For today’s post, I am continuing my walk around the Rocque Ring, exploring the boundary of London in 1746, and discovering just how big a task this will be, as there is so much to be discovered in just a short length of the walk.

I have an old, printed copy of Rocque’s map (unfortunately not the original), however if you would like a copy of this fascinating map, a reader left the following comment to the post covering part one of the walk:

“The London Topographical Society has just published – at about 50% of original size – John Rocque’s two maps of London, his 24-sheet ‘Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark’ and his 16-sheet ‘Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark with the Country near ten Miles round’. For more information and to order see http://www.londontopsoc.org “

In the following extract from Rocque’s map, the route is shown by the red line. The yellow arrow points to where I finished the last post, and my starting point for today:

In walking this section of Rocque’s Ring, I am crossing Victoria Street, one of the many new streets built in the 19th century to support the growing city and the ever increasing level of traffic, as well as providing improved, direct routes between key points.

Victoria Street carved through a network of streets and houses. In the above map, the blue line marks the future route of Victoria Street, showing in the lower part of the map, the streets and buildings that would be lost, and in the upper part, the open space that would soon be covered.

The route through today’s streets is shown in the following map, and again, sorry for the different orientations of the maps – it follows the orientation of the street names. The starting point is shown by the blue arrow (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

And this is where I am starting from, at the end of Great Peter Street, with Horseferry Road to the left and Greycoat Place ahead:

To the right is Strutton Ground:

Strutton Ground is a very old street. It is shown both on Rocque’s map as well as in William Morgan’s map of 1682 (I have an extract from this later in the post which shows the street).

In both Rocque’s and Morgan’s map, the street is called Stretton Street,, however the first mention I could find of Strutton Ground was from 1731, when there is mention in the Kentish Weekly Post of a wine merchant “of Strutton Ground, Westminster”, so the current name was in use, before Rocque’s map was showing it as Stretton Ground..

I have read that the street was a path that ran been Stourton Meadows and was used by “monks and peasants travelling from the fields and meadows to the abbey at Westminster”, although I have been unable to confirm or double check this.

Today the street has a market, which seems to mainly cater to the lunchtime needs of local workers, but it has a long history of being a general market for local residents.

The first mentions of the market that I can find date back to the start of the 20th century, and it may have been populated by traders that moved from an earlier market in Broadway.

In 1922, when describing the trade of a fishmonger at the market, a newspaper report described it as “a market street nearby when that district was notoriously very rough”.

Before following the route of the Rocque Ring, I am taking a short detour down Horseferry Road:

As at numbers 124 to 126 is the headquarters of Channel 4:

For a very recently constructed building (between 1992 and 1994), it is Grade II listed.

Designed by the Richard Rogers Partnership, the building was specifically designed for Channel 4, to replace the rented offices in the West End that the channel had taken on and expanded as the audience grew.

There were a number of reasons why the building was listed, including the “elegant work of the high-tech movement”, and the “sophistication of design”, but probably my favourite of the reasons for listing is that it is a “a late-C20 exemplar of both a prestigious, owner-occupied headquarters building and a television centre”.

The majority of buildings designed today give no idea of the business of the occupier, The design for this building makes clear who the building is for, with the large number 4, which was added in 2007, looking onto Horseferry Road being the stand out advertisement.

Adding decoration to a building indicating who occupied the building was once more common. For example the headquarters of ICI on Millbank and the British Telecom Faraday Building of Queen Victoria Street.

The building we see at surface level is only part of the business of TV programming and transmission. Below street level there are 10m deep basements that were designed for production and transmission facilities and a small studio space.

As we leave Great Peter Street and walk into Greycoat Place, on the right is the old Westminster Fire Station:

This wonderful building is typical of those built by the Fire Brigade Branch of the London County Council Architects Department. It is Grade II listed and dates from 1906.

Westminster fire station closed on the 9th of January 2014. It was one of 10 fire stations closed by Mayor Boris Johnson. The other were Belsize, Bow, Clerkenwell, Downham, Kingsland, Knightsbridge, Silvertown, Southwark, and Woolwich.

Opposite the old fire station building is the Grey Coat Hospital, with the two figures typical of a charity school above the door, with the arms of Queen Anne in the centre:

The Grey Coat Hospital was a charity school, and the name comes from the colour of the coats worn by those who attended the school. There were a few more of these school in the local area, each with their own coloured coat.

An early example of a school uniform.

An article from the London Chronicle on the 17th of July 1816 provides some history of the institution:

“Mr. J. Lancaster, Master of the Grey Coat School, Westminster, stated that it was founded in 1707 by Queen Anne: this establishment educated, lodged, and boarded 60 boys and 30 girls. The boys had a mathematical education, and those who were inclined to go to sea were taught the principles of navigation. The witness’s salary, as master, was £50. His wife, as matron was £20, with lodgings and board. There was a mathematical teacher at £45, an assistant at £30, with board and lodging; five women servants.

The witness delivered in a copy of the Charter, which recited, that in 1698 a Charity School was erected in the parish of St. Margaret, for the education of poor children in the principles of the Christian religion, and for teaching to write and cast accounts, and binding them (when fit) to honest trades and employments; and that the trustees, designing to enlarge the said charity, did, in 1701, take into their care several other poor boys and girls, and provide them with clothing, meat, drink, lodging, and other necessaries in a large house, known by the name of Grey Coat Hospital, appointed to them by the vestry of the said parish, rent free, and that the charge of the undertaking being upwards of £800 per annum, was made by voluntary subscriptions and benevolence.”

The 1698 charity school was funded by members of the parish of St. Margaret. Eight parishioners had subscribed 12 shillings and six pence to get the school established.

Queen Anne granted the school a charter on the 19th of April 1706, which enabled the school to purchase the land where the Grey Coast Hospital we see today would be constructed. It is not clear whether the Hospital took the original building on the site in 1701 when the charity was enlarged, or in 1706 when it was granted a charter and purchased land.

The Grey Coat Hospital is Grade II listed, and the Historic England listing confirms that the central block dates from 1701, and that the building was restored and wings added after war damage.

The listing also states that the arms of Queen Anne on the central block are of Coade stone. If the listing is correct, then the arms date from much later than 1701, as the artificial stone factory on the South Bank was not taken over by Eleanor Coade until the 1770s.

The site was originally a Workhouse, as can be seen (green arrow) in William Morgan’s map of 1682:

And referring back to Rocque’s map I used at the start of the post, in 1746, the Grey Coat Hospital is on the site of the Workhouse, and the overall area of land occupied by the Hospital appears larger than that occupied by the Workhouse:

I suspect the quality of the environment was not as important to the Workhouse as it was to the Hospital.

In 1874 the Grey Coat Hospital became a day school for girls, and there are frequent adverts in newspapers for the school, such as the following from 1896:

“GREY COAT HOSPITAL – Day school for girls, near Victoria Street, Westminster. Tuition &c £4 5s to £4 15s a year. Piano £4. Preperation for University and Public Examinations. Scholarships in the Schools and on leaving.”

The Grey Coat Hospital continues as a school today, based on Christian values, and for girls between the ages of 11 and 18, and with boys admitted to the Sixth Form.

On the school building, to the left of the main entrance shown in the earlier photo, there is a green City of Westminster plaque:

Explored and Mapped Canada is both an unbelievable achievement given the size of the country, and is also an understatement of a remarkable life.

David Thompson was born in London on the 30th of April 1770, and in 1777 he was in the Grey Coat Hospital, the charity school on which the plaque stands.

He left the school in 1784 when he was 14 via a route that offered a career for orphans and children of the poor – an apprenticeship with the Hudson’s Bay Company. This meant that at this still very young age, he left London and sailed for Canada where he started work as an apprentice in the fur trading industry.

His initial base in Canada was in what is today called Churchill in Manitoba, directly on the coast of the Hudson Bay. It must have seemed an incredibly remote and challenging place to live after having grown up in London.

At the age of 17, he left Churchill and started to walk and paddle west across Canada, meeting the indigenous peoples, learning their languages and their stories. He also saw the impact on imported diseases such as small pox that had such a devastating impact on the local people.

He was a successful fur trader, but his real interests were in surveying and mapping Canada and the north west of the United States, and he worked to the west of Lake Superior, walking and paddling on the numerous rivers that he came across, also recording the cultures and religions of the peoples that he met.

As his main interest was surveying and mapping, and focussing on the unexplored north western lands of Canada, he resigned from the Hudson Bay Company and took up employment with the North West Company, another trading company that was founded in 1779 by Scots who had migrated from the Highlands to Montreal, mainly due to the Highland Clearances.

He spent 15 years with the North West Company, making a total of 27 years surveying and mapping western Canada.

As well as exploring, surveying and mapping, during this time he also married. At the age of 29 he married a girl, Charlotte Small from the Cree peoples who was aged 13. A marriage today we would be appalled by as she was just a child.

David Thompson seems to have spent most of his life exploring and meeting indigenous peoples, so perhaps that was considered normal among the peoples that he met.

They did have a long life together, a total of 58 years, and had 13 children of which 5 were born during his time exploring. He would also take his wife and children on his explorations, including into unknown territory.

During his time exploring, he mapped a total of 3.9 million square km, and met and spoke with dozens of indigenous peoples.

When he finished travelling, he moved to Montreal in 1812, primarily to help his children get an education.

With money he had saved from fur trading he made some investments, but these went bad, and he lost the majority of his money. To compound his financial problems, two of his children died, and his eldest son left home after rebelling against his father.

He did get some short term surveying work, but this was never enough to pay the bills, and when out of work, things were so bad that he had to pawn his surveying equipment, which must have been a considerable blow to someone who had invested so much of his life in mapping a new country.

Such were his financial difficulties, that David along with his wife Charlotte, moved in with their daughter and her husband, and he spent some time trying to get all his journals into a format that could be published, but years earlier, which makes his exploits even more remarkable, he had lost his sight in one eye, and his second eye was failing.

He died in 1857, unknown to the wider world, and in poverty, with his wife Charlotte dying three months later.

None of his work was published in his lifetime, but the geologist Joseph Burr Tyrrell worked on his notes and journals, which were published in 1916 as “David Thompson’s Narrative“.

He work is now far more widely known in Canada.

The maps he produced were very detailed, with the following being an example of one such map. Lake Superior is to the lower right:

David Thompson, holding one of the tools of his trade:

Source and attribution: Winnipeg Free Press, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The remarkable story of the life of a boy from the Grey Coat Hospital.

Hard to get a photo of the full width of the buildings of the Hospital. The following photo from Greycoat Place shows the building, with the top of the Channel 4 building in the background.

The Grey Coat Hospital in 1854:

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

One of the wonderful things about Rocque’s map, is the level of detail. Every time you look at the map, you see something new.

In 1746, Rocque’s map shows a “Pound” just past the Grey Coat Hospital (circled):

A Pound was a place where animals would be held. This was either a place where stray animals were kept until an owner could be found, or where animals on their way to market were held on the journey. There were many of these across the city, and one that is still named on milestones today is the St. Giles Pound – see this post).

In the area today, the Pound would have been in front of the brick building with the large white surround around the door. The roundabout is the junction of Greycoat Place, Greycoat Streetand Rochester Row:

Whilst walking the Rocque Ring, we can see how the expansion of the city outwards from the area mapped in 1746 was already being laid out.

Returning to the map, and projecting out into Tothill Fields is a line of trees with buildings along the upper side. If you look at Morgan’s map from 1682 earlier in the post, this was just a track across the fields with trees lining both sides:

The track between trees and buildings is labelled Rochester Row, and today the street has been built up on both sides, and still has a number of trees (obviously not the originals), lining both sides:

The name Rochester Row comes from the Bishops of Rochester. A number of these bishops held the Deanery of Westminster and in that capacity owned land in Westminster, including the land on which Rochester Row was built.

If you look half way along Rochester Row in Rocque’s map, there are buildings labelled as “”Hills Alms Ho. & School”.

The alms houses and school were founded in 1708 by the MP Emery Hill, but the buildings we see today date from a rebuild in 1882 following a consolidation of almshouses in Westminster.

Known today as the Westminster Almshouses Foundation, they still provide accommodation for those over the age of 60 who need sheltered housing:

There is another large feature shown in the map above. Just to the right of Rochester Row and the Pound is the Artillery Ground, and whilst this open space is long gone, the name is still used for streets and buildings, on or alongside the site:

An Artillery Ground was a place where training with weapons took place, archery, musket firing etc. According to The London Encyclopaedia by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, it “Takes its name from the artillery practice which used to take place here. Butts had been erected in the area in obedience to an ordinance of Elizabeth I”.

Butt refers to a place where archery practice took place and is often used to describe the mounds of earth that were used as targets. Rocque’s map does not show any of these features, just a row of what appears to be trees along one side of the ground.

I have marked the approximate area of the Artillery Ground on a map of today – it was a large space (© OpenStreetMap contributors):

I am now at the junction of Greycoat Place and Artillery Row, and on the left is the Greencoat Boy pub (which is a good place to stop off on this walk – pint of Caledonian Deuchars IPA £6.65):

The street on the left hand side of the pub is named Greencoat Place, and there is a rather nice pub sign showing what look like a rather old boy, wearing a green coat:

The green coat refers to another charity school, a very short distance from the Grey Coat Hospital, Referring back to Rocque’s map of this small area, I have circled a couple of buildings, just above and to the left of the Artillery Ground:

The building on the left of the red oval is labelled as the Green Coat School. The school was originally founded as St Margaret’s Hospital by the Churchwardens of St Margaret’s, Westminster in 1624, but as was typical with charity schools the children wore green coats so it was clear which school they came from, and wearing green coats gave the school its later name.

A Charter of Incorporation was granted to the school in 1633 by Charles I, who gave £50 a year to support the school, which was “for the relief of the poor fatherless children of St. Margaret’s, Westminster”.

The school was always dependent on charity donations. The Civil War put an end to donations from Charles I, but after the restoration, Charles II gave £100 a year, but apparently he always had to be petitioned each year for the donation.

I cannot find out exactly when the Green Boy pub was built (the current version is an 1881 rebuild of an earlier pub on the site), but the land belonged to the Green Coat School as in 1818 the school received £1,200 for a renewal of the lease of the pub, a sum which a made a big difference to the school’s finances.

Print from 1811 showing aspects of the Green Coat School:

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

Next to the Green Coat School was the Tothill Fields Bridewell – the local Prison or lockup. The name Bridewell was taken from the institution of the same name in the City of London. Rather strange to have a prison located right next to a charity school.

Tothill Fields Bridewell in around 1780:

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

You could be locked up in the Tothill Fields Bridewell for a wide range of reasons. The earliest I found was from the 18th of January 1725, when:

“Yesterday three of the White-hand Club, vulgarly call’d Sodomites, were discharged out of Tothill Fields Bridewell, viz. a Cook to a Nobleman in Palmall; a Master Taylor, and a Man who kept a Dairy Cellar at the other End of the Town.”

On the 11th of August, 1729:

“Yesterday an Irishman caused his Wife to be taken into Custody, and committed to Tothill fields, Bridewell, for giving abusive language to a Woman that she was jealous of: A notable example to such of our English Dames as may give themselves too much Liberty to censure their Husbands Actions or Acquaintance.”

And on the 6th of January, 1737:

“Several Persons have been lately committed to Tothill Fields Bridewell, for driving Wheelbarrows about the Streets with Oranges, and seducing and enticing several Servants, Apprentices, &c. to play at Dice, whereby they are defrauded of their Money.”

They were very different times.

Tothill Fields Prison on the site shown in Rocque’s map lasted until 1834, when a new prison was completed a few hundred yards away, to the north of Francis Street.

This new prison did not last that long as it was closed in 1877, demolished and the site of the prison was later used for Westminster Cathedral.

Although the original Tothill Fields prison was demolished in 1834, there is a survivor from the building to be seen today.

Walk a short distance down Little Sanctuary in Westminster, along side the Supreme Court Building (the old Middlesex Guildhall), and you will see this old stone entrance:

This entrance is from the original Tothill Fields Prison, and was moved here by the Greater London Council in 1969.

There is a plaque above the entrance:

Which reads:

“Here are several Sorts of Work for the Poor of this Parish of St Margaret’s Westminster. As also the Country, according to LAW and the such as will Beg and Live Idle in this City and Liberty of Westminster. Anno 1655.”

I must carry on, and walking along Artillery Row, I reach the junction with Victoria Street. Looking back along Artillery Row, and on the left there is an impressive building of light coloured stone, which glows in the summer sun:

This is Artillery House, built on part of the old Artillery Ground.

It is Grade II listed and dates from 1928, and was designed by the architect Maurice Webb. The listing describes the stye of the building as being modernistic “Hollywood Egyptian”.

There are a number of nice features on the building, some recall the history of the site. The South Door:

Just above both the south and north doors is a feature described in the Historic England listing as being a “ceramic miniature howitzer”. No idea if this type of weapon was used at the Artillery Grounds. The grounds look a little too small for a weapon of this size, but you never know:

Artillery Row, Artillery House and the model howitzers are nice reminders of the use to which the land here was put in the time of Rocque’s 1746 map.

I have now reached the point where Victoria Street crosses my route, and across the junction is the Albert pub:

The Albert is a very prominent feature on Victoria Street because it is so very different to all the other buildings along the street – a street where buildings seem to be undergoing a continuous process of demolition and new build.

The Albert dates from 1862, and was named after Queen Victoria’s husband, Price Albert, who had died the previous year.

A pub that is well worth a visit, but having stopped off at the Green Boy, I decided to continue.

Looking west along Victoria Street (named after the Queen):

Victoria Street was one of the many 19th century “improvements” to the landscape of London, that carved new roads through an existing networks of much smaller streets, courts, alleys and buildings.

These new roads were built to manage the rapidly increasing volume of traffic across London, to provide routes between key places (Victoria Street linked Westminster and the Embankment with the new Victoria Station which opened in 1860, and then via Grosvenor Place, up to Piccadilly and Knightsbridge).

Victoria Street was built between 1850 and 1860, and the following is an image from the start of construction in 1851:

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

Towards the end of the 19th, and during the early 20th century, Victoria Street was lined with large brick apartment buildings, and offices, shops and department stores gradually populated the street. Today, the brick buildings are in the minority, and the street has gone through many iterations of offices, and today glass and steel office and apartment blocks line the street, and continue to be built, although some late 19th and early 20th century brick buildings survive.

Looking east along Victoria Street:

Before continuing along the route of the Rocque Ring, I am going to make a short detour east along Victoria Street.

Returning to the 1746 map of the area, the red line is the route of the Rocque Ring. The blue line is the future route of Victoria Street (the above two photos were taken where the red and blue lines cross).

I have ringed an area of open space in which there is a small building labelled “Chapel”, with “St Margaret’s Burying Ground” describing the rest of the space:

This is a very old site, and dates back to around the 13th century, when a chapel dedicated to St Mary Magdalene was here. By the end of the 16th century, Stow describes the chapel as being in a ruinious state. The dissoloution of religious sites by Henry VIII probably contributed to the chapel falling out of use.

A second chapel would later be built, and as indicated by Rocque’s map, the land surrounding the chapel was the burying ground of St. Margaret’s, the church that can be found between Parliament Square and Westminster Abbey. The chapel was replaced by Christ Church Broadway, but this church was destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. The grounds had already been reduced by the construction of Victoria Street in the mid 19th century.

In the 1950s, the land on which the chapel in the Rocque map, and the later church had been built, was lost to post war building, so what remains today is roughly the area between Victoria Street and the left of the chapel in the above map.

View of the post-war garden from the east:

There is an artwork of the composer Chopin at the eastern entrance to the gardens. Chopin stayed nearby in 10 Bentinck Street when he visited London in 1848:

Along the western side of the garden is an artwork dedicated to “Commemorate the courage and perseverance of all those men and women who in the long struggle for votes for women, selflessly braved derision, opposition and ostracism, many enduring physical violence and suffering”.

The relevance of the location is that as the artwork states “Nearby Caxton Hall was historically associated with women’s suffrage meetings and deputations to Parliament”:

A very important memorial when you consider that in the early 18th century, a husband could get his wife taken into custody in Tothill Prison, as quoted earlier in the post, and that:

“A notable example to such of our English Dames as may give themselves too much Liberty to censure their Husbands Actions or Acquaintance.”

View of the gardens looking from the west. The chapel and later church was located to the left of the photo:

Back to the route of the Rocque Ring, and after crossing Victoria Street and heading down Buckingham Gate, I come across another of the colour coated charity schools:

This is the rear of the Bluecoat School in Caxton Street.

I have put a yellow oval around the location of the school in the 1746 map below, showing that the Bluecoat School was on the edge of the built landscape of London in 1746:

This post is already a long one, so rather than look into the history of the Bluecoat School in this post, here is a link to a dedicated post on the school I wrote a few years ago.

Judging by how far I have come in two posts, I suspect I have underestimated how much there is to discover when walking the Rocque Ring, but it will be an interesting journey.