The House by the Thames Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Praise

  List of Illustrations

  Maps

  Family Tree

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Chapter I: In which we find the House

  Chapter II: London’s Other Town

  Chapter III: Of Winchester Geese, Bird’s-eye Views and Show Business

  Chapter IV: Of Water, Fire and the Great Rebuilding

  Chapter V: Genteel Houses and a Glamorous Trade

  Chapter VI: Of Bonds, Leases and Other Dirty Delights

  Chapter VII: The World of Edward Sells II

  Chapter VIII: All Modern Conveniences

  Chapter IX: In which Invisibility Settles on Bankside

  Chapter X: Doom. And Rebirth

  Chapter XI: Bad Guys and Good Ones

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography and Sources

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Just across the River Thames from St Paul’s Cathedral stands an old and elegant house. Over the course of almost 450 years the dwelling on this site has witnessed many changes. From its windows, people have watched the ferrymen carry Londoners to and from Shakespeare’s Globe; they have gazed on the Great Fire; they have seen the countrified lanes of London's marshy south bank give way to a network of wharves, workshops and tenements – and then seen these, too, become dust and empty air.

  Rich with anecdote and colour, this fascinating book breathes life into the forgotten inhabitants of the house – the prosperous traders; an early film star; even some of London’s numberless poor. In so doing it makes them stand for legions of others and for whole world that we have lost through hundreds of years of London’s history.

  About the Author

  Gillian Tindall is well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of her research. She is a master of miniaturist history, making a particular person or situation stand for a much larger picture. She began her career as a prize-winning novelist and has continued to publish fiction, but she has also staked out a particular territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place. Her The Fields Beneath: the history of one London village, which first appeared almost thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print since; nor has Celestine: voices from a French village, published in the mid-1990s and translated into several languages, for which she was decorated by the French government. Her two most recent books are The Journey of Martin Nadaud (‘haunting and moving … impossible not to love for its humanity and integrity’ The Times) and The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in reality and imagination (‘a book that is both elegant and thoughtful’ Sunday Telegraph), also published by Pimlico. Gillian Tindall lives with her husband in London, in a house that is old – though not as old as the house by the Thames that forms the centrepiece of her present book.

  Praise for The House by the Thames

  ‘Tindall is a painstaking scholar, but it is her empathy with ordinary lives that makes this book so remarkable.’ Frances Spalding, Sunday Times

  ‘This graceful discursive book restores forgotten lives, and unlocks a door to reveal London in its glorious breadth and entirety.’ Christopher Fowler, Independent on Sunday

  ‘This is London’s history as detective story, an assemblage of minutiae, a layering of clues … from vestry minutes books to old Thames flood prevention maps – through which Tindall has dredged and sorted in order to reconstruct the fascinating and, at times, touchingly intimate history of this tiny spot. What strikes you, above and beyond the sheer volume of graft that must have gone into compiling this book and its delightful illustrations, is the generosity of its author in writing it. Central London has been dissected by someone with the patient eye, the gift for elegant renovation and the forensic skills of Gillian Tindall.’ Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard

  ‘The story that Gillian Tindall weaves in this book is no less fascinating for an absence of grand characters and in many ways it is the better for it.’ Clive Aslet, Spectator

  ‘Tindall is a microhistorian with a rare power to communicate the fruit of her diligent and meticulous research … a wonderful book.’ BBC History Magazine

  List of Illustrations

  Long View of London from Bankside. Wenceslaus Hollar, etching (c.1640).

  The Tudor ‘Fish House’. Engraving.

  The Falcon Tavern. Engraving.

  Old Houses on Bankside, Southwark. 1827, pencil and wash by John Chessell Buckler. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London.

  The View from Bankside, c. 1820. Oil painting attributed to Thomas Miles Richardson but, in view of the dating, possibly by his father, Thomas Miles Richardson snr. © Museum of London.

  Edwards Sells’s first market sale note (1755).

  Thames Coal-boat. After a daguerreotype by Beard, in Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor.

  St Saviour’s Church. 1827, pencil and wash by John Chessell Buckler. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London.

  St Saviour’s National School. Engraving. From a brochure printed for the opening of the new building in 1792.

  Phoenix Gas Works, Bankside. 1826, watercolour by Gideon Yates. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London.

  The testimonial presented to Edward Perronet Sells I in 1852. Photograph © Nick Hale, 2003. Courtesy of Andrew Sells.

  Edward Perronet Sells II. Courtesy of Andrew Sells.

  Edward Perronet Sells III. Courtesy of Andrew Sells.

  View of Barges on the Thames. Wash and ink by William Luker jnr. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. Courtesy of the Luker family.

  Bankside 1927. Etching by Grace Golden. © Museum of London. Courtesy of Colin Mabberley.

  The quay in front of number 49 Bankside in 1911, with power station chimney behind. Courtesy of the London Metropolitan Archives.

  The same stretch of Bankside in 2004, with rebuilt chimney (now part of the Tate Modern). Photograph © Richard Lansdown.

  Anna Lee at home in number 49 (1936). Courtesy of the late Anna Lee.

  Buildings looking towards Southwark Bridge (1946). Wash and ink by Albert T. Pile. © Guildhall Library, Corporation of London. Courtesy of Cordelia Stamp.

  Bankside power station, from across the river (1946). Courtesy of Southwark History Library.

  Bankside 1970. Oil painting by Trevor Chamberlain. Courtesy of Alan Runagall.

  Maps by Martin Collins.

  Part of the family tree of the Bankside Sells

  THE HOUSE BY THE THAMES

  and the people who lived there

  GILLIAN TINDALL

  Land is like old vellum … a document that has been written on and erased over and over again.

  O. G. S. Crawford, archaeologist and aerial photographer (1886–1957)

  Chapter I

  IN WHICH WE FIND THE HOUSE

  YOU CAN REACH the house a number of different ways. It will still be the same, an inconspicuous but remarkable survivor in a landscape where almost everything else has changed. And changed. And changed again.

  You may approach it from London Bridge, as people did when it was a new house, because that was then the only route from the opposite bank of the Thames, on foot, on horseback or on wheels. There was already a bridge there under the Roman occupation, and a later one was constructed in wood on the remains of the Roman stone work. The song that is still sung in our nurseries today commemorates this wooden bridge: it was burnt down in the Danish wars about a thousand years after the Roman invasion. Subsequent bridges on the site also suffered from fire, or w
ere broken down by gales and flood tides. ‘Sticks and stones will wash away …’

  Then, in the last quarter of the twelfth century, another stone one was constructed, a triumph of engineering with nineteen arches. This bridge, with intermittent accidents and modifications, carried Londoners back and forth for the next six hundred and fifty years; till the time came when accumulating complaints about its antique inconvenience, followed by decades of discussion, finally decided the Corporation of London to replace it.

  Shortly before Victoria became Queen, when the new London Bridge was at last opened with flags, fire-works, balloon ascents, royalty and massed bands, the house across the water from St Paul’s was one hundred and twenty years old already.

  You could also take a route a little further west, over Southwark, Blackfriars or Waterloo Bridges. The house saw all these built too. From any of these bridges you can walk to the house along the river, where today a continuous, broad pedestrian path has superceded the old quays. What you cannot readily do, however, since the quays were swept away along with their many mooring points and water stairs, is what people did for hundreds of years: reach Bankside by crossing from the north shore in a boat.

  Bankside, where the house stands, derives its name from being one of the earliest pieces of embanking done on the edge of the sprawling Thames, providing a solid shore for men and goods to land in a low-lying, marshy area. But today Bankside’s long and intimate working relationship with the river seems to be over. The Thames, which throughout history has bound London and Southwark informally together, linking the north and south banks in waterborne commerce, is now little more than a great, airy space which separates them, a ribbon of changing light, a view.

  To counteract this separation one more very recent bridge has been built, with the declared intention of linking Bankside to the heart of London. The Millennium Bridge, the footway on the axis of St Paul’s cathedral, now crosses the water to meet the almost equally large bulk of the Power Station-turned Tate Modern on the other side. But a bridge at this point, usually a full-scale traffic one, has been hanging ghostly in the air for more than three hundred years. First suggested soon after the Restoration, the idea was revived at intervals through the eighteenth century but never quite got carried out. In the year of the Great Exhibition, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was proposed again with much fervour, and continued to be intermittently during the decades that followed. It nearly got itself built in the years just before 1914, but the Great War supervened and by the 1920s the sheer cost of the enterprise, including the amount of compensation that by then would have had to be paid to City property owners, meant that the plan lapsed again. This was fortunate, for the St Paul’s Bridge as dreamed by its most enthusiastic promoters was a massive affair, complete with a winged goddess driving a two-horse chariot, and double pedestrian staircases surmounted by turrets at either end. Whatever social cachet its construction might have imparted to the warehouses and wharves which by then crowded on Bankside, one thing is sure: built where the present airy, slim pedestrian bridge now spans the river, St Paul’s Bridge would have caused the destruction of a broad swathe of riverside buildings including the house which we are now approaching. As things are, by one of those chances which obliterate so much and yet sometimes idiosyncratically preserve, the newest bridge across the river misses the house but leads to within fifty yards of its door.

  Viewed from the footbridge today the house, and the two smaller rebuilt ones adjoining it, look like miniatures that have strayed into the wrong construction-model. The house is three storeys high, plus an attic, but the modest scale of this quintessential English domestic architecture is dwarfed by two giants. On one side of it stands the industrial pile of the ex-Power Station, and on the other the reconstructed Globe Theatre with its combination of Disneyland fantasy and genuine sixteenth-century building methods. These two exceptional buildings are strange company for the house to keep. Long ago, it was one of a whole line of houses, many of them rather like itself or at any rate built to the same dimensions. Then, people would have passed it by without a second glance.

  Now, as it stands almost alone in its white-stuccoed traditionalism, the guides on the passing tourist boats single it out:

  ‘– And on your left,’ the loud-speakers proclaim, ‘we are just passing the house that was lived in by Sir Christopher Wren while he was building St Paul’s, directly opposite.’ Heads swivel, cameras snap, starting images of the house on journeys to the ends of the earth, promulgating the myth. It is not actually true. Wren can never have watched the dome of his cathedral take shape from those twelve-paned windows, since the house was not built till about 1710 when only the final touches remained to be put to St Paul’s and Wren himself was nearing eighty. It is true that the present house stands in the footprint of a much older one; but where Wren may actually have lodged for a while in the 1670s was a house further west, whose dust now lies, along with so much else, under the block of flats on the far side of the Power Station.

  But today, we want the surviving house to be Wren’s. Today, the decent one-time ordinariness of 49 Bankside, rendered unique in that place by time and chance, has become emblematic of an entire world we have lost. Perhaps the fantasist who, shortly after the Second World War, noticed a Wren commemorative plaque on a wrecked wall further along Bankside and appropriated the idea to his own house, was achieving something more important than a bogus claim. On the new plaque he placed by the front door of number 49, he also made the far more implausible claim that Catherine of Aragon stopped for the night in 1502. Even if we assume that this refers to a night spent in an inn that is known to have stood on that site before the present house was built, it remains a fantasy. Catherine of Aragon was Henry VIII’s first and longest serving-wife, till she was eventually rejected in favour of Anne Boleyn. She had been married previously to his elder brother, Arthur, who died after a year. Her original landfall was in Plymouth, and from there she made the slow overland journey eastwards, finally to spend a night in Lambeth Palace before processing along the south bank and making her entry to London proper over the Bridge. Spanish princesses, let alone future queens, do not stay in waterfront inns.

  In any case, the probability is that in 1502 even the Cardinal’s Cap (or Hat) Inn lay in the future and the site where it would be built later in the century was vacant ground. No matter. We clearly need number 49 today to represent for us not only the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and the coming Enlightenment associated with Wren and his contemporaries. We also need it to symbolise a much older world, in which a gabled Tudor inn might be supposed to cater for queens and bishops and prostitutes on the same night, Shakespeare dropped in for a drink, bears were baited near by and boiled heads leered from poles on top of London Bridge, all conflated in some dateless Olden Time.

  People passing the house on foot, treading the brief stretch of cobbles, now hemmed in by the walkway, that is the remaining vestige of the Bankside quays, stop to look at the plaques. If you sit in the house’s first-floor front room, the room where Wren is said to have gazed out on his works, the sound of the words being read aloud and commented on in a variety of tongues reaches you from below. After several hundred years of resounding to the noise of laden wheels on cobbles, this river bank has been returned to the era of the footstep and the human voice.

  Occasionally strangers will be brave enough to tug the ancient bell-pull, which jangles a bell within on the end of a wire, and enquire if the house is a museum that can be visited. They are politely turned away.

  Before the door is shut again they will get a glimpse of a panelled room and an arched doorway, rugs and a longcase clock, perhaps a whiff of logs smouldering on a pile of soft ash in an open fireplace. Here, surely, is the past, on which the door has fleetingly opened? But there is no automatic admittance to the past. A way has to be found.

  You may try to reach London’s past through Wren, or the Adam brothers, or the builders Cubitt, significant creators of th
e idea of townscape within which we still live today. Or you may reach further back, through kings and queens and bishops, whose palaces and orchards are ground to powder beneath wharves, offices and by-passes, but whose much-encumbered lives have at least left tough parchment evidence behind them. You may reach it through the letters preserved in a few great families, or through the personal accounts of Pepys and John Aubrey, John Evelyn and Boswell; or through a procession of nineteenth-century commentators from Charles Dickens to Charles Booth, who felt a moral mission to record what they saw around them.

  But the vast mass of men and women in every time do not leave behind them either renown or testimony. These people walked our streets, prayed in our churches, drank in our inns or in those that bear the same names, built and lived in the houses where we have our being today, opened our front doors, looked out of our windows, called to each other down our staircases. They were moved by essentially the same passions and griefs that we are, the same bedrock hopes and fears: they saw the sun set over Westminster as we do. Yet almost all of them have passed away from human memory and are still passing away, generation after generation –

  ‘Rich men furnished with ability, living peacefully in their habitations.

  ‘… And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.

  ‘But these were merciful men, whose righteousness hath not been forgotten …’

  Witness to the living, busy, complex beings that many of these vanished ones were tends to be limited to fleeting references on pages of reference books that are seldom opened. At the most, there may be a handwritten note or a bill, perhaps a Will, a decorative trade-card, a few lines in a local newspaper or in a report from a long-obsolete committee, possibly an inscription on a tomb. There may perhaps be a relevant page or two in an account of something quite other, or a general social description which seems to fit the specific case.