The House by the Thames (9 page)

Melchisedeck Fritter, the long-time lessee of the Cardinal's Hat, died in 1673, and his widow took over the business. The ground landlords were no longer the Browker family since the property had been sold to a Thomas Hudson seven years earlier. In 1686 the Widow Fritter handed the tenancy of the inn on to a Sarah Humphreys: the inn may have adopted a different name for part of the Fritter tenancy, and now it was renamed in the lease as the Cardinal's Cap, as if the name of the alley alongside had finally won over other versions. Sarah Humphreys left the lease to her son and grandson, but I do not know for how long the innkeeping business was continued. Hudson died in 1688, leaving ‘his messuages on Bankside' to his sister, Mary Greene, and after her to his great-nieces Mary and Sarah Bruce.

About this family, I have not been able to discover anything more. Did Mistress Greene and her nieces, whose parents were evidently out of the picture, live in one of the houses, perhaps in the former Cardinal's Cap itself? Or was it, as before, a piece of property to be let as a source of revenue? The same family seem to have owned it for many years, but with the new century the nature of the house, and indeed of most of the houses on Bankside, was soon to undergo a great change. For in or about 1710 (the date can only be conjectural, based on architectural features, and on a lead drain-head marked ‘1712' which used to adorn the front of the next-door house) the timbered Cardinal's Hat/Cap was largely, though not entirely, demolished. It was never again to be an inn, for it was replaced by a decent, but not grand, brick-fronted gentleman's abode, in the new style.

Yet at this crucial moment in the existence of the house opposite St Paul's, we know less of what was going on socially on Bankside than at any other era since the Middle Ages. The house did not have to be rebuilt, for the Great Fire never reached the south bank. The Building Acts of 1667 and 1707, which were designed to thwart future fires by stipulating the use of less combustible materials, only applied to new houses, not existing ones. In other outlying parts of London that had escaped the Fire, particularly Holborn, timbered and gabled houses continued to stand, many lasting well into the nineteenth century. So the fact that most of the gabled houses of Bankside were rebuilt, in the approved modern style, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, can only suggest that this redevelopment seemed worthwhile to their owners – a fair number of owners. Unlike many better-documented areas on the other side of the river, Bankside was not one estate with a wealthy ground landlord making a comprehensive decision. Bankside proprietors, such as Henslowe and Browker, and now apparently the descendants of Mary Greene, did often own more than one house. The three houses a little to the east of the Cardinal's Cap, which had once been Henslowe's and were to become numbers 44, 45 and 46, belonged at this date to a Sir Richard Oldner, knight, and he owned another house along Bankside in which he lived. But this was the pattern: small holdings of freehold plots, two, three or four houses along the waterfront at the most, and then not always in one piece. Clearly, if so many of these were rebuilt at the same period, a number of individuals must each have decided that Bankside was the sort of desirable location on which it was worth laying out money. The banking system as we know it today was just beginning to form: credit was easier to get than it had been when much wealth tended to be kept in solid form in purses; London's population was continuing to rise, the town was growing rapidly westwards. There would surely, it must have been said, be a demand for genteel houses on the south bank also, where the air was purer than on the City side?

A new church, Christ Church, had been built in 1671 in the Paris Garden manor, to serve a new parish split off from St Saviour's. The money for this had been left in the Will of a Southwark worthy in 1631, but the religious uncertainty of the mid-seventeenth century meant that the executors waited prudently till after the Restoration to put the dead man's wishes into practice. Apparently they did not realise that the Paris Garden was still very poorly drained at that date: in fact, over the following decades, the new church and its yard became so waterlogged that it had to be entirely rebuilt in 1741. This perennial water problem may have been one of reasons why, apart from Bankside itself, the increase in houses south of the river was always rather slow – perhaps slower than the church-builders or the citizens of Bankside anticipated. Only three hundred and forty-nine houses are recorded as having been added to St Saviour's parish between the time Charles I came to the throne and the Restoration of Charles II, and then none till the late 1670s. But there must have been a substantial increase in the last three decades of the seventeenth century, with infilling along Maid Lane, ribbon development down the tracks leading south from it and many more houses near the Borough High Street, for in 1708 the number of houses in St Saviour's parish was said to be ‘about 2,500'. They housed a total population of some fourteen thousand, an increase of more than tenfold on Stow's figure of twelve hundred not much more than a hundred years before. Fourteen thousand does sound about right, if the figure of two thousand five hundred houses is to be believed, as that would indicate an average of 5.6 people per house, including children, servants and apprentices. But if the population for the whole of the London area at that time is to be estimated at between five and six hundred thousand, it is clear that Southwark was as yet far from built up. Indeed great tracts of it were open land, with paddocks, market gardens and cloth-drying grounds, and continued that way for much of the eighteenth century.

It was not a backwater, however. Conforming to its traditional role as a refuge for those who could not be accommodated officially within London proper, the suburb of the south bank had for some time been home to a number of respectable Nonconformists who, after James II's Act of Indulgence, could declare themselves as such. A Quaker Meeting House was built near Bankside, and several other dissenting chapels. The best known of these was a place that crops up in incidental references of the era as ‘Shallett's meeting house'; it was a pretty wooden building in a newly constructed cul de sac off Gravel Lane which was christened ‘Zoar Street' – Sanctuary Street. John Bunyan is always said to have preached there, but as he died within a year of the chapel being put up (1688), this is by no means sure. A charity school was also run from there, and several other free schools were started in the following decades, including a Roman Catholic one – whose existence spurred the low-Church factions to greater efforts. These little schools were intended primarily to inculcate Christian virtues into the offspring of the lower classes, to promote a proper spirit of obedience and to ‘suppress the beginning of vice': too much book learning might, after all, have encouraged the children to get above their station. But the schools did induce a basic literacy and numeracy, and must have given many youngsters a first glimpse of other things beyond the street and the vagaries of casual labour. St Saviour's too, thanks to two bequests from wealthy parishioners, started its own free school for small, poor boys (as distinct from the Free Grammar School for older boys which had been in St Saviour's churchyard since the days of Queen Elizabeth) and also made efforts towards providing them with respectable clothes and getting them apprenticeships.

The modern, decent, progressive-minded citizens who busied themselves with such works clearly required modern, cleanly built houses to live in, did they not? Otherwise, in the absence of such a stratum of society on the south bank, the gabled Elizabethan houses would simply have remained, let out into tenements as such houses were in other parts of Southwark, gradually becoming ‘rookeries' or slums, to be swept away more summarily by later waves of progressive thought.

The reason that I know that many of the houses along Bankside were rebuilt in the days of Queen Anne, or soon after, is that I have seen them. Not in real life: except for number 49 they have all vanished now, like the river ice of long-past winters. (The pair standing next to 49 across the alley look convincing, but they are little more than a decent simulacrum of what were originally three houses, reconstituted after incendiary bomb damage in the Second World War.) Everywhere else on Bankside late nineteenth-century warehouses gradually replaced the Queen Anne houses, to be replaced again now by still larger blocks of modern flats.

None of the extant early nineteenth-century panoramas of London, of which there are several, manages to show the sweep of Bankside with any clarity. But, when in pursuit of nineteenth-century drainage, I chanced upon a set of Flood Prevention plans of 1881. There was the whole river wall of Bankside, laid out detailed section by section complete with suggested extra defences, and beneath each section was a little elevation drawing of the one or two buildings relevant to those particular few yards. By re-drawing these elevations for myself, carefully measured, and then stringing them together in the right order, I was able to achieve my own Long View of the Bankside we have lost. (
see here
.)

As my laborious vista accumulated, it became apparent from the style of many of the houses still surviving in 1881 that they were of the same period as number 49, or only a decade or so later. There was a building boom in London after Marlborough's wars ended in 1715, which lasted till the mid-1720s: I believe that the bulk of Bankside's initial rebuilding dates from then. As you would expect from the multiple land-holdings, although the houses butted up against one another they did not anywhere form one complete terrace, but hung together in twos and threes, a procession of slightly varying rooflines, cornices and windows. Evidently many minds had had the same idea for improving their property within the same era, and had all gone about it in the same way, with just an
ad hoc
gentleman's agreement about style and proportion. As for the old footpaths running alongside the garden walls and down onto Bankside – Moss Alley, White Hind Alley, Cardinal Cap Alley, Pond Yard – these were simply slotted under masonry arches that ran, in several cases,
through
the ground floors of the new houses. Cardinal Cap Alley now emerged onto Bankside beneath the upper floors of what would become number 50.

Architectural historians have ignored Bankside, training their sights rather on the great estates north of the river and on what has survived rather than what is lost. In popular London mythology the playhouses and bear pits gave way to smoking chimneys and ‘slum courts' with no intervening period. But the days of Queen Anne and the early part of the reign of George I were, arguably, Bankside's own time in the sun, its moment of near-elegance. Even the more modest two-storey houses that were going up in the new side streets, and were sometimes still made of timber, were not then the working-class hovels they were later to become, but could be described by a contemporary (John Strype) as ‘clean and handsome … pretty well built and inhabited'.
²
Across the water Wren's huge new St Paul's, almost the only baroque building in London, glimmered in white splendour. There is some indication that Wren himself lodged on Bankside for a while – not in the yet-to-be-rebuilt 49, where he is misleadingly commemorated, but in another house further along by the Falcon Tavern. The story, which was collected from a ‘very old man' some eighty years later,
³
is that Wren designed this house himself for a Mr Jones who had started an iron-working business there, and that he rented a room there as a vantage point from which to survey the progress of work on his new cathedral. What
is
a fact is that Jones supplied the ornate railings that were eventually fitted at pavement level round the cathedral. Apparently, in the mid-eighteenth century, a porcelain plaque referring to Wren was made and placed on Jones's house, which survived for another hundred and fifty years.

The iron for St Paul's railings (and for similar ones round Jones's own house) was said to be from the last load of iron to leave an ancient forest smelting works in Sussex, such as the one owned by Henslowe's family a hundred years before. It travelled by boat round the coast and up the Thames, to the site above London Bridge which Jones had decided would be a promising place to establish his works. After that date, the manufacture of iron migrated almost entirely to areas where the available fuel for the forges was not wood but coal. So Wren and the Falcon Iron Works, as it was to become, coincide there on Bankside, on the cusp of a world that was passing and a new one that was soon to come.

THE IMPETUS TO
rebuild the fabric of London was not only driven by the wish to avert further terrible conflagrations. For the first time, those in charge of the spreading metropolis had a vision of the
kind
of town they wanted the capital to be. This owed much to the Palladian ideals that had been first expressed by Inigo Jones in the days of James and Charles I, and which surfaced after the Great Fire in the form of a grandiose Venetian style design for the Thames's north bank. This never got built – the wharf owners would certainly have objected. Nor were other schemes that were equally visionary and short on practicality, such as the transformation of the dirty Fleet ditch, which poured into the Thames opposite the Paris Garden, into an arcaded ship canal.

But the spirit of these grand projects was now diffused into a general architectural agreement about what was correct. The late seventeenth-century perception among educated people was that there was a universal law of proportion and beauty, of which architecture was only one manifestation. House widths in relation to heights, the placing of windows and their corresponding height and breadth, all now began to be codified. So was the positioning of houses. It had been a peculiarity of London that substantial and even aristocratic mansions were often approached down narrow side lanes, but this was to become a thing of the past. The country-style individualism of London building practices, in which each house was built by rule of thumb according to the fancy and habits of the original owner, and then enlarged and altered in any direction to meet the needs of subsequent ones, was to be controlled. Only four distinct types of house were now officially recognised – a concept of the Building Act of 1667 that was to dominate the building and leasing systems for the next two hundred years. These types were, firstly, mansion houses; secondly, big houses with four storeys, basements and attics; and thirdly more ordinary houses of three storeys, basement or cellar and attic, ‘fronting streets and lanes of note and the Thames' – a category which covered huge numbers of the newly built houses, including those along Bankside. In the fourth category were two-storeyed houses for occupants in a more modest way of life, and only these were thought suitable for the by-lanes. Most importantly, none of the houses was to have an upper storey, or added further storeys, jutting out from the lower in the time-honoured way, nor dormer windows projecting from the walls, nor outward-opening casements. Instead, sliding sash windows (a new idea imported from Holland) were set flush with the walls. The one major characteristic shared by all these new constructions, whatever their size, was the flat front, and the scaling down of the pitched roof so that it partially disappeared behind this façade.