Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (12 page)

The large retail shops which now dominate the area appeared from the latter half of the 19th century, the major exception being Fortnum and Mason which opened as a grocery store in the 1770s close to its present site. It was founded by Charles Fortnum, a footman in the household of George III who used his knowledge of the needs of the royal household, and his friend John Mason, a groom, who organised the deliveries.

Savile Row’s first tailors arrived in its smart residences from the 1850s. In 1875 Arthur Liberty opened a shop in Regent Street, calling it East India House, and specialised in selling fine silks. In 1881 the shop became very popular when librettist WS Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan incorporated Liberty fabrics in costumes for their comic operetta
Patience
; its designs also became associated with the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and William Morris. The sports shop Lillywhites began to trade near Euston Station in 1863, the enterprise of a family of cricketers. It did not move to Piccadilly Circus until 1925 where it remains, still the nation’s largest sports store. In 1909 the flamboyant American Gordon Selfridge opened London’s largest department store on Oxford Street on a site which in 1765 had been occupied by a furniture store bearing the name of the Waring family (later Waring and Gillow). In the meantime Waring and Gillow had moved to new premises in Oxford Street. Sam Waring encouraged Selfridge’s new enterprise on condition that Selfridge did not sell furniture, a promise he kept. The Waring and Gillow stores closed in the 1980s but Selfridges continues to thrive.

Shops defunct – and Harrods

Some once well-known names have not survived. Jackson’s of Piccadilly was established as a wax and tallow chandler by the 1820s though it later became established as a food shop, famous for its teas. Its name survives on branded goods supplied to other retailers but the shop closed in 1980. The same is true of the men’s outfitters Simpson’s of Piccadilly which closed in 1999 and became bookseller Waterstone’s largest store. The TV scriptwriter Jeremy Lloyd worked at Simpson’s as a young man and drew on his experiences when writing the popular television comedy
Are You Being Served?
A name now forgotten is that of James Shoolbred, a large department store on Tottenham Court Road which specialised in fine furniture, much of it made in-house, and other wooden artefacts, notably jigsaw puzzles. It traded from the 1820s and closed in 1931. Gamages traded from premises in High Holborn from 1878 to 1972. It was created by Arthur Gamage, a farmer’s son from Herefordshire who bought up a number of ill-assorted properties which were not designed to be used together, making a trip to Gamages an exercise in direction-finding as well as retail therapy. It was strong on toys, sports and camping equipment (being official supplier to the Scout Association) and a pioneer in the use of mail order catalogues. Its location – like that of Shoolbred’s rather remote from the traditional shopping district of the West End – proved an insuperable problem and it closed in 1972 to make way for offices. Only Harrods has managed to thrive as a major department store independent of the West End. In 1849, in the distant village of Knightsbridge, Henry Harrod, a tea merchant, bought a small grocer’s which benefited from the proximity of the Great Exhibition of 1851, many visitors flocking to his store with its motto of Omnia Omnibus Ubique (‘all things for everyone, everywhere’). By 1867 the store had the astonishing turnover of almost £1,000 a week. Its turnover now approaches £1 billion a year.

L
eicester Square, in the heart of London’s theatre district, has at its centre a statue of William Shakespeare, beneath which is an inscription explaining that the square was presented to the citizens of London by Albert Grant. It doesn’t tell the reader where the money came from. The district took its name from Leicester House, built in 1636 as the London home of the Earls of Leicester. In the 18th century it became the home first of the future George II and later of his son Frederick, Prince of Wales, each in turn using it as a base to pursue the Hanoverian tradition of sons quarrelling with fathers. In 1806 Leicester House was demolished and the square became a derelict eyesore: an equestrian statue of George I was vandalised by early graffiti artists, the rider being supplied with a broom in place of a sword and the horse covered in spots. Attempts to revive the square’s fortunes with such entertainments as ‘Mr Wylde’s Great Globe’ failed as these descended into bankruptcy.

Leicester Square

In 1873 Albert Grant – who styled himself ‘Baron’ after an honour supposedly granted to him by the new Kingdom of Italy – offered to buy the square and refurbish it at his own expense. He neglected to mention that he had gained his money as an early exponent of the black art of direct mailing, enticing widows and clergyman to invest in such non-existent enterprises as the Emma Silver Mine and the Labuan Coal Company. He raised £24 million from such hopeful investors, of which £20 million was never seen again. From such sources he paid for the square to be cleared, landscaped and supplied with statues of Isaac Newton, Joshua Reynolds, William Hogarth and the surgeon William Hunter, who had all lived in the area. A statue of Charlie Chaplin has since been added. Grant – whose birth name was Albert Gottheimer – built a magnificent house near Kensington Palace which was seized by his creditors, the staircase being bought by Madame Tussaud’s where it remains. He died in penury in 1899, his obituary in the
Illustrated London News
recording that he was ‘a man of agreeable presence and enthusiastic manners whose death brought back to mind many an ancient adventure of his as promoter, mineowner, millionaire and bankrupt’.

S
ome of London’s most amazing institutions have disappeared but are remembered by street names and similar mementoes. One of the strangest is St Martin’s-le-Grand. Founded as a monastery and college by two brothers in the reign of Edward the Confessor, its bells sounded the nightly curfew until this role was taken over by those of St-Mary-le-Bow in the 14th century. Criminals could seek sanctuary within its grounds until 1697 when this privilege was ended. Sir Thomas More claimed that Miles Forrest, one of those accused of the murder of the Princes in the Tower, ‘rotted away piecemeal’ in the sanctuary. The foundation was dissolved by Henry VIII in the 1540s and became noted for its production of jewellery and fine lace. It became the site of the headquarters of the Post Office in 1829.

St Martins-le-Grand

Nearby are the sites of two famous schools. Christ’s Hospital was founded in Newgate Street by Edward VI in 1553, shortly before his death, as a hospital for orphans in the buildings formerly occupied by the Greyfriars monastery before it was dissolved. It is known as the Blue Coat School because of its distinctive uniform. In 1666 most of the buildings were destroyed in the Great Fire and it was rebuilt to designs by Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Past pupils have included the poets Coleridge and Lamb and the Catholic martyr Edmund Campion. The school moved to Horsham, Sussex, in 1902 and the London site was taken over, like that of St Martin’s-le-Grand, by the Post Office. Just to the north the Charterhouse is remembered by the street which bears its name. Bought in 1348 as a burial ground for victims of the Black Death, it soon became a Carthusian monastery, accommodating a particularly ascetic order of monks who could talk to one another only on Sundays after a meal when they were permitted a 3 hour walk outside the monastery walls. The monks declined to recognise Henry VIII as head of the church and most were executed. In 1611, Thomas Sutton (1532-1611), reputedly ‘the richest commoner in England’ as a result of his ownership of coal mines in Northumberland, acquired the property and founded Charterhouse School whose pupils are known as Carthusians. He also founded the adjacent hospital for 80 ‘Poore Brethren’. The school moved to Godalming, Surrey in 1872 and the buildings, restored after being bombed in 1941, now accommodate St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School. It also provides a home for 40 Charterhouse Pensioners known as Brothers who have to have been born in London. One of the better known recent brothers is the novelist Simon Raven.

Charterhouse School

Cannon from steel

Steelyard Passage on the banks of the Thames near Cannon Street Station marks the former site of the London base of the Hanseatic League, a trading confederation of north European cities stretching from Novgorod in Russia to Bruges in Belgium. The Steelyard, which took its name from scales used to weigh imports and exports, was in effect a warehouse and its merchants enjoyed many privileges, including a monopoly of wool exports, in return for which they paid taxes to the monarch, most notably to Edward III to finance the Hundred Years’ War against France. Elizabeth I abolished these privileges in 1598 and the Steelyard continued to be used as a warehouse and also as a Rhenish Garden where wines from Germany as well as beer could be enjoyed in open air comfort. Samuel Pepys makes several references to his use of its facilities in his diary. The Steelyard was finally sold in 1853 for the handsome sum of £72,500 to become the site of Cannon Street Station. A plaque was unveiled in 2005 at Cannon Street Station to mark the former site of the Steelyard.

F
or many people the essence of London is the River Thames but very few realise that the city’s major waterway is fed by tributaries which still flow among or beneath the streets of the capital. Some of them occasionally emerge in the form of lakes while others pass through very unlikely places. The most extraordinary is the River Westbourne. Like most of the rivers north of the river it rises on Hampstead Heath. It then flows, mostly beneath the streets, surfacing in Hyde Park as the Serpentine and then passing through a conduit above the trains at Sloane Square Underground Station where the large and odd-shaped metal tube puzzles observant waiting passengers.

The Tyburn, which also begins on Hampstead Heath, appears as the pond in Regent’s Park and passes beneath Marble Arch where it gave its name to the site of public executions, in use until 1783. It then passes beneath Buckingham Palace before forming a delta and entering the Thames in two branches, one at Millbank and the other near Westminster Underground Station. Enterprising Victorians used to make subterranean voyages along these rivers. In 1862 one of them, John Hollingshead, rowed with some friends along the Tyburn until he estimated they were beneath Buckingham Palace, at which point they all stood, removed their hats and sang ‘God save the Queen’! The third major river to the north, the Fleet, has two sources, in Hampstead and Highgate ponds, and flows beneath the streets between King’s Cross and St Pancras Stations before passing through Clerkenwell underneath the Farringdon Road and entering the Thames just upstream from Blackfriars Station. At low tide its outlet into the Thames is clearly visible from the platforms stretching over the river. It was at one time a substantial river, navigable as far as Old Bourne (Holborn). In the reign of Edward II the Fleet was large enough to harbour pirates who emerged from it to attack the king’s barge as it passed up the Thames. The unseen river has, of course, given its name to Fleet Street nearby. The last of the major rivers to the north is the River Lea (also spelt Lee) which rises at Leagrave, near Luton in the Chilterns, and flows mostly above ground. It is most often seen in the opening credits of
EastEnders
as it enters the Thames opposite the Millennium Dome. Other rivers to the north include Stamford Brook in Acton; Counter’s Creek which flows beneath Chelsea’s football ground at Stamford Bridge; and the Walbrook which gives its name to a street and a church behind the Mansion House in the heart of the City.