Bleeding Heart Yard of picturesque name and fame, at the head of Ely Place, is written of by Dickens in "Little Dorrit", as the home of Plornish the plasterer, and it was here that the honest Daniel Doyce had his factory.
[SIX]
Along the Strand: and a Peep at Covent Garden and the Coffee Houses
Where Temple Bar Memorial, surmounted by a Griffin, is now in the Strand Temple Bar itself stood until 1878. In one form or another, at times merely a wooden structure, Temple Bar defined the limits of the City from the 14th century. To the very last of its days was preserved an ancient custom of closing the gate when a sovereign approached the City on any public occasion, and opening it with much ceremony to give entrance way. The last Temple Bar was built in 1670, but was demolished to facilitate traffic. On the top of the old gateway the heads of criminals who had been executed were exposed.
The Strand probably the best known street in the world to-day was once a royal road outlining the waterside. On one side were the castles of noblemen fronting on the river, with gardens between, and state barges carried the courtiers to the Tower, to Richmond or to Westminster wherever the king was to be found. The chief castle belonged to Peter of Savoy uncle of Henry III., and was set in the midst of an estate granted by the king in 1245. In those days the bishops were the principal owners of palaces on the Strand—the courtiers preferring the City as being safer from the attacks of their enemies. But the bishops were regarded as sacred and could live anywhere they pleased unmolested. The Strand became a regular thoroughfare about 1560.
At the time of the Reformation the palace of Walter Stapleton Bishop of Exeter was on the south, or river, side of the Strand and was called Exeter House. Afterward when the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's favourite lived there it was called Essex House for him and the present Essex Street so gets its name. The only tangible survival of Essex House is at the end of the street—the aged and picturesque Water Gate, with the worn stone stairs that once led directly to the water where the barges received visitors from the palace. It was down these stairs that the Earl of Essex was taken on his way to the Tower to be beheaded at the command of the fickle queen.
In Essex Street just where is now an entrance into New Court stood the tavern of the Essex Head. Here, in 1783, Samuel Johnson then suffering from the diseases which caused his death in the next year established a conversation club that was to meet three times a week. Johnson attended regularly as long as he was able to walk from his home not far away in Bolt Court.
Opposite Essex Street in the middle of the Strand is the church of St. Clement Danes, designed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1681. At this church Dr. Johnson was a regular attendant for years and the pew he sat in, No. 18 in the north gallery, is marked with a tablet telling of "the philosopher, the poet, the great lexicographer, the profound moralist and chief writer of his times." Joe Miller, the man of jokes, was buried here, and his epitaph records among other things that he was a facetious companion, a sincere friend and a tender husband, which is about all a man need be.