Villiers Street is a clean and quiet thoroughfare, where people seem to walk sedately as though strolling through a graveyard. It is named for George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who was a fashionable courtier much beloved by King James I., and who paid gallant court to Anne of Austria, wife of the French King Louis XIII. The establishment of Charing Cross Station robbed the street of its western side. Pepys' companion diarist, John Evelyn, lived hereabouts, and Richard Steele, too, after the death of his wife.
A newspaper office now occupies Number 149 Strand where Mrs. Siddons the actress passed the night after her first appearance in London when she captured the town by her art.
Charing Cross railway station stands where was once Hungerford Market, which in 1669 took the place of the recently burned mansion of Sir Edward Hungerford. On the Villiers Street side were a line of factories, among them Warren's blacking factory where Charles Dickens worked as a boy, the scenes and workers of which he reproduced in "David Copperfield," changing only the character of the business from blacking to wine. The river then crept up to what is now the northerly side of the Embankment. At the foot of Villiers Street was the Hungerford Stairs where passengers landed from the river. There were many of these "Stairs" along the waterside and two reminders of them may be seen in Essex and York gates.
When King Edward I., in 1290 journeyed from Lincoln to Westminster Abbey with the body of his beloved Queen, Eleanor of Castile, he rested the coffin on the spot now called Charing Cross. Some say the name Charing was an alteration of Chère Reine (dear queen), but the locality was so called before Edward's day so this cannot be verified. Charing was a little settlement that lay in the fields between London and Westminster and was at first called Cherringe. At all events, in the year after Eleanor's body had rested here Edward erected a memorial cross of Gothic design—which has since then been called Eleanor's Cross—to mark where the coffin had rested, one of nine similar monuments commemorating the various stages of the journey. In successive reigns, for almost four hundred years, Eleanor's Cross was alternately defaced, reinstated or repaired, on the occasion of coronations or visits of royalty. Finally Parliament had it removed in 1647, but a modern copy of it stands to-day in the courtyard of the Charing Cross railway station.
Across the road from Charing Cross railway station Golden Cross Hotel preserves the name of a famous place in old stage-coach days. The original house of this name stood on the site now held by the Nelson Column. In front of the original tavern, Mr. Pickwick of "Pickwick Papers" and his friends met Alfred Jingle for the first time and from here the entire party took the coach for Rochester. At this tavern, David Copperfield met Steerforth, some years after their school days together, when Copperfield had been put "into a small bedchamber, which smelt like a hackney-coach, and was shut up like a family vault."
Where Drummond's Bank is, at Charing Cross, once stood the celebrated tavern "Locket's Ordinary," where Thackeray in the novel "Henry Esmond," placed the dispute between Lord Mohun and Lord Castlewood ending at Leicester Fields and in the killing of the patron of Esmond.
Just beyond Northumberland is Craven Street one of the lonely ways leading from the busy Strand to the river. On the house No. 7 is a tablet reading:
Lived Here
Benjamin Franklin
Printer