Lost London (2 page)

The Strand

O
PENED BY
R
UDOLPH
A
CKERMAN
,
AN
Anglo-German bookseller and print-maker, this
shop was not only the first art library in England but also the first to be lit by gas ‘which burns with a purity and brilliance unattainable by any other mode of illumination’.

The building had been an art school from 1750 until 1806, attended by such notable figures as William Blake, Richard Cosway and Francis Wheatley. Beginning in 1813, Ackerman
held soirées each Wednesday attended by the great and good, many of whom were attracted by the fact that he was a prominent employer of aristocrats and priests who had fled the French
Revolution. As well as selling books, prints, fancy goods and artists’ materials, it was for many years the ‘meeting place of the best social life in London’.

Ackerman was also a notable publisher. Each month from 1809 to 1828, he printed
The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce and Manufactures
, a major historical source of information on
Regency fashion and a treasure trove for modern makers of Jane Austen period dramas. Meanwhile, his
The Microcosm of London, or London in Miniature
(1808–1810) contains hand-coloured
aquatints of many since-lost city views. Ackerman’s publishing business ended in 1858 and the site of his shop is now home to the legendary restaurant, Simpson’s-in-the-Strand.

Tottenham Court Road

F
ROM
1628
UNTIL THE LATE
1700s,
CITY DWELLERS
tired of the hustle and bustle of
life could take a stroll to this countryside tea garden famous for its tea and cake.

Located on what is today one of London’s most filthy traffic junctions where the Euston, Tottenham Court and Hampstead Roads meet, this public house was known for its
quiet orchards of wild fruit trees.

Its reputation declined as building developments encroached, with Larwood reporting the arrival of ‘highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, and low women’. By the early 19th century the
gardens were surrounded by houses notorious as hang-outs for prostitutes and criminals. The public house was subsequently closed by magistrates although it reopened as a tavern for a short time in
1813.

King’s Cross

C
HARLES
D
ICKENS DESCRIBED THE SLUM
that grew up here from 1840 as ‘a suburban Connemara ... wretched hovels, the doors
blocked up with mud, heaps of ash, oyster shells and decayed vegetables, the stench on a rainy morning is enough to knock down a bullock’.

The 72-acre site was previously the property of William Agar, a notorious litigant whose complaints even forced a change of direction in the intended route of the
Regent’s Canal.

After Agar’s death in 1838, the shanty town in King’s Cross emerged when his widow sub-let the land. In 1851 one W M Thomas, a visitor to London, described his journey through the
area: ‘The footpath, gradually narrowing, merged at length in the bog of the road. I hesitated; but to turn back was almost as dangerous as to go on. I thought, too, of the possibility of my
wandering through the labyrinth of rows and crescents until I should be benighted; and the idea of a night in Agar Town, without a single lamp to guide my footsteps, emboldened me to proceed.
Plunging at once into the mud, and hopping in the manner of a kangaroo – so as not to allow myself time to sink and disappear altogether – I found myself, at length, once more in the
King’s Road.’

Among the slum’s most famous residents was the boxer Tom Sawyer, while the music hall star Dan Leno was born
here in December 1860. The Midlands Railway Company bought
Agar Town in 1866 and demolished it to make way for the railways. Such was the area’s poor reputation that there was little protest, even though its residents received no compensation. Today
its name lives on in Agar Grove, a street running along the old slum’s northern boundary.

Leicester Square

B
UILT IN A BROADLY
M
OORISH STYLE WITH TWO
minarets, the Alhambra had a variety of different names and purposes. Originally
opened in 1854 as the Royal Panopticon of Arts and Science, it boasted a huge hall, hydraulic lift, lecture theatre and 97ft-high fountain.

This initial venture was a failure and in 1856 its exhibits, displaying scientific wonders of the age, were sold off for a mere £8,000 – 10 per cent of what it cost
to build.

Two years later the building reopened as a circus and from 1861 served as a music hall. Featured performers included Charles Blondin, who had recently tightrope-walked across Niagara Falls, and
Jules Léotard, whose performances inspired the song ‘The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze’ (and after whom the tight-fitting one-piece garment is named). However, the
Alhambra lost its
entertainment licence in 1870 after hosting the first London performance of the Can-Can, during which the dancer ‘Wiry Sal’ lifted her foot
‘higher than her head several times towards the audience and had been much applauded’.

For the next decade it staged plays and promenade concerts before burning down in 1883. The following year it returned as a music hall and became a venue for ballet in 1919. The theatre was
demolished in 1936 and where it once stood, facing into Leicester Square, is now an Odeon cinema. The Alhambra name does live on in Alhambra House on nearby Charing Cross Road, though rather than a
palace of entertainment it is a somewhat miserable black marble-fronted building housing offices and a bank.

Temple

T
HE NAME
A
LSATIA DERIVES FROM THE LONG
-disputed Alsace region on the French–German border that was historically outside
normal legislative jurisdiction.

In London, Alsatia covers the area formerly occupied by London’s Whitefriars monastery, which is commemorated in an eponymous street that runs south from Fleet Street
towards the River Thames.

After he dissolved the religious orders, Henry
VIII
parcelled
out monastic lands to his favourites and so Alsatia was given to his physician, Doctor
Butts. The area soon deteriorated into a maze of alleyways and squalid housing. Yet the idea of medieval religious sanctuary lived on in the area and from the 15th until the 17th century, the
population defended itself against any bailiff or city official who tried to enter the area to arrest any of its inhabitants. However, by Elizabeth I’s time attempts were being made to clean
up the area, as the State Papers record:

It was once said of Alsatia that ‘the dregs of the age that was indeed full of dregs, vatted in that disreputable sanctuary east of the Temple’. It was immortalised in two major
literary works, Thomas Shadwell’s
The Squire of Alsatia
and Sir Walter Scott’s
The Fortunes of Nigel
, both of which drew vivid pictures of this ramshackle kingdom where
people defended their liberties at all costs. Shadwell,
for instance, depicted the following scene:

‘An arrest! An arrest!’ and in a moment they are ‘up in the Friars,’ with a cry of ‘fall on.’ The skulking debtors scuttle into their burrows, the bullies
fling down cup and can, lug out their rusty blades, and rush into the mêlée. From every den and crib red-faced, bloated women hurry with fire-forks, spits, cudgels, pokers, and shovels.
They’re ‘up in the Friars,’ with a vengeance!