“On Newgate steps Jack Chance was found,
Bred up near St. Giles’s Pound.”[53]
The ground behind the north-west end of Russell Street was occupied by a farm occupied by two old maiden sisters of the name of Capper. They wore riding-habits, and men’s hats; one rode an old grey mare, and it was her spiteful delight to ride with a large pair of shears after boys who were flying their kites, purposely to cut their strings; the other sister’s business was to seize the clothes of the lads who trespassed on their premises to bathe.[54]
From Capper’s farm were several straggling houses; but the principal part of the ground to the “King’s Head,” at the end of the road, was unbuilt upon. The “Old King’s Head” forms a side object in Hogarth’s beautiful and celebrated picture of the “March to Finchley,” which may be seen with other fine specimens of art in the Foundling Hospital, for the charitable donation of one shilling.
I shall now recommence on the left-hand side of the road, noticing that on the front of the first house, No. 1, in Oxford Street, near the second-floor windows, is the following inscription cut in stone: Oxford Street, 1725. In Aggas’s plan of London, engraved in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the commencement of this street is designated “The Waye to Uxbridge”; farther on in the same plan the highway is called “Oxford Road.” Hanway Street, better known by the vulgar people under the name of Hanover Yard, was at this time the resort of the highest fashion for mercery and other articles of dress. The public-house, the sign of the “Blue Posts,” at the corner of Hanway Street, in Tottenham Court Road, was once kept by a man of the name of Sturges, deep in the knowledge of chess, upon which game he published a little work, as is acknowledged on his tombstone in St. James’s burial-ground, Hampstead Road.[55] From the “Blue Posts” the houses were irregularly built to a large space called Gresse’s Gardens, thence to Windmill Street, strongly recommended by physicians for the salubrity of the air. The premises occupied by the French charity children were held by the founders of the Middlesex Hospital, which were established in 1755, where the patients remained until the present building was erected in Charles Street. Colvill Court, parallel with Windmill Street northward, was built in 1766; and Goodge Street,[56] farther on, was, I conjecture, erected much about the same time. Mr. Whitefield’s chapel was built in 1754, upon the site of an immense pond, called The Little Sea. This pond, so called, is inserted in Pine and Tinney’s plan of London, published in 1742, and also in the large one issued by the same persons in 1746.[57] Beyond the chapel[58] the four dwellings, then called “Paradise Row,” almost terminated the houses on that side. A turnstile opened into Crab-tree Fields.[59] They extended to the “Adam and Eve” public-house, the original appearance of which Hogarth has also introduced into his picture of the “March to Finchley.” It was at this house that the famous pugilistic skill of Broughton and Slack was publicly exhibited, upon an uncovered stage, in a yard open to the North Road.[60]
GEORGE WHITEFIELD
“Fain would I die preaching.”