The House by the Thames Read online

  The birth rate picked up after the mid-century; more children survived their first few years, and among people of all ages death rates, which had always been high in London, began to go down. Plague, which had been a regular visitant on the Bankside of Henslowe and Taylor’s day, was by the eighteenth century a thing of the past. Now other traditional diseases, such as scurvy, dysentery and malarial fevers, declined also. Free lying-in hospitals and dispensaries were founded. Doctors, including a prominent Southwark medical man named Lettsom, began to have some notion of hygiene and of the importance of Good Air – an English preoccupation which was to become something of an obsession as the air generally available in London became increasingly polluted. Strolls on the new river bridges were recommended as a preventative against typhus. As for crime and violence, the reforming magistrate Sir John Fielding felt that he and his new system had had some impact on this by the mid-1770s, when he wrote that ‘the rabble [were] … very much mended … within the last fifty years’, while still considering them ‘very insolent and abusive’.

  That was, however, before the Gordon Riots of 1780, which was the last major outbreak of apparently senseless violence in London. The crowd broke open the Southwark prisons, including the Clink, and set on fire the King’s Bench prison. They came near to firing the Thrale brewery on Bankside too, under the impression that Henry Thrale was ‘a Papist’ because he believed in religious tolerance; they were foiled only by the manager cleverly ‘buying them off with meat and porter’ while he called in the troops. Elsewhere in town they marched on the house of the Lord Chief Justice and burnt his library. Then Fielding’s concerned comment was that ‘the mob’ had become a kind of fourth estate ‘threatening to shake the balance of our constitution’. Prophetic words, when we consider that the French Revolution was to overwhelm France a decade later. But what is significant is that revolution did not occur in England, and that in retrospect the Gordon Riots appear to have been a final spasm of ancient popular violence and paranoia which, by the end of the century, was becoming a thing of the past.

  Collective street life, in the form of old fêtes and fairs, was diminishing, and London’s social fabric was beginning to show many of the characteristics it would have in the century to come. The mix was complicated, because, at this time, and into the nineteenth century, well-to-do households such as the Thrales would still often live cheek by jowl with the poor ones who occupied the side alleys. Each class pursued its own preoccupations, sometimes with a robust disregard for others’ problems, yet shared inevitably the same environment – the same floods on Bankside, the same smells of boiling hops and tan-yards and drains, the same cries of street sellers and tolling bells of churches.

  *

  The major change in the course of the later Georgian period that particularly affected Bankside, followed by Southwark in general and the neighbouring and newly accessible district of Lambeth, was the arrival of many more industrial premises. The importance of industry in London from roughly the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century has been understated by many commentators, who have written as if trade, in the form of shipping and wharves, were the whole of the story. Indeed, one writing in 1925, a time when the Surrey side of the river seems to have fallen so far socially that those on the north bank hardly recognised its existence, actually described the Industrial Revolution as ‘a storm that passed over London and broke elsewhere’.4 It is true that the capital was not physically transformed by large factories in the way that some other parts of Britain were: it did not ever harbour much heavy industry. But Clerkenwell and Shoreditch, like Bermondsey, Southwark and Lambeth, all districts which had been right on the edge of London in 1700, saw over the following hundred years a great growth and proliferation in their traditional industries. Many of these required workshops rather than ‘dark satanic mills’. Many were quite small firms that were containable in one-time residential buildings, old chapels, stables, ale-houses or granaries. But clustered together with others of the same kind they came to form a substantial industrial presence.

  The traditional trade of Bermondsey had been leather tanning. Tanning smells awful, even without the vats of dog-excrement that were used to steep the skins, so this had for some time already made Bermondsey less than wholly desirable for living. Associated with tanning was wool-fulling, for the production of felted material for heavy coats and hats – many of the drying grounds still shown on early eighteenth-century maps of Southwark were for this purpose. Now hat making, another related trade, began to be important on the west side of London Bridge also. The Rocque map of 1746 shows ‘the Skin Market’ covering an area behind Cardinal Cap Alley that was originally one end of the Queen’s Pike Garden. I think this was probably related to the hat business, as many of these were made out of rabbit skins, suitably plucked and brushed with mercury to keep the wet out.

  Printing was another traditional trade in Southwark which now, with many more books and papers being produced, also expanded, adding its characteristic clack and thump to the background noises of the streets. Then of course there was the glass industry. Becoming more and more important at the western end of Bankside, the Falcon Glass Works co-existed for decades with the Tudor public house from which it had taken its name, but finally swallowed up the old house in the first decade of the nineteenth century. With the bridge at Blackfriars there was no call any more for the ferry and the chaises for hire. To the ironworks near the same place which had been there since Wren’s day were added other firms, to make the new machines for yet more firms, mills and presses near by. The use of steam to power machines, even in small works, was coming in now. By the late eighteenth century the Rennie family, who were to be responsible for Southwark Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and eventually for the rebuilding of London Bridge, had set up their general engineering works in Holland Street, near where Holland’s Leaguer had stood.

  But the major time-honoured trade along this stretch of the river, which had settled there because it needed a plentiful supply of water on hand, was brewing. In earlier centuries each inn had done its own brewing – that was what the term ‘ale-house’ implied – but by the late seventeenth century the activity tended to be concentrated into fewer and larger wholesale enterprises. As London had spread so little to the south, the Kentish hop fields remained readily accessible, and hop-dealing too became a major Southwark business. (An elegant Victorian Hop Exchange stands to this day in Southwark Street, put to other uses.) By the mid-eighteenth century, west of London Bridge, there was a brewery off Gravel Lane and another further west on the site of the one-time Royal Barge House, but much the largest was the Thrale brewery nearer to London Bridge, at Bankend.

  Ralph Thrale, MP for Southwark, had clerked in the brewery for many years for his uncle; eventually he acquired the place himself as a flourishing concern and built it up much further. His son Henry inherited the business in 1758. He is a good example of a well-educated man of the period, undeniably a gentleman, who thought it quite in order to live within the precincts of the family manufactory. It was not till well into the nineteenth century that captains of industry habitually sought out countrified retreats, at a decent distance from the prosaic source of their wealth, where they assumed the lifestyle of landed gentry. Henry Thrale’s wife, Hester, actually was from this class, her mother being the widow of a Scottish landowner. She did not particularly like living on Bankside, preferring the house and large garden that Henry owed in Streatham, an hour’s drive away by coach over country roads. However, her contacts and her spirited intelligence led her into friendship in London with Dr Johnson and his circle, which included Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke and Fanny Burney.

  She seems to have comforted herself with the idea that the stench of the tan-yards, not far from their house in Deadman’s Place, protected against infection. (This was presumably an alternative theory to the Good Air one that would later be promulgated by Dr Lettsom.) As many of her children, including their only son who was to have inher
ited the business, disappeared at an early age into St Saviour’s churchyard (their extinguished names are there to this day in the burial registers), this theory must have worn thin, but Hester Thrale was indomitable. She managed to steer her erratic husband through several near-disasters, including bursting casks, a failed experiment with brewing a liquor to protect ships’ bottoms from worms, and the winter when ‘Mr Thrale over-brewed himself … and made an artificial scarcity of money in the family which has extremely lowered his spirits. Mr Johnson endeavoured last night, and so did I, to make him promise that he would nevermore brew a larger quantity of beer in one winter than 80,000 barrels, but my Master, mad with the noble ambition of emulating Whitbread and Calvert, two fellows he despises – could scarcely be prevailed upon to promise even this, that he will not brew more than four score thousand barrels a year for five years to come.’

  Large-scale trading indeed – though not as large as it was to become on that site in the following century. A steam-engine was installed by Thrale in 1770 to raise the water for his works that had previously been raised by a horse-powered treadmill. This was replaced again twenty years later by a more elaborate steam-piston engine, made by the great James Watt and his partner Boulton, but by then Mr Thrale and his mad ambition were dead and gone. Very corpulent, he collapsed with apoplexy in 1780. Mrs Thrale set to work in the counting house herself to sort the business out, helped by Thrale’s executors: these included a cousin, an illegitimate son, John Cator of Bankside who was now an MP – and Dr Johnson. A contemporary description has the great man himself, ‘bustling about, with an ink horn and pen in his buttonhole, like an exciseman’. Evidently the romance of the new commercialism had captivated even him, for when asked by a prospective buyer for his estimate of the real value of the brewery, he famously answered: ‘ “Sir, we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” ’ Mrs Thrale commented in her journal:

  ‘Johnson … desires above all other good the accumulation of new ideas [and] is but too happy with his present employment … difficult to win him from the dirty delight of seeing his name in a new character flaming away at the bottom of bonds and leases.’

  I daresay that much of the same delight was felt by others, who, in that propitious era, were beginning to build big fortunes by trading in basic commodities – others such as the brewery Charringtons, their cousins the coal-merchant Charringtons, the Horne family and indeed the Sells.

  Mrs Thrale, who wanted only to dispose of the business profitably, was delighted when she received through the offices of John Perkins, the brewery manager who had seen off the Gordon Rioters, an offer from ‘a knot of rich Quakers’. They paid £135,000. The first Thrale had got it early in the century for £30,000, so even though Mrs Thrale suspected that Perkins was in cahoots with the Quakers (the Barclay family) to ensure his own future, she was satisfied with the deal. She was now free to retreat into ‘peace and a stable fortune, restoration to my original rank in life’ – in which she married an Italian music master and lived to eighty far from Bankside. The brewery, briefly renamed the Anchor Brewery, became Barclay Perkins by the 1790s, though local people long went on calling it ‘Thrale’s’. For the whole of the next century it was one of the sights of London and was visited by generations of respectful foreigners, often ladies, who have left fervent descriptions of its vats, boilers, grain chutes, huge output, sweating muscular employees and scores of equally muscular dray-horses.

  Although, with the rise of the Victorian temperance movement, the amount of beer drunk by the working classes would come to be seen as an evil in its own right, in the late eighteenth century this counted as a good old English habit, much preferable to gin-drinking. It could even be seen as central to England’s increasing influence throughout the world and to the founding of her empire. A Southwark worthy – Concannen – wrote in 1795:

  ‘Thrale’s intire is well-known as a delicious beverage, from the frozen regions of Russia to the burning sands of Bengal and Sumatra … It refreshes the brave soldiers who are fighting the battles of their country in Germany [what were to become the Napoleonic Wars had begun for Britain in 1793], and animates with new ardour and activity the colonists of Sierra Leone and Botany Bay.’

  As the brewery expanded further, it came to dominate a whole stretch of Bankside, swallowing in the process burial ground, almshouses, remains of Tudor houses and the sites of the old theatres. (Mrs Thrale thought she had seen the last of the Globe demolished to allow more light into their house. In fact, these ‘ruins of Palmyra’, as the family christened them, seem more likely, from their position, to have been those of the last Bear Garden, which may have gone on with furtive bear- and dog-fighting activities almost to the time when Mrs Thrale arrived on the scene in 1762.)

  The brewery was still flourishing in the first half of the twentieth century, but shrank into a bottling plant in the 1960s. It shut at last c.1980. Today, flats and offices cover the site. But the Anchor pub, discreetly rebuilt but not much changed in appearance since the seventeenth century, still sits on the river at Bankend and once again attracts crowds of drinkers on fine summer evenings.

  On such evenings two hundred and fifty years ago where did the Bankside bourgeoisie go? Apart from taking evening walks on the bridges to ward off typhoid fever, what did they do for entertainment, the Sells, the Cators, the Shalletts, the Astells, John Perkins and all the others who were turning the Surrey shore to good account? Today, we are so accustomed to the post-William Morris concept of places being degraded by ‘the spreading of the hideous town’ that it takes a conscious adjustment to realise that dingy urbanisation was not uniformly spread – and that that was not, in any case, quite how the eighteenth century saw the matter. In the middle decades of the century at any rate, the influence of new commerce was perceived as bringing with it a desirable civilisation and gentrification to the rural backlands of Southwark.

  St George’s Fields, a large and puddly common heath immediately south-west of the Borough, had long been a popular place for early morning duck-shooting, duels, assignations and also for large assemblies of people. The rowdy late-summer Fair there that Hogarth had painted was suppressed in 1756. Mineral springs, that enthusiastic preoccupation of the period, were ‘discovered’ among the pools. The old Dog and Duck tavern5 turned itself into a Spa, complete with breakfast room, bowling green, a tea-garden and a Long Room with music and dancing. Even Mrs Thrale was not above recommending the waters for health. The fact that so many people were prepared to believe in the special properties of waters from the spas, which were now dotted plentifully round the fringes of the great city, is probably an indication of just how polluted many other London water supplies were, including that produced by the Thrales’s own engine from the river.

  A few years later another place of resort, Finch’s Grotto, opened near by in the grounds of a former country house. Apparently aiming at a slightly more exclusive clientele than the Dog and Duck, it boasted more supposed medical springs, garden walks, evening concerts and other delights including ‘A Lodge of Free-Masons and a Club composed of the most respectable persons in the vicinity’. Excerpts from Mr Finch’s handbills for his Grotto over the years tell their own tale of how the St George’s Fields area was developing. In the 1760s the ‘coach road’ was said to be by Blackman’s Street (an old name for the Borough High Street), while ‘Such Gentlemen and Ladies as chuse to come by water, will please to observe that Mason stairs’ [very near 49 Bankside, with a way through to the Gravel Lane] ‘are nearest to the Gardens.’ But by the ’70s, when Blackfriars Bridge and ‘Great Surrey Street’ leading from it (today’s Blackfriars Bridge Road) were established, cutting across the old lanes, the publicity could make reference to the coach routes being ‘from Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges’. This meant that these bridges, though widely separated on the shore-line by the curve of the river, now had new south-bank turnpike roads linking them and also picking up t
he old main road from Southwark. The central point where these roads met was on St George’s Fields: an obelisk marked the spot at the time, and now does once again today (St George’s Circus). Thus a whole new district, suitably drained, would become ripe for the building of new streets of houses.

  This fairly soon began to happen for, forty years after the last building boom had petered out at the end of the 1720s, another one was under way. Finch’s Grotto did not even last a generation, dying with its owner in 1777. Perhaps the nearby opening of a white lead manufactory, among other works, did not encourage any new proprietor. The site has ended up today just on the western side of Southwark Bridge Road, at the bend in the road immediately south of the junction with the much older Great Guildford Street – the one-time Bandy Leg Walk. It was bought by the St Saviour’s Vestry to build a new workhouse, ‘spacious and convenient’, to accommodate four hundred people, at a much-disputed cost of £5,000.

  Other, more prestigious new constructions in the ‘classical’ style soon arrived in Great Surrey Street. An octagonal chapel was built there for the popular Nonconformist preacher Rowland Hill. In 1788 a rather similar building appeared, the Rotunda, built to house natural history specimens, then very fashionable objects as the world opened ever wider. Some of these specimens had allegedly been brought back from Australia by Captain Cook. Eighteen years later the deteriorating remnants were auctioned off and the Rotunda, renamed the Surrey Institute, was used for lectures on the sciences. Later again, less improvingly, it became a place for concerts and general entertainments.6

  But the real drama of change going on under the eyes of those who lived on Bankside in the late eighteenth century was connected with the central business of living, and the grandest building in Great Surrey Street was a temple to steam. It was the type of industrial architecture that was now creating a new world in the north of England, but it was a novelty in London and much admired by some as a sign of Progress. This was the Albion Flour Mills, designed by Samuel Wyatt and equipped by Rennie with the latest in steam-powered rotary machinery. It could grind far more wheat, night and day, than the wind- and water-powered mills that were still in general use: millers all round London and the south-east were alarmed, seeing the future and not liking it. However, the mill was in business only four or five years before a fire destroyed it in 1791. It was widely rumoured that arson was involved, though Wyatt and Rennie themselves thought that badly lubricated machinery was to blame. At any rate, local millers rejoiced, and are said to have been seen dancing on Blackfriars Bridge in the light of the flames.