Georgian London: Into the Streets (37 page)

The river, docks and surrounding areas continued to become increasingly busy and crowded during the nineteenth century. But slowly, slowly the advent of improved rail and subsequently road travel meant that goods could come into other more convenient and deeper ports, such as Southampton, and still make it to London in reasonable time. Then, during the Blitz, bombs rained down upon the neglected Georgian squares of Stepney and the ancient, shabby
tenements of Wapping. Some of the buildings were already empty, and many of the older residents did not return after the war. Soon, vast sullen estates would cover what had been London’s nautical hamlets. As historian and journalist Ian Nairn recalled, visiting in 1966, ‘Nobody cares enough.’

South of the Thames was a marshy scrubland and a ‘
hideous’ foreshore overladen ‘with dank tenements, rotten wharves, and dirty boat-houses
’. Southwark encompasses Bankside, the Borough and Bermondsey, and away to the west lies Lambeth. It was a landscape punctuated by industrial buildings and windmills.

These vast areas were too wet for building, and the expense of draining the land coupled with the lower returns meant people were not in a hurry to live there. Worse, the nearby tanneries filled the air with a pungent reek, relying as they did on human urine and dog excrement for the curing. Collectors of the excrement trolled the streets of the city, performing an entrepreneurial social service and filling buckets with what was ironically known as ‘pure’, which they then sold to the factories. Soon, these factories were exiled away from the city to belch their stink further afield.

Here and there, small bonfires burned rubbish, and old women pegged out their washing on lines and bushes dotting the open spaces. To the east of London Bridge was St Saviour’s Dock, ‘
or, as it is called
, Savory … It is at present solely appropriated to barges, which discharge coals, copperas from Writtlesea in Essex, pipe-clay, corn and various other articles of commerce.’ Behind it lie the Borough and Bermondsey – an ancient, patchy settlement with a busy fruit and vegetable market and a medieval hospital, St Thomas’s. By the end of the eighteenth century, Savory marked the swampy boundary of London’s most terrifying slum, Jacob’s Island. The area was riddled with prisons: the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, the County Gaol, the House of Correction, as well as Borough Compter and the Clink.

Away to the west is Lambeth, home then to a rambling bishop’s palace and the Baltic timber yards. There was also the School for the Indigent Blind where, from 1779, blind children were taught to
weave baskets and to play musical instruments so that they might be able, wholly, or in part, to provide for their own subsistence. By the end of the Georgian period, the children were taught to read from books with raised letters. Small groups of blind musicians were employed throughout London, most famously in Covent Garden as depicted by Hogarth, to play at orgies.

Southwark, showing Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals due south of London Bridge, detail of John Greenwood’s map, 1827

Lambeth was rapidly becoming a pretty Surrey suburb housing
nurseries, ‘pineries’ and melon pits for growing exotic fruits and forced vegetables. On the edge of the river was the huge Guy’s Hospital, founded in 1721 as a hospice for the ‘incurables’ from St Thomas’s. Close to the southern end of London Bridge were the lanes leading into Southwark, the medieval entertainment centre on the south bank, the back streets and rotting theatres of Bankside, and the already ancient Borough Market. Old and new was the theme of Southwark: medieval remnants, the new industries and pioneering medicine.

Bankside had traditionally been the site of London’s bear-baiting. The Elizabethan court was particularly keen on this cruel sport. Bankside was a popular destination on Sundays where crowds of both rich and poor gathered to place wagers on the unfortunate contestants, though not everyone agreed it was an acceptable pastime.

What folly
is this, to keep with danger

A great mastive dog, and fowle ouglie bear;

And to this and end, to see them two fight,

With terrible tearings, a full ouglie sight.

Bear-baiting was prohibited under the Puritans, and only hare coursing remained as a dog-based sport. Upon the Restoration, the Bankside Bear Garden cranked back into life, but Charles did not encourage the sport. Cock-throwing (aiming stones or bottles at a cockerel tied to a stake), dog-fighting and dog-versus-rats matches abounded throughout. Bandogs, the frightening relative of the pit bull, were bred in Clerkenwell and used specifically for baiting larger animals. But when tastes turned towards seeing bears perform rather than die, these animals needed new targets. In February 1675, an elderly lion was baited to death on Bankside. In the same year, the Earl of Rochester’s ‘
savage’ horse was ‘baited to death, of a most vast strength and greatness’.

Approximately 19 hands high, the horse stood 6ft 3in at the shoulders. It had destroyed ‘several horses and other cattel’ and was responsible for human fatalities. Rochester sold him to the Marquess of Dorchester, but the horse then hurt his keeper and was sold to a brewer, who put him to a dray. Soon, he was breaking his halter and carting the fully laden wagon off behind him in order to attack people in the street, ‘monstrously tearing at their flesh, and eating it, the like whereof hath hardly been seen’. Realistically there was no option but to destroy this particular animal. Baiting was not the humane way of doing it, but nevertheless, the horse was put to the dogs for ‘the divertisement of his Excellency the Embassadour from the Emperour of Fez and Morocco; many of the nobility and gentry that knew the horse, and several mischiefs done by him, designing to be present
’.

The horse was put to the dogs in the ramshackle Hope Theatre (a Jacobean playhouse which had been taken over exclusively for blood sports). It killed or maimed them, all. The owner decided to stop the contest, but the crowd became a mob, demanding to see the horse baited to death, and started to pull the tiles from the roof of the theatre. Dogs were ‘
once more set upon
him; but they not being able to overcome him, he was run through with a sword, and dyed’. The ambassador failed to attend, owing to inclement weather.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, baiting had moved north of the river – to Hockley-in-the-Hole, in Clerkenwell. In 1710, there was

… 
a match to be fought
by two dogs, one from Newgate-market, against one from Honey-lane market, at a bull … which goes fairest and fastest in, wins all. Likewise, a green bull to be baited, which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him. Also a mad ass to be baited. With a variety of bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with fireworks. To begin exactly at three of the clock.

Hockley was the centre of bull terrier breeding in London, and so perhaps it is natural that the sport would move there. In 1756, Hockley disappeared with the continuing Fleet development, and bull-baiting moved to Spitalfields. Increasingly unpopular, it was soon confined almost exclusively to market towns.

At the same time, Hogarth was campaigning against the ‘
barbarous treatment
of animals, the very sight of which renders the streets of our metropolis so distressing to every feeling mind’. His ‘Four Stages of Cruelty’ connected the cruel treatment of animals with the degenerate mind. The first plate of the ‘Four Stages’ features Tom Nero attempting to force an arrow into a dog’s anus, and another youth pleading with him not to.

Attitudes were changing in London. In 1785, it was reported that

… 
a fine horse
, brought at great expense from Arabia, would be delightfully worried to death by dogs, in an inclosure near the Adam and Eve, in Tottenham-court-road; and to exclude low company, every admission-ticket was to cost half-a-guinea. But the interposition of the magistrates, who doubted of the innocence, or of the wisdom of training dogs and horses to mutual enmity, put a stop for once to that superfine exhibition.

In 1822, the Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cattle was passed. It was known as Martin’s Act. Richard Martin was a politician and campaigner for animal rights who brought Bill Burns, a costermonger, to trial for abusing his donkey. Deploying shock tactics, Martin brought the donkey into the courtroom so that its injuries could be seen. Burns was the first man to be convicted for animal cruelty. In 1824, in Old Slaughter’s Coffee House on St Martin’s Lane, a group of men met with the idea of forming a new society concerned with enforcing Martin’s Act and heightening awareness of animal welfare. They were headed by the Reverend Arthur Broome and included Richard Martin and William Wilberforce. This society would soon have a new name: the RSPCA.

From the early seventeenth century, Londoners busied themselves finding spas, or ‘spaws’ as they were often known. Mineral springs abounded, and the waters were sold throughout the city. Streatham
water was a natural emetic sold in coffee houses as a rather drastic hangover cure. It was also said to have the alarming ability to expel worms from the body. Hoxton’s ‘
balsamic’ water was a purgative, causing ‘much bustle and ferment in nature
’. The water of St Pancras Wells made the boldest claims of all: it could, apparently, cure scurvy, scrofula, leprosy, piles, running sores, ulcers and cancer.

After the Restoration, these spas became larger and more formal. More sophisticated food and drink were served, and events were held to bring in the customers. Usually, gardens were built around these spas, some with innovative designs and water features.

Cuper’s was an old formal garden dating from at least 1589, on what is now the approach to Waterloo Bridge. In 1624, the Earl of Arundel acquired it and then leased it to Abraham Boydell Cuper, his gardener. The Cupers opened it as a pleasure garden, ‘
with Bowling greens … whither many of the Westerly part of the Town resort for Diversion in the Summer Season’. The gardens were also famous for ‘their retired arbours, their shady walks ornamented with statues and ancient marbles, and especially the fireworks
’.

The marbles were smaller pieces of the Arundel Marbles:

… 
which had for that purpose
been begged from his lordship … On the pulling down of
Arundel
-house, to make way for the street for that name, these, and several others of the damaged part of the collection, were removed to this place. Numbers were left on the ground, near the river-side, and overwhelmed with the rubbish brought from the foundation of the new church of
St Paul’s
.

The main collection is now in the Ashmolean Museum, and it is extraordinary to think of such antiquities lying amongst the rubble of the ancient cathedral.

Despite such highbrow entertainments and surroundings, Cuper’s was gaining a reputation: it was seedy, though, and old-fashioned. Nearby, Vauxhall Gardens were on the rise. Cuper’s would close in 1760, when the competition simply became too much. From then on, Vauxhall was the dominant London pleasure garden.

Vauxhall was originally known as New Spring Gardens. Samuel Pepys visited, in 1662, and during the following century the gardens
grew larger and more popular. In 1729, the gardens were taken over by Jonathan Tyers, a cultured man with big ideas. He paid for a twenty-year lease and introduced art, architecture and music. There were works by William Hogarth and Francis Hayman, and music by Handel. The Soho-based Huguenot sculptor Louis Roubiliac created the statue of Handel which stood in the gardens for years and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Frederick, Prince of Wales, was an enthusiastic patron of the gardens and had his own pavilion built there amongst the fake ruins, arches and temples, which were added as the years went on.

In 1785, the Tyers’ children were managing their father’s gardens. The gardens had become an impressive enterprise:

… 
that substantial
Brick Dwelling Houses called Spring Garden House, the Tap House and 36 other Dwelling Houses, Coach Houses, Stables, Out houses, Workshops, Sheds, Icehouse, Great Room, Orchestra, Covered Walks, open Walks, Ways, Passages, Pavilions, Boxes and Spring Gardens Yards, Pond and an Aquiduct to supply the said Pond from Vauxhall Creek.

Much of the food served was grown locally. Borough Market sold both local fruit and vegetables, as well as produce brought in from Kent and Surrey. Southwark was famous for its melon pits and nurseries, where exotic fruit such as pineapples were grown. An article in the
London World
during 1755 mentions that, ‘Through the use of hothouses … every gardiner that used to pride himself in an early cucumber, can now raise a pineapple.’ Andrew Moffett’s ‘
Pinery’ on Grange Road in Southwark, stocked ‘Fruiting and Succession Plants’ of the sweetest sort, guaranteed ‘free of Insects
’. By February 1798, any problems with the surrounding environment had clearly been overcome, as Mr William North, at his Nursery near the Asylum in Lambeth, Surrey, was advertising new forms of dwarf broccoli above his pineapple plants in the
Morning Chronicle
.