TEMPLE BAR
The Strand, indeed, is very much altered since the year 1837. At the west end the removal of Northumberland House has been followed by the building of the Grand Hotel, and the opening of the Northumberland Avenue: the Charing Cross Station and Hotel have been erected: two or three new theatres have been added: Temple Bar has been taken down—in any other country the old gate would have been simply left standing, because it was an ancient historical monument; they would have spared it and made a roadway on either side; the rookeries which formerly stood on the north side close to the Bar have been swept away, and the Law Courts stand in their place—where the rooks are gone it is impossible to say. I myself dimly remember a labyrinth of lanes, streets, and courts on this site. They were inhabited, I believe, by low-class solicitors, money-lenders, racing and betting men, and by all kinds of adventurers. Did not Mr. Altamont have chambers here, when he visited Captain Costigan in Lyons Inn? Lyons Inn itself is pulled down, and on its site is the Globe Theatre.
THE ROYAL COURTS OF JUSTICE
As for churches, there has been such an enormous increase of churches in the last fifty years, that it seems churlish to lament the loss of half a dozen. But this half-dozen belongs to the City: they were churches built, for the most part, by Wren, on the site of ancient churches destroyed in the Fire; they were all hallowed by old and sacred associations; many of them were interesting and curious for their architecture: in a word, they ought not to have been pulled down in order to raise hideous warehouses over their site. Greed of gain prevailed; and they are gone. People found out that their number of worshippers was small, and argued that there was no longer any use for them. So they are gone, and can never be replaced. As for their names, they were the churches of Allhallows, Broad Street; St. Benet’s, Gracechurch Street; St. Dionis Backchurch; St. Michael’s, Queenhithe; St. Antholin’s, Budge Row; St. Bene’t Fink; St. Mary Somerset; St. Mary Magdalen; and St. Matthew, Friday Street. The church of St. Michael, Crooked Lane, in which was the grave of Sir William Walworth, disappeared in the year 1831; those of St. Bartholomew by Eastcheap, and of St. Christopher-le-Stock, which stood on either side of the Bank, were taken down in the years 1802 and 1781 respectively. The site of these old churches is generally marked by a small enclosure, grown over with thin grass, containing one, or at most two, tombs. It is about the size of a dining-room table, and you may read of it that the burying-ground of Saint So-and-so is still preserved. Indeed! Were the City churchyards of such dimensions? The ‘preservation’ of the burial-grounds is like the respect which used to be paid to the First Day of the week in the early lustra of the Victorian Age by the tobacconist. He kept one shutter up. So the desecrators of the City churchyards, God’s acre, the holy ground filled with the bones of dead citizens, measured off a square yard or two, kept one tomb, and built their warehouses over all the rest.
LYONS INN IN 1804
(From an Engraving in Herbert’s ‘History of the Inns of Court’)
All round London the roads were blocked everywhere by turnpikes. It is difficult to understand the annoyance of being stopped continually to show a pass or to pay the pike. Thus, there were two or three turnpikes in what is now called the Euston Road, and was then the New Road; one of them was close to Great Portland Street, another at Gower Street. At Battle Bridge, which is now King’s Cross, there were two, one on the east, and one on the west; there was a pike in St. John Street, Clerkenwell. There were two in the City Road, and one in New North Road, Hoxton; one at Shoreditch, one in Bethnal Green Road, one in Commercial Road. No fewer than three in East India Dock Road, three in the Old Kent Road, one in Bridge Street, Vauxhall; one in Great Surrey Street, near the Obelisk; one at Kennington Church—what man turned of forty cannot remember the scene at the turnpike on Derby Day, when hundreds of carriages would be stopped while the pikeman was fighting for his fee? There was a turnpike named after Tyburn, close to Marble Arch; another at the beginning of Kensington Gardens; one at St. James’s Church, Hampstead Road. Ingenious persons knew how to avoid the pike by making a long détour.
