Georgian London: Into the Streets (5 page)

Smithfield market scene, with St Bartholomew’s Hospital beyond the animal pens, engraving after Pugin and Rowlandson, 1811

In the slaughterhouses animals were stunned by a blow, hoisted and then bled to death. Sometimes this happened in small cellars beneath butchers’ shops as other animals waited, penned in corners. Most of the butchered meat went out to Clare Market, near Covent Garden, which was London’s largest retail meat market, and where the gangs of butchers’ apprentices were feared for their tendency to fight with knives. Cattle and sheep were skinned of their valuable hides in another set of buildings, and these fresh hides went out to special wholesalers who sold them to tanners – the closest on St John Street, just outside the City limits.

Since medieval times it had been customary for London’s wholesale butchers to remove their waste down to piers on the Thames, where it was loaded into boats, taken out to the middle of the river at low tide and tipped in. Other unsaleable parts were disposed of on London’s laystalls, which were boxed-in rubbish tips dealt with by the parishes, who employed scavengers to clean the streets. Sometimes the butchers disposed of their waste in the sewers, where it coagulated just beneath the pavement in piles of sweating gore, damming the legitimate flow of human excrement to the Thames. Disposal into drains and sewers was eventually banned, and there were high fines which were rarely enforced (probably due to the unsavoury nature of investigating the crime). Added to this were the rivers of urine from cattle and sheep pens as well as dairy yards, which Londoners had to navigate as they walked the streets. In warm weather, the smells from the sewers and the fetid pens enveloped the area in a fug of animal stench.

Two other markets which remained open for the whole period between the Restoration and the Regency were Billingsgate and Leadenhall, both of which were inside the City limits and were open
to traders and the public alike. Billingsgate had long been established just east of London Bridge, where an inlet allowed fishing boats to dock out of the traffic. Like Smithfield, it was an ancient market with permanent shops and stalls which had sprung up around the dock, growing so numerous that it became a constant unregulated market. The modern architecture and geography of that area of the City disguises what would have been a steep descent down to the river, like a ravine into which one was obliged to venture to get to the water with its huddle of fish stalls and shops.

There were many little places to eat oysters fresh off the boats. German visitor Sophie von La Roche had never eaten an oyster before she visited London in 1788, but after watching the oysters being unloaded at Billingsgate, she was persuaded to sample them in one of the inns by the market.

The cubicles were neat
, the tables were laid with white cloths, and there were delightful wicker-chairs to sit in. A fisherwoman with a basket of oysters, a youngster with lemons and a small basket containing bread, plates and knives followed immediately after us … I liked them very much.

This charming set-up would please anyone who likes an oyster today, as would the image of the Billingsgate fishwives who peddled their stock in the inns and on the streets. Described even as ‘boisterous’, these

… 
crying, wandering, travelling
creatures carry their shops on their heads, and their storehouse is ordinarily Byllingsgate or Ye Brydge Foot … They set up every morning their trade afresh. They are easily furnished; get something and spend it jovially and merrily. Five shillings a basket and a good cry are a large stock for them.

Each ‘cry’ was particular to the seller, and prospective purchasers would have listened out for their favourite. These women specialized in selling eels, herring, white fish, crabs or other small shellfish. They announced their stock daily, with shrimp and other moieties sold by measuring them out in third-of-a-pint pewter tankards, the larger items by piece – a practice still found in some pubs today.

Leadenhall was one of the oldest London markets and was much
like a farmers’ market today, with small stalls selling a variety of seasonal produce. Strawberry and soft fruit sellers were everywhere during the summer months. This was a trade dominated by women, pretty girls in particular, who spent a great deal of time making ‘pottles’, the eighteenth-century version of a punnet: thin wicker cones with a loop handle, into which they packed their wares. The vegetable man and his donkey or ‘little moke’, its back laden with panniers, was a common sight. There was no fixed cry for the vegetable seller, as his shouts varied with his stock, which would include ‘collyflowers’, asparagus, potatoes, carrots, beans, peas, parsnips, leeks and turnips. More exotic fruits and goods were also sold at these markets, including home-grown and imported oranges, lemons, and Spanish and French onions. Other street traders included the mouse-trap man, the water carrier, the knife grinder, the ink seller, the muffin man, egg girls and earthenware sellers.

The Fleet Market emerged when the Fleet River was covered over in 1736. The river was a symbolic boundary, and those who came and went over the busy Fleet Bridge regarded it as the real gate to the City. It rose on high ground to the north near Kenwood House in Hampstead and flowed down to the City, running along what is now Blackfriars Bridge Road in a wide stream before joining the Thames where the foot of Blackfriars Bridge now stands. The stream was navigable for a stretch, and it provided a useful place to get out of the busy traffic of the Thames.

Once a ‘fleet’ and fast-flowing river, by the middle of the seventeenth century the Fleet waterway was silted up. Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke oversaw a project to reopen it, boarding out the banks and creating a deepish navigable channel again, this time with commercial potential. For three and a half years, lighters were filled with silt and rubbish at each low tide by men standing in the filth and digging, filling wheelbarrows and baskets. It was completed, finally, in the autumn of 1674 at the stupendous sum of £51,000, roughly the equivalent of £5,730,000 now. But one major problem was that no one had stopped the residents upstream throwing their rubbish into the river, and by the early Georgian period the Fleet River had become ‘
a mere sluggish
and plague-breeding sewer’ once
more. In an attempt to solve the problem, the river was bricked over in a piecemeal fashion; by the 1730s, much of it was underground. The size of the sewer, and the amount of rubbish in it, was revealed by
The Gentleman’s Magazine
in August 1736, when it reported:

A fatter boar was hardly ever seen than one taken up this day, coming out of the Fleet ditch into the Thames. It proved to be a butcher’s near Smithfield Bars, who had missed him five months, all which time he had been in the common sewer, and was improved in price from ten shillings to two guineas.

The area had been popular with medieval religious houses, such as the Carmelites and the Dominican ‘black friars’, but by Wren and Hooke’s time the banks were lined with warehouses. Upriver, close to where Holborn Viaduct now stands, was Holborn Bridge. The valley was steep and therefore avoided by heavy carriages and wagons when possible. Horses were often trapped beneath their load which had overtaken them, or fell to their knees on the ascent out of the dip, unable to haul their burden. The houses built near and upon Holborn Bridge were medieval slums which had escaped the Great Fire. A letter featured in
The Times
described how the ‘
rear of the houses
on Holborn Bridge has for many years been a receptacle for characters of the most daring and desperate condition’.

The Fleet and some of the streets around it fell into an ancient City ‘Liberty’. Liberties were geographical and historical hangovers from the religious properties, and exempt from City laws. So, in a curious twist of fate, the Fleet was a place where ordinary laws could be flouted. The river – or, as it became known, ‘the Ditch’ – was bounded on the eastern side by what was known simply as ‘The Fleet’, a prison which was seven centuries old when it was finally demolished, in 1846. From the late thirteenth century it was a debtors’ prison, where people could be incarcerated by order of their creditors for very small amounts of debt. Many prisoners took lodgings in the streets included in the Liberty, from where they continued to live relatively normal lives. Foreign workers could also work there and ignore the City’s need for an apprenticeship and consequent ‘freedom’, with many of them congregating in the lodgings around The Blew Boot pub. Various bylaws
made prosecution of Fleet clergy impossible, even for conducting bigamous or over-hasty wedding services, and so the Liberty of the Fleet became the Las Vegas wedding chapel of London.

There, it was possible to walk in off the street and be married legally, at very little cost. By the 1740s, more than half of all London weddings were celebrated within the Fleet’s boundaries, where houses and shops displayed ‘
the frequent sign
of a male and female hand enjoined with “Marriages performed within” written beneath’. It was possible to walk in, sign and get out in under fifteen minutes, as the mammoth number of records for the period show: over a quarter of a million in fifty years. Marrying ‘at the Ditch-side’, as it is called on some certificates, might not have been romantic but it was fast, fuss-free and didn’t require parental consent. Local pubs, such as the Belle Savage, held set-price receptions.

In 1753, Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act was passed, bringing in rules regarding parental consent for those under twenty-one, and stricter guidelines for the reading of the banns, the issuing of licences and the church celebration. The Liberty of the Fleet was not exempt. The regulations did not come into force until sundown on 24 March 1754, at which point the Fleet Chapel recorded ‘
near a hundred pair
had been joined together’ in a single day.

Hardwicke’s Marriage Act coincided with the end of the Fleet as an open river, and its reincarnation as a market. The Fleet was silting up again, slowly rolling a ‘
large tribute
of dead dogs to Thames’. This time the City of London wasn’t interested in spending a fortune digging out a stinking ditch which would only be impassable again within another few decades. The water was unfit for consumption or bathing, and was so filthy and muddy that it had become a health hazard. It was decided that the river would be totally bricked over, thus creating not only a large and handy sewer, but also a wide piece of open ground on which a market was to be constructed. But it would take until the completion of Blackfriars Bridge in 1769 for the majority of the river to disappear beneath the bricks. In the winter of 1763, the Ditch claimed its final victim, but not through contagion or drowning. A drunken barber from Bromley fell in and, before he could clamber out, died frozen upright in the mud.

Along the river, the City warehouses acted as a crowded market, selling exotic goods to middlemen, a ‘
mighty mass
of brick, and smoke, and shipping, Dirty and smoky’. Many different types of goods arrived in the Port of London, and from the carriage charges levied to take them from the wharves it is easy to see that products such as calico, tobacco, rice, figs, sugar, wine, currants, olive oil, cheese and cream of tartar (used in industrial quantities as a metal cleaner and known as ‘argol’) were readily available. Alum came from the Middle East, or the north of England, and was used both in cloth dyeing and as a deodorant. Other goods included perishables, exotic manufactured products, and diverse animal products such as tortoiseshell and whalebone, essential to the London fashion industry.

Whalebone, in particular, was a much sought-after commodity, as it was essential to the better class of ‘stays’ – the corsets worn by almost every woman.
The baleen to oil ratio
of any catch was calculated at about 1:20, but with over half the income coming from the baleen (from the mouth of the whale), this was the prized asset. England was unique in that stays were worn by very young children in the hope of preventing deformities and encouraging good posture: girls remained in them until maturity, and boys until they were ‘breeched’ or went into trousers aged about six. Only the poorest children went stay-less. Women of low status wore stays sewn by seamstresses, who fashioned them from brown linen or leather and stitched them with packthread.

The Throgmorton Street area, in particular, was known for its ‘Bone-Shops’ where bundles of expensive finished and steamed whalebone could be purchased. When Madame du Bocage visited, in 1750, she observed that, ‘
The women use no paint
and are always laced.’ Elizabeth Ham recorded tight-laced corsets of the period as ‘
very nearly purgatory
’. The ever-fashionable Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, featured them in her novel of 1778,
The Sylph
, writing, ‘
my poor arms
are absolutely sore with them; and my sides so pinched! But it is the “ton”; and pride feels no pain.’