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A real hidden gem – Henry V111’s wine cellar

July 11th, 2017

Vic Keegan

THE PHRASE “hidden gem” is the most overused way of describing curious places in London, not least by me. But in the case of the wine cellar constructed by Cardinal Wolsey – and later appropriated by Henry V111 when the Cardinal failed to get him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon – it is an understatement. It is hidden because it is concealed deep within the bowels of the huge Ministry of Defence building which straddles the east side of Whitehall needing special permission and tough security procedures to view. And it is a gem because, wow, it is the last remaining intact piece of Henry V111’s Palace of Westminster, which was once bigger – and certainly uglier – than Louis XIV’s Versailles. It was the palace of English monarchs for 200 years.
What struck me after negotiating a series of stairways was not just the unexpectedly large size of the cellar itself but the way it is presented. It is designed in museum style, with large reproductions of paintings and maps and numerous boards along the outside walls. This explains the historical background to it as you walk around the outside of a mausoleum-style structure (see, below) that has encased the cellar since it was moved sideways (10 feet to the west) in its entirety and lowered almost 19 feet during the reconstruction of the building in the 1940s. This was needed to prevent it protruding 30 feet into Horse Guards Avenue. It was an impressive bit of engineering for the time. It took 90 men eighteen months according to a parliamentary answer at the time (though the current brochure says it was completed within three months). It is a sad fact that the wine cellar was only saved because of a public outcry when the architect’s plans were revealed leading people to believe that it would be demolished.
Entering the wine cellar itself really is like falling into a time capsule. In the depths of a building where battles are planned and nuclear tactics discussed is one of the last remains of Tudor London just as it was almost 500 years ago bar a bit of restoration including replacement stones, a lick of white paint on the walls and some more recent wine barrels at each end to recreate part of the atmosphere of a bygone age. There is a stark beauty to the columns and the vaulted ceiling made of sculptured bricks which come together in “V” shapes.

Map showing proximity of the wine cellar to the Great Hall

There is bit of unfinished business. The wine cellar was very close to the Great Hall of Wolsey’s Palace where in later years some of Shakespeare’s plays were produced. I read somewhere that part of the wall of the hall can still be seen. Does anyone know?
There has been speculation about what sort of wines were stored here to slate the Cardinal’s thirst. England – and London – were not short of vineyards in those days but it is presumed that Tudor snobbery – oops, sorry, taste – would have ensured that most of the wines would have come from France including, possibly, from Champagne (which in those days was a still white wine). It is a sad fact that because of its location and the security involved it is unlikely ever to be opened to the public – unless of course, the Government sells the building off to a hotel group for re-development. On recent trends, I wouldn’t bet against that in the long term!
A memorable experience and I am most grateful to Cdr John Aitken for showing me around.

Part of the casing for the wine cellar

London is made of poems

July 4th, 2017

Vic Keegan

I have just published – OK self-published – my first book about London. All done in poems, over 80 of them.I was going to write about the process but @DaveHill kindly offered me a guest slot on his excellent London blog. You don’t say No to Dave!
Instead here are a few random samples to give an idea of what it is all about.
Poems are a hugely flexible medium in terms of shape, length and subject matter even though I seem to have become ensnared by rhyming couplets (blame primary school). I usually try to spend 10 minutes or so first thing in the morning waiting for the muse to move. I respond best to suggested subjects and deadlines. Any offers?

80 poems about the world’s most exciting city

Plaque on the wall

It’s not a column, nor statue, it’s true
It could be grey but it’s usually blue,
It’s just a plaque on an outside wall.
You could fix your own on a wall in the hall.
But sadly it won’t be the same you see,
For it needs the seal of the right committee
Which thinks you are someone above the norm,
Whose name on a plaque won’t generate scorn.
But there’s another reason you should dread
For to get a plaque you have to be dead.
So, until that happens go forth, walk tall
Rejoice that there’s no writing on the wall.

Necropolis Railway

The Necropolis Railway at Waterloo
Conveyed dead people no matter who
From a station in London’s centre, no joking
To a fresh built city for the dead in Woking
No probs as long as you paid for a pass
Which could be first, second, or even third class
As in life, so in death, you must know your place
As well as being in a state of grace.

The most famous customer so history tells
Was Communist founder Frederick Engels
Whose principles should have – oh let it pass
What does it matter if he travelled first class
You don’t want dead bodies to lose any face
When you’re gone, class distinction leaves no trace.

On arrival at Brookwood, there’s a religious test
One station for Protestants and a second for the rest
(Remember – even when you bury your dead,
There’s a risk that a religious virus could spread)
So, let’s give thanks to the railway of Necropolis
For helping God sort bodies before the Apocalypse.

I remember London

I was born in low rise London
Which has now all but gone
In those balmy days buildings knew their place
Before planning became an endless race
They were intended to be no more,
Than the height of the buildings right next door.
Centre Point produced the first pain
We never thought they’d do it again
Monstrously, it was built a la mode
Destroying the lines of Tottenham Court Road
Built to appease the emerging Gods fiscal
It became not a one-off but a starting pistol
For a race to the sky by developers all
Determined to profit from urban sprawl
Of all the buildings in London the most tall
For centuries was the Fishmongers Hall
Built close by London Bridge to the north
But look now at the concrete that has poured forth
Fishmongers’ Hall is now a mere mound
Dwarfed by giant new buildings all around
Have we nothing to show more fair to our Creator
Than a Gherkin, a Walkie Talkie and a Cheese Grater?

Etiquette on the Tube
A young woman stood up without a sound
In a crowded carriage on the Underground
I thought she was leaving at the next station
Till she looked at me puzzled for a short duration
Then smiled and pointed at her vacant seat
I knew I should have conceded defeat
She was rightly doing what she’d been told
Though she was telling me I was too old
To be left to stand on my own two feet
I should have said Yes and embraced defeat

But too quickly I thanked her and politely said No
Not thinking that this might be such a blow
She may never do such a good turn again
I tried to explain but it was all in vain
She had sunk back into her book
Not deigning to give me another look
Her mum had told her to help the elderly
But that training had failed for all to see
So an old man could keep his punctured pride
And try to keep standing for the rest of the ride.

To buy on Kindle at £3.99(download) or £5 (paperback)

New gardens for old – meet the new Garden Museum in Lambeth

May 29th, 2017

Vic Keegan

The new garden (above) and the old one (below)

The newly revamped Garden Museum, next door to Lambeth Palace, is a triumph of professionalism over history and intimacy. It used to be my favourite place for lunch in the whole of London. You could sit at tables in the garden with overhanging trees, the graves of the Tradescants and Captain Bligh on one side and a couple of banana trees and a rosemary tree on the other, the nearest place to Eden in the metropolis.

Now it has yielded to modernity but anyone who didn’t know what preceded it will doubtless be very impressed. Gone are the exotic trees and the café now occupies a sealed off area on the far side. But in their place is a finely conceived sculptural space which is likely to attract far more tourists. The inside of St Mary’s church, now given over to museum space, is for sure, a huge improvement on the impertinent wood structures which dominated the walls before the changes.

But it is hard for anyone who knew it before to condone the destruction of what was a magical garden in the middle of London. Not something you would have expected an organisation dedicated to the history of gardens to have done. As Patrick Hutber once said, progress brings deterioration.

Forget craft beer – meet London’s new wineries

April 5th, 2017

Vic Keegan

Warwick Smith (left) and winemaker, Josh in their Bethnal Green winery

IF YOU care to walk along a down-at-heel alleyway cluttered with second hand furniture barely 30 seconds from Bethnal Green Tube station in East London you will stumble across a spanking new space under a Network Rail arch. Welcome, Renegade London Wine, the latest in what is beginning to look like a mini boom of wine makers in London. Forget craft beer, artisan wine is the new red. London Cru started it in 2013 in a winery close to West Brompton underground station and is still going strong. Now three others are joining the fray. Vagabond Wines which serves wine by the glass (with a choice of 140 varieties in its newly opened Victoria branch) will soon launch a new winery in the Nine Elms complex by Battersea Power Station complete with visitor centre. Meanwhile Sergio Verrillo, an American from Connecticut is opening yet another one in the Queenstown, Battersea area later this year in time for the harvest. All of them will be processing at least some UK wines.
Making wine in capital cities where rents are often sky high is not quite so barmy as it sounds. There are reckoned to be over 300 urban wineries around the world including successful ones in New York with sampling and eating facilities attached.
Warwick Smith, who runs Renegade with the winemaker, Josh Hammond is hoping to attract cult customers if all goes well by offering wine by the glass and possibly snacks in the winery itself as well as seeking online sales and getting into restaurants. An ex City asset manager he gave me a sample of several of this year’s newly labelled wines yesterday including Bacchus (fast becoming the flagship English still wine) Sauvignon Blanc from France and Pinot Noir from Italy. I was impressed. They have made 7,500 bottles this year from English grapes from Suffolk and Herefordshire plus fruit from France and Italy. Bizarrely – like London Cru – they are not allowed to call their Chardonnay “Chardonnay” even though it is from a well respected Italian vineyard because of arcane EU rules about certification. They know they will have to sell a lot more that 7,500 to turn a profit but they seem very focussed to do that. They are also believed to be making a batch of sparkling wine from English grapes but they are a bit coy on the subject. As I was leaving Josh showed me a few Chardonnay cuttings which he is about to plant in a wooden container to catch the afternoon sun outside. Maybe one day they will make a little wine from their own grapes. You can follow them on (hash)renegadelondonwine or instagram.

Gavin Monery, winemaker at London Cru

London Cru, which pioneered the idea of an urban vineyard in London in 2013, produced an impressive 24,000 bottles of English and Continental wines last year of which about 60 per cent goes to the trade (mainly restaurants) and the rest directly to consumers especially at tasting events in the winery. It has built up a good reputation for quality and counts French sommeliers amongst its customers. Winemaker Gavin Monery reckons that London could support lots more urban wineries – probably with a restaurant or café attached as Vagabond is doing at Nine Elms – but he admits high rents are a problem. Both London Cru and Renegade admit they will have to sell a lot more to achieve long term viability. Gavin says the “magic number” is 50,000.
These are the first commercial wineries in London for a very long time though exactly how long is hard to nail down. The antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726 to 1798) observed that “The genial banks of the Thames opposite to our capital (ie in Lambeth) yield almost every species of white wine; and by a wondrous magic, Messrs. Beaufoy here pour forth the materials for the rich Frontiniac, destined to the more elegant tables, the Madeira, the Caleavella, and the Lisbon, into every part of the kingdom. . . . The foreign wines are most admirably mimicked.” It was reported that five sixths of the white wines consumed in the capital were the produce of home wine presses.
If Renegade does produce a sparkling wine then it will open a fascinating discussion about which sparkling wine is more truly “London” – that of Forty Hall (grapes grown within the London postal area but processed in Sussex) or that of Renegade (grown in the country but processed in London). Let the debate roll on.
(This blog is replicated on my English and Welsh wine blog victorkeegan.com)

How Sir Robert Cecil’s mansion became the world’s biggest hotel and then Shell Mex House

February 12th, 2017

Vic Keegan

Hotel Cecil from the Embankment, now Shell Mex House

If you walk along the Strand today in the direction of Waterloo Bridge you will probably pass by number 80 (photo below) without even noticing it. It is actually the entrance to what used to be called Shell Mex House formerly the HQ of Shell Mex and BP which is more recognisable from the Embankment end because of its Art Deco clockface, the biggest in London.

Actually it is not what it seems. It is not the entrance to Shell but the shell of a former building, the Hotel Cecil, in it’s day the biggest hotel in the world. If you enter into the courtyard and turn around it is obvious that what you are looking at is the rump of the former hotel now used as offices.

Through the entrance is a substantial portion of the old hotel

The Cecil Hotel needs a book to do it justice.If you walk through the entrance you will see a substantial portion of the Strand Facade of the former hotel.
It was built by a Victorian fraudster and Liberal MP Jabez Balfour using funds from his Liberator Building Society, the biggest in the country before it crashed in 1892, depriving thousands of small investors of their savings. Balfour absconded to Argentina where he lived for a few years before being captured but the hotel was rescued by the liquidator after a new company was formed to complete it.
It was big. The main dining room could serve 600 customers, the second one 350 and the third 200. It was a hugely popular place for dancing and eating during the roaring 20s particularly with American visitors.

Sir Robert Cecil’s mansion

It was called Hotel Cecil to preserve a link with the almost equally large building, Salisbury House, which was built on the same spot by Sir Robert Cecil Secretary to State to Elizabeth 1 and James 1. It was one of the chain of grand palaces that occupied the whole of the space between the Strand and the Thames as immortalised by the drawings of Wenceslaus Hollar the Czech engraver. It is not to be confused with another Cecil House built on the opposite side of the Strand by Sir Robert’s dad Lord Burghley which was constructed on the site of today’s Strand Palace Hotel.
The fact that these three buildings were all built on the same site on the Embankment reflects the Capital’s unending re-invention of itself. There is an enbedded link between the existing building and the hotel but it is an open question how much of the stone and bricks of Salisbury House are still extant in the walls or foundations if surrounding buildings. It is one of the features of London – helping to explain why street levels are much higher than they were in Roman times – that building materials are conveyed into London and mainly stay there.

Shell Mex House from the river on the same spot as the Hotel Cecil and Robert Cecil’s house (Photo D Jones)

This is where Spitalfields buried its dead

December 12th, 2016

Vic Keegan

charnelsmall
THE HISTORIC Charnel House in Spitalfields has been much written about by enthusiasts but rarely seen – even by people who live and work in the area. I gave up asking people where it was yesterday and, rather ironically, had to rely on SatNav to find the only medieval remains in Spitalfields, indeed in the whole of Tower Hamlets.
The reason passers-by – including yours truly in times past – miss it is that has been beautifully and cunningly preserved. There is a glass floor at street level which you wouldn’t notice unless you knew you could observe the remains underneath. To see properly you must go down stone steps and peer through glass at the bulk of the remains including a recent dark sculpture to add an extra touch of the macabre. It is a bit like looking into a medieval aquarium.
The Charnel House was at the perimeter of the very large ancient Priory of St Mary Spital (short for hospital) where they kept the bones – mainly heads and legs – of the deceased so prayers could be said for the repose of their souls. It dates from the early 1300s though the hospital – which derives from the word “hospitality” – was founded in 1197 on the site of what is believed to be a much earlier Roman cemetery.
At a time when the people of Spitalfields are resolutely fighting for the preservation of their more recent heritage the Charnel House stands as a fine reminder of how it is possible to preserve the past within the present. It is to be found under the Norman Foster building at 1, Bishops Square.
For a more detailed review with lots of pictures see the Gentle Author at http://tinyurl.com/gsx3bol

London’s Top 5 medieval buildings

November 17th, 2016

Vic Keegan

whitetower1240 ethelreda1
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OLDNESS is not what it seems. I have walked passed Westminster Abbey for decades thinking it was a bastion of medieval solidity. Not so. At least, not on the outside. Hardly any of the edifice is that old, apart from occasional bits of old stone visible near the foundations. The rest has been replaced over the centuries. The same is true of Southwark Cathedral – formerly St Mary Overie – which existed in some form or other long before old London Bridge – the one with houses on top – was built. Only the very eastern end survives in its medieval form. Likewise with Grays Inn, where Shakespeare’s troupe once performed and which occupies almost exactly the same site as Lord Grey de Wilton’s original “inn”. Nothing from its medieval hey days remains apart from a font embedded in the wall, some stained glass and recycled bricks.
westminsterhall1
So, where is medieval London? In the course of researching an iPhone app on medieval London – to join those on the right of this screen – I have been trying to sort the true medieval from the reconstructed. If I had to name a Top Five then first would be the White Tower of the Tower of London, a globally recognised icon that is much as it was – bar a few window changes by Christopher Wren – when William the Conqueror had it built in the late 11th century. Close on its heels must be Westminster Hall, built by the Conqueror’s son William Rufus with its amazing hammer beam roof – still claimed to be the biggest in the world – installed by Richard ll. When some of the beams had to be replaced a century ago the wood was taken from trees which were already growing 600 years ago in the same woodland as the original oaks. Only in England . . .
The third may be a surprise. St Ethelreda’s is the former chapel of the Bishop of Ely’s London palace in Holborn which for most of recent history has been a legal part of Cambridge, not London. It is difficult to see as you enter the approach road – though not as difficult as the Mitre inn built by Bishop Goodrich in 1546 to feed his workers. This is concealed down a nearby alleyway,which separates the church from Mammon’s Hatton Garden, the centre of the diamond industry. St Ethelreda’s is one of the very few structures in London surviving from the reign of Edward l (1274 – 1307). Nearly all of the walls and the crypt beneath where (see photo above) you can still see the original beams on the ceiling are very old. The church, almost miraculously, has survived two world wars, the Reformation and the Great Fire of London which changed direction at the last moment. Inside there is a holy calm yards from the bustling city of London. Truly a gem.
For the other two of the top five, you can take your pick. I would choose the Middle Temple Hall where Shakespeare’s players premiered Twelfth Night on February 2, 1602 before Queen Elizabeth l which still has its original walls as does much of the even more historic Temple Church nearby. But Clerkenwell has a claim also with the beautifully preserved – though heavily reconstructed – Charterhouse while the area south of Westminster Abbey has the small but wonderfully preserved Jewel Tower dating back to 1365 and, over the river, the 14th century entrance to Lambeth Palace. Any other candidates? Please email me victor.keegan@gmail.com

Lambeth – seedbed of circuses and music halls

September 21st, 2016

Vic Keegan

IF You stand at the junction of Royal Street and Upper Marsh in a forgotten backwater of Lambeth (see map below) you will be looking at the seedbed of two revolutions in entertainment, though there is nothing to show for it. Not even a single plaque. A few hundred yards to your left, roughly on the site of today’s Florence Nightingale Museum, stoood Astley’s the world’s first modern circus (photo below). The pioneering dimensions of its ring are still in use today. On your right a hundred yards away stood the Canterbury Music Hall. It was Britain’s – and maybe the world’s – first big music hall which spawned hundreds of imitators and to which can be traced the rise of today’s stand-up comics. The only reminder of it is the name of the apartment block which has taken its place, Canterbury House.

In 1849 Charles Morton opened the Canterbury Hall in an area full of gin palaces, ragged children and inebriated men. It started off in the back room of a pub. It was replaced by a larger grandiose music hall in 1856 able to take 1,500 people (and eventually double that). The 1856 theatre was built around the walls of the older version which was then demolished, reportedly, in a single weekend. Among the performers were Charlie Chaplain’s father, and numerous others including at one stage Chaplain himself. Blondin did his famous tight-rope act there. By this time it had a large entrance in Westminster Bridge Road. It also exhibited paintings and was dubbed “The Royal Academy Over the Water”. The building lasted until 1942 when it was bombed beyond restoration and demolished in 1955.

Near neighbours – Astley and Canterbury

Circuses in some form had existed for many centuries, the word itself is of Greek origin, and exhibitions of strange animals were held in ancient Egypt. But Astley’s, was the world’s first modern circus with what is now a standard circle for the ring and was born here on January 9, 1768 when Philip Astley (1742 to 1814) pioneered it as a modern arena surrounded by tiers of seats to watch trick horse riding and other acrobatic exercises, with tumblers. tight-rope walkers and clowns added later.

Astley reckoned that a diameter of 42 feet for the circus ring was needed so horses could move comfortably. Astley’s success soon spawned imitators. A rival, Charles Hughes, who had once worked with him, set up a Royal Circus a short distance from Astley’s ‘ Amphitheatre of Equestrian Arts’ in Lambeth. Hughes, who was the first to use the word “circus” in this context, took his troupe to entertain Catherine the Great in 1790 and is credited with planting the idea of circuses in Russia. Meanwhile John Rickets, another pupil of Astley, went to America and established a circus in Philadelphia. Later on, the US showman Barnum may have become more successful than Astley but there is no doubt who was the true architect of circuses. He established wooden ampitheatres around Britain and 18 in other European cities. He opened his first Paris circus in 1782 and is buried in the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Though Astley’s circus has long since disappeared he lives on in literature having been mentioned by Jane Austen, James Joyce, Charles Dickens and Tracy Chevalier.

It is one of the attractions of London that it has so much history underground often ignored. Nevertheless, at a time when Britain’s entertainment industry is doing so well it is sad that that some of the key institutions that started it all are not better remembered.

The City office block with a Roman bath house of its own

July 25th, 2016

Vic Keegan

How underfloor heating worked

UNTIL A FEW months ago it was only possible to visit the very ordinary office block at 101 Lower Thames Street in the City on special occasions such as London’s Open Days. Now it is open at weekends with time-slots throughout the day. Not a lot of people know this yet. When I visited it yesterday I had two excellent guides all to myself. After an introductory talk they took me down a breeze-blocked stairway into what looked at first sight like a B & Q warehouse awaiting completion.

Except that this structure was actually completed around 43 AD, shortly after Boudica’s ravaging of the City. It is the spectacular site of a Roman villa complete with the remains of underfloor heating and a bath house, preserved for centuries under four metres of earth. Water on an extremely hot floor created steam fired from a wood burning stove for the equivalent of a Turkish bath. The wearing of sandals was de rigueur unless you wanted to burn your feet. Among numerous other things, I was impressed with the way a piece of modern technology – a laser light pointer – can be used to explain the contours of ancient walls highlighting details that would otherwise have been missed.

The main section of the remains was discovered by the Victorians in the 1840s when they were building the Coal Exchange, a handsome neo-classical building – and a cathartic contrast to the coal mines from which the black gold was extracted – which was demolished in 1962 despite the fierce opposition of John Betjeman and his conservationist colleagues.

Wood burning stove with shelf for wood on the right

It is not the only, or even the biggest, Roman bath in London but is, for now, the most accessible. A much bigger one is on the site of the wonderful Clearly Gardens in Queen Victoria Street, near St Paul’s Cathedral. This is an idyllic hidden garden, complete with its own vineyard. The main remains of the Roman bath now lie preserved but hidden and unaccessible under a nearby office block. But if you wander around the layers of the garden you can see memories of former times hidden among the bushes.

Other public baths have been found in Cheapside and other possible sites include Lime Street and the area around Cannon Street. It is a sobering thought that the remains of an entire city many metres beneath the ground are gradually being uneathed in London, one of the most layered cities in the world.

Tickets (£8 or £6 for concessions) can be booked via the website of the Museum of London
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Graffiti Grove – drown your Brexit blues

June 30th, 2016

Vic Keegan

From the York Road end near Waterloo Station it looks like the tradesman’s entrance to Hades. Those of a nervous disposition, or suffering from Brexitphobia, may be better off using the other end of Leake Street in Lower Marsh where an embryonic urban garden presents a more gentrified vista. Either way don’t miss Graffiti Grove – or the Graffiti Tunnel as it is more prosaically known – whose regularly changing urban art ranges from the salacious to mind bending blizzards of colour that would enrich the new Tate Modern.
The amazing thing is that it is still there at all as a semi-official gallery, owned by Network Rail, where anyone with a spray can is able to dare to overpaint an existing work by someone else. It hasn’t returned to the dizzy heights of 2008 when it was Banksyfied by an exhibitiion of the Bristol artist’s stencilled works but it still breathes a fly-by-night creativity under railway tracks herding unknowing commuters to their artless office desks.
Legal graffiti still sounds a bit oxymoronic but it works well here and the tunnel has lost little of its freshness over the years and is still surprisingly little known. Sometimes when I amble through there are more artists than visitors. For what it’s worth it is rated the 256th most popular destination in London with 82 out if the 90 reviews rating it Excellent or Very Good.

New rivers for old – what to do about the Fleet and the Walbrook

April 25th, 2016

Vic Keegan

LostRivers WHEN BORIS Johnson became Mayor of London in June 2007 he said he was going to open up the lost rivers of London. Surprise, surprise, it never happened. The Fleet, the Tyburn, the Walbrook and all the other romanticised arteries of bygone London have remained buried under the ground or have long since been diverted into Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s amazing sewage system.
But is now the time for fresh thinking? A revised version of Nicholas Barton’s seminal “Lost Rivers of London” – co-authored with Stephen Myers, an experienced water engineer, – has come up with some practical suggestions which cry out for some Lottery money.
The idea is along these lines. Forget about those lovely schemes like opening up the Fleet by St Pancras Old Church or putting glass over it when it runs under Farringdon Road as it nears Blackfriars Bridge. Why not, they argue, run an under-surface pipeline from near its various sources among the Hampstead hills – when it is still fresh Fleet water before being merged with the sewage system – and let gravity take it down the hills towards London town where it could be diverted to form ponds or rivulets in interesting spaces such as housing estates or public places or parks. Local authorities could bid for part of the action. A good example of this already exists – the New River Walk in Islington – where a stretch of the New River, which has supplied London with water since the reign of James 1 still exists in landscaped surroundings. Maybe the Tyburn, fed from the same Hampstead Hills, could re-emerge in The Green Park where the undulations formed by the original river can still be seen.
The authors have a bolder idea. They claim that in the early 15th century the monks of Charterhouse monastery and the Priory of St Bartholomew “hi-jacked” (their words, not mine) the course of the Walbrook river by channelling water from one of its sources near the Angel to Charterhouse through wooden pipes. Since water continues to flow to this day through the original pipeline the authors suggest it could be tapped (or re-hi-jacked) to beautify the area around Smithfield, now in the throes of re-development. Alternatively, it could routed along the old Walbrook emerging in Finsbury Square or passing alongside the Roman Temple of Mithras which is to be re-erected deep in the bowels of the Bloomberg building on its original location.
Lost Rivers of London (Historical Publications, £22.50) is a well researched and beautifully produced book with the old river routes overlaid on colourful Geographers’ A-Z maps, It will remain as the classic work on London’s Lost Rivers.

Shakespeare mania in Pall Mall

March 20th, 2016

Vic Keegan

PallMall3

52PMthis The Shakespeare Gallery, Pall Mall then (left) and now (right)

DURING Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary spare a thought for a London street normally associated with exclusive clubs rather than high culture. Walk down Pall Mall today you are denied entry to almost every building on the south side unless you are a member of one of the clubs. It is difficult to believe that in the late 18th century this street was a hive of artistic activity mainly around Shakespeare. It was triggered by the artrepreneur James Boydell who opened the Shakespeare Gallery in 1789 at 52 Pall Mall which soon contained 180 specially commissioned paintings depicting scenes from Shakespeare, many by established artists such as James Fuseli, Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Romney. It sported a large statue of Shakespeare (see above) which now resides at the bottom of Shakespeare’s garden at New Place, Stratford-upon-Avon. The gallery was free and was intended to direct British art to a more classical direction choosing rich literary themes instead of portraits. But Boydell also had a business plan. Like Hogarth earlier in the century he sold engravings of the paintings here and on the Continent with great success until the Napoleonic wars broke out, cutting off the Continental market, which led to his bankruptcy – and a fire sale of all his artworks in a lottery.
On January 28, 1805, William Tassie, a London gem engraver, struck lucky. His three guinea ticket to the lottery won him the entire contents of the Shakespeare Gallery – over 160 pictures at the height of its fame.Tassie refused an offer from Boydell’s nephew Joshua to buy them back for £10,000 and they were sold at Christie’s for just over £6,000, way below their cost price. As a result the Boydell collection, which in its day challenged the artistic supremacy of the Royal Academy – which until 1780 had also been located in Pall Mall before moving to Somerset House – bit the dust. Many of the paintings disappeared for ever. But some have been retained in galleries and private collections many of which are on show at a special exhibition at Compton Verney to mark Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary.

The Boydell gallery was but the biggest of a mini explosion of artistic galleries often featuring Shakespeare in Pall Mall at that time. In 1788, a year before the Boydell gallery opened Thomas Macklin’s Poets’ Gallery which showcased over 50 British poets including Shakespeare, opened to an enthusiastic response. Meanwhile James Woodmason moved his New Shakespeare Galley from Dublin to Schomberg House at 88 Pall Mall in 1794 across the road from Boydell’s initiative which he copied by using illustrations and text employing some of Boydell’s artists. Among the works Woodmason commisioned were Matthew Peter’s Death of Juliet as she prepared for suicide, dagger in hand, and Fuseli’s depiction of Titania falling in love with Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The Shakespeare galleries in Pall Mall must have left something in the air because years later in the 1840s after their closure Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59), the great engineer, who was living in nearby Duke Street, commissioned paintings of Shakespeare scenes from some of the top artists of the day including Edwin Landseer and Charles West Cope. They were hung in his spacious dining room which came to be known as the “Shakespeare Room”.
There were others. Henry Fuseli opened a Milton Gallery in the late 179os, Christies had their showroom there, Schomberg House, the facade of which still exists today (complete with statues made of artificial COADE stone) was host to the studio of Thomas Gainsborough and also the exhibition rooms of the Polygraphic Society which aimed to make multiple copies of oil paintings available for people who couldn’t afford the originals. At the other (eastern) end of Pall Mall at Spring Gardens the Society of Artists had its main exhibition venue while on King Street (off Schomberg2

Schomberg1 St James’s Square) there was another gallery, the Imperial Museum, (later the European Gallery) which showcased British and Continental paintings. There are still lots of paintings in Pall Mall but they are all behind the closed doors of the clubs. There is nothing, apart from the Schomberg facade (photo, right), to remind us that Pall Mall was once had a strong claim to be the artistic centre of London.

The hidden memories under Victoria Street’s last bit of greenery

January 19th, 2016

Vic Keegan

Christchurch Gardens today. The telephone exchange (above) replaced the church (below)

CHRISTCHURCH GARDENS, the last patch of greenery in Victoria Street, looks decidedly undernourished as if it is expecting to be gobbled any time soon by a developer for yet more luxury flats. It is only when you look among the discarded tins and other detritus by the telephone exchange at one end to see a row of half-hidden tombstones that it starts to reveal itself as an historic churchyard and burial ground. Its best known alumni is Captain Blood, an Irishman and local resident, who nearly stole the Crown Jewels but managed to blarney his way out of execution and ended up with a pension in the Court of Charles 11. He was such a notorious conman that his body was dug up a few days after his death to ensure he was not still alive.

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(Photo courtesy of J McCarthy taken from a window in their former premises in Strutton Ground).
The churchyard is one of the last visible remains of Tothill Fields which once stretched from Tothill Street to the Thames at Vauxhall, apart from the 10 acres of playing fields at Vincent Square which was “enclosed” by Westminster School in 1810. But this space which once had a Chapel of Repose – built on the site of a much older 17th century church called New Chapel – and a burial ground which stretched under today’s Victoria Street was also the scene of two remarkable legacies of slavery – black and white.

Here is buried Ignatius Sancho (1729 – 1780), an extraordinary African (below) who was reputably born on a slave ship and after working as a black servant in a rich household – a fashionable thing for the upper classes to do at the time – he was actively encouraged by the Duke of Montagu to educate himself which he did with relish.
There is a plaque in King Charles Street, Whitehall, which I have walked under for decades without noticing.
It records that there was once a grocer’s shop (right) at number 19 Charles Street (as today’s King Charles Street was then called and where the Foreign Office now stands) run by Ignatius Sancho who escaped from slavery in the 18th century to become a London celebrity and an admired writer, playwright and composer. He was feted by Dr Johnson, painted by Gainsborough and a correspondent of Laurence Sterne author of Tristram Shandy whom he encouraged to campaign against slavery. When a book of his letters was published on a subscription basis – today we would call it crowdfunding – the subscribers read like pages from Debrett’s. Sancho was also the first black African to have voted in England.
But Christchurch Gardens is also the place where one of the most shameful incidents in England’s history took place. In the 17th century it was a burial ground – stretching across today’s Victoria Street – taking bodies that couldn’t be accommodated at nearby St Margaret’s. Samuel Pepys complained that demand was so high that “none but such as are able to pay dearly for it can be buried there”. After Oliver Cromwell’s victory at Worcester during the civil war an estimated 1,200 Scottish prisoners were buried here or in Tothill Fields after being marched in terrible conditions from the battlefield while others were sold as indentured labour – effectively, slaves – and sent to plantations in the West Indies and America. One example was Thomas Kemble, a lumber merchant from New England who ran sawmills in New Hampshire. He transported 274 Scottish Highlanders who had fought for Charles 1 to America as slave labour.
This patch of grass remains as one of the very few historic memories of the surrounding area that have escaped the clutches of developers. One other is nearby Blue Coat School. Christchurch Gardens may soon be confronted by several 20-storey plus blocks of flats and offices on the other side of the road where New Scotland Yard now stands, if plans go ahead. It may be only a matter of time before the ugly telephone exchange on the northern side of the gardens is redeveloped on a bigger scale. But, hopefully, Christchurch Gardens will remain to remind people of a very different world. If they notice it.

London’s largest un-hidden gem

October 25th, 2015

Vic Keegan

Statue by Grinling Gibbons of Charles 11, founder of the Royal Hospital

IT IS OFTEN said that the nearer you are to something the less likely you are to visit it. A variation is that some things are so big you don’t notice them. Such it was with the Royal Hospital – home of Chelsea pensioners – which I have passed on numerous occasions, admiring Wren’s facade of course, and presuming it must be a private space. Even as I was passing its narrow entrance the other day I thought the same. There was no notice saying it was open to visitors and when I asked a man by the door whether it was open to the public, I was answered with a beaming smile and told I could wander where I liked. Which I did, apart from the spaces reserved for pensioners, and was instantly smitten. It was not just the numbing architecture of Wren’s marvellously understated chapel (below, right) and dining hall or the Grinling Gibbons sculpture of Charles 11 (above) who founded the hospital so as not to be outdone by Louis 1V’s Les Invalides in Paris.

It was the sheer size of the place. It makes St James Park seem like a back garden, surely the biggest group of buildings and gardens in central London stretching as it does from Royal Hospital Road to the Embankment.
It was only after I was turning for home after walking the length and breadth of its nooks and crannies, including allotments and a putting green for residents, that I observed a discreet notice with the words “Ranelagh Gardens”. Could this be – yes it is – the site of the famous Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens (below, left), an upmarket version of the equally famous Vauxhall Gardens across the river. It was built in 1688 by the first Earl of Ranelagh (née Roger Jones, son of the Archbishop of Dublin) who was Treasurer of Chelsea Hospital from 1685 to 1702.

In 1741 the house and grounds were bought by the proprietor of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and opened to the public complete with the Rotunda where in 1765 the nine-year-old Mozart performed.

If ever there was a secret garden in London this is it, still roughly the size it was in its hey days when Horace Walpole observed: “It has totally beat Vauxhall” adding “You can’t set your foot without treading on a Prince or Duke of Cumberland”.

Today the spirit of the pleasure gardens continues. Pensioners seem to have permanent smiles on their faces and are only too happy to lead a conducted tour or explain the history of the place – not least that it is called a hospital in the old sense of giving hospitality. Retirees from the army spend four days in the hospital before being accepted – including eating in Wren’s dining hall. If they are accepted their army pension is paid to the hospital to help finance their stay. Entrance is free but it would be a hard person who didn’t leave a donation to maintain this delightful place. After a pleasant coffee and scone in the attractive café (hidden down an alley) I walked home amazed at the scale and history of London’s most unhidden gem.

An old print showing the hospital and Ranelagh Gardens with Rotunda on the right

Little known fact – Fulham Football Club played here for two years from 1886

Destruction of a unique London garden – by the garden gurus

October 12th, 2015

Vic Keegan

A last look at a very special garden

THE GARDEN MUSEUM and its amazing café – my favourite place in the whole of London to have a quiet lunch – is closing on Wednesday until 2017. I had my last nostalgic meal there today (it is adjacent to Lambeth Palace) and mourned with others over its wanton destruction.
OK, not destruction – reconstruction. Much of what they are doing is admirable. They are extending the world’s first garden museum – at the place where John Tradescant, the father of English gardens who died in 1638 is buried – into a much classier operation within the deconsecrated church of St Mary’s where the museum is housed. This includes bringing back historic artefacts from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which were transported there from Tradescant’s ark or museum in Lambeth after his death in rather dubious circumstances. All that is good.
But the garden! This is a garden museum for heaven’s sake dedicated to gardening. Progress will be achieved by greatly shrinking the size and nature of a very special place, one of the few oases of tranquility left in central London. One side of the garden is to be enclosed by a new café which will open on to a much reduced area of garden on one side and the main road on the other. This replaces a tiny galley inside the church from where a small team produced lovely vegetarian meals which helped to get it declared the sixth best museum cafe in the world by an American Gourmet magazine in 2012. It wasn’t applauded because it had the grandeur of other contestants like the Michelin starred Nerua at the Guggenheim, Bilboa but because of its simple delicious home made food and idyllic garden which will now be enclosed on all four sides by intruding extensions, not the best advertisement for a museum dedicated to garden design.
I took my last melancholic look at the garden today (above) with its banana trees, mulberry, and an unusual tree of rosemary which watch over the graves of the Tradescant family and Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. They are among 26,000 souls buried there including six and a bit archbishops of Canterbury (don’t ask . .). I shall never see it or its like again. I pray I will be able to eat my words, but I doubt it. The graves and knot garden will remain to be gawped at rather than wandered among. Other than that a unique patch of London will be gone forever, never to return to its former glory.

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How Sir Robert Cecil’s mansion became the world’s biggest hotel and then Shell Mex House

This is where Spitalfields buried its dead

London’s Top 5 medieval buildings

Lambeth – seedbed of circuses and music halls

The City office block with a Roman bath house of its own

Graffiti Grove – drown your Brexit blues

New rivers for old – what to do about the Fleet and the Walbrook

Shakespeare mania in Pall Mall

The hidden memories under Victoria Street’s last bit of greenery

London’s largest un-hidden gem

Destruction of a unique London garden – by the garden gurus

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