After a long series of posts exploring the Royal Docks and the area around north Woolwich, I am now back in the City of London, continuing my series of posts on the plaques that can be found across the city streets, and some of the history that they tell, starting with:
Thomas Linacre – Physician
The plaque for Thomas Linacre is in Knightrider Street, a section of which runs along the back of the Faraday Building in Queen Victoria Street. It is a strange street, as although there are no barriers, and it appears to be an ordinary public street, it is a private road, and there are orange signs on the walls at the entries to the street that advise it is a private road, and that unauthorised parking will be clamped.
I assume it is a private road due to the Faraday Building, and that there were once Post Office buildings on both sides of the street.
In the following photo, the Faraday Building is on the left, and you can see the plaque just by the start of the ramp up to one of the entrances to the building:
The plaque tells that the Physician, Thomas Linacre lived in a house of the site:
The years on the plaque cover the period from his birth until his death rather than the time he lived at the house on this site. I cannot find any firm reference to when he did live in Knightrider Street, and it is one of the interesting things about plaques in general. The plaque does not tell us how important the site was to Linacre. A short visit or a long life in Knightrider Street.
Linacre is believed to have been born in Canterbury in 1460 (as usual, there is a very small amount of doubt due to the distance of time, and the availability of written records from the time), but he did go to Christchurch, Canterbury, and followed this with university at Oxford, where in 1484 he was elected a fellow of All Souls’ college.
He travelled widely in Italy, Rome, Florence and Padua, where he obtained his Doctor of Medicine, which was confirmed when he returned to England, where he continued his stay in Oxford.
In 1501 he was appointed to the office of preceptor and physician to Prince Arthur, the eldest son of King Henry VII, and the next in line to the throne.
In 1501, at the age of 15, Prince Arthur married Catherine of Aragon, and soon after their marriage, the couple moved to Ludlow Castle. Not long after their arrival they both became ill with the “sweating sickness”. Catherine recovered, but Arthur died on the 2nd of April, 1502.
Henry VII’s second son, also a Henry, would then become next in line for the throne, and he would marry his elder brother’s widow. In 1509, Arthur’s younger brother would become Henry VIII – how history would have change if a 15 year old boy had not become ill and died.
How much responsibility Thomas Linacre had for the health of Prince Arthur is not clear, however his death does not seem to have done any damage to Linacre’s career, although after the death, Linacre does seem to have devoted his time to study and furthering his skills within his profession as a physician – perhaps he was keeping a low profile.
As well as medicine, Linacre also started on a course of study in theology, and was ordained as a priest, collecting a number of parishes across the country, far too widely distributed that he was able to serve as a local priest, and this was probably either for an income, or for a pension as he often resigned from the parish a short time after taking on the role.
In the early 16th century, the role of a physician and the practice of medicine was incredibly basic by today’s standards. During his time in Italy, Linacre had seen a more structed environment for the distribution of knowledge, and this led him to the founding of the Royal College of Physicians of London.
He had received royal approval for the new college through the granting of letters patent, however there was no money associated with royal support, and the costs of the college had to be covered by Linacre, and other associated with the college.
One way in which Linacre supported the new college was through the use of his home in Knightrider Street, where meetings of the college were held. Linacre gave his home to the college before his death, and the house was used as the meeting place for the Royal College of Surgeons all the way to 1860, when the site was taken over to become Her Majesty’s Court of Probate.
Again, it is strange what is not mentioned on these plaques, and for Thomas Linacre, there is no mention of his role in the founding of the Royal College of Physicians, or that the College held meetings at the house on the site for many years.
Thomas Linacre died in 1524, and was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Thomas Linacre “from a very curious old drawing”:
Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Her Majesty’s Court of Probate was a short term replacement for Thomas Linacre’s old house, and the meeting place of the Royal College of Physicians, as this area was soon to be taken over by the new London Telephone Service, then the Post Office and now British Telecom.
Knightrider Street is an interesting street that has changed over the centuries. Taking over other streets, lengthening, then being chopped and shortened. I wrote a post a few years ago which included some of the history of Knightrider Street, which can be found here.
At the western end of Knightrider Street, Addle Hill runs north, and along this we find:
Faraday Building North – The home of multiple London telephone exchanges
The building on the right of the above photo is relatively new, however look along the ground floor of the building, and half way along, there is a strange architectural addition, the surround to an entrance to an earlier building on the site:
The VR in the rectangular panel above the entrance shows that this is a survivor from the reign of Queen Victoria, and the plaque to the left explains the origins of the feature:
That this was the former site of the north block of Faraday Building.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rapid expansion of telephone services across London. These started out as a local service, then expanded national, and finally during the 20th century, international services.
Telephone services became an essential business tool for the financial, insurance and trading businesses that occupied the City.
Early technology for telephone services, which continued through most of the 20th century, required lots of space. All the cables that ran across the City to individual telephones needed to be terminated, the equipment that connected telephone to telephone needed space, which grew rapidly with the introduction of mechanical automated telephone switching equipment. Space was needed for the teams of operators who manually connected calls.
We can follow the expansion of the site through a couple of OS maps, and in the first from the 1890s, I have marked the buildings that at the time were labelled as the Controller’s Offices for London Telephone Services of the General Post Office. The site surrounded by the red lines is that of the building in Addle Street. In yellow is the building that was in the site of the current Faraday Building (Map ‘Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland“):
By the 1950s, the current Faraday Building along Victoria Street had been built, and the building on Addle Street had extended east, occupying the site of all the small buildings to the right of the red lined building in the above map, and had now become Faraday Building North, and confirmed by the blue plaque. and as shown in the following map:
As indicated by the plaque, the building was home to multiple different exchange systems supporting local traffic all the way to international traffic, as the Faraday Buildings were the hub of international cables, and the operator services that went with them.
Key telephone circuits were also routed via Faraday, including the hotline between Washington and Moscow. Space requirements continued to increase and more modern buildings were required to house new technology and during the early 1980s, Baynard House was built to the south of Queen Victoria Street.
As the technology serving telephone services continued to evolve, automated switching become standard, removing the need for space for operators. Electromechanical switching was replaced by computer controlled switching, again removing the need for large amounts of space.
These changes meant that space requirements for telephone services reduced considerably, and telephone services consolidated to the main Faraday Building and Baynard House on Queen Victoria Street, and in 1982, the old building on Addle Hill was vacated, however the surrounds to the entrance to the building were retained, and now add some interest to the building on the site today, that, along with the plaque, inform that this area was once a central hub of telephone services that connected the City of London to the country, and the rest of the world.
A few years ago, I wrote a post on the Faraday Building in Queen Victoria Street, and the comments to the post are brilliant, as there are many from those who worked across the Faraday Building complex. The post can be found here.
Gregory de Rokesley – Eight Times Mayor of London
The next plaque can be found in Lombard Street, towards the junction with King William Street. In the following photo, there are three people to the right of the grey van. look between the front two, and a blue plaque can just be seen:
The plaque informs that Gregory de Rokesley, who was eight times Mayor of London lived in a house on the site:
Gregory de Rokesley, or Gregory of Ruxley, took his name from Ruxley in north Kent; to the south east, and now almost a suburb of Sidcup.
As with so many others who were part of the governance of the City of London, Rokesley was a highly successful merchant, trading in a wide variety of goods, including wine, corn and wool. He also supplied the Royal Court with goods, and to indicate the wealth that he had accumulated, in 1290 he lent the King a sum of £1,000. A huge sum in the 13th century.
His first steps into the management of the City were as a sheriff between 1263 and 1264. This was followed by becoming an Alderman of Dowgate ward, and then between 1274 and 1281, he held the position of Mayor of London.
During his first period as Mayor, he did undertake actions to improve the governance of the city, improve the hygiene of the city by employing what were described as a corps of scavengers to remove waste from the city streets, however his efforts in maintaining law and order in the city were not that effective, with rising crime rates, and he consequently lost the position of Mayor in 1281.
His successor, Henry le Waleys, proved equally unpopular, and in 1284 Rokesley was again elected as Mayor, although this time he only last until the following year.
His downfall again was law and order, and in 1285, King Edward I set up a commission to examine lawlessness across the city.
Edward I also allowed the Canons of St. Paul’s Cathedral to enclose the site of the old folkmoot, just to the north east of the cathedral due to the trouble caused by those who used the site (the Folkmoot was one of the Anglo Saxon methods of governance and was a meeting place of the free population of London in order to make decisions on important issues of the time. It was held three times a year at Midsummer, Michaelmas and Christmas.
By the end of the 13th century, the Folkmoot as a method of governance was becoming redundant, and the space appears to have been used by those described as “evil-doers”, hence the justification for the closure, however enclosure of the space, as well as setting up a commission to look at lawlessness in the city was seen by the inhabitants as an attack on the city’s special liberties, and Rokesley was blamed for not defending these liberties from the King’s attentions, so, for the second and final time, he lost the position of Mayor.
Rokesley was a bit of a contradiction, because as well as being a successful City trader, having many roles in the governance of the City, including Mayor, he was also a Royalist and was given many important roles by the King, which also probably contributed to his wealth.
He died in 1291, and his will included a considerable amount of property scattered across and around London, as well as his large mansion house in Lombard Street – the site referred to by the plaque.
Thanet House – Aldersgate Street
Close to where Aldersgate Street meets the roundabout circling the old Museum of London site, there is a bus stop, with a plaque on the adjacent wall which tells anyone waiting for a bus that here was the site of Thanet House:
Which could have been found here between 1644 and 1882:
Hard to believe if you walk along Aldersgate Street today, that in the book Londinopolis (1657), the author James Howell describes Aldersgate Street as having “spacious and uniform buildings which made Aldersgate Street resemble a street in an Italian town”.
One of those buildings was Thanet House, built by Inigo Jones in 1644, which is shown in the following print, published around 40 years after the house was completed:
Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Thanet House was the building’s original name, and it would later be called Shaftesbury House. Old and New London has the following to say about the building:
“Shaftesbury or Thanet House, one of Inigo Jones fine old mansions, formerly the London residence of the Tuftons, Earls of Thanet. From them it passed into the family of the clever and dangerous political intriguer, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury”.
Thanet House is shown in William Morgan’s 1682 map of London (the centre of the following extract), where the house also has gardens stretching back towards the location of the wall around London:
Thanet House, or Shaftesbury House came back into the ownership of the Thanet family in the early 18th century, however rather than being a London residence for the family, it was used as an Inn, a Lying-in-Hospital, shops, and, as the following 1851 print shows by the sign above the central door, there was also warehouse space to rent:
Image: © 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 middle of the 19th century, Aldersgate Street was a busy commercial street, with the Post Office buildings at the southern end of the street adding to the importance of the area.
The end of Thanet House came in 1882 when it was demolished, and by the 1890s editions of the Ordinance Survey map, the site was being shown as having been subdivided into a number of smaller buildings facing onto Aldersgate Street.
A short distance along from the plaque to Thanet House, there is another plaque to be found:
John Wesley – The Probable Site
Which can be seen on the wall to the left:
The plaque on the wall:
John Wesley was the key founder of the religious movement known as Methodism.
He was born in 1703 into a religious family, and religious learning was a key part of his early education, which continued at Charterhouse School in London, and then at Christ Church, Oxford.
The event in Wesley’s life that happened at Aldersgate Street was after his return from a couple of years in Savannah, Georgia, in the US, where he had been invited to act as the local minister attending to both the spiritual needs of the colonists as well as trying to convert the indigenous American population.
He was largely unsuccessful with attempts at conversion, and sailed back to England both disillusioned and depressed by his experience, and doubting his inner spiritual strength.
On the 24th of May, 1738 Wesley attended a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street (the Moravians were one of the oldest Protestant streams of Christianity, dating back to the 15th century), and it was at this meeting that, as described on the plaque, he “Felt his heart strangely warmed”, as he described in his diary entry for the day:
“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s ‘Preface to the Epistle to the Romans’. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
His later diary entries do though throw some doubt on how influential the meeting in Aldersgate Street was to his restoration of faith and spiritual strength, however he started to preach widely across the country, and his lasting legacy was to be the Methodist Church after his death in 1791.
“The Beauties of Methodism. Selected from the works of the Reverend John Wesley”:
Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
There is though some doubt as to exactly where in Aldersgate Street the Moravian meeting that Wesley attended was being held. The plaque does state that it is at the “Probable Site”.
The plaque is also now part of the history of the area, as it was placed on an earlier building in Aldersgate Street in August 1926:
So the plaque itself has survived the destruction of much of the area during the last war, and the demolition of buildings across the area ready for the build of the Barbican estate, and is therefore one of the very few survivors from before the last 70 years of Aldersgate Street reconstruction.
Five more of the plaques that tell the long and diverse history of the City of London.
The blocks you have identified as the Faraday Buildings have an interesting history. They were originally called “GPO South”. The fist block was on Queen Victoria Street and housed the Post Office Savings Bank. The Savings Bank moved to Blyth House in Hammersmith at the beginning of C20, and GPO South was then repurposed for telephony. So I think the portico dates from the days of the Savings Bank and not the old Faraday Building.
Another interesting factoid about the Faraday Building is that it blocked the view of St Paul’s from the Thames. And that prompted the enactment of the laws that now protect views of St Paul’s.
When Faraday House was being built they hit a gas main. There result was an explosion in Paul’s Bakehouse Court, destroying the offices of my grandfather, the architect of Shell-Mex House amongst others in London
In the mid-eighties I had the privilege of visiting the London Stock Exchange’s document archive in Bow where all the historic minutes of meetings of the Stock Exchange Committee were held. In one of the early volumes (late C19 as I remember) I came across, the committee considered a proposal to install a telephone at the Exchange. After much discussion, the Committee decided this would not be a good idea because ‘then anyone could telephone us’. Given that at the time there must have been very few telephones installed anywhere in the city (or the Country!) one can only wonder who they were so concerned about making unwelcome calls to the Exchange!(?) Needless to say, the Committee eventually relented!
My great-grand-father, had an architect’s practice. When they first installed a phone callers were told ‘he did not come to the phone’.Some time later, when everyone was out to lunch, he booked a call to an old friend who had moved to the north of Scotland. He was caught be staff chatting animatedly when they came back from lunch
Thanet House was at some point ( 1751) an important Lying-in Hospital for poorer women, which was known later as the City of London Maternity Hospital. After many moves, it was still in the City of London till
WW2, when it moved to Hanley Road in Islington, still with the same name. Like hundreds of women after the war, I had my first child there. In 1983 it was closed, quite shamefully, with the loss of 86 beds, only 47 of which were moved to the Whittington hospital. With maternity wards in Barts closing in 1986, as with hundreds of dedicated maternity beds all over London, we are now in a desperate situation with loss of maternity beds in London – and midwives and mothers have to put up with cramped and inadequate dedicated maternity spaces and far too few beds.
“One way in which Linacre supported the new college was through the use of his home in Knightrider Street, where meetings of the college were held. Linacre gave his home to the college before his death, and the house was used as the meeting place for the Royal College of Surgeons all the way to 1860, when the site was taken over to become Her Majesty’s Court of Probate.”
Surely Physicians rather than Surgeons?
Just not sure how Rokesley (late 1200’s) was a highly successful merchant, trading in a wide variety of goods, including wine, corn and wool, if corn wasn’t brought back from the Americas til 1493.
. Are you confusing corn with maize? Wheat has been cultivated in the British Isles for thousands of years.
Fascinating post, as always. I wonder what has become of the larger plaque about Wesley that was at the entrance to the old Museum of London.