Leadenhall Street

“ It extends from Aldgate to Lime street corner in Leadenhall street, and takes in all the streets and lanes on the one hand to Bevis Mark and Shoemaker row, and on the other to Ironmongers hall in Fenchurch street; to the navy office, only a part of which is in this ward, and to the end of River street Tower hill; including Poor Jury lane, Crutched Friars, London street, Woodroff lane, &c. The principal buildings are these four parish churches, St. Catharine Cree church, St. ”

“ Another piece found at East India House, Leadenhall Street, is not set 155up rightly. The pattern is of two interlacing squares; the margin should not be parallel to either of these, but it should touch two of the points of the star form. (Fig. 98. See Sir W. Tite’s illustration in Archæologia; compare also the Bucklersbury pavement at the Guildhall.) This floor came from the same level as the Bacchus mosaic and not far away from its position; probably the small chamber to which it belonged was part of the building which contained the large square hall of the Bacchus mosaic. ”

“ Intersecting the town lengthwise, or from east to west, are three great leading thoroughfares at a short distance from each other, but gradually diverging at their western extremity. One of these routes begins in the eastern environs, near Blackwall, and extends along Whitechapel, Leadenhall Street, Cornhill, the Poultry, Cheapside, Newgate Street, Holborn, and Oxford Street. The other may be considered as starting at London Bridge, and passing up King William Street into Cheapside, at the western end of which it makes a bend round St. ”

“ On the north Leadenhall House is solidly faced in granite, with granite columns on the frontage. West India House is neatly built in white stone.
Farther eastward the street is singularly dull; it is lined at first by dreary blocks of imitation stone buildings. These are succeeded by brick buildings all turned out of the same mould. The north side is better than the south, and is chiefly made up of solid, well-built houses on various designs. ”

“ Certainly it is not on the highest point of Panyer Alley. A writer in Notes and Queries has lately suggested that the highest point in the City was at or near Leadenhall Market, or the chancel of the primitive St. Peter’s Church on Cornhill.
A statuette, also representing a naked boy, not sculptured in stone, but carved in wood, is placed on a pedestal affixed to the wall of a public-house, at the corner of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, called the Fortune of War. The spot was commonly [9] known as Pie Corner: it is hardly necessary to add that here ended the Great Fire of London. ”

“ The northern portion of the street is not remarkable for architectural beauty. The street consists chiefly of great square blocks of buildings interspersed with dull early nineteenth-century brick boxes. In Bell Yard there is an almost unbroken line of old houses on the south side, and at the end the half-embedded gilt bell over a public-house points to the name-derivation. On the east of Gracechurch Street a high arch of rusticated stone leads to Leadenhall market (see p. 160) . Gracechurch Buildings follow, and Bull’s Head Passage, leading to Skinner’s Place, is lined by open stalls. ”

“ Pickwick’s Hotel—“The Green Dragon,” alias “The Blue Boar,” Leadenhall Market; Tony Weller’s Headquarters—Newman’s Court (alias Freeman’s Court) , Cornhill; The Offices of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg—House of Sol Gills, Leadenhall Street; The Wooden Midshipman—St. Mary Axe; Pubsey and Co.—House of Sampson Brass in Bevis Marks—“The Red Lion;” Mr. Dick Swiveller’s recommendation—Bull Inn, Aldgate; Starting-place of the Ipswich Coach—The Minories—Aldgate Pump; Mr. Toots’s Excursions—Mincing Lane; Messrs. Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles—Boarding House of Mrs. Todgers, King’s Head Court—London Bridge ”

“ With the characteristics of London as a great mart and port is included the foreign elements in its population. In Lombard Street the merchants of Lombardy from early mediæval times had performed the operations of banking and foreign exchange; and{27} around them were assembled the English merchants of all qualities and degrees. Business was conducted in the open street, and merchants merely adjourned into the adjoining houses to seal their bonds and make their formal settlements. Henry VIII. tried to induce the city to make use of the great building of Leadenhall for this purpose ”

“ Besides the standing watches all in bright harness, in every ward and street in this city and suburbs, there was also a marching watch that passed through the principal streets thereof, to wit, from the little conduit by Paul's gate to West Cheap, by the stocks through Cornhill by Leadenhall to Aldgate, then back down Fenchurch Street by Grace Church, about Grace church conduit and up Gracechurch Street into Cornhill, and through it into West Cheap again, and so broke up. ”

“ Magnus Church, at the North end of London Bridge, and so into diuerse men’s houses in Thames Street, New Fish Street, and Grasse-street, vp vnto the North-west corner of Leadenhall,—the highest ground of the Citie of London,—where the waste of the first maine pipe ran first this yeare, one thousand five hundred eightie and two, on Christmasse eeuen ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that Leadenhall was the market, and that the Crossing at Cornhill was the carfax of London during the Middle Ages.
We have seen above that Brock said that fragments of painting were found on the site. In the British Museum are four pieces of wall painting, given by Mr. Hilton Price—1 and 2 in 1882, and 3 and 4 in 1883; the first pair are said to be from Leadenhall, the second pair from Leadenhall Market. One and 3 are fragments of large-scale scrolls of ornamental foliage of a grey-green colour; 2 is a piece of large-scale drapery, and 4 is part of a life-sized foot. ”

“ All that our plan requires, and our space admits, is to give a general notion of what a citizen’s house in a mediæval town was like. The houses of wealthy citizens were no doubt mansions comparable with the unembattled manor-houses of the country gentry. We have already quoted Leland’s description of that of Michael de la Pole at Hull, of the fourteenth century, and Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate Street. St. Mary’s Hall, at Coventry, is a very perfect example of the middle of the fifteenth century. Norwich also possesses one or more houses of this character. ”

“ John-street to Saffron Hill—from West-street to Clerkenwell Green, is a maze of narrow lanes, choked up with dirt, pestiferous with nauseous odours, and swarming with a population that is born, lives, and dies, amidst squalor, penury, wretchedness, and crime.
Leading out of Holborn, between Field Lane and Ely Place, is Upper Union Court—a narrow lane forming a thoroughfare for only foot passengers. The houses in this court are dingy and gloomy: the sunbeams never linger long there; and should an Italian-boy pass through the place, he does not stop to waste his music upon the inhabitants. ”

“ If she had been pleased with Tottenham Court Road, and delighted with the essentially commonplace Oxford Street, she exulted in that alluring curve which will always make Regent Street a fascination for the visitor to London and even a satisfaction to the Londoner himself. ”

“ From the Obelisk at the junction, or approximate junction, of the Westminster, Waterloo, Blackfriars, Borough, and London-roads, in pretty well every direction to the banks of the Thames, are a mass of private-looking streets—as far as the absence of shops constitutes the privacy of a street—old and half-ruinous, or modern and trim, in all of which perhaps may be found street-sellers, and in some of which are pickpockets, thieves, and prostitutes. ”

“ Between Shoreditch Church and Wentworth Street the most intense pangs of poverty, the most profligate morals, and the most odious crimes, rage with the fury of a pestilence.
Entire streets that are nought but sinks of misery and vice,—dark courts, fœtid with puddles of black slimy water,—alleys, blocked up with heaps of filth, and nauseating with unwholesome odours, constitute, with but little variety, the vast district of which we are speaking. ”

“ The sky was a crimson battlefield of spring, but London was not afraid. Her smoke mitigated the splendour, and the clouds down Oxford Street were a delicately painted ceiling, which adorned while it did not distract. She has never known the clear-cut armies of the purer air. Leonard hurried through her tinted wonders, very much part of the picture. His was a grey life, and to brighten it he had ruled off a few corners for romance. ”

“ Leading from the neighbourhood of Church Street up into the Hackney Road, is a sinuous thoroughfare, composed of Tyssen Street, Turk Street, Virginia Street, and the Bird-cage Walk; and in the vicinity of these narrow and perilous ways are the Wellington Road (bordered by a ditch of black mud) , and several vile streets, inhabited by the very lowest of the low, the most filthy of the squalid, and the most profligate of the immoral.
We defy any city upon the face of the earth to produce a district equal in vice, dirt, penury, and fear-inspiring dens, to these which we are now describing. ”

“ All I knew was that we had turned off Regent Street about half-way up and that the house was situated in a quiet, rather dark street, an old-fashioned house of three storeys.
Eagerly in search of the place from which I had so narrowly escaped with my life I wandered in the night up and down those narrow thoroughfares, that puzzling maze of streets that lie between Regent Street and Soho Square—Brewer Street, Bridle Lane, Lexington Street, Poland Street and Berwick Street. ”

“ Broad Street is at all times noisy, and it is moreover the favorite route for all the processions, military or political, by torchlight or by daylight, that [Pg 218] ever rejoice the hearts of Philadelphia’s children. It is a haunt, too, of pitiless organ-grinders and importunate beggars. Well I remember the wretched woman who set up her stand, and her tuneless organ, but a few steps beyond Mr. Leland’s window, grinding away there day after day, indifferent to expostulations and threats, until at last the civil authorities had to be appealed to. ”

“ Fashion had long ago turned her face in another direction, and yet in a way the Terrace held its own. It could boast of some wealth, and more distinguished grandfathers were to be heard of within its small area than in the length and breadth of Dean Avenue.
Its residents felt for each other that friendliness born of long association. Some of the best people of the town had built their homes here between thirty and forty years ago, and a comparison of directories would have shown a surprising proportion of the old names still represented. ”

“ It would p. 8stop to change horses at the “Black Horse,” in Coventry Street. Time, from Chelsea, ten in the morning and two in the afternoon; supposed to do the journey in an hour—which it never did. This coach appeared to be as much as was required, as it was seldom full, although it would go round in the morning to pick up its regular passengers.
The roads and streets had a very different appearance at that time, when the King’s Road was like a country road, with a toll gate on the north-east side of Sloane Square. By the Asylum Wall, as far as Whitelands, there was no path at all. ”

“ But, while the plain, nondescript brick houses of Gower Street and Baker Street still remain the prevailing type of London architecture, there is everywhere noticeable a tendency to improve and embellish the streets of the metropolis, to rebuild in a better or, at any rate, a more ambitious way. Travelling along the highway of Oxford Street, from ancient Tyburn to Tottenham Court Road, how many tall, new, and ornate house-fronts rise along the line on each side of us! ”

“ High Street, which was in all probability an extension of the "celebrate" market along the Worcester and North Road; Vine Street and Bridge Street, both skirting the boundary wall of the abbey precincts, and so probably the oldest in their origin; and Port Street, the main thoroughfare of Bengeworth, forming part of the London road beyond the river bridge. High Street, Bridge Street, and Vine Street lead from the Market Place, and here we will stand and look around. On the north side is the "market-sted," "fayre and large" as when Leland viewed it, but now converted to private uses. ”

“ I hate this incorrigible little thoroughfare; this New Street. It is full of bad smells, mangy little shops, obstructions, and bad characters. There is a yawning gin-palace at its south-western extremity. The odours of its eating-houses—especially of a seedy little French pension bourgeoise about half way up—are displeasing to my nostrils. The cigars vended in New Street are the worst in London, and the sweetstuff shops are mobbed—yes, mobbed—by children in torn pinafores who never have any pocket handkerchiefs. ”

“ Take the entire district that is bounded on the north by Peter Street, on the south by Great Suffolk Street, on the east by Blackman Street and High Street, and on the west by the Southwark Bridge Road,—take this small section of the metropolis, and believe us when we state that within those limits there is concentrated more depravity in all its myriad phases, than many persons could suppose to exist in the entire kingdom. ”

“ I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice that he lives on the most respectable street in the East End—a street that would be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in the desert of East London. It is surrounded on every side by close-packed squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation; but its own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have no other place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are the people that come and go. ”