America. New Amsterdam was then renamed as New York.

George Downing owned land near Westminster, and when the leaseholder died in 1682, Downing developed a cul-de-sac of more than twenty plain, brick built, three storey terrace houses, and he petitioned Charles II for permission to name this new street Downing Street.

Royal approval was granted, but he did not live to see the completion of the street as he died in July 1684 when he was 60, two years prior to work was finished.

The general view of Sir George Downing was that whilst clever, quick to action, ambitious and a very hard worker, he was also self serving, would shift his allegiance depending on changes in political and royal power, and as demonstrated with Okey, Corbet and Barkstead, this would also include the betrayal of his former friends and colleagues.

After the restoration, there were many who recognised Downing’s true character. After the capture of the regicides, Samuel Pepys’s wrote in his diary:

“This morning we had news from Mr. Coventry, that Sir G. Downing (like a perfidious rogue, though the action is good and of service to the King, yet he cannot with any good conscience do it) hath taken Okey, Corbet, and Barkestead at Delfe, in Holland, and sent them home in the Blackmore.”

Downing – a name associated with self perseveration to the extent that former colleagues and the cause for which they all worked, were betrayed, and now recorded in the name of the street where the Prime Minister resides.

Sources: I have been reading a number of books about the Civil War recently which I will list in a future post. My main source for the actions of Downing in the Netherlands and the capture of Okey, Corbet and Barkstead is from “Sir George Downing and the Regicides by Ralph C. H. Catterall in The American Historical Review, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Jan., 1912), and published by the Oxford University Press“.

Resources – The World Turned Upside Down

As today’s post is the first of a new month, it is a post where I cover some of the resources available if you are interested in discovering more about the history of London.

As today’s post has been about the fate of three of the regicides involved with the trial and execution of King Charles I, and George Downing, who supported both the Parliamentary cause and then swiftly converted to support the monarchy, today’s resource is a brilliant website full of resources covering everything Civil War, and events in London played a very significant role, not just during the Civil War, but the lead up to, the causes of the war, the Commonwealth and Protectorate, the people, politics and religion, the restoration and later impact.

The website is The World Turned Upside Down:

The name of the website comes from the title of an English ballad published in the mid 1640s, when Parliament was implementing policies that tried to ban the more traditional celebrations of Christmas that the more Puritan and to an extent Baptist members of Parliament believed were associated with the Catholic religion, and that Christmas should be a more solemn event, without the drinking, feasting and joyous elements of the traditional Christmas:

Source: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The standout feature of the website are the podcasts. There are currently 112 on the site with more being gradually added (you can sign up for alerts). Each podcast explores a different aspect of the Civil War and is by an expert in the subject.

For each podcast there is also a transcript, glossary, timeline, maps and further reading.

The first four podcasts in the list are shown in the screenshot below:

There is so much in the news about the destructive elements of social media, AI and the Internet, but the World Turned Upside Down is one of those sites that restores your faith in what the Internet can deliver when a community of real experts put together such a resource – which is freely available.

Even if you have only a passing interest in the mid 17th century and the Civil War, the site and podcasts are well worth a visit, and again, the link to click for the site is: The World Turned Upside Down

A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London

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The level of pollution in the River Thames has long been a problem, even in 2026, decades of under investment in sewage treatment has resulted in effluent being dumped in the river. Hopefully something the Tideway Tunnel will help resolve.

The state of the river in the 19th century was far worse than it is today. The rapid rise of London’s population and industry resulted in large quantities of effluent being dumped, untreated in the river.

Similar to the Tideway Tunnel, Joseph Bazalgette’s sewer system and pumping works of the 1860s and 1870s acted as an interceptor, catching sewage before it was dumped in the river, and routing it to new treatment works.

Before construction of this new system, the condition of the river was an open sewer, and what was worse, the river was used as a source of water by the water companies that supplied the city. Even the companies that relied on other sources were frequently drawing on heavily polluted water.

In April 1850, Arthur Hill Hassall published “A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplied to the Inhabitants of London and the Suburban Districts”, where he reported on an investigation into the sources of water used by the London water companies, and examined the condition of their water supplies using a microscope to see what material the water contained.

Arthur Hill Hassell was the son of a Doctor and was born in Teddington in 1817. He was a student in Dublin and apprenticed to his uncle, Sir James Murray, a Dublin physician, and whilst in Dublin he published his first work “A Catalogue of Irish Zoophytes”, where he used a microscope to examine microscopic organisms, which at the time were believed to be somewhere between plants and animals.

After graduating, he returned to London and setup in general practice in Notting Hill, but he continued to be fascinated in what could be revealed by the microscope, and his next publications were “A History of British Freshwater Algae” (1845), and “The Microscopic Anatomy of the Human Body” (1849).

His 1850 publication would reveal the horrendous state of the water supplied to the residents of London.

In his description of the method used, he states that he collected a wine bottle full of water from the output of the different water companies, the river, and the sewer system, and examined samples of this water under a microscope.

Arthur Hill Hassall:

Licence: Public Domain Mark, Credit: Arthur Hill Hassall. Photograph. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.

In 1850, there were a number of privately owned water companies that supplied different areas of London. These were, along with the main source of their water as listed in Hassall’s book:

New River Company (source – springs around Ware in Hertfordshire and the River Lea)
East London Company (source – the River Lea near Old Ford, Stratford, below Lea Bridge)
Hampstead Company (source – several large ponds near to Hampstead Heath)
Kent Company (source – the River Ravensbourne)
Lambeth Company (source – the River Thames at Lambeth)
Vauxhall Company (source – the River Thames at Vauxhall)
Southwark Company (source – the River Thames, also at Vauxhall)
Chelsea Company (source – the River Thames, near Battersea)
West Middlesex Company (source – the River Thames at Barnes)
Grand Junction Company (source – the River Thames at Brentford)

In his examination of the water under the microscope, he was looking for organic and inorganic matter, including specific organic material that he described as “complex in organisation, endowed with life, and in many cases possessed of active powers of locomotion”.

Using the scientific understanding and terminology of the time, he described this type of organic material as:

Infusoria – animal productions, and include a great variety of singularly organized atoms, most of which are invisible to the common eye
Entomostraca – constitute a well defined division of Crustacea, or the Crab tribe and are remarkable for having their bodies enclosed in shell-like cases
Conferveae – vegetable productions of very simple organisation, consisting of cells or utricles, placed end to end and joined together, forming, by their union, threads often of extreme fineness
Desmideae – also vegetable productions, exhibiting however, some affinities to animals, so that, for a long time, it was a matter of doubt and dispute to which of the kings of the organic world they really belonged.
Diatomaceae – unite in their organization the characters of both plants and animals, insomuch that it is still uncertain which they really are. They are readily distinguished from all other organisms by their colour, which is brown, and by the fact that they are furnished with skeletons of Silex, or flint; it is this which renders them so durable – indeed, almost indestructible.

These are rather dry descriptions of what could be found in samples of water, so in a perfect example of a picture is worth a thousand words, Hassall included colour illustrations of what he saw whilst looking through the microscope at the samples of water collected in a wine bottle from across London.

Firstly, the Thames at Brentford and at Hungerford (near where the railway bridge is located today between the South Bank and Charing Cross):

Comparing these two illustrations shows that whilst the Thames at Brentford was bad enough, in central London there was a dense collection of both organic and inorganic matter.

Hassell adds little notes to show how he collected the water, and for Hungerford he added that the water was collected “two hours after the steam-boats ceased to ply”. Presumably, then as now, powered boats on the river churn up the sediment and prevent it from settling, and Hassall wanted to collect his samples in as near a natural state as possible.

As well as the view through the microscope, he added that the water from Hungerford presented a dirty and opaque appearance, and also contained dead organic matter, very considerable, both animal and vegetable, ochreous substance; down of wheat.

Hassall was surprised by the amount of living matter that he found in the water at Brentford, and he conducted further tests along the river, and came to the conclusion that “these have brought to light the singular and important fact, that Thames water, from Brentford in one direction, to Woolwich in the opposite, warms with living productions”, and that they are met with the greatest abundance near to central London and in the neighbourhood of the bridges.

He also added the following description of what a walker alongside the Thames in the mid 19th century would see:

“In one spot he will notice the carcases of dead animals, rotting, festering, swarming with flies and maggots, and from which a pestilential odour proceeds, contaminating the air around; in another he will see a variety of refuse borne along by the lazy current of the stream – decaying vegetables, the leaves and stalks of cabbages, grass from a recently mown lawn, excrement; in another he will remark on the commotion of the water, occasioned by the bubbling up of some noxious gas; and still further on, he will perceive some sewer; discharging its corrupt and filthy contents into the bed of the river, and causing the water around to assume an inky blackness.

Should the tide be out, the observer should now abandon the towing path, take a boat, and row to some of the shallower parts of the stream, If here he plunges his hand into the water, he will bring up a dirty and slimy mass. Entire acres (I might say without exaggeration) of a substance similar to the above may frequently noticed on the recession of the tide.”

To show what was being put into the Thames, he included a picture and description of sewer water, which contained large amounts of both organic and inorganic matter, much dead and decomposing matter, a black carbonaceous matter on which the inky colour of many sewer waters depend, and large quantities of sulphated hydrogen.

All this was being pumped into the river, frequently not that far from where a water company was drawing water to supply the residents and industries of the city.

Drawings of the view through the microscope of sewer water, and the first of the water companies examined- the Grand Junction Company:

The Grand Junction Company took their water from the Thames at Brentford, at a place which Hassall described as being “within reach of the sewage of that large and dirty town”.

Next came the West Middlesex Company, which took water from the Thames at Barnes, along with a sample of Cistern water:

The lower image shows Cistern Water, and the text explains that this was water from a cistern supplied by the Hampstead Water Company.

Cisterns were tanks where water was temporarily stored as part of the overall distribution system, between the source / reservoir, and the end user.

Hassall found numerous problems with the quality of the water in cisterns across London, and he had the follow general comment about cistern water “It may be observed, in general. that these waters contain the same forms of organic life as those encountered in the waters of several companies, with this important difference, however, that their numbers, for equal quantities of fluid, are usually much greater in the former than in the later”.

He goes on to explain that the samples he took from cisterns contained much greater quantities of living organisms, than the source water, for example:

The Chelsea Company is remarkable for its bunches of Ova cases
That of the Lambeth Company for its immense numbers of Bursaria and Paramecia
That of the Vauxhall Company for its hirsute worms or Annelida

Hassall makes the observation that the amount of life found in cisterns was dependent on the time of year (more growth when the weather was mild or warm) and also on whether the cisterns were frequently cleaned.

The Chelsea Company, who took their water from the Thames, near Battersea, and the Southwark Company, who took their water from the Thames near Vauxhall:

The water of the Southwark Company was described as being in the “worst condition in which it is conceivable any water to be, as regards its animalcular contents, in a worse state even than Thames water itself, as taken from the bed of the river”. Quite some achievement for the Southwark company to have their water described as being worse than the river water.

In the mid 19th century, the Southwark and Vauxhall Water Companies had combined. Most of the water companies had moved their supply sources to beyond the expanding city of London, looking for sources which did not have the same level of contamination as the Thames, along with methods of purification such as increased use of, and more complex design, of filtration beds, however the Southwark and Vauxhall Company still had their works in Battersea, as shown in the following map from 1894 (‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):

The site of the Southwark & Vauxhall Water Works would later become the site of Battersea Power Station, and if you walk through the power station building today, you are walking over the space once occupied by the central reservoir.

The Lambeth and New River Company’s water:

The Lambeth Company’s water “is procured from the river at Lambeth, and not far from a large sewer”.

In looking at the samples of water Hassall concluded that “the water of the Companies on the Surrey side of London, viz. the Southwark, Vauxhall, and Lambeth, is by far the worst of all those who take their supply from the Thames. They are demonstrably contaminated with more or less of the organic and decomposing matters, animal and vegetable, derived from sewer-water”.

In the above drawings, the lower is from the New River Company, who took water from the springs around the Hertfordshire town of Ware, along with the River Lea in Hertfordshire. This water was transported along a man-made river to the reservoir of the New River Company in northern Clerkenwell, from where it was distributed to consumers across the city.

See this post on New River Head and London’s Water Industry.

Hassall described that in the New River Company’s water, “living animalcules were not very numerous, but that it contained great numbers of Diatomaceous”, and that it also held abundant filaments of Fungi, dead organic matter, and much earthy matter, so even using a source well away from the polluted city did not mean that you had a clean supply to distribute to your consumers.

The water of the Hampstead Water Company was described as being generally bright and clear, but did contain numbers of Entomostraca and Infusoria.

The East London Company took their water supplies from the River Lea, and it was described as being similar to the water of the New River Company.

The Kent Company took their water from the Ravensbourne, and this water contained numerous species of the organic life that Hassall listed, along with much dead organic matter, and for good measure, quantities of grit.

Arthur Hassall was rather innovative in his thinking about sources of pollution in the Thames. He did not just look at the sources within central London, but considered the Thames as an overall system, comprising the core river, along with all the tributaries and the towns along the river and tributaries, as the inhabitants of all these towns were also putting all their rubbish, industrial waste and sewage indirectly into the Thames, and all this would eventually find its way to where the central London water companies were extracting their water.

Hassall used the 1841 census to illustrate the problem, and in the following table, he had added up the population of the towns along the Thames and tributaries above the town of Henley (Hassall used the name Isis for the river for its length from source to where it joins the River Thame by the village of Dorchester in Oxfordshire):

The following table shows the population along the Thames from Henley to London, as well as the towns along the tributaries that join along this section of the Thames:

This gave a total population of 2,316,273 living within the system of the Thames and its tributaries up to and including the city of London, according to the 1841 census (although it was higher than this as Hassall admits that there were some small towns where he had not been able to find the population).

It was not just the population along the river, but also the rapid growth of industry in London, and major towns in the river and tributary area, also produced polluted water as an industrial by-product, and frequently dumped this into the river system.

The state of the river was such that there were many cartoons emphasising the appalling state of the river, and the impact that it had on the health of the city’s residents, such as the following from Punch magazine in 1858:

Source and attribution: Punch Magazine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In the book, Hassall included a section on Remedial Considerations, where he offered suggestions for improving the quality of water supplied to Londoners.

In doing so, he does not consider cleaning up the river, rather by seeking cleaner supplies of source water. His reasons for assuming the state of the river will not change are:

“It has been shown, and the fact is established by incontrovertible evidence, that all those companies who take their water from the Thames draw it from a polluted source, and, as long as this river is employed as the outlet of all the sewage of so vast a city as London, so long must its water used by so many of the metropolitan companies be bad at its sources, it can scarcely be otherwise than impure when delivered to the public.”

The challenge was in finding new, clean sources of water. Hassall looked at the River Wandle, which had a source in springs near Croydon, along with a large pond, however he finds that the refuse of a gas-works, a tan yard. a slaughter house and the sewage of the town is poured into the pond, and hence the Wandle.

Similar issues are found with all the small rivers around the wider area, people, industry, and even cross contamination between streams and canals.

In the mid-19th century, it seems almost every possible source of water in the counties around London was polluted to a greater or lesser degree.

Artesian Wells were a possibility, as these draw water from deep below ground, however Hassall considers the “operation of boring deep into the bowels of the earth” as expensive, uncertain and unnecessary, and that we should really be using the abundant supplies of water that nature provides on the surface of the earth.

Hassall recommended that open reservoirs be covered up, that cisterns should be cleaned regularly, and that water in cisterns should be refreshed, being stored in a cistern for no longer than 24 hours. At the time, many of these cisterns were made of lead, which was not recognised as a problem in the mid 19th century.

Filtration was identified as a major way of cleaning water between source and distribution, and Hassall conducted a series of experiments to determine the best method of filtration, using different types of charcoal, patent filters, loam, mild and strong clays, to see which individual or combination of materials would provide the cleanest water, and he identified a combination of charcoal, and clay mixed with sand as the best approach, and that three consecutive filtering operations should be carried out.

His summary recommendations are that a proper water supply to a populous city such as London, requires:

An unpolluted source
An unlimited supply
Perpetual renewal
Filtration
The abolition or modification of reservoirs and cisterns
Moderate cost

It would take many decades for the changes to be implemented that were needed to provide London with a clean supply of water. Investment, engineering, technical improvements, new sources, storage methods, distribution networks etc. were all needed, and today, on the whole, we have a very clean supply of water.

The Thames is today, cleaner than it was in the mid 19th century, but there is no way that I would want to drink water straight from the river, and I find it worrying when I see children playing on the foreshore, who, being children, will put their fingers in their mouth.

The Tideway Tunnel will prevent many of the overflows into the river from the wider London area, however as Hassall described back in 1850, it is the whole catchment area of the river and tributaries that need to be clean, as these contribute to the waters that flow through central London.

Perhaps we need another Arthur Hassall to graphically describe the contents of the water that flows through the city.

He seems to have been widely respected for his knowledge of water contamination. In July 1850, the same year as the publication of his book on the water companies of London, he was speaking at the Botanical Society of London “On the colouration of the water of the Serpentine”, where he described the cause of the vivid green colouration of the Serpentine that had taken place that year.

In the same year he also published a report on the “Adulteration of Coffee”, which apparently was a problem at the time, as he reported that roasted wheat, beans and potatoes had all been used.

As well as the pictures shown earlier in the post, Arthur Hassall’s writing was always very descriptive, and I will leave you with this graphic sentence from his summary, back in 1850:

“It is thus beyond dispute that, according to the present system of London water supply, a portion of the inhabitants of the metropolis are made to consume, in some form or other, a portion of their own excrement, and, moreover, to pay for the privilege.”

Watermen’s Rates, The Shock of America and a 19th Century Street View

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Three different subjects in this week’s post, but they all have a common theme of time – change over time, how centuries old data can be interpreted in modern ways, and how the future always develops in a way we can never foresee, starting with:

The 1803 Table of Watermen’s Rates

In last week post on Pageant’s Stairs, one of the references I included to the stairs, was the Watermen’s rates for taking you from London Bridge to the stairs in 1803, according to the “Correct Table of the Fares of Watermen, which has recently been made out by the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen”, as published in the Evening Mail on Monday the 16th of May, 1803..

The table included the rates for a long length of the Thames, from Windsor to Gravesend, and in my nerdy way of looking at stuff like this, I thought it would be interesting to interpret this data in a way we are familer with now, if we travel on London’s underground and rail network, where basic charging is by zone.

So taking the starting point of London Bridge, in the City of London, I mapped the rates in 1803 on to a map of the Thames, with each zone defining a specific Watermen’s price to row you from London Bridge.

If you walked down to the river in 1803 to take a Watermen’s boat to your destination, then, as with an Underground station today, we can imagine the following maps pinned to the wall of the alley leading down to the stairs, the first map starting with the zones from London Bridge out to Blackwall (the actual zone pricing is after the maps). All base maps are © OpenStreetMap contributors:

London Bridge is the bridge on the left edge of Zone 1, and this is the starting point for a journey east along the river, and as with Transport for London’s (TfL), charging today, the price increases as the length of journey increases.

There are some strange charges, for example the whole of the Isle of Dogs appears to be in a higher priced zone (6), whilst Deptford has it’s own little zone (5), which is a lower price to the Isle of Dogs.

Displaying data in this way does make some huge assumptions. For example, with the Isle of Dogs, the 1803 table does not specify where on the Isle of Dogs the priced journey would end, so as stated in the table it looks to cover a large distance of river, from Limehouse round to Blackwall.

In the next map, we continue along the river to Gravesend, which, as Zone 13 is the final easterly zone, and priced destination in the 1803 table:

There seems to be no standard length of journey, so as can be seen in the above map, the length along the river of zone 9 is much more than zones 11 or 12.

The pricing and sample locations within each zone is shown in the following table:

The best description of the difference between Oars and Sculler that I can find, is that with Oars, a rower is holding a single Oar in two hands, whilst with a Sculler, a rower is holding a pair of Oars in both hands.

I assume this explains the difference in pricing and why the price for a Sculler ends at the Isle of Dogs / Greenwich, as a boat could be rowed by a single person, using two oars, where with Oars, at least two people would be needed, each holding one oar on either side of the boat.

If this is wrong, comments are always appreciated.

The price for a Sculler ending at the Isle of Dogs / Greenwich is probably due to this being the physical limit that a single person could row along the river.

Regarding my earlier comment about the difference in length of the zones, the pricing table helps to explain this, with the jump in rates roughly rises in line with the distance travelled.

The above maps and table cover the east of the river. If you wanted to travel west, then there is a similar zone map hanging on the wall at London Bridge.

This is the first seven zones, from London Bridge up to Wandsworth:

Zone 6 covers the rate to Chelsea, and the following print from 1799 shows a party being rowed along Chelsea Reach. The boat is being rowed by Oars, as there are six rowers and three oars either side, so each rower is holding a single oar with both hands:

(© 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 above print shows several people being rowed by a team of six, and an obvious question is whether the rates apply to any number of passengers and number of rowers, and the answer is that there is an additional charge.

The 1803 Table of Watermen’s rates states that for the journey from London Bridge to Chelsea, for every additional passenger, there is an additional charge of 4d on top of the base rate, so in the above print there are ten passengers, plus two playing instruments who I assume also incur a charge as they are not Watermen.

The man at the back is wearing a Watermen’s badge on his arm, so presumably comes with the boat, so if the above boat had been rowed from London Bridge to Chelsea, the charge (see table after the next two maps) would have been 2s 6d base rate plus 12 times 4d (passengers plus musicians), so a total charge of 5 shillings and 10 pence.

Continuing along to Zone 18, Shepperton, Chertsey and Weybridge:

The final two zones, 19 and 20 run all the way to Windsor:

The table of rates travelling west from London Bridge:

The final five zones from Hampton Court / Town up to Datchet and Windsor:

The journey out to Windsor is considerable, and is way beyond the area of Port of London Authority’s responsibility, which ends at Teddington, the last westerly point on the tidal Thames.

Including Windsor in the Waterman’s rates must have meant there was demand for travel this far west, and is probably due to the times when the Monarch was based at Windsor Castle, so there would have been a need for travel from central London out to Windsor.

The price is also considerable for 1803 at 21 shillings, and on top of this there was a 3 shilling charge for additional passengers. Assuming the traveller from London to Windsor required a return trip, then the price would have been double, so not a journey that the average Londoner would have taken. Only one for the rich, and those on state business.

As well as listing charges for additional passengers, there were a number of other additional charges:

If the journey is not a direct journey between places on the river, for example, if the journey is taking or collecting passengers from a ship, which may include waiting at the ship whilst passengers and luggage transfer, then the Waterman has the option of charging either the standard distance rate, or a time rate of 6d for every half hour for oars, and 3d for scullers.
If the Waterman is detained at a stop by the passenger, for example having to wait at the destination stop whilst the passengers wait to disembark, wait to be met etc. then the Waterman can charge an additional 6d per half hour of waiting for oars and 3d for scullers.
A journey directly across the river is charged at the standard rate of 2d, or if more than one person, 1d per person
There were also standard rates between different stairs or landing places on the river, these were roughly the difference between the zones in which the different places were located. As an example, Wapping (Zone 3) to Greenwich (Zone 7), was 1 shilling 6 pence. The difference of the London Bridge standard rates of 2s 6d (to Greenwich) minus 1s (to Wapping, Zone 3).
No more than six persons are to be carried in a wherry (the standard Watermen’s boat), and up to Windsor and Greenwich, up to eight in a passage boat (which I believe is a larger boat than the basic wherry).

One surprising omission is any reference to the state of the tide, as for a rowed or sculled boat, it would have been considerably harder rowing against the tide than rowing with the ride. It may be that this is expected to average out over a series of journeys with half being against the tide and half with the tide.

It would also be interesting to add a time column to the listing of rates, as the journey to the furthest reaches to the east and the west must have been considerable. This was reflected in the rates for the watermen, however it must have taken many hours to reach the furthest places in the table, and time of the journey would have been variable, depending on tide, weather, other river traffic etc.

Despite what seems to be well regulated pricing, there were challenges for the passenger who used the river to travel through London.

The following print dated 1816 from the Miseries of London series shows a woman walking down the steps at Wapping Old Stairs, presumably wanting a boat to travel to her destination, and being “assailed by a group of watermen, holding out their hands and calling Oars, Sculls, Sculls, Oars, Oars”:

(© 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 Watermen are wearing their badge on their arms to signify that they are a Waterman, and the following is an example of such a badge:

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

Not adhering to the rates would often result in being brought to court, for example in 1847, waterman John Thomas Jones was in court on a charge of overcharging a passenger 12s 6d for a fare that should have been 4s 3d. The Waterman was fined 20s.

Watermen also were at a number of risks, as well as the daily danger of rowing along a congested river, they were also valued for their skills, and were prized as recruits for the Navy.

A report in the London Magazine in 1738 on the need to crew several new naval ships, states that a “press” took place on the river, with 2,370 men taken and enrolled in the Navy, the majority of them being Watermen.

The 19th century saw a gradual decline in the need for a Watermen to row passengers along the river.

The growth of steam ships on the river, the growth of the railways, underground, improved roads, bridges etc. all made it easier to travel without the need to be rowed.

Steam powered boats started ferrying passengers along the river, although initially this method of transport was not always safe and reliable. The following print from 1817 titled “Travelling by Steam” shows two Watermen watching a steam packet boat exploding and throwing the boat’s passengers across the river:

(© 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 newspapers listing of the Watermen’s Rates were always dense columns of text, and showing these visually on a map, in a similar way in which TfL display underground and rail fares helps with understanding part of the rich life of London’s river.

One big difference between 1803 Watermen charges and today’s TfL charging is that in 1803 there was no capping of the daily charge, so in 1803, you would have been charged for each journey you would have taken on the river.

The Sunbeam Weekly and the Pilgrim’s Pocket – Shock and Outrage at the Evolution of the United States of America

There is a wonderful statue at Cumberland Wharf in Rotherhithe, which is today a small area of open space alongside the river at the place indicated by the arrow in the following map:

Once a wharf between Rotherhithe Street and the Thames, servicing a large granary across the street via conveyors which ran across the street in the photo below, and which shows the area occupied by Cumberland Wharf:

If you look to the left of the space, there is a walkway with a statue at the end, which is alongside the river:

The statue consists of a taller figure – William Bradford, who was Governor of the New Plymouth colony in the United States for a number of periods between the years 1621 and 1657. The boy is in 1930s clothes, and represents a local boy reading a comic of the time:

The work by Peter McLean dates from 1991 and is titled “Sunshine Weekly and the Pilgrims Pocket”:

William Bradford was one the Pilgrims who left Rotherhithe on the Mayflower in 1620. The ship sailed from Rotherhithe from the area around Cumberland Wharf, although not their last port of call in England, as they stopped off at Plymouth before crossing the Atlantic on a two month journey.

Bradford is looking over the boy’s shoulder at his comic with, as described in the adjacent information board, “a look of shock and outrage” as he turns the pages of the comic:

The Sunbeam Weekly was a comic from the 1930s:

Why was the Pilgrim William Bradford, who had a long career as the Governor of the Plymouth Colony at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts, looking at a 1930s comic with a look of shock and outrage?

The reason is that the pages of the comic are showing how the United States of America has evolved since the Pilgrims landed in 1620.

(Sorry, the photo is slightly out of focus. It was grey, overcast, raining, breezy and cold).

The pages of the comic show the Statue of Liberty, an aeroplane, cars, a train, skyscrapers, the Space Shuttle and King Kong:

William Bradford was a Puritan, the strand of English Protestantism that believed that the Reformation had not gone far enough in ridding the Church of England of Roman Catholic practices. Puritans, and the clash between reformers. separatists and the established church would play a major part in the English Civil War and the Protectorate which would take place during the 1640s and 1650s.

I am sure Bradford would be absolutely shocked how the United States has developed in the 400 years since he was part of Plymouth Colony. I am not sure about the outrage, as Puritans were against Roman Catholicism rather than what can loosely be described as technical progress, however they were strict religious adherents (which is where stories about Christmas festivities being banned during the Protectorate, although in reality the vast majority of the population continued to celebrate).

The pocket of William Bradford includes some key symbols.

A 1620 A to Z of the New World, a lobster claw and fish to show the seafood that was key to the Pilgrims survival in the early years of the colony, and a cross which is symbolic of the religion that the Pilgrims carried to the new colony. There is a small US badge at the base of the cross:

The artist’s tools are shown at the feet of the statue:

And along the edge of the base is the sculptors name and year the work was created:

I think this is a wonderful work of art.

I often wonder when looking at old photos, what the people in the photo would think about how the future has developed, as it is always in a different way to that expected at the time.

My father mainly photographed scenes rather than focusing on people, however whilst it is a gap of only 73 years, compared with the almost 400 years in the Rotherhithe statue, it would be interesting to see how those waiting for the 1953 Coronation procession in one of his photos, would look at the London of today:

If you walk the Thames path in Rotherhithe, or along Rotherhithe Street, stop at Cumberland Wharf to take a look at “Sunshine Weekly and the Pilgrims Pocket” and also consider that whatever we expect the future to be – it will almost certainly be very different.

And for the final look at a different aspect of time hopping, another of my first post of the month looks at the resources available if you are interested in discovering more about the history of London:

Resources – Tallis’s London Street Views

Today, if you want to look at a street and see the buildings and businesses along the street you can use Google Street View.

Imagine if it was possible to do this for the years long before photography and Google made this possible, well for the years between the late 1830s and early 1840s there is a Street View available, which whilst being drawn, and not as comprehensive as Google still provides the opportunity to take a virtual walk along a London street.

This is Tallis’s London Street Views.

(Before going further, the version of Tallis’s Street Views available on line is the 2002 reprint of a London Topographical Society (LTS) print of the street views. The copy was held by the University of Michigan and digitised by Google, and is made available online by the HathiTrust, a US organisation who describe themselves as:

“HathiTrust was founded in 2008 as a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries now preserving 19+ million digitized items in the HathiTrust Digital Library. We offer reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. and international copyright law, text and data mining tools for the entire corpus, and other emerging services based on the combined collection.”

The HathiTrust have made the work available under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives.

It is difficult to know the true copyright status of documents such as this, when you have very large organisations such as Google digitising vast amounts of works and many, often US based organisations making these fully available online, a situation which I expect is going to get more problematic in years to come).

John Tallis was the publisher of the Street Views. He was based at 15 St. John’s Lane, near St. John’s Gate.

Tallis was a prolific publisher of prints covering people (real and fictional), actors, landscape scenes, buildings, places etc. As well as multiple prints of London, he published images of other places, for example the following print of Margate Pier and Harbour:

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

Initially, Street Views was published in parts before being published as a complete set.

The following, from the Gloucester Journal on the 21st of July 1838 is typical of advertising for the Street Views:

“TALLIS’S LONDON STREET VIEWS. For the sum of Three-half-pence, you can purchase a correct View, beautifully engraved on steel, and drawn by an artist of great talent, of upwards of One Hundred Houses, with a Street Directory, or a Key to the Name and Trade of every occupier to which is added a Map of the District, and an Historical account of such Streets, Courts, or public Buildings worth recording.”

The Street Views obviously does not cover all the streets of London, but does provide comprehensive coverage of the major thoroughfares of central London, along with many of the smaller streets, particularly in the City.

An example of the way that streets are illustrated is the following view of part of Hatton Garden:

As well as an illustration of the building, where a business occupies a building, the name and trade is also provided, so at number 109 Hatton Garden there is a Pianoforte Maker and Music Publisher who presumably goes by the name of Hart.

Next door at 108 there is Schonberg, Engraver and Printer, along with a Taylor and Draper in the same building, and at 106 there is Battistessa & Co, Looking Glass and Artificial Flower Maker.

What is fascinating is being able to find more about these business, and in the British Museum collection is a trade card for the above mentioned L. Schonberg of 108 Hatton Garden:

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

Tallis’s London Street View is a fascinating way of walking the streets of London in the late 1830s and early 1840s, and a reminder that John Tallis came up with this format of recording a city long before Google Street View.

The Tallis’s Street View can be found at the HathiTrust, by clicking here, where you can scroll through the pages or download a copy.

Google Street View is a brilliant equivalent resource of today. Imagine being interested in London’s history in a couple of centuries time, and being able to walk through a photographic view of the City’s streets, however continuing the theme of the future is always very different to that we expect, and that services such as Street View are digital, will they survive that length of time given the magnitude of change that can occur over such a period of time.

New Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets, Horn Stairs and a Confusion of Greshams

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One of the challenges with the blog is that there are many updates I would like to add to previous posts. If I update the original post, then the update will be part of a post that could be from several years ago, so not very visible, therefore for this week’s post, I thought I would cover three very different updates to past posts.

The last two are based on feedback from readers, which is always greatly appreciated. The first is following a recent decision by the City of London Corporation, regarding:

The future of Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets

The City of London Corporation has been looking at relocating the Smithfield and Billingsgate markets for some years.

Smithfield Market is set to become a new cultural and commercial centre, with the new Museum of London already under construction in the old General and Poultry market buildings.

Billingsgate Market moved out of Billingsgate in 1982, when the fish and seafood market moved to a new location by the North Dock, between the northern edge of the Isle of Dogs, and the A1261 Aspen Way.

Originally, the City of London Corporation were planning to relocate both markets to Dagenham Dock, a location that was not popular with the market traders, and in November 2024, the City of London Corporation abandoned this move, and appeared to take an approach where traders would be helped to move to other locations, without having a single location available.

At the start of December 2025, the City of London Corporation announced a new policy, that the two markets would be consolidated and moved to a new location at Albert Island at the eastern end of the Royal Docks.

In the following map, the green arrow on the left shows the location of Smithfield market, the centre yellow arrow shows where Billingsgate Market is located today, and the red arrow on the right shows the future consolidated location of both markets, between the eastern end of the Royal Docks and the River Thames (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

In the following map, I have put a red line around Albert Island, the land which is planned to be used for the new markets (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The land is currently derelict, with the majority of the buildings that once occupied the site having already been demolished.

At northern and southern ends, the land is bounded by two of the old locked entrances between the Royal Docks (a small part of which can be seen to the left), and the River Thames, on the right.

On the left centre of the map is the eastern end of the runway of London City Airport.

The following image is taken from the book that was issued to commemorate the opening of the King George V Dock in 1921. This new dock had not yet been officially opened by the King, so could only use his name once he had declared the dock open, which is why it is labelled as the New Dock in the image.

I have outlined in red the area of Albert Island as it was, following completion of the King George V Dock, the final dock of the three “Royals”:

As the plot of land is bounded on all sides by water, and the Royal Albert Dock is to the west, the plot of land goes by the name of Albert Island.

This location for the consolidated markets is a rather inspired choice.

It is a challenging location. Being at the end of the runway for London City Airport means that you could not build residential buildings. Even if these were built, they would have to be low rise, and would have the sound of planes either landing or taking off a short distance overhead.

The location is well connected from a transport perspective. In the above map, there is a road crossing towards the left of the plot. Follow this road north, and it connects to the A13, and south to the Woolwich Ferry, and further west to the new Silvertown tunnel.

The land has been derelict for some years, whilst the land around the rest of the Royal Docks has been gradually redeveloped.

Relocating the market here, will also bring a different activity to this part of east London, and will break up the rows of residential towers which have and continue to be built here, particularly along the land to the south, between the Royal Docks and the Thames.

I explored the area back in 2024 in a number of posts on the Royal Docks and surrounding areas. If you have been on my walk “In the Steps of a Woolwich Docker – From the Woolwich Ferry to the Royals”, you will also recognise Albert Island.

Firstly, this is why the site would not be suitable for residential. This photo was taken from the road that runs over Albert Island and shows that the land is at the eastern end of the London City Airport runway:

Starting from the north, this is a walk along the road over Albert Island showing how the area looks today. In the following photo, the end of residential development to the north can be seen, as well as the old locked entrances between the dock and the river. The start of Albert Island is the undeveloped land to the right of the residential:

The original eastern entrances between the Thames and the Royal Albert Dock:

Heading south and this is the central part of Albert Island. The majority of buildings associated with the docks were demolished some years ago, leaving the outline of walls, paths, streets and the concrete floors of long lost warehouses and industrial buildings:

There are still a few old streets that thread across the site, generally bounded by large growths of vegetation:

The main entrance from the road that crosses the site to Albert Island:

At the southern end of Albert Island is the locked entrance between the Thames and the King George V dock. This photo is looking at the northern side of the lock channel, which will become part of the new market site:

Also back in 2024, I had a walk around Albert Island. This is one of the old streets that thread the site, along with the one remaining warehouse building on the left:

Some of the few roads across the site were fenced off:

The only route across the island back in 2024 was a footpath that ran alongside the Thames, at the eastern edge of Albert Island. This is the footpath heading towards the Thames:

At the corner:

In the following photo, on the left is the Thames, on the right is Albert Island. It was a hot day when I went for this walk, and my main memory of this stretch is the hundreds of butterflies that were in the bushes on the right. As you walked along the footpath, they would rise out of the bushes, before settling back after I had passed – it was a rather magical place, also with the Thames on the left:

At the end of the footpath, steps up to a short path that went up to the locked entrance to the King George V dock:

Crossing the lock, and looking back towards the King George V dock. This channel marks the southern boundary of Albert Island, and the new market area which will be on the right:

The above photos were taken back in 2024, last year, 2025, I went on another walk through the area whilst I was planning my Woolwich to Royal Docks walk. I had intended to walk through Albert Island, however this proved impossible, as the crossing over the locked entrance between the Thames and King George V dock was then closed, and there was no clear route through.

I did try some options, but every route ended in fencing, or some other obstruction.

In the following photo, I had just walked along the footpath shown to the left of the photo, and optimistically found this sign for a footpath:

I followed this apparent footpath, and it ended in a waterlogged channel with no way through:

The relocation of the two markets is subject to the passing of a Parliamentary Bill to allow the old markets to be closed at their current sites, along with planning permission from Newham Borough Council for the Albert Island site, and I suspect neither of these will be a problem.

The 3rd of December press release stated that the markets “will continue at Smithfield and Billingsgate until at least 2028”, and I suspect that clearing the current site, any remedial work that needs to be done on what was an industrial location, followed by the new build, will take more than a couple of years, so the “at least 2028” suggests the possible timescale.

When the two markets have moved to Albert Island, they will be called “New Billingsgate and New Smithfield”, although for Billingsgate this is the second move after the original 1982 move from the original Billingsgate in the City.

Regarding the existing market locations, an updated press release on the 2nd of January 2026 states that “at Smithfield, the Grade II* listed buildings will become an exciting international cultural and commercial destination to complement the London Museum, which is moving next door”, and that “Plans for Billingsgate will deliver up to 4,000 much-needed homes in an inner-London Borough, alongside a new bridge across Aspen Way to help address the social, economic and environmental disparities between Poplar and Canary Wharf.”

It is a shame that Smithfield is moving from its City location as it was the last City market in its original location, and ends an activity that has taken place in the City for hundreds of years.

Having said that, the new location is good. It makes use of an otherwise difficult to use plot of land, it brings diversity of function and employment to the area around the Royal Docks, and in many ways it continues the tradition of the Royal Docks, as a place where products were stored, traded and moved on to their eventual location.

Albert Island has a website, which does not yet mention the move of the Smithfield and Billingsgate markets, and still covers the original proposals for a commercial shipyard, marina, university hub, and with easy public access to the Thames river path. Hopefully some of these will be part of the overall development. Bringing a shipyard back to the docks would be good, and access to the Thames river path would be essential. The Albert Island website can be found here.

The City of London Corporation announcement on the move of the markets to Albert Island is here.

If you would like more photos of the area, and the construction and opening of the King George V Dock, my post “King George V Dock – The Last of the Royals” covering this can be found here.

It will be an interesting development to follow.

Horn Stairs

Horn Stairs are one of my favourite Thames stairs, as they lead down to a lovely part of the Thames foreshore. At low tide, a wide expanse of gently slopping foreshore, with superb view across to Limehouse and the northern part of the Isle of Dogs.

My last visit to Horn Stairs was in mid January 2024, and almost two years later, I walked to the stairs again following an update on the state of the stairs sent in by a reader.

The reader commented that the stairs had been closed as they had lost a couple of their top steps, had come away from the wall, and moved back and forth significantly with the tide.

They were in a poor condition when I visited two years ago, with rotting wooden steps, and their fixing to the wall not looking very robust, so I am surprised they have lasted for almost another two years.

When I went in January 2024, it was a bright, sunny day. My return visit in January 2026 was wet, overcast and raining.

On arriving at Horn Stairs, there was a footpath closed sign, and temporary fencing at the top of the access steps, which looked like it had been moved, or blown aside:

Very temporary fencing off of the stairs:

I walked through a gap and looked at the stairs and the remains of the causeway leading across the foreshore:

It was clear to see that the top steps are missing, the top section of steps do not look in great condition, and the fixings at the side have come away:

This was the stairs back in 2024, looking very dodgy, but not fenced off and it was possible to walk down:

Horn Stairs, and the area of foreshore to which they lead, has a fascinating history, which I explored in the post “Horn Stairs, Cuckold’s Point and Horn Fair”.

Some photos from my previous visit, when the weather was much better than January 2026. Firstly looking along the causeway across the foreshore:

At the end of the causeway is a navigation marker, shown on the PLA chart for this section of the river, with a wonderful view across to the towers that occupy the Isle of Dogs:

Looking back along the causeway, showing that during a low tide, there is a large expanse of dry foreshore:

Wooden stairs do not last as long as concrete or stone stairs, and there are a number of examples along the river where wooden stairs have not been replaced after they gradually fell apart (see this post on King Henry’s Stairs for an example). I am also not sure why some are concrete / stone whilst other are of wood. Whether the frequency of use, their importance or location along the river deemed some to be of a more permanent structure, or whether it just came to costs at the time.

I have emailed both the Port of London Authority and Southwark Council to see if there is any information on who would be responsible, are there any plans to replace the stairs etc.

It would be a great shame if the stairs at Horn Stairs were not replaced.

Sir John or Sir Thomas Gresham – The Trouble with Identifications

A couple of week’s ago, I wrote a post about the Greshams of Norfolk and London.

The post told the story of Sir John Gresham, the founder of a school in the town of Holt in Norfolk, a member of the Mercer’s Company and a Lord Mayor of the City of London, along with his nephew Sir Thomas Gresham who was also a Mercer and through his Will, in 1597, Gresham College was established, to be run and administered by the City of London Corporation and the Mercer’s Company.

I included images of both Sir John and Sir Thomas Gresham in the post.

One reader commented “A very interesting post. The picture of ‘Sir John Gresham’ and the engraving of ‘Sir Thomas Gresham’ are identical: the engraving is laterally reversed because of the engraving technique, but otherwise the images are the same, even down to the number of done-up buttons and the hand holding the gloves. It’s the same man! Either the attribution of the painting is wrong or that of the engraving – probably the latter, I think.”

So I went back to the images and yes, they do look as if they are of the same person.

This is the image of Sir John Gresham:

I found the above image on Wikimedia, with the description “Portrait of Sir John Gresham (1495–1556)”.

As a general rule, I never take anything on Wikipedia / Wikimedia (or the Internet in general) as absolute fact, without finding supporting evidence, and in the search for evidence to support the Wikimedia description, I found the same image in the National Trust Collections website, where it is attributed as “Portrait of a Man, possibly Sir John Gresham the elder” I also found the same image at the Alamy website, (a stock image service company, where images are made available for a price, for use in other forms of media) where the image is described as “Sir John Gresham (1495 – 1556) English merchant, courtier and financier”.

So the image I found on Wikimedia was also described by the National Trust and Alamy as Sir John Gresham (in fairness to the National Trust they also included “possibly”), so I was happy to use the image from Wikimedia.

The following image of his nephew, Sir Thomas Gresham, is from the British Museum collection, and was an engraving by John Boydell of Cheapside, London and published on the 1st of May, 1779, and is described as being taken from “In the Common Parlour at Houghton”, which is presumably Houghton Hall in Norfolk, a county where the Gresham’s had property, hence the link with the town of Holt in my post:

To provide a good comparison between the two images, I converted the image of Sir John Gresham to black and white, and reversed the image (the reader commented that the image could have been originally reversed due to the engraving technique, therefore reversing again would get the image back to the original).

Now putting the two images side by side, we get the following (Thomas Gresham on the left and John Gresham on the right):

They look almost identical, down to the creases on the clothing, the number of buttons, the pose, the clothes, etc.

There are minor differences, however I suspect that these are down to the engraving (on the left) being made from the portrait (on the right).

I assume the process to create prints such as these, which were in wide circulation in London in the 18th century, was that an artist would visit Houghton Hall and make a copy of the original painting. As this was a copy, there would be minor differences to the original painting.

This copy was then used to create the engraving which John Boydell then published from his premises in Cheapside.

So is the image of Sir John or Sir Thomas Gresham?

I suspect it is of Sir Thomas Gresham, as the following image is from the National Portrait Gallery collection, and has the following reference: “Sir Thomas Gresham by Unknown Netherlandish artist
oil on panel, circa 1565″:

Attribution: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Source National Portrait Gallery, London

Although the clothes are very different, the likeness, facial expression, the beard all look very similar to the painting and print.

This would mean that the National Trust is incorrect to state that their painting is Sir John Gresham, although again, they do state “possibly”.

To add a bit more confusion, in the print of Sir Thomas Gresham from the British Museum, the “size of the picture” is stated as 2ft, 1inch by 2ft 9 3/4 inches. whilst the National Trust give the dimensions of the painting of Sir John Gresham as 36 x 26 in, and that the painting is located at Dunham Massey in Cheshire.

So the painting is larger than that given in the print, and today is in a different location.

This confusion of Gresham’s shows just how hard it is to be certain of the facts when identifying anything painted, engraved or printed from some centuries ago. If I had the time, I would want to track down more original artwork of both the Greshams and see if this could come to a consensus of appearance of these two, whose contributions to the City of London can still be seen today.

I always try and make sure that the images used, and the detail in my posts is as accurate as possible. I use visits to the sites I am writing about, books and maps (of an age as close to the time I am writing about the better), newspapers from the period, and where I use the Internet, it is from reputable sources such as the British Museum Collection, and anything else is cross checked with other sources.

As the Gresham images show, it is hard enough to be sure of the facts of what we see, whether an image is of who we are told it is, but AI, which always seems to be in the news these days, is going to make this much, much worse.

I will never use any AI generated content in my posts, whether text or image, and to demonstrate why, I asked ChatGPT to generate an image of Sir Thomas Gresham, and this was the result (ChatGPT made the decision to produce a portrait “in velvet” for some reason):

The above image shows the dangers of where we are heading with AI image creation. Without any context, this could easily be taken as a painting of Sir Thomas Gresham. It took less than a minute to create, and is why we are moving into a dangerous period where we have no idea whether what we see or read is real or not.

And for all the comments that my posts receive, two of which were used for today’s post, thank you. I learn much, and they add considerably extra context and information to the post, which is what it should be, rather than machine generated content.

The Future Of London’s Past

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Beneath the streets and buildings of the City of London there are centuries of history, stretching back to the early Roman period, and frequently to be found several metres below the current ground level.

Finding, excavating and reporting on what is found beneath the surface is how we can understand the development of the City of London. The buildings and streets, defensive structures, the Thames shoreline, the people who once called the City home, how they lived, what they used, the trade of the City and the goods shipped in and out, the street patterns, bridges over the river etc.

I photographed a few of these excavations in the City in the early 1980s, including the work around St. Benet’s and the site of Baynard’s Castle, south of Queen Victoria Street in the early 1980s:

As well as excavations at Billingsgate Market:

Archaeology in London has a long history, starting with amateur antiquaries, with an interest in the random finds resulting from everyday activity in the City, through to the professional work of today.

The post war period was one of major change in both the City of London, and the way in which the history of the City was explored and recorded.

The challenges resulting from the bombing of much of the City, the lack of resources to explore the land revealed by bombing and demolition, little serious interest from the authorities and institutions who could support archaeological investigation across the City, and lack of resources and the pressure to rebuild were major concerns to those with an interest in what could be found beneath the bombed areas of the City of London.

The result of these concerns about the state of archaeology in the City of London, and the potential for a significant loss of discoveries of London’s history with the expected level of rebuilding during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in Martin Biddle, Daphne Hudson, along with Carolyn Heighway publishing in 1973 “The Future Of London’s Past. A survey of the archaeological implications of planning and development in the nation’s capital”:

I have a copy of this survey, which consists of a large folder containing two booklets along with some large maps, which I come onto later in the post.

The above photo is of the cover of the folder, which shows a map of the major known elements up to the 30th September 1972 of Roman London.

The detail in the survey is contained within the two booklets. The first is a comprehensive 83 page investigation into the development of archaeology in London, the problems encountered whilst the City was undergoing considerable and ongoing development, and recommendations for how this should be addressed to avoid the loss of much of what still remained below the City’s streets, buildings, cellars, river bank etc.

The booklet starts with an overview of the growth of archaeological research in the City,

From the end of the 16th century to the early years of the 19th century, this was mainly of the amateur antiquarian approach, with the 19th century starting to see a more focused, professional approach, but this was still very limited, and based on a few small groups. This approach would last until the 1920s.

The 19th century was a period of significant Victorian redevelopment across the City, with major projects such as the construction of Queen Victoria Street, large warehouses and office buildings, infrastructure such as the cut and cover underground railways, new sewer systems, pipes and cables for gas and electricity etc.

Whilst the City of London was transformed, so much of the City’s past must have been lost.

Just one example of what was found during construction comes from the St. James’s Gazette on the 12th of April 1884:

“DISCOVERY OF ROMAN REMAINS IN THE CITY – During the week an interesting discovery of Roman remains has been made by the excavators engaged on the District Railway works, which pass under the site of the church of St. John the Baptist upon Walbrook, which was destroyed during the Great Fire of London. About twenty feet below the surface a piece of pavement about 5ft by 3ft 6in., and 10in thick formed of Roman tiles on edge, was with great difficulty, on account of its weight, taken up, and after some time, enclosed in a timber case and removed to the lower hall of the Cannon-street Hotel, where it is awaiting removal to some place belonging to Sir Edward Watkin, Bart., M.P.

It doubtless was part of the floor of a Roman villa, situated on the east bank of the watercourse known as the Walbrook, and in line with another which stood where the Safe Company’s premises now are, and from whence the magnificent specimen of mosaic work in the Guildhall Museum is now to be seen, and where this one ought also to be. What invests this circumstance with additional antiquarian interest is that two successive churches, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, have entombed these relics since Norman and perhaps Saxon times.”

After a brief search, I cannot find out what happened to the pavement found in 1884, or what Sir Edward Watkin may have done with it – I will try an email to the Museum of London.

Another curious example of 19th century finds, this time from Academy on the 27th of May, 1882:

“DISCOVERY OF ROMAN REMAINS IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY – When the grave for the late G.E. Street R.A, was being dug the interesting discovery that a Roman villa had once stood on the site of the nave of Westminster Abbey church. Some ten or twelve feet below the present pavement fragmentary remains of a hypocaust were found, and some of the large square brick which had formed the pilae, or short pillars supporting the hollow floor, were apparently in situ. Fragments were also discovered of the broad flange tiles which rested on the pilae, and carried cement and mosaic, which formed the upper layers of the floor.”

I had a quick look through the book “Westminster Abbey: A Church in History” (edited by David Cannadine), and I cannot find any reference to anything Roman on the site of Westminster Abbey, although the focus of the book is mainly on the history of the church. Perhaps a question for the abbey.

What the above two examples demonstrate is that much of London’s archaeology was found during construction works of some sort, and that in earlier years, a find would not have been followed up with any structured excavation or research work, or looking at the overall context of the find, and what else was there.

In the 1920s, the first professional observers started to record archaeological evidence revealed during building construction, however this would be at the whim of a developer, and consisted mainly of observation rather than excavation.

This observation was very limited, primarily because of the resources available. The Guildhall Museum was one of the few institutions that had an interest in the past of the City of London, and the museum’s curator (then called the Museum Clerk) would be called on to investigate building sites, and in the early 1920s, Frank Lambert fulfilled this role, however when he left the museum in 1924, there continued to be only a single person available for this work, and Lambert’s replacement, Quintin Waddington took on an ever growing range of responsibilities.

In 1926, Mortimer Wheeler was appointed as Keeper of the London Museum.

Wheeler started to introduce some of the more modern methods of archaeological research, including the cataloguing and publication of reports and inventories

Bombing of the City during the 2nd World War devastated the life of the City, but also created an opportunity to look at what was hidden below the surface of a large part of the City, as around one third of the ancient walled City of London had been destroyed.

In response to the urgent need to explore what lay beneath so much of the City, before redevelopment took place, a series of events took place which would ultimately lead to the discovery of many survivals of Roman and Mediaeval London.

This started in May 1944 when the Council for British Archaeology asked the Society of Antiquaries to take some action regarding exploring the City.

A Committee was set up to seek support and funding. The Corporation of London allowed their Librarian to be on the Committee and the main support for the proposed work was from the Ministry of Works.

The archaeologist W.F. Grimes was appointed the Supervisor of Excavations, and in the spring of 1946, a trial excavation was underway.

The original name of the Committee was the Roman London Excavation Committee, however the focus on only the Roman period was very restrictive for a place such as the City of London, where the ground below the surface has layers from the Victorian period down to Roman, so the committee was renamed the Roman and Mediaeval Excavation Committee to broaden the time span that would be the focus of excavations.

The work of the committee, supervised by Grimes continued until 1962, and a wide range of discoveries were made, including excavating and dating the bastions around the current Barbican, through to the Temple of Mithras (now on display at the approximate site of its discovery, at the London Mithraeum).

W.F. Grimes published the results of the excavations in his 1968 book “The Excavation of Roman and Mediaeval London”:

The book is a fascinating summary of the work carried out between 1946 and 1962, and demonstrated the considerable amount of remains from London’s past to be found beneath the bombed buildings, cellars and streets. As well as detailed descriptions, there are many photos of both the excavations and the finds from the period.

What is also interesting is the financial challenges of maintaining such an excavation programme for well over a decade.

At the back of the book there is a list of subscribers who helped with funding the work. The list starts with the subscribers who contributed the most, with the Ministry of Works by far the largest contributor. Strangely, the Corporation of London’s contribution was relatively modest:

The final pages of the subscribers list are individuals who donated £1, as can be seen from the lower right of the following list, which continued for another two pages:

The total between 1946 and 1962 was £43,499, which averaged about £2,700 per year to fund the work – a tiny amount compared to what was needed, and meant that until around 1953, Grimes was the only working member.

It perhaps reflects the then prevailing attitude of City institutions such as the Corporation, the Livery Companies and major City businesses, in that they donated such small sums to the one off opportunity to discover what lay beneath such a wide area of the City.

After the Roman and Mediaeval Excavation Committee under W.F. Grimes completed their work in 1962, responsibility for the historical remains beneath the streets continued with the Guildhall Museum, although on a very limited scale. The museum employed a single excavation assistant who had to deal with the considerable ongoing development across the City.

By the mid 1960s, development was starting to change from post war reconstruction, to the demolition and site rebuilds of buildings that had not been destroyed during the war. This continued to provide opportunities to discover what lay beneath.

In 1964 a Roman bath house in Huggin Hill was discovered and the site was excavated by a team which consisted of a large number of volunteers, and in October 1964 this group had formed into the City of London Excavation Group, who worked under the Guildhall Museum’s excavation assistant Peter Marsden.

Despite the 1960s being a time of volunteers and ad-hoc reactive work as the City continued an ever increasing pace of redevelopment, there was progress, including the publication of the ongoing discovery of historic London, with, for example, the books on Roman London by Ralph Merrifield (which continue to be available second hand online), and with the start of the London Archaeologist journal, which I featured in an earlier post.

The early 1970s saw further progress with budgets for work being increased by both the Corporation of the City of London and the new Department of the Environment.

The maps within the “The Future of London’s Past” aim to show the current state of knowledge in 1973, and a fold out map within the booklet provides an overview of the development of London from early Roman to late Mediaeval, but with the caveat that some of the sketches are hypothetical, the positions of London Bridge represent only one of several possible options etc.

(Click on any of the images in the post to enlarge):

The Future of London’s Past provides a thorough report into the development of archaeology across the City of London, and what was understood of the City’s past in the early 1970s, however the main reason for the publication was the urgent need to get a more structured approach into how excavations, reports, working with developers etc. was carried out, along with the important issue of how such work could be financed.

The publication makes a number of recommendations to ensure that the level of archaeological research to meet the continuing redevelopment of the City in the 1970s and 1980s could be delivered.

These recommendations centred around a City of London Archaeological Unit which would have the primary task of the observation of building sites, conducting excavations and reporting on their work.

This organisation would be properly funded, supporting the number of staff and equipment needed to monitor and excavate as the City redeveloped.

The figures seem really small by today’s standards, and in 1973 were expected to be an expenditure of £185,000 a year, with an expected cost of £2 million over ten years.

The proposed City of London Archaeological Unit was recommended to be either a division of the Museum of London, or an independent organisation with charitable status.

Simple and obvious recommendations from those best placed to know what was needed.

The timing of the Future of London’s Past was critical, given the limited resources then available to meet the level of change across the City, and the challenges of working with those carrying out these developments, a point summarised in the last paragraph of the recommendations:

“There is very little time left: If the unit is to be successful it will need to work with development and business interests in the City in an atmosphere of goodwill, mutual confidence and mutual comprehension”

The fold old page from the Future of London’s Past is supplemented with eight large maps which illustrate the early 1970s understanding of the City at a number of key periods.

Map 1 is a base map of City streets and key features:

The following seven maps are transparent overlays. (These are over 50 years old and rather fragile so difficult to flatten out for photos, but hopefully they give a good indication of what was known across the City in 1973. Click on any map to enlarge).

The first overlay is Map 2 – “Roman London c. A.D. 43 to c 450 showing the major known elements in relation to the extent and character of archaeological observations on the 30th September 1972”:

Map 3 is an overlay of “Anglo-Saxon London c. 450 – 1066”, again showing what was known on the 30th of September 1972:

Map 4 is an overlay of “Medieval London 1066 – 1500”:

Map 5 is an overlay of Modern London, showing the depth of basements based on a survey up to 1970. Basements were important as they showed the degree of disturbance to what could have remained below ground level:

Map 6 shows the depth of archaeological deposits, including the depth below former basements. The map shows just how deep some deposits are across the City, and that it was still worth excavating below basements:

Map 7 shows the age of buildings, listed buildings, public and private open spaces:

Given the context of “The Future of London’s Past”, Map 8 is perhaps the most important, as it shows the “extent of future destruction”, with areas to be developed in the near future, permission outstanding, and areas where development or new roads are likely in the next five years, along with a view of buildings constructed before 1910 and those between 1910 and 1943. Note the large area along the Thames. Excavation along the edge of the Thames would lead to considerable finds of the Roman and Medieval river embankments and buildings.

Soon after publication of The Future of London’s Past, the Department of Urban Archaeology was formed to cover the City of London. This organisation was a department of the Museum of London, and a second department, the Department of Greater London Archaeology was formed ten years later in 1983 to perform a similar role across Greater London.

Both of these departments were merged to form the Museum of London Archaeology Service in 1991, and in 2011 MOLA as it had by then been abbreviated to, was separated out from the Museum as an independent charitable company.

MOLA now operates nationally with a team of over 400 archaeological professionals, according to their website – a considerable change since the early days of excavations across the City in the 1940s and 1950s.

MOLA are still very much involved with London archaeology, and probably their most recent major find was a Roman mausoleum and the largest Roman mosaic found in the last 50 years at a construction site in Southwark.

As well as a dedicated organisation, suitably staffed and equipped, one of the other issues covered in the survey was that of the relationship with site owners and developers.

The last thing that a site owner and developer wanted was for a significant set of archaeological remains to be found on their land, delaying redevelopment, increasing costs, and potentially changing the plans of what could be built.

The discovery of the Temple of Mithras was an example of the impact this could have, as the discovery caused a delay to the site rebuild.

This needed addressing in law, and in 1990, Planning Policy Guidance Note 16 (PPG16) confirmed archaeology as a factor in determining planning applications, and the principle that funding for archaeological investigation on a site should be provided by the developers.

This guidance has since been updated and in the last couple of decades, the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was introduced, and English Heritage has since developed the National Heritage Protection Plan.

So archaeology appears to be in much better shape today than in 1973 when The Future of London’s Past was published.

The survey provides far more detail than I can cover in a single post. The challenges of archaeology in the City of London, key finds across the City, proposals and recommendations for how the continuous and ever increasing redevelopment of the City goes ahead whilst putting in place the organisation and processes to discover what can be found beneath each site.

The survey also provides a snapshot of knowledge at the start of 1973, as illustrated by the maps and written sections of the report.

Thankfully, those archaeologists who worked on the survey, as well as the excavations across the City in the post war period, put in place the framework, ideas, proposals and discoveries that would ensure that exploration of the long history of the City of London and what can be found below the surface, ended the 20th century, and continues into the 21st century, in a much better place.

I am sure there is still much more to be found beneath the streets of London.

From Thamesmead to Covent Garden – London in Film

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London has been filmed and photographed for as long as these technologies have existed, and today. social media is awash with images and videos, which are often only a few minutes long, such is the direction of the modern attention span.

Move away from social media, and the Internet is an enormous archive of old London films, many produced by local authorities such as the GLC or Corporation of the City of London, also television companies, media agencies, and amateurs.

These films provide a form of time travel, where we can revisit earlier decades, learn more about London, how the city has developed, and see just how much the city has changed, physically, socially, the way the city is governed, transport etc.

Two years ago, in the Christmas / New Year period, I wrote a post about 1980s music videos shot in London (which you can see here), and last year I looked at a number of London films, films that were produced as publicity for developments, for educational purposes, to document aspects of London Life, etc.

There are so many of these that look at different aspects of London’s life and development that for today’s post, I have another selection.

So, if there is nothing on TV to watch, in that strange period between Christmas and New Year, here is another sample of the many films produced about London, starting with:

Thamesmead, 1970

Thamesmead, 1970 is a film by the Greater London Council on the reasons for, the design and development of Thamesmead, and new community for the growing population of Greater London between the Boroughs of Greenwich and Bexley.

The film starts with some wonderful colour views of the River Thames, as the film travels from Westminster down to the site of Thamesmead.

The film is a wonderful insight into 1960’s GLC planning for housing, communities, transport etc.

Living at Thamesmead, 1974

Living at Thamesmead is another Greater London Council film from 1974, using both fictional and real families, to take a look at what it was like to live in Thamesmead. A rather idyllic view of the new development in light of the troubles that would later plaque the area due to poor transport links, lack of amenities, crime, poverty and design issues.

Thamesmead probably highlights the problems that can arise from a well intentioned approach to the provision of housing, without a design that takes in every aspect of what a community needs, the money to implement and build, provision of employment as well as housing, long term management etc.

Thamesmead is a study in the challenges of a new town, compared to very long standing communities, which develop and adapt, are well connected and have a mix of council, community and privately provided amenities.

The Woolwich Free Ferry

This is a wonderful 7 minutes of colour film showing the Woolwich Free Ferry as it was in 1961:

(My Woolwich and Royal Docks walk includes a trip across the river on the Woolwich Ferry. More dates when the weather improves later in the spring. Follow here on Eventbrite for dates).

London 1942

London 1942 is from the British Film Institute collection, and shows London in the middle of the last war. The film was probably meant to portray a very positive view of the city in the middle of war, and may well have been for American audiences as well as British:

At 2 minutes, 56 seconds, there is a view from St. Paul’s Cathedral of the temporary water tanks at what is now Paternoster Square. Just after the war, my father took photos of the view from the Stone Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral (see this post) and the outlines of these water tanks could still be seen:

Covent Garden Market in 1960

Covent Garden Market is a 1960 film in the Rank Organisation’s series Look at Life that shows the market in operation, in colour. The film highlights that planners have been wanting to move the market for years, and also looks at other markets such as Billingsgate and that there are plans to demolish the Victorian Coal Exchange for a much wider road (which would become the southern ring road, now Lower Thames Street).

At 5 minutes, 31 seconds there is a view of the street outside Billingsgate with the Coal Exchange, and “lovers of Victorian architecture oppose the idea” of demolition.

I included one of my father’s photos showing Lower Thames Street and the Coal Exchange in one of my first posts back in 2014 (the building on the left with the colonnades):

Covent Garden Closes

The Covent Garden market did eventually close, and this film looks at the closure and the new Nine Elms site:

The Weekend Millionaires – An Oral History of the Thames

These days, it is hard to appreciate just how much the River Thames played in the life of Londoners, and how central the river was to employment, trade, the communities that developed alongside the river, and how London as a city has developed.

The Weekend Millionaires is a fascinating oral history that tells the story of the working river, from those who lived and worked by and on the river. Again, a film that shows just how much the city has changed.

Banging Out – Fleet Street Remembered

Banging Out – Fleet Street Remembered, is another oral history looking at another aspect of working London which has completely disappeared, the newspaper and print industry which once occupied much of Fleet Street and the surrounding area:

1964 WOOLWICH – The significance, history, character, decline, markets, ferry, theatres, landmarks

Woolwich is an area that is currently undergoing significant change, with the area alongside the river, north of Beresford Street and Plumstead Road, developing in a very different way to the south of the streets.

This film looks at Woolwich in the early 1960s, people, streets, buildings, the Royal Arsenal, challenges of housing, the military etc.

WW1 1918 Royal Arsenal Woolwich Workers Part 1 and 2

Another look at Woolwich, from 1918, at a time when the Royal Arsenal was in full production for the armaments that were needed for the First World War:

BBC How They Dug the Victoria Line

Large infrastructure projects, such as Crossrail / the Elizabeth Line are still documented with programmes on national TV, however today, these films tend to be constructed around “will they get it finished in time” or “something has happened to impact a critical timescale”. Showing a major bit of construction work taking place in a short time has always been good TV, however in the past it seems to have been more documenting the project rather than creating tension.

The title of “How They Dug the Victoria Line” is self explanatory, and covers the construction of this new underground route, with all the technical challenges and construction methods that went with the project:

The Port of London (1921)

The Port of London is a 1921 Port of London Authority film, again with a self explanatory title, and again shows how central the River Thames was in the life of the city.

Today. the Thames is very quiet, and is mainly a scenic backdrop for those who live along the river, walk the sides of the river, or across the bridges. For centuries, the river was the heart of London:

London’s Lost Transport

London’s Lost Transport is a collection of archive images and films showing the various methods of transport in use across London between the years 1905 and 1962:

Sunshine in Soho (1956)

Sunshine in Soho is a very brief film from 1956 showing a selective few parts of Soho:

The Changing Face of Camberwell (1963)

Whilst the City of London and the River Thames feature widely in many archive films, there are plenty of films showing other parts of London, one of which is the 1963 film the Changing Face of Camberwell, which shows how Camberwell was being redeveloped to create far better living conditions for residents.

It is interesting to compare the positive expectations when these developments were planned, with the challenges which many areas of redeveloped London would later experience.

Waters of Time – A Port of London Authority Film produced for the 1951 Festival of Britain

There were many films produced by national and local authorities, institutions and companies , to tie in with the 1951 Festival of Britain.

One of these films was a lengthy (one hour fifty minute) film by the Port of London Authority titled the Waters of Time.

The film is a comprehensive exploration of the history and the working operations of what was the worlds largest port. The film again shows how in a relatively short period of time, the river has gone from being central to life in London to a feature which today has little consequence in the life of the majority of Londoners.

These films show just how dramatic the change has been over the last several decades, and it is always interesting to speculate what London will look like in decades to come, as any point in time is just a snapshot of continuous change.

If you would like some more views of London:

And that is my last post for 2025, can I wish you a happy New Year, and for another view of how London has changed, you may be interested in my post on when we celebrated New Years Eve in Trafalgar Square in 1981 – a more chaotic celebration than the managed, ticketed event of today.

The Greshams of Norfolk and London

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Almost 12 years ago, the blog started as a means of recording then and now photos based on my father’s photos, but since 2014 it has also been a way for me to explore London and the city’s history (or rather take more interest in what I used to walk past, and I still have lots more of my father’s photos to post about).

As well as taking more notice whilst walking London, it is also fascinating to find connections between the city and the wider country, and one of these connections is the subject of this week’s post.

A couple of week’s ago, we were in the small town of Holt in north Norfolk (thanks to A & C for the suggestion and company). and at the western end of the Market Place, there was a building which had a very familiar symbol for the institution that occupies the building:

The building is the home of Gresham’s Nursery and Pre Prep School, and further west there is a much larger part of Gresham’s School, and what initially caught my attention was the image of the grasshopper, which is on the sign board and also on one of the school busses that went through the centre of the town:

The name Gresham is a key part of London history, and the grasshopper is the crest above the Gresham family coast of arms.

The Gresham grasshopper can also be found in a central part of the City of London. The following photo is of the Bank junction with the Royal Exchange in the centre of the photo:

Not easily visible in the above photo, but on the weather vane of the small tower on the roof of the Royal Exchange is another Gresham grasshopper:

So why does the name Gresham, and the symbol of a grasshopper appear both in Holt and in the centre of the City of London?

Firstly, Holt is in the far north of the county of Norfolk, not far from the North Sea coast, and surrounded by agricultural land. The following map shows the location of the town of Holt (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

The Gresham family had long held land in this part of Norfolk, having descended from Ralph de Braunche who fought with, and came over during William the Conqueror’s invasion of England in 1066.

He was granted land in Norfolk (as part of a great transfer of land ownership from the earlier pre-conquest Saxon land owners, to those who had supported William during and after 1066), and at some point in the following years, the family took the Gresham surname from the village in north Norfolk where the family were land owners, and near where they had settled in the 14th century.

In the following map, I have ringed Holt in blue to the left, and the village of Gresham in red, to the right (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

We did not get a chance to visit the village of Gresham, however Geograph has an image of the village name sign, which also has a Gresham grasshopper:

© Copyright Humphrey Bolton and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. Image source: https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1051802

In the early 15th century, members of the family had settled in Holt, and had built a Manor House at the eastern end of Market Place, on the site of the current Pre Prep School shown in the photo at the start of the post, and it was in this Manor House that Sir John Gresham was born, at some point around the year 1496.

His father was also a John Gresham, and as well as Holt, he was also involved with business in London, an involvement which would grow considerably in the following years.

Sir John Gresham had been apprenticed to John Middleton, a textile dealer in the City of London when he was 14, and when he was 21, he became a member of the Worshipful Company of Mercers.

He became heavily involved with the Tudor Court of Henry VIII and helped Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell with trade, and his provision of finance, arms and men in support of Henry VIII’s military ambitions helped build his popularity with the King.

He was also Lord Mayor of the City of London in 1547.

Returning to Holt, it was Sir John Gresham that founded the school which still exists to this day, and the need for a school appears to have been due to a gap in local education left by the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1539.

In the early 16th century, much formal education was provided by religious establishments, and Sir John Gresham had attended the school at Beeston Regis Priory. This school was closed in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and there was no other option to replace the Priory.

The first school was in the family manor house which had been extended specifically for the purpose, and Letters Patent from Queen Mary in 1555 provided royal approval for the school.

He would not though live to see the formal opening of the school as he died in his London home on the 23rd of October 1556, a short time before the school opened.

He was buried in St. Michael’s Bassishaw, a parish church in Basinghall Street, however the grave, monument and church were destroyed during the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Sir John Gresham, founder of the school in Holt, member of the Mercer’s Company, Lord Mayor of the City of London:

Attribution: Flemish school, artist unknown., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Whilst Sir John Gresham is mainly remembered in the town of Holt as the founder of Gresham’s school, it is his nephew, Sir Thomas Gresham who left a mark on London that is still very much in evidence today.

Sir John Gresham’s brother was Sir Richard Gresham.

He seems to have followed a very similar career path to his brother John as he was a member of the Mercer’s Company, Lord Mayor of the City of London in 1537, involved in the Court of Henry VIII, and a significant trader in goods with the Low Countries, the area of Europe now mainly occupied by the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

He also provided goods for the King, and Richard amassed a significant fortune as a result of his trading activities.

Richard had four children, one of whom was the future Sir Thomas Gresham, and is believed to have been born in 1519 in Richard’s house in Milk Street in the City of London.

Sir Thomas Gresham was also a Mercer and had been apprenticed to his uncle Sir John Gresham. He would go on to amass far more wealth than his father or uncle, engaged in trade throughout London and Europe, and in many ways he was one of the original driving forces in establishing the City of London as one of the major financial and trading centres in the world.

He would serve three different monarchs – Edward VI, Mary I and then Elizabeth I, and what is intriguing was the apparent ease of transition between different monarchs as he seamlessly went from the staunchly Catholic Mary I to the Protestant Elizabeth I.

As well as a house in the City of London, he also spent considerable periods of time over a period of around 30 years, living in the city of Antwerp, then the major trading hub of Europe, and a city which had a Bourse, a place where a trading and credit market would operate, and where traders in both goods and finance would meet to agree loans, make foreign exchange trades, trade goods etc. all the different types of trading activity that would soon make London the main trading hub of the world.

Gresham seems to have had a remarkable memory and ability to calculate trades, and would make money on the small differences between currencies, borrowing and lending rates etc. He also attempted to influence rates, for example by providing friendly merchants with amounts of money so that they could make a trade which would raise or lower the value of the currency being traded, just in advance of when Gresham had to make a trade.

The earlier trade changing the rate at which his later trade would take place in a way that was beneficial to Gresham, was indicative of how Gresham would try and manipulate markets to his own advantage.

He was apparently extremely self confident to the point of arrogance, and would do everything needed to get a good outcome from a trade, a loan or borrowings. An example of his approach to raising capital is through his marriage in 1544 to an apparently wealthy widow, Anne Ferneley, whose husband, a wealthy merchant had died at a young age.

Thomas Gresham:

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

His time in Antwerp was not all about trade. He became fluent in multiple European languages, experienced the impact and benefits of the renaissance, and saw the benefits that a formal education had to commercial trade. He built up an extensive network of informants across Europe, and he also understood the importance that having a Bourse would be to the trading life of a city. All themes that would later influence his plans for the City of London.

Sir Thomas Gresham, painted by an Unknown Netherlandish artist, circa 1565:

Attribution: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. Source National Portrait Gallery, London

Gresham was involved in so many financial innovations, from ways to improve personal accounting through to how the country’s finances were managed and initiatives to improve the global standing of England’s currency.

One example of the later, was with the strength of Sterling.

Today, the value of the UK’s currency is more dependent on measures such as interest rates, trade deficits, GDP etc. however in the 16th century, the value of the currency was linked to the metal in which the coin was minted, and much of England’s coinage was viewed as “debased” – meaning that the face value of the coin was more than the value of the metal in which it was minted.

A common cause of debasing a coin was through clipping, where small pieces of a coin around the edge, were clipped off. Doing this to a sufficient number of coins provided a large amount of valuable metal, however the value of the metal of the clipped coins was now less than their face value.

When using coins for trade, such as to purchase goods for import, continental traders were not happy to accept English coins without weighing and testing their metal content, to ensure they were getting the value of payment expected. This took time, and reduced the value of English coinage to foreign traders.

Initiatives had been tried to recall all the coinage in circulation with little success, and during Elizabeth I’s reign, Gresham was the brains behind the plans for Secretary of State William Cecil to recall and remint the currency in circulation, as a way of restoring the correct value to the country’s coinage.

The concept of debased coinage replacing coinage that aligned with face value was later framed as Gresham’s Law – “Bad money drives out good”, although the issue around debased coinage, and its impact on coinage as a method of trade, store of value etc. had been known for many years before Gresham.

Thomas Gresham was also a champion of double-entry book keeping and he appears to have been one of the first to have used and introduced the technique into England.

Double-entry is where separate entries are written using two accounts for credits and debits, and was a method that Gresham encountered during his time in Antwerp. The technique was used considerably by European merchants, and appears to have originated with Italian merchants.

Gresham’s double entry journal covering the period from the 26th of April 1546 to the 10th of July 1552 has survived and shows how meticulous Gresham was in using this accounting method for his own, personal finances.

The period covers part of his time as a trader in Antwerp, when he was bringing in goods from England to trade and sell, as well as goods he purchased in Antwerp to sell in England.

Gresham called the profit and loss account in his ledger his account of “damage and gain”, which is a rather good way of describing losses and profits.

Another print of Thomas Gresham, and what I like about this print is the ship to his right. Paintings, prints etc. would often include things that were important of representative of the person portrayed. The print may be symbolic of Gresham’s interest and influence in global trade and commerce. The print also records his founding of Gresham College:

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

It is impossible to overstate Gresham’s importance to the financial health of the country, the rapidly growing importance of the City of London as a financial and trading centre, free trade, trading and accounting techniques etc. But there were many other ways in which Thomas Gresham had a considerable impact on the future of the City of London. One of which is still very active and follows its founding principles, the second is still physically here, but no longer has the purpose that Gresham intended. This is:

The Royal Exchange

In the 16th century, trading in the City of London was carried out on the street, or in the small houses and shops that lined streets such as Cornhill and Lombard Street, and there had been calls for a dedicated place where people could meet to trade, agree prices, and generally conduct business of all types.

Sir Richard Gresham first became aware of the opening of a Bourse, or trading centre in Antwerp, one of the major trading centres of Europe. Sir Richard pushed for such a building to be constructed in the City of London, however despite the project receiving royal support, there was no suitable space available.

The proposal was taken up by his son, Sir Thomas Gresham, who was also very well aware of the Bourse from his many years in Antwerp, where he worked on behalf of the Crown, as well as trading on his own account.

Gresham put his own money into the project, along with significant funding generated through public subscriptions, and which supported the purchase of a block of land in Cornhill Street, a short distance from what is now the Bank junction, and occupying the same site as the current Royal Exchange.

The building was opened by Queen Elizabeth I in January 1570, and it was the first, large, Renaissance style building in the City. Gresham had intended that the new Exchange was named after him, however at the opening, Elizabeth I gave it the name Royal Exchange, and Gresham obviously had to retain the Queen’s favour, so the Exchange retained the name Royal.

Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange:

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

On top of the tower in the above print is a grasshopper, as still to be seen on the current Royal Exchange, and at Gresham’s School in Holt, Norfolk. The following is an enlargement of the grasshopper from the above print:

The purpose of the Royal Exchange was to provide a place where trades could be carried out, where people could meet, offices could be rented etc. and followed the approach Gresham had seen in the Antwerp Bourse.

Providing a central place for face to face trading was more efficient than being distributed across the city, and the opening of such an impressive Exchange greatly enhanced the City of London’s growing reputation for trade, commerce and finance.

This first Royal Exchange was destroyed during the 1666 Great Fire, and was soon rebuilt following a design by Edward Jarman.

The second Royal Exchange, from a print of the late 17th / early 18th centuries, again with a grasshopper on the top of the tower:

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

This second iteration of the Royal Exchange lasted until 1838, when, as with the first, it was also burnt down.

The Royal Exchange was soon rebuilt, following a competition to find a design. The competition was won by the architect William Tite, who seems to have also been one of the judges of the competition.

Tite’s design follows the layout of the original two Exchanges, with a central courtyard surrounded by four wings of offices and shops, however Tite’s design changed the main entrance from facing onto Cornhill, now to face onto the Bank junction.

The buildings that had once occupied the triangular space in front of the Exchange were demolished, and it was opened up so that the full Corinthian portico of the new building faced directly onto the Bank junction, and seems almost to mirror the Mansion House across the junction.

The new Royal Exchange was opened in 1844 by Queen Victoria, and this is the building that we still see today, and which retains the grasshopper shown in the photo earlier in the post.

The use of the Royal Exchange as a place for general, face to face trading and commerce faded in the late 19th century as specialist trading exchanges were set up to provide a place where trades could be made, meetings held, and news received in a specific and related set of commodities or services.

In 1939, the building became the offices of the Guardian Royal Exchange Assurance Company, and in the late 1980s, the company made substantial changes to the interior of the building, which included replacing the original roof, and an additional upper floor.

In 2001, the building was again refurbished, and reopened as a centre for luxury shops, restaurants and bars, and the Royal Exchange retains this function today.

Although Sir Thomas Gresham was instrumental in the founding and construction of the Royal Exchange. it never carried his name, just the Gresham family’s grasshopper symbol as a weathervane. His name though has been, and still is, recorded in a number of London places, including the 1845 Gresham Street, which was a rebuilding of earlier streets Lad Lane and Cateaton Street.

Gresham’s name is also still in use with a significant London educational institution, in which Gresham was again instrumental in founding. This is:

Gresham College

In Antwerp, Sir Thomas Gresham experienced the way that an education in trade, scientific and technical developments would benefit the commercial life of a country to such an extent that through his Will, in 1597, Gresham College was established, to be run and administered by the City of London Corporation and the Mercer’s Company.

Gresham College was an attempt by Gresham to provide an education to those of the City, traders, merchants and mariners, who had not had a formal education.

The college provided free lecturers that were delivered by Professors appointed by the City of London Corporation and the Mercer’s Company.

The Mercers appointed professors in Law, Physic and Rhetoric, whilst the City of London appointed professors in Divinity, Astronomy, Geometry and Music.

Until 1768, the College was based a Sir Thomas Gresham’s former home at Bishopsgate. When the site was redeveloped, it moved to the Royal Exchange, and then to a new, dedicated building on the corner of Gresham Street and Basinghall Street, the college later held lectures at a number of different locations, ending up at Mercers Hall, before finally moving to the current location of Barnard’s Inn Hall in 1991.

Remarkably, given that Gresham College is over 400 years old, the approach is basically the same as when the college first started.

Professors are appointed for a three year term and each professor, along with visiting professors, will provide free lectures during their term.

Lectures can be attended in person, or watched online. Many of the past lectures are also available to watch online.

Lectures cover an extremely varied range of subjects, ranging from “How It Ends: What We Know about the Fate of the Universe” by Professor Chris Lintott, who is Gresham Professor of Astronomy:

through to “Modern Pagan Witchcraft” by Professor Ronald Hutton, the Gresham Professor of Divinity:

A could be expected, there is also a very large archive of lectures on London’s history, as well as lectures on Sir Thomas Gresham.

The website of Gresham College can be found by clicking here.

The Watch Now option along the top of the page takes you to a page where a sample of lectures are listed, as well as a topic list along the top of the page.

There is also a search option, and as an example, entering the term “London” brings up a large list of London related lectures.

The last lecture of 2025 is this Wednesday, the 17th of December, and is on the subject of a Tudor Christmas. You can book to attend in person, or to watch the lecture live online.

If you have finished reading all the back issues of London Archaeology mentioned in last week’s post, then the lecture archive of Gresham College provides another wonderful source of learning on not just London, but so many other different aspects of the wider world.

It is a wonderful resource, all thanks to Sir Thomas Gresham.

Returning to Holt, and as you walk back west along Market Place from the site of Gresham’s old manor house, and at the end of High Street, there is a wonderful Grade II listed, mid-18th century milestone:

I wondered if London was listed on the milestone, however all the miles and destinations were to local towns and villages, with the furthest being 41 miles away:

An indication of how relatively remote Holt was at the time, and a long way from any direct roads to London, with a trip to Norwich probably being required to pick up the main road to London.

The Gresham’s were a fascinating family. Whilst Sir John Gresham was active in London, and a Lord Mayor of the City of London, his lasting monument is Gresham School in Holt.

It was his nephew Sir Thomas Gresham who left a lasting reminder of his life in London, apparently one of the richest and most well connected men in England at the time.

If you would like to follow up on the story of Sir Thomas Gresham, there are some lectures on his life in the collection at Gresham College, and the book Gresham’s Law by John Guy (who also presents some of the lectures), is excellent:

In the game of who from history you would invite to a dinner party, Gresham would be high up on my list, although by the end he would probably have left with a large profit after selling me some wool and providing a loan – all at rates beneficial to Gresham.

The King’s Chapel of the Savoy

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From the Strand, head down Savoy Street, then into Savoy Hill and you will find a remarkable little chapel, which today looks out on much taller buildings, but once was surrounded by a very different estate. This is the King’s Chapel of the Savoy. The chapel tells a story of the complexity of medieval land ownership, and the challenges of being sure of facts when using historical records, maps, books etc.

This is the view from Savoy Hill. The main entrance is through the modern brick building to the right:

If you approach the chapel from the Strand, along Savoy Street, you will find the entrance to the small churchyard located to the east of the building:

And in the churchyard, we can see the eastern side of the chapel:

There are many remarkable things about this chapel, one is how much larger the interior is when compared to the view from outside, along with the colour and decoration to be found within:

There is a cleaner working on the pews in the above photo, with their bucket in the aisle. In a bit of historical symmetry, the following print from 1808 shows a much plainer interior, but with two cleaners working on the flag stones which then paved the floor:

The King’s Chapel of the Savoy is today the only survivor of a much larger institution, and includes the name of a medieval owner of the land. The chapel has also long held a unique position with respect to the Church and Crown.

The easily traceable history of the estate, a small part of which is occupied by the chapel, goes back to the 13th century, when the land was owned by Simon de Montfort, the 6th Earl of Leicester, who formed an estate to the west of Somerset House, and built a palace on the land.

de Montfort has a fascinating history and both supported, and fought against the king, and for a time he ran an early form of Parliament. de Montfort died during the Battle of Evesham on the 4th of August, 1265, when he led a small army of rebellious barons against Edward, the son of King Henry III.

de Montfort’s land then went through many different owners, eventually becoming part of the Duchy of Lancaster, which is still in existence today, and continues to be a landowner, with assets held in trust for the King or Queen of the day, in their role as the Duke of Lancaster.

One of the owners of the land was Peter of Savoy hence the use of the name Savoy in the full title of the chapel. Some accounts state that Peter of Savoy built a large house on the land in 1245, later known as Savoy Palace, however Simon de Montford did not die until 1265, so the house was either built later during Peter of Savoy’s ownership, or it was built in 1245 by Simon de Montford.

The Duchy of Lancaster continues to own the land occupied by the chapel, along with a number of surrounding parcels of land and buildings. I wrote a post about the Duchy of Lancaster here, and included the following diagram as an attempt to trace the ownership of the estate through to the Duchy taking full control:

The above was an attempt to explain how this area of land between the Strand and the Embankment was formed, came into Royal ownership, and how the name of Savoy became part of the chapel’s name.

Interesting that although Peter of Savoy owned the estate for a relatively short period of time in the 13th century, the use of Savoy continued for many centuries, and today can be found not just in the name of the chapel, but in many of the surrounding streets, the hotel and theatre.

But in all the above changes in ownership, and by 1399 when Henry IV combined the Savoy estate with the Duchy of Lancaster, the chapel had not yet been built. That would have to wait until the early 16th century when Henry VII founded the “Hospital of Henry late King of England of the Savoy”.

The Savoy Palace had been attacked during the Peasants Revolt in 1381, when the rebellion, angered by the actions of then owner, John of Gaunt, destroyed all the contents of the palace, and set fire to the building.

It remained semi-derelict until the founding of the hospital by Henry VII, although he died in 1509, six years before the completion of the hospital in 1515, when Henry VIII was on the throne, hence the use of “Henry late King of England” in the original name of the hospital.

According to Henry Chamberlain in “A New and Complete History and Survey of London and Westminster” (1770), the hospital was “controlled by a Master amd four brethren, who were to be in priests orders, and officiate in their turns, and they were to stand alternatively at the gate of the Savoy, and if they saw any person who was an object of charity, they were obliged to take him in and feed him. If he proved to be a traveller he was entertained for one night, and a letter of recommendation, with so much money given to him as would defray his expenses to the next hospital”.

Henry Chamberlain goes on to state that the hospital was supressed in the 7th year of the reign of Edward VI (who reigned from 1547 to 1553, so presumably the final year of his reign), with the furniture being given to the Hospitals of Bridewell and St. Thomas.

Once Mary I came to he throne (1553 to 1558), she refounded the hospital, there was also recorded a porter, who was responsible for locking the gates of the hospital every night, and for receiving rents, so presumably some of the land had been rented out or leased to other occupiers, and a considerable sum was received, amounting to around £20,000 per annum.

The chapel was one of a number of chapels built as part of the hospital complex, which appears to have been of some size, with the main dormitory being described as larger than Westminster Hall.

The following map, part of an 1660s “bird’s-eye plan of London” by Wenceslaus Hollar shows the area from the Thames in the south, up to High Holborn (© 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 following is an extract from the map showing the Savoy estate. Just to the lower left of centre, there is a tower which may be the tower of the chapel:

The above extract shows a substantial complex. Presumably much of the estate had been leased or rented out, hence the high level of income, and the main dormitory could have been the long building just to the south of the tower, running east – west, with a couple of transverse wings running north – south.

The following print from 1736 shows a view of the Savoy from the river, and the building in the print can be aligned with the above map from about 75 years earlier (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.):

By the time of the above print, the hospital had been dissolved, and act carried out in 1702.

The print also creates a bit of a mystery regarding the King’s Chapel of the Savoy.

Nearly all sources state that the chapel has always been dedicated to St John the Baptist, however in the above print, the tower, seen in the print and earlier map is part of a church that is dedicated to “St. Mary-le-Savoy”. Henry Chamberlain states the following “The chapel of the Savoy (which is called St. Mary le Savoy) is probably the chapel of St. John the Baptist”, the St. Mary may have been a later dedication which came into more common use in the 18th century, before the later restoration of St. John the Baptist, which is the current dedication.

In my ongoing interest in Thames Stairs, it is good to see that Savoy Stairs are also shown in the print, towards the left, with some waterman’s boats at the base of the stairs, along with two larger boats, which presumably were used for carrying goods to and from the Savoy.

These stairs can also be seen in the following extract from another 18th century map, where the church tower can again be seen, although a tower that looks more like a traditional church tower than the tower we see today:

Confirmation of the dedication of the chapel, and identification of a number of other chapels on the site of the Savoy and hospital can be seen in Rocque’s map of 1746, where the chapel has a St. John dedication – circled in red in the following extract:

In the mid-18th century, as well as the chapel of St. John, there were three other chapels marked on Rocque’s map – a German (green circle), Dutch (yellow) and French (blue):

To add confusion to the chapels, Henry Chamberlain states that there were two German churches, one a Calvinist and the other Lutheran, a French church and a Quaker meeting house.

Henry Chamberlain also records that after the hospital had been dissolved, the site was occupied by “barracks for 500 soldiers, the Savoy prison for deserters and other delinquents of the army, and for securing the recruits. There is also a handsome infirmary for such of the guards as fall sick, and for three or four officers”.

Soldiers seem to have been sent to the prison for relatively trivial offences, for example in January 1729: “On Sunday 62 Soldiers of the second Regiment of Foot Guards were sent to the Savoy, for having spots on their Cloths”.

The prison and barracks for 500 are confirmed in the earlier print of the complex, with the large central building running east – west being the barracks. The print does not mention a Quaker meeting house, however there is a mention in a March 1776 article about a fire at the Savoy estate, when:

“The flames then communicated to the Soldiers Barracks, which are totally destroyed down to some stone work, Several men escaped from the Savoy Prison; but the building itself is not burnt. The Lutheran Chapel is not damaged, and the Quaker’s Meeting House nearly destroyed. Happily through the vigilance of Captains Greenfield and Stephens, and the activity of the Savoy Guard, the Gunpowder was moved in time, to prevent the consequences of the fire catching it.”

Many of the buildings survived until to the early 19th century, but by this time there was pressure to redevelop the area, and major construction projects such as Waterloo Bridge required land as the approach road to the bridge was built over the eastern edge of the Savoy estate.

The chapel was repaired in 1721 at the expense of George I, who was also responsible for enclosing the churchyard, as well as adding a side door between the chapel and churchyard.

Throughout all this time, the King’s Chapel of the Savoy survived. Firstly a part of Henry VII’s hospital, then after the hospital was dissolved, part of the different uses of the buildings on the Savoy estate, including military barracks and prison, then seeing all these buildings demolished as the area became occupied by more commercially focused buildings.

The Savoy Stairs were lost when the Embankment was built, distancing the chapel from the Thames, and further reconstruction in the later part of the 19th century and the 20th century resulted in the area as we see it today, where the 16th century chapel still survives.

Inside the chapel. the core of the walls are Tudor, from the time of the chapel’s original construction. The ceiling is part of a later restoration:

The organ, which was built by J W Walker & Sons Ltd, and dedicated by Queen Elizabeth II during a service on the 27th of October 1965:

The magnificent ceiling, recently restored and decorated to mirror what is believed to be the original appearance of the ceiling:

The font:

The font was a gift to the chapel in 1864 to replace an earlier font which had been “destroyed with the chapel by fire”.

The fire was significant, and helps explain why only the core of the walls are original, and the roof, decorated ceiling and much of the rest of the chapel is later. The following is typical of newspaper reports from the 15th of July 1864, describing the fire:

“On Thursday afternoon, one of the most ancient structures in London, the Savoy Chapel, was destroyed by fire. When first it was seen it would appear that only the organ was burning; but in a few minutes the whole interior woodwork, open seats, pulpit, &c were in flames. The fire presently burst out of the stained glass window at the northern end, and caught the veranda of the house in front of it, 109 Strand, a tailor’s shop. The upper part of the house, occupied by the Press newspaper, was also on fire for a short time, but the flames were got under control by the timely arrival of the steam engine.

The fire in the church however was not subdued till the roof had fallen in. The cause of the unfortunate occurrence is in this instance more easy to trace than usual.

It appears that there was an escape of gas near the organ, and the gasmen were engaged at one o’clock to find the precise spot. They left for their dinner without turning off the gas at the meter, and it is supposed that they either left a light behind them, of that they had unwittingly lighted an escape and left it burning. The keys of the church were not forthcoming for some time after the engines had arrived.”

The report states that the ceiling was entirely destroyed, and that it was the most striking feature of the interior of the chapel (as it is today). It was wholly of oak and pear tree, divided into 138 quatrefoil panels, and enriched with a carved ornament either of sacred or historical significance. The report also covers some of the many monuments in the chapel, only a few of which survived the fire.

The 1864 fire appears to have been the last of three fires that overall caused severe damage to the chapel. A report in 1911 states that “Owing to three fires between 1842 and 1864, very little of the old interior is left”.

At the rear of the chapel, underneath the organ, are two separate seats:

The name King’s Chapel of the Savoy explains why these seats are here, and the unique status of the chapel.

The King’s Chapel of the Savoy is a private royal chapel for the monarch, and is not subject to the jurisdiction of the established church. It is also therefore not a parish church.

Until recently it was the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy, but with the death of Elizabeth II and the coronation of Charles III, the chapel changed to the King’s Chapel.

The addition of “King’s” to the name Chapel of the Savoy is relatively recent, as in April 1939 “The Duchy of Lancaster Office last night issued the following announcement – His Majesty, in right of his Duchy of Lancaster, has been pleased to command that his Chapel of the Savoy shall be styled henceforth ‘the King’s Chapel of the Savoy'”.

Two years earlier, in 1937, George VI has also commanded that the Savoy Chapel should be the chapel of the Royal Victorian Order, an order that was founded by Queen Victoria in 1896 for services to the King or Queen, and other members of the Royal Family.

The special seats at the rear of the church, which face straight down the walkway between the pews are for the monarch, and on the wooden panels behind the seats are copper panels which display the Coat of Arms of previous monarchs and other members of the royal family who have or had a role in the life of the chapel, for example Princess Ann who as Princess Royal is the Grand Master of the Royal Victorian Order, part of the honours system that is closely associated with the chapel:

There are similar copper plates on the wooden panels that line the rear and side of the chapel. These are for members of the Royal Victorian Order, and include John Mansel Miller who as Lieutenant Colonel Sir John Miller was made a GCVO (Knight or Dame Grand Cross) in 1987 having been a Crown Equerry between 1961 and 1987:

Colonel Sir Henry MacGeagh who was the Deputy Treasurer of the Middle Temple and also became a GCVO, in 1950:

As well as the devastating fire in the chapel in 1864, much of the stained glass at the northern end of the church was destroyed by a bomb which hit a neighbouring building during the last war. Stained glass to the southern end survived, but is later than the chapel fire of 1864.

Stained glass window dedicated to the memory of Richard D’Oyly Carte and his son Rupert:

Richard D’Oyly Carte was behind the construction of the Savoy Theatre which he built using the profits from Gilbert & Sullivan productions and he also built and owned the Savoy hotel, this time using profits from the Mikado:

He married his second wife, Helen Lenoir, in the Savoy Chapel.

The latest stained glass window in the chapel is a window dedicated to Elizabeth II and installed in 2012 for the Queen’s diamond jubilee:

The King’s Chapel of the Savoy has been the location for many baptisms, marriages and funerals over the years, normally for someone who has some association with the chapel, or with the Royal Victorian Order.

An interesting court case in July 1756 shows that unofficial marriages were also celebrated, but these would lead to a substantial sentence.

“Yesterday, the Rev. Mr Wilkinson was tried at the Old Bailey, for celebrating clandestine Marriages at the Savoy Chapel. He was found guilty after a trial of upwards seven hours, and ordered for transportation for fourteen years.”

I very much doubt that a clandestine marriage could take place in the chapel today.

The King’s Chapel of the Savoy is a fascinating place to visit, just a short detour from the Strand. As well as the original church, there is a side room which contains some historical maps, prints and photos which help to tell the history of the chapel, and the staff at the chapel are very happy to tell visitors the story of the place, and point out key features of the building.

On the chapel’s website, the opening times for visitors is stated as from 9am to 4pm, Monday to Thursday, however I have found that it can also be closed during these times, but a bit of perseverance is worthwhile to see a unique chapel that retains the name of the owner of a long lost estate back in the 13th century, and was part of an early 16th century hospital founded by Henry VII.

London Rebuilt 1897 – 1927. A Snapshot of an Ever Changing City

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One ticket has just become available for my walk “The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain” on the 8th of November. Click here for details and booking.

London has always changed. Buildings have been constructed then demolished. New streets built, others widened and some built over and lost. Individual building plots have been consolidated and replaced with much larger buildings. As well as covering larger plots of land, buildings across the city have also grown taller, although it is only in the last few decades that the city has become home to a growing number of very tall towers.

London has always been a city where you can walk down a street after a space of a few months, and find a familiar building demolished, with a new building, frequently of a very different design and materials, being constructed on the same site.

Patterns of ownership change, ways of working change, new space is needed, older buildings become expensive to maintain, planning regulations change, new materials make very different designs possible and architectural styles change.

London has been through two major reconstructions caused by very tragic events. The need to rebuild after the 1666 Great Fire of London, and again after the bombing of the Second World War.

But there is also continuous change, and this has long fascinated anyone who has lived, worked, or just visited London, and there have been many approaches to documenting this change.

One such approach is the book “London Rebuilt, 1897 – 1927” by Harold Clunn and published in 1927.

The book documents the changing city over a period of thirty years from 1897 to 1927. In many ways this is an arbitrary period of time, and the author admits that he was aiming for the first three decades of the 20th century, however there were so many changes at the end of the 19th century that the last three years of the previous century were taken into the account.

The book could have begun much earlier, as the 19th century was a period of extensive change, with the Victorian transformation of London responding to the city’s growth as a world city, exponential increase in trade, commerce, industry and population, and Victorian attempts to improve living conditions, sanitation, traffic routes and roads, along with the introduction of new utilities such as gas and electricity.

But again, London is always changing, so a book covering any period would always be an arbitrary choice of dates.

The book consists of chapters focussing on different areas across the wider city, and each chapter includes a written description along with a number of photos, many showing before and after views.

As well as the physical aspect of the city, there are other changes.

The way people dress, the number of people on the streets, traffic, the gradual change from horse drawn transport to the use of the motor vehicles.

Clunn’s book provides a fascinating glimpse into London in the first decades of the 20th century.

In many ways, streets that we would easily recognise today, but also streets that have changed dramatically in the past 100 years.

So in this post, we will travel back to the early years of the 20th century and explore the streets of the city, starting with Finsbury Pavement as it appeared in 1901 before the start of reconstruction:

Finsbury Pavement was the street that ran to the west of Finsbury Circus, between London Wall and Ropemaker Street. A large block of land to the west of Finsbury Pavement was demolished and rebuilt, and this work included upgraded entrances to Moorgate Station.

Today, Finsbury Pavement is known as Moorgate. The following photo is from the mid 1920s and shows the street rebuilt, and new entrances to Moorgate Station can be seen to the left and right:

This is King William Street around 1890:

The rebuilt King William Street shows how buildings were increasing in height amd becoming more imposing. We can also see the start of the transformation of vehicles types with horse drawn in the above photo and just over 30 years later, a motor driven lorry van be seen in the foreground:

This is a 1901 view along Cornhill from the Royal Exchange:

Twenty five years later, Cornhill is still a busy street with a number of buildings of recent construction, made obvious by their clean appearance. Not yet darkened by the smoke of the city:

Many of the photos in the book appear to have been taken from the top of the open top buses that carried Londoners along the street. The following image is one example, and is looking along Fleet Street from Ludgate Circus:

Just to the right of centre can be seen one of the new electric street lights. I wrote about the introduction of these into Tottenham Court Road in a previous post, here.

As well as the replacement of individual buildings, the late 19th and early 20th century saw large areas of London completely rebuilt. One of these was around Kingsway and Aldwych, and the following photo shows a large open space where the construction of Kingsway was underway in 1904:

Little details in these photos help to add to the character of London at the time. To the left of the above photo is a painted sign on the end of a building wall for the “Army Men’s Social Work Shelter”.

It is hard to make out the words at the top and bottom of the text on the building, but I think the word at the top is Salvation, as this building was probably one of the many Salvation Army Men’s Social Work Shelters across London, and indeed across the major cities of the country.

These institutions provided cheap overnight lodgings and food for the homeless, and in 1900, over 4,000 men were taken in nightly from the streets. Each person had to pay a charge of one penny, so it was not an absolute charity, and the Salvation Army established a three stage work programme, which had a very questionable outcome.

Stage one was work and accommodation in their city institutions. Stage two was their transfer out to the Salvation Army farm in Hadleigh, Essex for “outdoor work”, and stage three was their transfer to an overseas colony.

Hadleigh Farm is still run by the Salvation Army.

One wonders how voluntary this progression through the three stages was, particularly the transfer to an overseas colony.

The following photo is a 1920s photo of Kingsway, looking north from Aldwych. The book does not explain whether there is any relevance between the photo above and the photo below:

In the centre of the above photo can be seen the “LCC Tramway Station Entrance”:

The following photo is on a different page, but has the same title as the above photo “Kingsway, looking north from Aldwych”, but now with a date of 1906:

If they are of the same view, then there had been a remarkable transformation in thirty years. Kingsway was a new street, planned during the late Victorian period, along with other major road schemes such as New Oxford Street and Shaftsbury Avenue, with an aim to relieve the growing amount of traffic congestion across the City.

The above photo also shows an entrance to the tramway station.

It was not just streets and buildings that were redeveloped. The following photo shows the reinstatement of the lake in St. James’s Park:

The reason for the reinstatement was that after the outbreak of the First World War, the lake in St. James’s Park was dried out, and a series of temporary buildings erected in the site, presumably in someway connected with the war effort.

In 1922 the huts were demolished and the lake was restored, however the lake had been left dry for so long that many of the repairs were inadequate, water started leaking out, and the lake almost completely dried up again.

More repairs were made, the lake refilled and restored to become the familiar part of the park that it had been.

This is the “old” Strand, looking east from Southampton Street:

And the “new” Strand, again looking east from Southampton Street:

The above two photos again show the transformation of traffic from horse drawn to motor, and we can also see how smaller plots of land were being converted into larger plots for larger buildings.

The two photos above seem to be of the same view, as the church steeple can be seen at the end of the street, although it is very faint in the above photo.

The following photo has the title “The Old Tivoli Theatre, demolished in 1914”, and is a view along the Strand, with the Adelphi theatre on the right and Adam Street on the left:

And the following photo shows the “New Tivoli Cinema and the widened Strand, looking west”:

The Tivoli Cinema is the building on the left of the photo. It opened on the 6th September 1923 with music hall artiste Little Tich, so despite the book calling it a cinema, it was also continuing to operate as a theatre.

The demolition and new build of the Tivoli was part of the scheme to widen the Strand, and the end of another building which will soon be demolished as part of this scheme can be seen further along the street.

The Tivoli was closed on the 29th September 1956, demolished and a new Peter Robinson store built on the site, which in turn was demolished in the late 1990s, with the office block we see today then being built on the site.

In the above photo, the building to the right of the Tivoli, on the left of the street, the building with the arch above the second floor remains to this day.

Staying in the Strand, this is the “Old Strand, looking east from Savoy Street”:

The same view in the 1920s:

It is interesting how new builds often retain features from the previous building on the site, for example the dome on the top of the corner building on the left in the above two photos.

Another soon to be demolished entertainment building was the old Middlesex Music Hall in Drury Lane, shown on the left of the following photo:

Old High Holborn, looking east from Southampton Row:

New High Holborn, again looking east from Southampton Row:

There is a single horse drawn vehicle in the above photo, with the rest being motor vehicles, where in the “old” photo it was all horse drawn. Street lighting has also changed from smaller lights on the side of the pavements, to taller lights in the centre of the street, and again, the later buildings are of a more substantial build.

Many of the rebuilding works were aimed at improving traffic flow across London. Many streets still had what were described as bottle necks, where the width of the street would reduce, and many works of the late 19th early 20th century were aimed at eliminating these.

The following photo shows the “High Holborn Bottleneck”:

The “Oxford Street Bottleneck Near Tottenham Court Road”:

The following photo is titled “Charing Cross in 1904, prior to the construction of the Admiralty Archway”:

And then “The New Admiralty Archway, Charing Cross”:

There do appear to be a number of errors in the labelling of some of the photos in the book, so I am not sure how much either Harold Clunn, or his editor checked. In the above two photos, the first is labelled “Charing Cross in 1904, prior to the construction of the Admiralty Archway”, and the reference to Admiralty Archway implies that the archway would be built somewhere in the scene in the old photo, however the “prior” photo is looking down Whitehall (the buildings on the left are still there), the photo is not looking down the Mall, which is the location of the Admiralty Archway.

The following photo is much earlier than the date range in the book’s title of 1897 to 1927. This is the old His / Her Majesty’s Theatre on the corner of Haymarket and Pall Mall, which had been destroyed by fire in December 1867, so the photo must be from 1867 or earlier:

The fire was significant, with the Illustrated London News reporting on the fire on the 14th of December 1867 that “The spacious and beautiful opera house at the corner of Haymarket and Pall Mall, called Her Majesty’s Theatre, and formerly the King’s Theatre, was entirely destroyed, in less than an hour, by a fire which broke out on Friday night about eleven o’clock”.

The His / Her Majesty’s Theatre dated from 1791, and was the second theatre to have been built on the site. It occupied a large plot of land. After the fire, the remaining walls were demolished, and the new His Majesty’s Theatre that we see today was built, but only on part of the plot of the old theatre.

For some of these photos, I did get a chance to do a photo of the site today, to show a Then and Now comparison.

The following photo shows the site of the original His Majesty’s Theatre as it appears today:

To the left of the new version of the theatre (which can be seen to the right of the glass fronted building), the Carlton Hotel was built. The following drawing shows the elevation of the hotel facing onto Haymarket, with the rebuilt His Majesty’s Theatre in outline on the right (which can still be seen in the above photo):

Attribution: Charles J. Phipps (1835–1897), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The hotel suffered bomb damage during the last war. It was later demolished, and New Zealand House, which remains to this day, was built on the site – the glass fronted lower floors and tower.

The following photo shows the “Carlton Hotel and the Kinnaird House, Haymarket and Pall Mall”:

The above photo was taken in Cockspur Street, just after leaving Trafalgar Square. The building on the left is still there, as is the second building on the right. The Carlton Hotel is the building in the middle, furthest from the photographer, and the large dome on the roof is the same as that shown in the plan for the hotel.

In the following photo of roughly the same view today, the building on the left, covered in scaffolding, with an image of the building along the front, is the ornate building on the left in the above photo. The tower block in the background is where the Carlton Hotel was located:

In the following photo we are still in the Haymarket, and the view shows the “Haymarket, looking north showing the Capitol Cinema and Haymarket Hotel”:

The photo was taken a short way down Haymarket, and the first street leading off to the left is St. James’s Market. It is from the 1920s as we can now see a large number of motor vehicles in the street.

The Capitol Cinema was formerly named the Capitol Theatre, and opened on the 11th of February 1925, so just before the book was published.

The Capitol had a relatively short life as in 1936, most of the theatre was demolished, and reconstructed as the Gaumont Theatre, which in turn was significantly rebuilt in 1959, reopening as the Odeon, Haymarket in the basement of an office block. The Odeon closed in 2000, but the office block still remains on the site.

The building at the far end of the street, with the triangular shaped top to the façade is still there in Coventry Street, and the ground floor now houses a Five Guys, the following photo shows the same view today, with the old Capitol theatre building on the left, and the triangular shaped upper floor building at the end of the street:

And heading up to Coventry Street, this is Coventry Street in 1904, looking west:

In the above photo there is a sign for “Wales” on the left, and this is the Prince of Wales Theatre, so the street on the right is Rupert Street and Piccadilly Circus is in the distance.

The following photo is of the same view, but I think was taken further back towards Leicester Square, as the building with the arch on the façade is still there today and is the Rialto:

In the 1904 photo of Coventry Street, on the right you can see some of the late 18th century houses surviving from the first stages of development of the area. These had been demolished by the 1920s, and replaced with the larger buildings, many of which survive today, including the building on the right with the dome on the corner just below the roofline, which is the Trocadero.

Also in the above two photos we see the transition from horse drawn vehicles to motor vehicles.

The following photo shows the same view today, with the arch of the Rialto still to be seen on the right:

These photos provide a brief example of how London has changed over the years.

We could step back into many of the 1920s photos, and instantly recognise the majority of the buildings. What has changed, and is not really visible in these photos, is the change in the businesses that occupy the street facing ground floor.

Just taking the above photo, today the majority of businesses on the ground floor are focused on the tourist trade, with restaurants, take-aways, foreign exchanges, the American Sweet Shops and Souvenir Shops that pop up and disappear rapidly across so much of the West End of the city.

London Rebuilt focused on three specific decades, starting at the end of the 19th century, and up to the late 1920s, however, as discussed at the start of the post, change in London is continuous, and any book, blog post, photo etc. will only show a snapshot of the city at a specific time.

In just a few years, the view can change dramatically, and that is the only thing which is certain for any city such as London – there will always be change.

Nile Street Stairs, Woolwich

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One ticket has just become available for my walk “The South Bank – Marsh, Industry, Culture and the Festival of Britain” on the 8th of November. Click here for details and booking.

The Port of London Authority book “Access to the River Thames – Steps, Stairs and Landing Places on the Tidal Thames” lists 240 of these places between Teddington and Southend, and as you may have noticed from a number of blog posts, I am trying to visit all of them.

The 240 ranges from a causeway at Two Tree Island, near Southend, the last of the sites listed, via multiple sites as the Thames winds through London, out to Teddington, the end of the tidal river.

Back in May, I featured Bell Watergate Stairs in Woolwich, and today I am returning to visit another set of stairs in Woolwich – Nile Street Stairs.

This is the entry point to Nile Street Stairs from the embankment walkway:

The location of the stairs down to the foreshore has changed slightly, as concrete stairs now run parallel to the river wall, down to where the causeway that led from the original stairs can be seen to the right:

Looking to the right, we can see the full length of the causeway that ran from the stairs, with the access jetty to the Woolwich Free Ferry visible at top right:

Nile Street Stairs and Causeway, with the Woolwich Free Ferry:

The causeway runs for some length across the foreshore, and provided a reasonably dry, mud free route between the base of the stairs and your boat which would have been alongside the causeway.

It is in a remarkably good condition. I do not know when it was last repaired, but it is a remarkable survivor given that the original pier to the Woolwich Free Ferry was built immediately to the right of the causeway. The pier and docking point for the ferry we see today is a mid 20th century change from its first location.

As with many other Thames stairs, they have been very many events related directly to the stairs, and a strange headline concerning the stairs in the Kentish Independent on the 3rd of May 1957 read – “The Affair Of The Wet Footprints”, and the article goes on to state “After police boats had been alerted to scour the Thames near the Woolwich Free Ferry on Friday night to look for a youth who was reported to have fallen feet first into the water, P.C. Booth found wet footprints leading from the ferry stairs. He followed them as far as the Odeon cinema where they petered out.

The pier master told police that he had seen an 18 year old youth in Edwardian clothes stagger down the Nile Street stairs alongside the ferry. He then hit the rails, straightened up and slipped feet first into the river.

Later another youth said he had seen a man come up the stairs soaked to the skin.”

A rather mysterious story, with the wet footprints and the youth in Edwardian clothes in 1957.

What is remarkable about Nile Street Stairs and the causeway leading across the foreshore is their survival, as it was here where the original access to the Woolwich Free Ferry was built.

The following photo shows the entry to the foot tunnel to the left, and the pier providing access to the ferry straight ahead.

The stairs and causeway were immediately to the left of the ferry pier:

We can see how close they were in the following extract from the 1897 edition of the OS map, where I have arrowed the causeway (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland):

Which is much clearer in the following extract from the above map, where we can see Nile Street Stairs leading down, immediately to the left of the pier, and the causeway running out along the foreshore:

In the above map, the round entrance to the foot tunnel cannot be seen, as this had not yet been built. It was completed and opened in 1912, and in the following 1956 revision of the map, we can now see the round entry building to the foot tunnel, slightly inland from the pier and to the left of what was Nile Street, now named Ferry Approach, with the stairs and causeway still in place (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland):

The Woolwich foot tunnel had been built after the opening of the Free Ferry as an alternative method of crossing the river, when the ferry was not operational due to weather conditions such as fog and ice, maintenance problems etc.

Both OS maps only use the name “causeway”, rather than give the name Nile Street Stairs. It is named on earlier maps, one of which I will show later in the post. I suspect that the construction and use of the pier for the ferry diminished the importance and use of the stairs and causeway, which may have contributed to the failure to provide a name in these maps.

The above map also shows some brilliant street planning, as you have both the ferry and foot tunnel entrances side by side, so if you were in a hurry to get to your job at the Royal Docks across the river, and when you arrived, the ferry was not working, you could just detour to the tunnel entrance, and walk under the river rather than sail across.

You can also see in the middle of Ferry Approach, a space with the word “Lavs” – some public toilets, also possibly essential in what must have been a place with a very high footfall, as thousands of workers once used either the ferry or tunnel to get to their place of work, either at Woolwich Arsenal, the Royal Docks, or the very many industrial premises that lined the river on northern and southern sides.

In the following photo from the current top of the stairs, I am looking back along what was Nile Street. The round brick access building to the Woolwich foot tunnel is to the right, and the Woolwich Waterside Leisure Centre is the building to the rear of, and surrounding the foot tunnel entrance. The Leisure Centre was also built over Nile Street:

The following photo was taken from the edge of the leisure centre, as far back as I could get, to try and recreate the old photo earlier in the post. I should have been much further back, but the leisure centre now sits above Nile Street:

The area around Nile Street, the old ferry pier, and north towards Woolwich High Street has been considered as the original nucleus of the town of Woolwich, and many of the old street names recall rural surroundings. Streets in the area had names such as Hog Lane, Dog Yard, Hare Street and Cock Yard, and Hog Lane was the original name of Nile Street, as we can see from Rocque’s 1746 map of London, where I have underlined the name in red, as it was also used to name the stairs:

Rocque’s map shows the origins of Woolwich as a number of streets and buildings clustered along the river, with a total of five stairs providing access to the river. Hog Lane was both the name of the stairs and the street running back from the stairs, both of which would later change to Nile Street.

To the right of Hog Lane stairs in the above map is Bell Water Gate, which I wrote about in this post.

I cannot find out when the name changed, but I did wonder, given the ship building, naval and military aspect of Woolwich, with the Royal Arsenal (part seen to the right of the above map by the name of “The Warren”, whether the name changed in the late 18th / early 19th century following the 1798 Battle of the Nile where a fleet led by Nelson defeated a French fleet at Aboukir Bay, at the mouth of the River Nile where it flows into the Mediterranean.

This theory falls apart though as Hog Lane still appears in use for much of the 19th century, so in 1861 there is a newspaper report of a drunken man being robbed in Hog Lane, after he had gone to Hog Lane Stairs to wait for a boat, fell asleep, and on waking found that he had been robbed of his hat, handkerchief, boots and money.

Also in 1861 there was a report of a woman’s suicide at Hog Lane Stairs. She was wandering the foreshore and was asked by two boatmen whether she wanted a boat, but replied that a boat was coming for her. After going up the stairs, and returning sometime later, they found the same woman face down in the river.

The use of Hog Lane seems to die out after the 1860s, and in 1882 there is a report of the theft of timber from a wharf . It had been stolen from the pond adjacent to the owners wharf, and was re-landed at Nile Street Stairs, where the timber was sold for chopping into fire wood.

In 1915, Police Constable Taylor received the Royal Humane Society’s certificate for rescuing a boy from drowning at Nile Street Stairs.

The above news reports show why I find Thames stairs so fascinating. It is not just their physical nature, it is the very many stories of London life that can be pinpointed to their specific location. Looking over the river wall at the causeway and thinking about the thousands of Londoners who have used the steps and causeway, their stories, mostly just using the stairs to travel across or along the river, but also what drove some of them to suicide, crime, and the heroism of a rescue of a child from the dangerous waters of the Thames.

I have a theory that the majority of Thames stairs had a pub alongside. This seems true for nearly all stairs in Wapping, Shadwell, Limehouse, Rotherhithe etc. but also seems to be true for Woolwich.

There was a pub called the Nile Tavern adjacent to the stairs. In 1848 this pub was to be Let or Sold, and the following details were in the Morning Advertiser on the 15th of June 1848:

“Woolwich, Kent – Most excellent FREE WATER-SIDE PUBLIC HOUSE and TAVERN – to be LET or SOLD, with immediate possession, the Nile Tavern, Hog-Lane, Woolwich, situated adjoining the stairs next the Royal Dockyard, close to the Steam-boat Piers, and directly opposite the Eastern Counties Railway. The house is at present doing upwards of 20 puncheons of porter per month, with spirits , &c. in proportion, but which may be considerably increased.”

In other adverts for the pub it is described as “river facing”, so must have been at the river end of Hog Lane / Nile Street and facing onto the river.

I wonder if the pub was named after the Battle of the Nile, and the street changed name to reflect the name of the pub.

The Eastern Counties Railway refers to the railway and station that had just arrived in North Woolwich, and the steam boat piers refer to piers for boats travelling along the river, as well as the ferry set up by the Eastern Counties Railway to transfer rail passengers between their station of the north bank, and Woolwich on the southern bank of the river.

And if you fancy trying to order a “puncheon of porter” for Christmas from your local off licence, a puncheon is a third of a tun, which was a large barrel that held 252 gallons of wine.

In another advert, the Nile Tavern was described as “fronting the Thames and conveniently arranged for doing an extensive Public house and Tavern Trade, which its situation is always sure to command, being the nearest house to the shipping lying off the Royal Dockyard, and the place for embarkation for all persons connected therewith, and others employed on the river, the waterside premises” – a description which perfectly summarises why there was nearly always a pub next to a set of Thames Stairs, when the river was the working heart of the city.

In the following photo from the Woolwich ferry, part of the causeway is just visible emerging from the receding tide. The stairs are now on the left, but originally followed the causeway back and up to the land. The Nile Tavern must have been to left or right of the stairs, and Nile Street / Hog lane headed back to the left of the round foot tunnel entrance, under what is now a sports centre, and up to Woolwich High Street:

Woolwich is protected from the river by high concrete walls, as is the opposite shore along North Woolwich. The above photo provides a view of these defences.

They are needed as Woolwich is downstream of the Thames Barrier, and is therefore not protected by the barrier. When the barrier is closed, the height of the water is a remarkable spectacle.

Whilst the Thames has for centuries been the source of London’s economic growth, prosperity, work, trade and travel, it has also been a source of danger to the low laying land along the sides of the river.

Nile Street and the Nile Tavern were mentioned in reports of a major storm during the first week of January 1887 when the “weather had been rough and stormy during the greater part of the week. Heavy rain had fallen every day and the temperature has continued unseasonably high”.

In Woolwich, several houses in Nile Street were flooded, as was the cellar of the Nile Tavern, and along the length of the Thames there was flooding from the lower portions of Chiswick and Hammersmith, where barriers were erected. Parts of Kew and Richmond were flooded, and in central London, Nine Elms, Wandsworth, Lambeth, Blackfriars, Deptford and Rotherhithe were all reported as suffering from flooding.

In Shadwell there was an “inundation”, and the “sailors and waterside characters turned out en masse, and beguiled the small hours of the night with songs in praise of the ocean and the river. The poorer of the people who worked in the docks were great sufferers of the inundation, which at one time threatened to wash away their wretched houses.”

In a similar way to the storm and floods of 1953, the 1877 storm also caused flooding along parts of the east coast, and in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire.

Nile Street / Hog Lane Stairs – that is another of the 240 river access points on the tidal Thames.

Each has been a part of the development of their local area, both on the river and on land. For many thousands of people over the centuries, they were an important place for so many reasons.

We have lost that connection with the river, but it would be good if the name of these stairs was on display, along with a brief bit of their long story and how important they once were to the people of Woolwich.

Regicides

John Okey

Miles Corbet

John Barkstead

Escape and Capture

After the Regicides

Resources – The World Turned Upside Down

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The 1803 Table of Watermen’s Rates

The Sunbeam Weekly and the Pilgrim’s Pocket – Shock and Outrage at the Evolution of the United States of America

Resources – Tallis’s London Street Views

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The future of Smithfield and Billingsgate Markets

Horn Stairs

Sir John or Sir Thomas Gresham – The Trouble with Identifications

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Thamesmead, 1970

Living at Thamesmead, 1974

The Woolwich Free Ferry

London 1942

Covent Garden Market in 1960

Covent Garden Closes

The Weekend Millionaires – An Oral History of the Thames

Banging Out – Fleet Street Remembered

1964 WOOLWICH – The significance, history, character, decline, markets, ferry, theatres, landmarks

WW1 1918 Royal Arsenal Woolwich Workers Part 1 and 2

BBC How They Dug the Victoria Line

The Port of London (1921)

London’s Lost Transport

Sunshine in Soho (1956)

The Changing Face of Camberwell (1963)

Waters of Time – A Port of London Authority Film produced for the 1951 Festival of Britain

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The Royal Exchange

Gresham College

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