Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (31 page)

Shaftesbury Avenue dates from the mid-1880s. It was built as part of the same scheme as Kingsway to improve road communication between the West End and the Tottenham Court Road and Bloomsbury areas. The name ‘Shaftesbury’ recalls Anthony Ashley Cooper (1801–85). As Earl of Shaftesbury, he was a philanthropist and leading campaigner for factory reform. Another reason for the construction of these roads was to open up and sanitise some of London’s worst rookeries or criminal sanctuaries, namely St Giles and Seven Dials. The latter, previously known as ‘Cock and Pye Fields’ after a local inn, got its strange name from a Doric pillar topped in fact by only six sundials. This stood at the intersection of seven streets and was a noted rendezvous for criminals. It was taken down in 1773 amid great excitement because it was rumoured that its base contained a large amount of money. It did not. The pillar was subsequently re-erected at Weybridge in Surrey. Shaftesbury Avenue lacks architectural distinction but is noted for being the centre of London’s theatreland. At the junction of High Holborn and Shaftesbury Avenue, Endell Street can be seen on the left and this contains the Swiss Protestant Church founded in 1762 where Sunday services are conducted in French. Beyond Endell Street is Bow Street. A courthouse was opened here in 1748 where Henry Fielding and his half-brother, Sir John Fielding, were magistrates. They attempted to bring some degree of rationality to the workings of the law and it was here that the Bow Street Runners started their operations. Bow Street Magistrates Court now stands on the site.

We proceed along the old route up St Giles High Street. On the south side is the Angel pub. This is an ancient hostelry although it was rebuilt in 1898 and was previously known as the Bowl. It is said to have been one of the major stopping places for the condemned felons and their hangers-on making their way from Newgate to Tyburn and is reputed to be haunted. Other drinking places nearby also claim this distinction. They include the White Hart, Drury Lane and the Three Tuns, South Portman Mews, although both lie slightly off the direct route. Immediately on the left is the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields topped by a fine steeple 150 feet high. St Giles is close to where the Great Plague of London broke out in 1665; in just one month in that year 1,391 burials were recorded to have taken place in its churchyard. This church has many historical associations of which only a few can be given here. George Chapman was buried there in 1634. It was his translation of Homer which sent John Keats (1795–1821) into such poetic raptures. Five now beatified Jesuits, put to death after the Popish Plot, were buried in the north part of the churchyard in 1678. Lying close by was the canonised Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was executed for high treason in 1681. In his tomb was buried a copper plate with this inscription: ‘Accused of high treason, through hatred of the faith, by false brethren, and condemned to death, being hanged at Tyburn and his bowels being taken out and cast into the fire, suffered martyrdom with constancy.’ He was soon exhumed and it was reported that miraculously his bodily parts became reunited. Much earlier, in 1417, the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle died after being hanged over a hot fire. The prolific if somewhat pedestrian portrait painter, Sir Geoffrey Kneller, was buried in St Giles in 1723. Luke Hansard was interred in 1828. He and his descendants printed parliamentary reports from 1774 to 1889 and his surname has been immortalised as the title of the verbatim reports of Parliament’s deliberations. It is possible that Claude Duval, the famous highwayman, is buried within the precincts. As with so many of his kind, he went to meet his Maker while only young. He was hanged at Tyburn in 1670. Others buried here include Arthur William Devis (1762–1822), an artist who mostly painted charming portraits of children but is best remembered for his
The Death of Nelson
and a painting of Dr William Balmain, the co-founder of New South Wales, whose name lives on in a suburb of Sydney. He was buried in St Giles in 1803. On the west front of St Giles the name of its architect, Henry Flitcroft, is displayed prominently on a frieze, and close by is what can best be described as a stone lych gate, erected in 1804. This rather curious structure incorporates a wooden bas-relief of the Resurrection which was carved in 1687 and may be based on Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement
in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. The interior of St Giles contains many fine seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furnishings.

From St Giles High Street the route passes Andrew Borde Street where St Giles Hospital stood before it was dissolved. Andrew Borde himself was a noted wit who lived during the reign of Henry VIII. Very briefly we join New Oxford Street. This was completed in 1847 and had been built to reach Holborn more directly than the old route which curved through St Giles High Street. Its construction involved the knocking down of some of London’s most festering slums. Now we enter Oxford Street proper which has long been a traditional route out of London to the west. The systematic development of buildings along Oxford Street dates from the late 1730s. By the end of the century, development was complete from the Tottenham Court Road end to Park Lane. At first the buildings lining Oxford Street were largely residential. Slowly one or two places of entertainment were opened such as the Pantheon at no. 173, now occupied by a Marks & Spencer store. The Princess’s Theatre was opened in 1840 where the Oxford Walk shopping precinct now stands. At no. 275 stands Regent Hall. This building which at one time contained a skating rink is now occupied by the Salvation Army but remains surprisingly unaltered. After 1850, Oxford Street began to assume its more modern character as a centre of retailing. At first, however, the shops were mostly small private ones largely serving the rich families who lived in the fashionable residential streets and squares on both sides of Oxford Street. Gradually these gave way to department stores of the sort which can now be seen on most of the nation’s high streets.

The first road junction along Oxford Street on the north side is that with Hanway Street. This is probably named after Jonas Hanway (1712–86) who was assured immortality as the first Englishman reputed to have ventured out on to the streets of the capital brandishing an umbrella to protect himself from the rain. Hanway was a man of many interests including foreign travel, prison reform, philanthropy and hatred of the tea-drinking habit. He alienated the great Dr Johnson when he attacked tea on the grounds that he believed it led to adultery and other social evils.

Berwick Street joins Oxford Street on its south side. At no. 22 a Westminster City Council plaque is affixed to the house where Jessie Matthews, actress and dancer, was born. The last role for which she is remembered is as ‘Mrs Dale’ in the 1950– 60s radio soap opera
Mrs Dale’s Diary
. On the north side of Oxford Street is Berners Street. At no. 13 the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825) lived, in the early nineteenth century. The best known of his works was probably the puzzling, even disturbing,
Nightmare
of 1781. It was perhaps the powerful quality of this work that led an admirer to call on Fuseli and expect to be welcomed by some enormous and sturdy bearded figure resembling a Viking warrior. Imagine the visitor’s surprise when he was greeted by a diminutive silver-haired man wearing an old flannel dressing gown and what appeared to be part of his wife’s work-basket on his head. In 1809, Berners Street was the scene of a cruel hoax. This was carried out by a young reprobate named Theodore Hook who had been expelled from Harrow, had written thirteen operas while he was still a minor and was under investigation for fraud. For reasons unknown he decided to play a complex practical joke on a Mrs Tottingham who lived at no. 54. He spent six weeks making his preparations and the result of these was that on one memorable day hundreds of tradesmen descended on her house presenting her with a vast quantity of goods varying from coffins to coffee and snuff. As if that was not enough, other callers included a cosmopolitan selection of clergymen to shrive her soul, doctors to cure her body, lawyers to assist her with the writing of her will and even stay-makers to fit her up with corsets.

About one-third of the way along Oxford Street is the junction with Regent Street. This was part of an ambitious scheme by John Nash (1752–1835), the town planner and architect, and others, to connect what came to be called Regent’s Park with the official residence of the Regent, Carlton House. In the early part of the nineteenth century property speculators were keen to maximise the value of residential development planned for the Marylebone district by having easier road access from the Charing Cross and Strand areas. This would help to raise land values in run-down areas such as the Haymarket and Pall Mall through which any new road was likely to run. Nash wanted the proposed road to be part of a grandiose programme of improvements that would bring London’s architecture up to the standards of other European capital cities. Parliamentary approval was obtained in 1813 and work started quickly. Nash was severely frustrated in his attempt to place his own imprimatur throughout the scheme, individual developers using their own designs where it suited them. However, Nash was very successful in the work he undertook between Piccadilly and Oxford Street in the Quadrant. This part of Regent Street did represent something close to the model he had envisaged. For many years in the nineteenth century, along with Bond Street close by, Regent Street was the shopping resort of the very rich and fashionable but by 1900 they had tended to drift away and Regent Street was beginning to look somewhat down-at-heel. Many of the buildings were showing serious structural faults and it was evident that shortcuts had been taken when this part of Regent Street had originally been put up. Complete redevelopment was considered and the prominent architect Richard Norman Shaw (1831–1912) was asked to come up with suggestions. The shopkeepers, led by the managing director of Swan & Edgar, totally rejected these as too expensive and also because they thought that adding to the height of the buildings would make the street seem cavernous and off-putting. Eventually a new design for the Quadrant was accepted and rebuilding was completed in the 1920s.

Today Regent Street remains one of the leading shopping areas of central London. Visible from Oxford Circus just down the east side of Regent Street is Liberty’s. This famous, highly idiosyncratic emporium traces its origins to Arthur Lasenby Liberty who started selling oriental fabrics and other goods in Regent Street in the 1870s. Liberty had an almost devotional enthusiasm for oriental art and design and was also fired by a passionate desire to encourage craftsmanship and to improve public taste. He became a fervent supporter of the Aesthetic Movement, a reaction to what was seen as the brash vulgarity of the standardised, mass-produced articles associated with the Industrial Revolution. Liberty was convinced that the beauties of oriental colour and design could be reproduced using the latest mechanical aids. It did not prove easy but Liberty was possessed of a persuasive missionary zeal. British manufacturers eventually managed to produce fabrics that displayed both original oriental and new designs and which often incorporated ancient dyeing techniques, again using new technology. For those occasions when designs could only be hand-printed, he established a printing works at Merton Abbey. His influence on taste and fashion was enormous and he came to hobnob with some of the leading artists, aesthetes and critics of his time such as William Morris, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Such was his success that he eventually occupied all the buildings from 140 to 150 Regent Street. However, redevelopment took place in the 1920s and the buildings we see now are highly eclectic, the result of the conservative agents of the Crown who own the land and the flamboyant Liberty reaching an uneasy compromise. Eastern and British motifs in curious juxtaposition adorn the Regent Street facade while that part of the building fronting on to Great Marlborough Street has a half-timbered Tudor appearance with an interior incorporating oak and teak timber work from three naval men-o’-war. There is high quality stained glass, linenfold panelling and also galleries with hammer-beam roofs.

Just before the intersection of Oxford Street and Regent Street, Argyll Street comes in from the south. Close to Oxford Street are 8 and 10 Argyll Street. These display blue plaques commemorating Washington Irving and William Roy respectively. Washington Irving (1783–1859) was an American who was also something of an Anglophile and is perhaps best known for his American adaptation of German folk tales such as ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. At no. 10, Major General William Roy’s residence is remembered. He lived from 1726 to 1790 and was a skilled surveyor and cartographer whose work on mapping Scotland after the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the battle of Culloden in 1746 provided the model for the development of the Ordnance Survey. Immediately after Argyll Street stands Oxford Circus Underground station. This has largely managed to retain the facade with glazed dark ruby red tiling which was so characteristic of the work of Leslie W. Green, appointed in 1903 as the architect of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London. Close to Oxford Circus and running between Great Portland Street and Titchfield Street is Market Place, the name of which recalls the Oxford Market which served the affluent residential quarters nearby from around 1720 up to the late nineteenth century.

On the north side of Oxford Street, Hollies Street gives access to Cavendish Square from which Harley Street runs up towards Regent’s Park. One interesting resident of 33 Harley Street was Jane Digby, who gained notoriety in the 1820s and 1830s. She came from a very privileged social background and was only seventeen when she married a peer twenty years her senior. Jane was a young woman of great beauty, being tall, well proportioned and having the most winsome eyes. She was also an accomplished linguist and painter. These qualities were combined with a rapacious appetite for amorous adventures. In the first two years of marriage she took a succession of lovers by one of whom – reputedly her cousin – she had a child. At the age of twenty-one she met the love of her life. There was little that was understated about this man, starting with his name. This was Prince Felix Ludwig Johann von Nepomuk Friederich zu Schwarzenburg, an attaché at the Austrian Embassy. Their relationship became the focus of much disapproving gossip but such was the Prince’s contempt for the mores of fashionable society that when Jane went to Brighton for a few days, he decided to make a surprise visit to her and did so in a garish yellow coach sporting his family arms. Divorce was inevitable and after the birth of a daughter by the Prince, Jane found a new theatre for her activities in the Mediterranean. Here she took a succession of eminent lovers. These included three kings, some princes and a German baron before she decided to go native. After frolicking with an Albanian brigand, she made for the deserts of Syria and enjoyed a number of Bedouin lovers, one of whom she ended up marrying. She died in 1881 and was buried in a Christian cemetery in Damascus.