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The Victorian prison they found underneath my road this week

April 18th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Road works in our street in Victoria to install new electricity cables this week have uncovered part of the entrance to a vast Victorian prison. The old bricks (above) which are from the right side of the trench (below, right) are from the prison known as Tothill Fields Bridewell built in 1834 on the site of what is now Westminster Cathedral and surrounding mansion blocks. The prison extended over what is now Thirleby Road as can be seen from the illustration (below, left) which overlays a current map of the area on a map of 1862 showing the extent of the prison. The long trench in the photo runs from the beginning of Thirleby Road at the Francis Street end. It can be seen that the remains of the wall were very near the entrance to the prison and the fragments of stone (bottom photo) may have been part of the entrance (reproduced in the print below). Bones were also found during the excavation of the trench.

Roadworks offer an unusual opportunity for amateur archaeologists to exercise their curiosity. Among finds I have come across recently in this area are two separate sightings of the Tyburn River and part of the foundations of Whitehall Place.

Tothill prison was built on the site of an earlier prison on an 8 acre site along open principles espoused by Jeremy Bentham as a House of Correction for vagrants. Bridewells became the generic name for prisons after Bridewell Palace by Fleet Street, built by Henry V111, was converted into a goal. Tothill had a reputation for being well managed – which may account for the fact that it had a high degree of re-offenders who rather preferred the goal to the outside world. The stone entrance to the prison (seen at the rear of the courtyard below), can still be seen as it was transported to the rear of what is now the Supreme Court in Parliament Square.. This is the only remnant of the original prison I have come across – apart from some bricks recovered from this week’s excavations which I am keeping as a souvenir.

Stone from the entrance to the prison (left) and print of the original entrance to Tothill (right)

London’s vineyards on the biggest roll since the Middle Ages

April 13th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Me (left) sampling Forty Hall – Chateau Tooting (centre) – and Olding Manor, right
A highlight of my sojourn among English and Welsh vineyards last year was the almost biblical sight of volunteers toiling among the ten acres of grapes at Forty Hall (photo below) in Enfield, probably the biggest vineyard in London since the Middle Ages. Yesterday I had my first taste of the 2013 vintage at the Real Wine Fair at Wapping. Davenports the highly regarded vineyard in Sussex which made wine from the Forty crop was also at the Fair. And the result? Young but fruity and very palatable, the best of the new London vintages I have tasted this year.
This was one of about 200 bottles of still white wine (the sparkling, which takes longer to mature, is yet to come) produced in this pioneering year which will mostly go to members of the community who have given their time or donations to bring to fruition a project that is the pacemaker in the sudden revival of winemaking in London.

Forty Hall
But it is not yet the biggest despite Forty’s plans to expand eventually to 10,000 bottles. London’s current leading wine producer couldn’t be more different. It is Chateau Tooting, which I have written about before, is producing nearly 700 bottles of wine – with ambitious plans for expansion – from anonymous grapes submitted by volunteers from their gardens and allotments. I was so surprised by the quality of the Tooting wine considering the changeling circumstances of its birth that I asked their winemaker, the multi-prize winning Bolney Estate in Sussex, what sort of alchemy they had employed.

Sam Linter, managing director of Bolney, commented: “When the grapes arrived we thought this is going to bean exciting challenge. All our experiences and skills were needed.” She said the batch was a mish-mash including ripe, overripe and under-ripe grapes. Among the techniques used to cope with this were to reduce acid at the pre-fermentation stage, put in a few light oak chips while fermenting and ensure a gentle pressing so unripe grapes not would not be squeezed so hard. How would she judge it in a blind tasting? She replied that it was the best Chateau Tooting yet and she had drunk an awful lot worse in supermarkets. It was, she said, ”easy to drink though with no real complexity, but is clean, fresh, with some fruit, a sound wine.” The lesson, it seems, is that you can make drinkable wine from poor grapes as long as you have the right techniques and equipment. However, she emphasises that top quality wines still require the best quality grapes!

Camley Street vineyard, Kings Cross (left) – Paul Olding (right)

If Forty and Tooting are Premier Division, there is a growing number of smaller operations such as Paul Olding (above. right) who produces around 100 bottles of Olding Manor – very drinkable whites and reds – from his 42 vine allotment in Lewisham which he kindly gave me a tasting of. It is already proving contagious as eight out of 15 nearby allotments have taken his cuttings and he himself wants to buy land in Kent for a proper vineyard.

Alex Smith, founder of Alara Wholefoods and one of the pioneers of urban winemaking, has wrapped some vines around the perimeter fence of his works in Camley Street, King’s Cross (above, left) and has produced around 70 bottles this year. Tony Hibbert, who writes about his experiences as a small-scale grower in UKvine.com, hopes to produce 200 bottles a year eventually but this year his main crop was 24 bottles of red from his Pinot Noir vines which he is rather pleased with. Marko Bojcun has planted a vineyard called Hawkwood in Chingford to grow for the local community making wine for dozens of households who bring their grapes to him.
All these projects have one thing in common. Community. They are run by volunteers doing something for the common good which purely commercial considerations might rule out. Whether it will all wither away or, helped by global warming, grow to become a national phenomenon remains to be seen.
Of course, the price of land in London rules it out as a source of major vineyards but you only need to take a train journey to see an abundance of wasted land either side of the tracks which, with suitably secure fences, could be put down to grapes as could gardens and allotments up and down the country.
The quality of the wine could easily be improved by coordinating the efforts of volunteers to plant one particular variety which grows well in England and Wales – say Bacchus or Seyval – and exchanging regular advice on best practice. London used to have lots of vineyards including at Westminster, Piccadilly, St Giles, Holborn, Lambeth and Bermondsey. Now there is a revival, thanks at least in part to global warming.
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What happened when Mr Tate didn’t meet Mr Lyle

April 2nd, 2014

Vic Keegan

The Tate and Lyle refinery at Silvertown

It started as one of my walks from Trafalgar Square without crossing a road. Taking up where I left off last time at the Millennium Dome I headed past Antony Gormley’s beautiful Quantum Cloud sculpture with its spasmodically visible man (himself) which provides an unintended counter point to the invisible people in the underused cable car ferrying passengers high above the Thames to the north bank.
Pausing only for a detour at the pretty Greenwich Peninsular Ecology Park I strolled along the reed-lined banks of the river to the Thames Barrier for a quick lunch in the cafe where the view is rather better than the food. Then to the Woolwich pedestrian tunnel under the Thames, which I have to admit I hadn’t even realised existed until embarrassingly recently. (We all have our manors . .) It is similar to the foot tunnel at Greenwich but a bit spookier to walk along when you are the only one.

Quantum Cloud (left) Woolwich Tunnel (right)

Sadly, the Thames path north of the river came to an abrupt halt shortly afterwards at the far end of Tate and Lyle’s dominating presence at Silvertown which is still one of the biggest sugar refineries in the world and one of the very few large industrial complexes left in London.
Seen from the other side of the river (above top) it has an almost majestic presence and a welcome antidote to the Stalinisation of the north bank upstream where miles of look-alike apartment blocks dominate the eyeline.
You can ‘t look at this building without thinking of the history it emerged from. Henry Tate set up the (cane) sugar refinery while Abram Lyle established a rival golden syrup factory a mile upstream. The two rivals took the same train from London every day in separate carriages without speaking to each either. Indeed they never ever met – but after their deaths the two companies merged in 1921 to form Tate and Lyle.
Tate and Lyle sold its refining business to American Sugar Refinery in 2010 leaving it to concentrate on bulk ingredients, a shrewd move, maybe, now that the adverse health properties of sugar are being emphasised. Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin, which has remained almost the same since 1885, has been recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as Britain’s oldest brand.
The refining of sugar sits uncomfortably between its original links with the slave trade in the West Indies and modern perceptions that too much sugar is ruining our health. But the people – mainly women – who laboured there appear to have been an uncommonly happy workforce as is charmingly chronicled in a recent book The Sugar Girls (@The_Sugar_Girls). Sir Henry Tate, of course, is best known for his role in establishing the eponymous Tate Gallery. I wonder whether it would have been of the slightest interest to him to know that today you can walk from the Tate Gallery (the opposite side of the road admittedly) to Tate and Lyle’s premises at Silvertown in the East End . . . without crossing a road.

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The other Crystal Palace – in Victoria Street

March 24th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Westminster Palace Hotel (left) and Royal Acquarium (right) Imperial Theatre

Few London scenes have changed as little as Parliament Square with the Commons and Westminster Abbey preserved in aspic. But looking west from the abbey towards Victoria Street (above, left) there have been dramatic changes. The building (left) on the corner of Victoria Street and Tothill Street is the long demolished 400 room Westminster Palace Hotel, in its time the biggest hotel in London and the first with lifts (before the 1,000 room Hotel Cecil was built in the Strand). Here Gandhi started a correspondence by letter with Tolstoy.

Side view of the Royal Acquarium at the end of Victoria Street and Tothill Street

But it is the building on the right of the same photo (and in the etching immediately above) advertising Zulima – the strongest woman in the world, since you ask – that knocks one for six. Built on the ground now occupied by the Methodist Central Hall it was the Royal Aquarium, a huge building inspired by the only slightly bigger Crystal Palace, housing all sorts of entertainment (except fish and royalty). It sported a very large angled glass and iron roof, clearly influenced by the Crystal Palace, and a grand hall which was 340 feet long and 160 feet wide. Arthur Sullivan looked after the music and Millais the paintings. It housed a 400 piece orchestra, a large reading room, chess room, a roller skating rink, a palm court, exotic trees, fountains and the biggest collection of circus and freak acts you would find anywhere. These included the tightrope walker, the Great Farini, Zazel, the human cannonball, and a music hall where George Robey made his debut. Next door was the Acquarium Theatre, later re-named The Imperial Theatre (above, right) before being demolished in 1907 brick by brick and rebuilt as the Imperial, Canning Town eventually becoming the Imperial Cinema before being burned down in 1931.

The noble vision of the Royal Acquarium was for a building of “public instruction and entertainment” but this didn’t stop objections from nearby Westminster School which was worried “there would speedily gather round the place persons and associations of a character calculating to be seriously detrimental to the interests of the school”. Their forebodings proved correct and the initial rule that “no lady unaccompanied by a gentleman would be admitted after dusk” lapsed into the admittance of lots of women whose prime interest was not acquariums. One such lady, Emily Turner, was lucky. A “Major Hamilton” she picked up there and who offerred to set her up with rooms in Lambeth turned out to be the serial killer Thomas Neil Cream. He gave her pills to take which made her ill but they turned out not to be poisonous containing only quinine. She declined to identify Cream in court lest her lifestyle became public.

Interesting facts: the Acquarium took only 11 months to construct compared with a period of years for later, smaller, buildings erected in Victoria Street right up to the present day.

In the distance of the main photo down Tothill Street between Westminster Palace Hotel and the Acquarium is a block of flats which at the time of building in 1884 was the tallest, and in many critics eyes, the ugliest block in London. But, of course, they did not know what replaced it – today’s monolithic Home Office building.

The joy of Chateau Tooting’s 2013 vintage

March 7th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Claiming bottles of Chateau Tooting

Everyone knows that making good wine is all about concentrating on the best grape varieties that suit your soil and then honing them to perfection monitored by experts. Which makes Chateau Tooting, which breaks every rule, all the more interesting. People from all over London – and especially from the south – bring grapes grown in their allotments and gardens to a central point once a year from where they are taken to an established vineyard, Bolney, for processing.

Most of them – including myself – don’t even know what varieties they have been growing or even whether they are wine grapes or desert ones. It is a surefire recipe for vinicultural disaster mitigated by hopes that imbibers will make allowances for the circumstances of its birth.
Which makes it all the more amazing that at last night’s premiere tasting of Chateau Tooting 2013 at Le Gothique by Wandsworth Common it was found to be – well, not bad at all. In fact, rather good.
None of us could pretend to be unbiased observers but everyone seemed genuinely to like it even though, unsurprisingly in view of its provenance it didn’t taste like any wine we were used to. One member from Heathcote&Ross who obtained a distinction in the tasting section of a wine course he took, immediately sensed aromas of greenapple and limey citrus and found it summery and fresh awarding it 7.5 out of 10.
Richard and Paul, who organised it all commented: “The wine looks and tastes great which is fruity and dry with a slight oak hint to it”.
This year they produced 660 bottles of crowd-sourced wine, a bit down in the 1,000 produced two years ago attributed to the fact that they took a year off and started late in 2013. In theory the experiment could be extended by getting some participants to grow the same varieties, but that would take away the spontaneity of the exercise and its uniqueness. If you are growing grapes in your garden or allotment or know someone who is you can join or follow the community at Urban Wine on Facebook. I hope to write sooner about the success of the 2013 urban vintage across the whole if London where vineyards are sprouitng up in unexpected places. It hasnot yet reached the success of the microbreweries but it is on the way,

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Parliament Square – where William Caxton, Sir Walter Raleigh (and lots of others) are buried

February 14th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Where to begin? From where you are looking the weather-beaten lawn on the left (above) conceals hundreds of bodies including William Caxton, whose printing works were nearby, Wenceslaus Hollar, the brilliant engraver and the largest number of regicides you’ll find in an English church and, maybe, anywhere. Sir Walter Raleigh, who was executed across the road, is given more dignity, a resting place under the altar. The only grave you can actually see (near the side entrance) is that of Alexander Davis whose daughter Mary inherited nearly all of what we now call Belgravia and Mayfair. In 1677, aged 12 she was betrothed to a little known 21-year-old man called Sir Thomas Grosvenor whose family still own the same vast estates, now worth rather more than they were then.
Diaryist Samuel Pepys, poet John Milton, Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill were all married here and Pepys came back later to use it as a place to meet his secret lover as on
June 3rd1666: (“I to St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and there saw at church my pretty Betty Mitchell, and thence to the Abbey, and so to Mrs. Martin, and there did what ‘je voudrais avec her…”)

Welcome to the endlessly fascinating St Margaret’s Westminster, laden with history, yet the most passed-by church in London. It could be mistaken for a changeling child left outside the mighty Westminster Abbey (next door) for protection. In a way it is, having been set up by the Benedictine monks of Westminster Abbey around the 1050s so local worshippers would not disturb the monks at prayer or whatever next door.
As you go in you are hit by a dizzy array of large, softly spoken, abstract stained-glass windows along the right wall by John Piper which provide a modernist descant for the deep blue medieval stained-glass window above the altar (above right) which arrived here after a Cook’s Tour of the realm. Featuring Henry Vlll and his first Queen at the bottom looking up at the blood of Christ spilling out from his body at the Crucifixion, it was created in Holland around 1526 and intended for a new chapel in the Abbey to commemorate Henry ‘s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It was not best timed. When the marriage was ended the window was dispatched to Waltham Abbey where it remained until Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries when it was transferred to a private chapel at New Hall in Essex where its Catholic symbolism would be less noticed. It came into the ownership of General Monk who apparently buried it to hide it from fanatical Puritans. It was subsequently purchased by Edward Conyers of Copped Hall in Essex (where Mary Tudor was imprisoned and A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first performed) whose son sold it in 1758 to the inhabitants of St Margaret’s for 400 guineas. Then it starts getting complicated. The Dean and chapter of Westminster regarded it as superstitious imagery and brought a lawsuit for its removal which lasted seven years before eventually failing. It was the religious equivalent of Charles Dickens’ perpetual law suite in Bleak House, Jarndyce v Jarndyce.
The church of St Margaret (of Antioch) is of course a working church with regular services. Its parish once stretched as far the end of the Strand but now it is mainly known as the church serving Parliament. It answers not to the Bishop of London but to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey who in turn, answer to the Crown as a “Royal Peculiar”.

And those regicides? They were those who signed Charles l’s death warrant at the instigation of Oliver Cromwell and were held to account (sounds better than hanged, drawn and quartered) on the accession of Charles ll. There is a small bust of Charles I on the (outside) east wall of the church looking across the road at a big statue outside the House of Commons of . . Oliver Cromwell.
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The Rolling Stones of London

January 29th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Spot the difference – National Gallery . . . Carlton House
When old buildings in London were pulled down, the bricks and stonework didn’t just walk away. They often lived on in other buildings. It is one of the ways the city preserves continuity with its past. The trouble is no records were kept so we don’t know the half of the story. Stones from the grandiose Savoy Palace in the Strand – given by Henry 111 (1207-1272) to the Duke of Savoy and once the home of John of Gaunt – were recycled into the Royal Coburg theatre (now known as the Old Vic) across the Thames. Millions of bricks from the ill-fated Millbank Penitentiary where convicts were transported to Australia (now replaced by Tate Britain) were used to build the Millbank Estate just behind the Tate where the brickwork can still be seen. This is very close to Pimlico which owes its existence to earth recycled from the construction of St Katharine Docks in the Port of London which was used to tame the marshlands that existed before.

One of the shortest journeys was made by the Corinthian columns now gracing the portico of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. They came from the disgracefully opulent Carlton House, (above, right) built by the extravagant Prince Regent before he became George IV in 1820. Carlton House Terrace and the Duke of York steps now occupy part of the ground of the former Carlton House. There are at least 20 places in and around London where you can still find stones from London Bridge (the medieval one as well as unwanted bits of the one went to America.) ranging from a wall in Wandsworth (below, right) to a mansion at Greenhithe, Kent (below, left). Sir Christopher Wren recycled hundreds of stones from previous churches on the site of St Paul’s some of which still carry soot from the Great Fire.

Ingress Abbey (left) and a wall in Wandsworth (right) built of stones from the old London Bridge
The Old Bailey is built on the remains of Newgate Prison (and earlier roman ruins) while the Innholders’ Livery Hall stands on the petrified remains of the earlier hall destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666.The rapacious Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of the boy-king, Edward VI (who became sovereign aged 9 when Henry VIII died in 1547) pillaged buildings including the charnel-house of St. Paul’s and parts of the Priory of St John of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell to build Somerset House. But natural justice took its course: he died before he could move in. Meanwhile, some of the paving slabs from Clerkenwell, pulled up when the world’s first underground railway was built at Farringdon, can now be found in the gardens of Myddleton House in Enfleld which also has parts of the medieval London Bridge and the old St Paul’s. Part of the New River canal that once ran through Myddleton House is filled with earth from the building of the Victoria Line. Everything that goes around, comes around and the stones of London keep rolling on.

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The art gallery that started the national grid

January 13th, 2014

Vic Keegan

Belstaff boutique (left) with Doric columns dating from 1925 and (right) as it looked in 1877
It is easy to walk past 135/137 New Bond Street – currently a flagship fashion shop for Belstaff – without having any inkling that it helped to launch two disparate revolutions in the nineteenth century when it was known as the Grosvenor Gallery.
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord Henry says that the painting of Dorian is so good it should be sent to the Grosvenor Gallery because the Royal Academy is too large and vulgar: “Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.”
So it was in those days, a custom-built gallery where modern paintings could be hung that had little chance of being accepted by the ultra conservative Royal Academy nearby. For the opening ceremony in 1877 Oscar came in a suit shaped like a cello.
It was at the Grosvenor that John Ruskin, famously said that Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket was “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”. Whistler sued, won, and after being given a measly farthing in damages was plunged into bankruptcy. The original entrance (right) is reputed to come from Palladio’s Church of St Lucia in Venice when it was demolished to build a railway station.

But the Grosvenor Gallery’s lasting claim to fame is that it was the birthplace of the modern electricity grid. Sir Coutts Lindsay, who built the gallery – helped financially by his wife, a Rothschild ,- achieved fame and fashion by creating a temple to contemporary art but never made any money out of it until 1883 when he decided to use recently invented electricity generators to light the gallery. It proved so successful that neighbours wanted to be supplied from his generators and, with the help of Sebastian Ferranti – these days acknowledged as the father of the National Grid – he eventually supplied electricity from Regent’s Park to the Thames and from Kensington to the City of London.Although the building has had other uses since, including as a concert hall by the BBC and on one occasion the Beatles, it is as the unusual cradle of modernity in both the arts and electricity for which it will long be remembered. But not yet so remembered as to merit a blue plaque.

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The hidden Underground of St Mary Woolnoth

December 24th, 2013

Vic Keegan

Starbucks (left) and the front of the church (right) with sign for Bank Underground

At Christmas time God and Mammon declare a truce. So, no better time to visit Nicholas Hawksmoor’s awe-inspiring Baroque masterpiece, St Mary Woolnoth (by Bank station) which only exists because of compromises made with Commerce as can immediately be seen along one of its side walls (left) which has a Starbucks fitted into it – yes, a Hawksmoor Starbucks. In another bit of privatisation, part of its churchyard was sold off long ago to the City Corporation so the Lord Mayor could build his official residence, the Mansion House there. But the biggest compromise was in 1897 when, having survived several attempts to pull it down, the church was faced with the City and South London Railway which wanted to demolish it to build Bank station. Permission was granted and it was only saved by massive public opposition. The result was a deal: the crypt was sold and now actually forms part of the station while the church was underpinned with steel girders making it stronger than before. You can see part of the old crypt ceiling above the lifts near the exit to the station. Its luck held out in the Second World War. It was the only City church to escape unscathed.

If this leads you to belief St Mary’s has been endowed with a special kind of grace, you would not be far wrong. John Newton, a former captain of slave ships was the pastor here for 27 years from 1780 where he wrote a hymn called Amazing Grace chronicling his conversion, one of the most popular on the planet. His tub-thumping evangelical Calvinism attracted such big crowds that they sometimes swapped him for another less charismatic preacher to deter too many worshippers from coming. The clock on the side of the church has a walk-on part in the Waste Land by T S Eliot (who worked at nearby Lloyds Bank): “To where St Mary Woolnoth kept the hours / With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.”

The church itself has charisma bordering on the sublime. Outside, it looks like a Greek temple sitting on a sculptural base with angular parallel lines that wouldn’t look out of place at Tate Modern. At the top there are two archways – leading it seems to a free fall – which look like eyes watching over the City, balm to Hawksmoor’s psycho-geographic disciples who read mystical interpretations into practically anything he has built. This is no ordinary church having been a place of worship going back 2,000 years to pagan times.

Inside, you are struck by four sets of Corinthian columns laid out as triplets in what Ian Nairn described as “a square within a square . . where space is made so tangible that you can experience for the price of a bus ticket to the City, the super-reality of the mystics”.
The church is built on an impossibly small triangle of land between two City streets with brutalist skyscrapers blocking what once must have been a magnificent setting. But once you push open its formidable doors you enter a different world that hasn’t changed for hundreds of years. Mammon is nowhere to be seen. Leave email on left of screen to receive new posts 2 or 3 times a month

Panoramic view of the inside of the church showing three of the four groups of Corinthian columns

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Rare view of Nelson’s column from the Duke of York’s column

December 10th, 2013

Vic Keegan

Towards Trafalgar Square – with the British Council in between
Augustus J C Hare was not a fan of Trafalgar Square. Writing in 1896 he found a “dreary expanse of granite” with the “miserable buildings” of the National Gallery flanked by a “hideous hotel and a frightful club”. Nelson’s Column was “a very poor work, which, however, does not signify much as it can only be properly seen from the top of the Duke of York’s column which no one ascends”.
Almost 120 years later, it still remains true that no one is allowed to ascend the Duke of York’s column. But reading Augustus Hare aroused a long held curiosity which promoted me to seek permission to climb it. And today it happened. Accompanied by two very helpful people from the Royal Parks I climbed the 168 odd Aberdeen Granite steps, torch in hand, dodging pigeon droppings and the odd egg on the way before being hit by a mesmerising, panoramic view of London I’d never seen before. I looked immediately at Nelson’s Column only to find that what would have been Augustus J C Hare’s untrammelled view of Trafalgar Square and St Martin-in-the-Fields was partially obscured by that Johnny-come-lately, the British Council HQ. However, with a little imagination, one can remove the barrier and see what Hare intended us to see. This apart, the platform reveals an unfolding panorama rarely seen from the west of the Capital even though clouds obscured the Surrey hills which can be seen on a fine day (like yesterday?).

Towards St James Park

I love the brazen majesty of the Duke’s column and always pause to admire when I pass by (Reality Check – it rates 1,678 of 1,788 Attractions in London on Trip Advisor) but it is something of a mystery why the Duke (1674 – 1728) was accorded such a personal monument. He was appointed Commander in Chief of the Army by his doting father, George 111, but failures on the field of battle in France and Holland made him widely regarded as unfit to command an army in the field. He was a notorious philanderer and gambler with the dubious honour of being satirised in the famous nursery rhyme:

“Oh, the grand old Duke of York, he had 10,000 men:

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

And he marched them down again.”

When he died he left debts of £401,169 – tens of millions at today’s prices – leaving some to suppose that he was put on top of a column to dodge his creditors. However, he did leave a lasting legacy for which the nation was grateful by reducing corruption in the granting of army commissions (though this didn’t stop his mistress earning a bob or two that way) and established a military college that became Sandhurst. The column – built from Aberdeen granite and, appropriately, York stone -was paid for by soldiers in the army donating a day’s pay worth £25,000 (by conscription rather than subscription, one presumes) for its construction from 1830 to 1833.

The public used to be able to climb to the top from 12pm to 4pm, from May to Sept for 6d until a spate of suicides led to its closure in the late 18th century. On a clear day you can see for miles. Thst didn’t happen today but the vista is firmly imprinted in my mind – except for the interfering British Council.

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The view towards Regent Street and he Post Office Tower

The Slavery Map of London

December 1st, 2013

Vic Keegan

Georgian London, as Dan Cruickshank tells us, was partly constructed from the ill-gotten gains of the sex industry. But a shameful amount of the rest was built from the profits of the slave trade as can be seen on the slavery map of London compiled by researchers at University College, London (above). For some years they have been gathering the – publicly available – compensation paid to slave owners after the 1833 abolition act. Since the addresses of the slave owners had to be included in any claim for compensation it has been possible for the researchers to put together a map – part of which is reproduced above – with mind blowing effect. It is not just the dense concentration of slave owners who lived close to each other in Christian conviviality in places like the Portman estate but the dizzy scale of compensation paid to them.
According to Nicholas Draper and Rachel Evans of University College London – writing in the current newsletter of the London Topographical Society (LTS) - there were 45,000 claims worth a staggering £20 million or at least £2 billion at today’s prices. All of these claims are online at ucl.ac.uk/lbs
The victims received nothing. Indeed, they were not really freed because for the 4 to 6 years after being “freed” they were forced into unpaid labour known as “apprenticeship”.
Large tracts of Bloomsbury, Fitzrovia and Marylebone have already been mapped by the UCL team but the focus of the LTS article is on the Portman estate including Portman Square (and Hom House in particular) where over 100 individuals received compensation.
One of the biggest recipients was James Blair of Portman Square who received £83,530 (worth tens of millions today). About 40% of recipients were women. A very small minority were of colour, presumably the sons or daughters of slave owners. Most of them seem to have been churchgoers rarely questioning what Him up there might have thought of what they were doing to his fellow creatures.
It is a sobering thought, to say the least, that so many of the fine homes in London – not to mention country houses – were built on the wealth created by the slave trade and subsequent compensation. Almost everyone was involved whether directly as plantation owners or as consumers of sugar and spices on which the slave trade thrived. Walking around these areas of London will never again be the same.

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Friends reunited – Tate Britain’s swanky make-over completes a revolution in Friends’ rooms in London

November 19th, 2013

Vic Keegan

The most stunning thing about Tate Britain’s £45m makeover – which opened today – is the glorious sliced aubergine spiral stairway (above, right) which, if it was an exhibit in the gallery, would put most modern sculpture to shame. Whether it works as a staircase is another matter. I worry that the narrowing of the steps towards the centre will lead to accidents as two-way traffic builds up. Tate Britain does art brilliantly but definitely has a staircase problem. The one inside the side entrance to the gallery had to be altered because so many were slipping on it and the one outside the side entrance looks nice but is one of the worst designed I have ever come across in terms of ergonomics. It thwarts all the natural rhythms of where your feet should land. Try it. Dare me to be wrong.
Fortunately, people don’t go to galleries to stare at staircases. But regulars do like a good Friends’ Room and here the Tate scores. The top of the stairway opens out onto a large circular cafe, a miniature whispering gallery of St Paul’s, with arm chairs and nooks and crannies where you can hide from humanity with your laptop. It is a huge improvement on the tiny former Friend’s Room which was a bit like dining in a liquorice allsort and it makes the basic single membership of £62 good value for money since it gives you free admission to shows, discounts on books and entrance to Friends rooms at other Tates including Tate Modern with its breathtaking views (oh, and free wi-fi). I love the new Friends Room at the British Museum – which combines a cafe downstairs with a contemplative space upstairs – and only to a slightly lesser degree the revamp at the Royal Academy. London is blessed to have such lovely Friends’ Rooms in its galleries. Truly gems.

The office block that links the birth of the gas industry with cricket’s LBW rule and the best claret in England

November 18th, 2013

Vic Keegan

In a city that takes pride in burying its history, the nondescript office building at 100 Pall Mall, sandwiched between the Reform and RAC clubs, takes some beating.

On Friday February 25 1774 the basic laws of cricket including the LBW (leg before wicket) rule were established at the Star and Garter tavern on this site (the forerunner of the building on the right, above). A cricketing club existed here long before the establishment of the MCC. Even earlier – in 1750 – the Jockey club, which laid down the rules for horse racing, was founded in the Star and Garter before it moved to Newmarket. Sporty people of merit could join the Jockey Club but not, of course, jockeys. This is Britain, remember.
Not content with starting two of Britain’s biggest sports, the Star and Garter also saw the foundation of one of Britain’s biggest industries. British Gas can trace its origins directly back to 1806 when Frederick Winsor started experiments with producing gas from coal here and set up The Gas Light and Coke Company, claimed to be the world’s first public gas distributor and the first public utility in the world. On June 4, 1807 his carbonising furnace dispatched gas along small pipes to illuminate gas lights in the nearby Carlton House, home of the Prince Regent.

It is ironic that at a time when there is so much controversy about foreigners taking over our utilities that Frederick Windsor (née Winzler), actually a German (or possibly Moravian) using disputed French patents, was the founder of the Brutish gas industry. The first gas lamps were erected in Pall Mall where they burned brightly until very recently when they were replaced as part of “improvements” to the neighbourhood. There are still thousands of working gas lights in central London (eg St James Park), a testament to Winsor’s pioneering endeavours.
In 1815 the Epicure’s Almanack claimed that the Star and Garter had been “celebrated for vending the best claret in England”. Later it became a factory for making shoe blacking. Today it is an office block inhabited by Laird Group and others. Add your email address in the slot on the right of the screen for twice monthly updates @vickeegan

The Art of the Power Station . .

November 8th, 2013

Vic Keegan

The next couple of days – it closes Sunday – afford a rare opportunity to see the innards of Battersea Power Station before it is converted into an £8bn complex of flats, shops, cinemas, concert hall, a new Northern Line station and parks. The inside is not a pretty sight, or even site but it has a grandeur of its own with its cross-section of beams and stanchions, now open to the skies, but recalling the decades in which it supplied a great deal of London’s electricity including central heating direct to the Churchill Gardens council houses across the river.
Council houses are not on the agenda of this development. A batch of “affordable” houses will be built towards the end of the project, apparently lost in the fog of trade-offs that inevitably surrounds projects of this nature. That aside, it is boldly ambitious with plenty of public space. Its four hall mark chimneys are to be pulled down and re-built, one of them with a lift to an observation platform at the top (Just don’t ask me how they repair it if it gets stuck half way . . )
Hardly anyone who has witnessed the aborted attempts to re-invigorate the biggest unused acreage in central London in recent years will oppose this Malaysian- backed project which will improve life for Londoners and provide yet another reason for overseas visitors to come to the capital. It will include contributions from Norman Foster and Frank Gehry. To view the remains of the power station you must first go through an interesting exhibition of the history of the site and the plans for the future – with forms to fill in at the start and finish.
It seems quite bizarre now that Giles Gilbert Scott’s plans to build the power station in 1927 met with very fierce opposition amid fears that the resultant pollution would harm the paintings in the Tate Gallery upstream. Now Battersea and his other power station at Bankside, which hosts Tate Modern, have become incubators for the cultural renewal of London. Maybe they should spend an extra few quid in Battersea and install one of Gilbert Scott’s iconic red telephone kiosks to remind visitors of the debt we owe to this great architect.
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Sunday in the Inn with George

November 4th, 2013

Vic Keegan

To watch a play in the same space – the hall of Gray’s Inn – where it was first staged in 1566, and which has hardly ever been produced since, is awesome enough. But to discover that the play itself (George Gascoigne’s “Supposes”), which I saw yesterday, is as relevant now as it was in Elizabethan times makes this resurrection verge on the magical.
Gascoigne, like so many early modern playwrights was a rogue. He was in and out of prison, in and out of Parliament and in and out of Grays Inn where he practised as a lawyer (and which explains some splendid anti-lawyer references in the play). He wrote this play – or rather translated it from the original Italian version by Aristo in 1508 (itself based on Plautus’s Menaechmi) – on a subject that is of burning relevance to the internet of today. Identity.
It is not just switched characters and impostors in which this and so many plays of Shakespeare’s time wallowed in but the vital question of proving who you are. When towards the end of a complicated plot the father of Erostrato comes from Sicily to Ferrara to contact his errant student son he finds that his son’s servant Dulipo has been impersonating Erostrato for so long that the rest of the neighbourhood refuse to believe he is Erostrato’s father. With no passport, birth certificate let alone electricity bill all the father can offer is to plead that a few people from Sicily be allowed to come over to prove who he is (as if all that couldn’t be fabricated). This, according to some lawyers present yesterday, is the post-Norman origin of our jury service – getting ten men and true to vouch for who you are. This would have resonated with Elizabethan audiences when people from outside a village could be arrested if they couldn’t prove who they were and will strike a chord with those struggling with the problem of identity on the internet and elsewhere.
Yesterday’s performance revealed another gem of London – the Read Not Dead company, an offshoot of the Globe Theatre’s education section, which is hosting regular readings of all the extant manuscripts of surviving early modern plays. To my amazement yesterday’s company of (unpaid) jobbing actors and Grays Inn lawyers under the direction of James Wallace only received their scripts and roles at 10 am yet by 3pm had produced a highly professional performance that got a rousing reception from the audience. “Supposes”, the first play in English written in prose, has hitherto been mainly mentioned as a source for Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Comedy of Errors (also first staged in Gray’s Inn). It is time it moved centre stage.
To get twice monthly posts from this blog put your email address in the slot on the right of the screen. @vickeegan

Inside Gray’s Inn during the interval (taken in bad light with mobile, faces blurred out)

The Victorian prison they found underneath my road this week

London’s vineyards on the biggest roll since the Middle Ages

What happened when Mr Tate didn’t meet Mr Lyle

The other Crystal Palace – in Victoria Street

The joy of Chateau Tooting’s 2013 vintage

Parliament Square – where William Caxton, Sir Walter Raleigh (and lots of others) are buried

The Rolling Stones of London

The art gallery that started the national grid

The hidden Underground of St Mary Woolnoth

Rare view of Nelson’s column from the Duke of York’s column

The Slavery Map of London

Friends reunited – Tate Britain’s swanky make-over completes a revolution in Friends’ rooms in London

The office block that links the birth of the gas industry with cricket’s LBW rule and the best claret in England

The Art of the Power Station . .

Sunday in the Inn with George

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