The House by the Thames Read online

  Scant evidence, you may say, of lives as vivid and as important to the bearers as our own are today to us. But by putting these scraps together, sometimes, with luck, something more coherent is achieved. Pieces of lost lives are genuinely recovered. Extinct causes clamour for attention. Forgotten social groups coalesce again. Here and there a few individual figures detach themselves from the dark and silence to which time has consigned them. They walk slowly towards us. Eventually, we may even see their faces.

  Chapter II

  LONDON’S OTHER TOWN

  LONDON IS AN odd capital city by European standards and therefore by those of other cities round the world that have inherited the European urban tradition. In Paris, as in Rome, Washington or St Petersburg, a prime site on a river bank opposite the centre of the town and its celebrated cathedral would not be occupied by a small piece of three-hundred-year-old private property. It would long since have been selected as a suitable location for a large governmental building, institute, university or opera house. Such plans have indeed been mooted for sections of London’s south bank at various times, and one or two of them have actually been built a little further up river, but Bankside itself has remained untouched by grandiose urbanism.

  One reason for this is that, till the 1960s, the Pool of London below London Bridge was a working port and the entire stretch of the south bank up as far as Westminster Bridge and Lambeth acted as a necessary back-up area of wharves, docks and warehouses. But to state this is already to beg a question: how was it that, in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when London was consolidating the shape it still has today, the south bank had such ample space available for lowly commercial uses? The north bank, too, was fringed with wharves, but these had to compete with the demands of City institutions, livery halls, the Inns of Court, the aristocratic houses in the Strand, the Palace of Westminster, and later with government offices and with the new embankment laid out with prestigious public gardens. Yet the first and almost the only grand administrative building to be located on the south side of the river, and that in a deliberate attempt to colonise suitably the site opposite the Houses of Parliament, was the 1922 County Hall (now turned to other, piecemeal uses). Even when London was in the throes of visionary planning after the blitz damage of 1940–44, and the Festival of Britain was celebrated in the ruined spaces by Waterloo Bridge, what got rebuilt immediately across the river from St Paul’s? A smoking industrial plant whose chimney stack rose as high as Wren’s dome. It was as if the south bank, though physically only a couple of hundred yards from the nexus of the City’s power and prestige, was perceived as somewhere far more remote, indeed hardly visible.

  Cities are formed not only by what happens but also by what fails to happen, by the force or inertia of tradition, and by the almost random decisions of individuals which sometimes have unthinkably long consequences. Historically, the south bank has always avoided becoming part of London. As late as the 1830s the parishes on the south of the river were fighting a rearguard action to be allowed to form a township separate from the capital (a true ‘Borough’) with its own corporation, magistrates and judges. They were hauled protesting into the London system only by the establishment of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855, and finally by the creation of a new County of London in 1888. Till well into the twentieth century, long after the London County Council had carved Southwark and its eastern district into two London boroughs of Southwark and Bermondsey – casually splitting the ancient and cohesive area of greater Southwark down its central spine of London Bridge and Borough High Street – the whole area south of the Thames was still known as ‘the Surrey side’.

  Yet some sort of settlement on the Surrey shore, at the south end of London Bridge, goes back almost as far as London itself. By the second century AD there was a Roman suburb there, where leather was made, and glass (two riverside activities we shall meet again) and possibly golden ornaments too. A couple of Roman bodies have been found, pottery, and fragments of mosaic paving under a nineteenth-century brewery. The building of the Jubilee line in to London Bridge station in the late 1990s turned up an oil-lamp in the shape of a sandalled foot, a tiny breath of fantasy and elegance from the lost time.

  Like much of Roman creation, that suburb was abandoned, along with London Bridge, in the ages we call ‘dark’, but it had been resettled again by the time of the Viking invasions in the eighth and ninth centuries. Essentially, it was formed as a fortification for the southern entry to London, and in spite of episodes of destruction by fire and sword it prospered, survived the arrival of the Norman rulers, and grew.

  Being outside the walled city but so near at hand, it became a convenient place for the establishment of religious houses. A little later it was where lords both spiritual and temporal built themselves mansions. Edward II had a summer residence there in the early fourteenth century, on the riverfront a little to the east of London Bridge – its foundations, complete with cloisterlike central garden and a landing-stage for boats, briefly became visible again during re-development of the site in the 1990s. A hundred-odd years after Edward, a different grand house built on the same site was bought by a Sir John Fastolf, who is generally said to have been the original of Shakespeare’s Falstaff. Both before and after the Reformation church dignitaries had houses in Southwark, in addition to the principal episcopal palace of the Bishop of Winchester, which was west of London Bridge on Bankside itself.

  Already, by the Middle Ages, Southwark had become what has been described as ‘an administrative jungle’. It consisted of five separate manors, each with its own privileges and rules. In addition, it was split into a number of parishes which were not necessarily coterminous with the manors. St Mary Overy’s very ancient church (later to become St Saviour’s parish church) had been refounded in Norman times as an Augustinian priory. A tiny church called St Mary Magdalene, built against its wall, ran a parish for commoners living immediately near by, but the main parish was based, until the Reformation, in a church called St Margaret’s half way down the High Street. This parish covered a large area westwards from London Bridge, which included Bankside. Further south, the land on that side was in the parish of St George’s; that church stood where its successor stands today, where the pilgrim road to Canterbury forked eastwards.

  On the eastern, Bermondsey, side of Southwark was the parish of St Olave’s. Its small church stood guardian of the bridge as St Magnus’s did on the northern shore. Much rebuilt over the centuries, it survived on the edge of the river till it was destroyed by a combination of commercial and municipal vandalism in the 1920s.

  To complicate matters further, the priory of St Mary Overy’s had acquired a substantial stake on the Bermondsey side of the High Street also, when St Thomas à Becket’s hospital for the sick and poor, which had been founded within the priory, was transferred after a fire in 1212 to the other side of the street. There it remained for six hundred and fifty years, a separate fief occupying a substantial tract of ground, and eventually joined by Guy’s Hospital alongside, till the demands of the railway age forced it off to another site in nearby Lambeth.

  As time went on, there were added to these overlapping administrative parcels various smaller fiefs, notably the prisons of the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, in the control of the Crown, and the Surrey County Gaol under the Sheriff of Surrey. Other aspects of life in Southwark, particularly those to do with the trade guilds, were inevitably monitored by the City, as was the traffic on the river. There were rows about Southwark activities being in unfair competition with City trade, but grievances that were essentially economic were often dressed up as moral issues. There were long-running battles about who had or had not the right to sit as a magistrate in Southwark, and how far the Lord Mayor might intervene on that side of the water. Being outside the jurisdiction of London, Southwark became something of a haven for wrongdoers. In fact the Templars, and after them the Knights of St John, who owned what became known as the ‘Paris Garden’ mano
r, made it into a sanctuary. Here criminals from London could shelter from arrest among rather boggy willow groves, reed beds and ditches full of ‘hedgehog grass’ for 6d. a night.

  Naturally the City and the Crown did not look particularly favourably on all this unauthorised activity across the water. However, at the same time, Southwark was useful to them, in the time-honoured way of out-of-town areas, as a location for hospitals, prisons, almshouses and brothels. There were plans in the fifteenth century, under Richard III, to build a wall right round Southwark matching the walls on the City side and so make it indisputably part of London, but these plans were never carried out. At the Reformation Henry VIII had the opposite idea; he acquired a good deal of land in Southwark, including the priories and Paris Garden, and planned to build a palace and a hunting preserve there, but this did not happen either. Come Dissolution of the monasteries, Reformation, regicide, Commonwealth, Restoration and through a variety of ground landlords including the Crown, Southwark continued to function, more or less, in its own anarchic, fragmented way.

  The only administrative areas that really concern Bankside are the Paris Garden and Winchester Park, both originally within the parish that started as St Margaret’s and then became St Saviour’s after the Reformation. Winchester Park was also known as the Liberty of the Clink (‘Liberty’ implies an autonomous jurisdiction) from the nickname given to the Bishop of Winchester’s private gaol underneath his palace on the riverfront. ‘Clink’ means a latch or other fastening device. The Clink never seems to have been as large or important as the other Southwark lock-ups, so why, for later centuries, it should have bestowed its name as a general slang-term for prison anywhere is a small mystery. Today, the Bishop’s prison has a mythical afterlife in the ‘Clink Museum’ near St Saviour’s, which serves as a sort of general touristic compendium of Bad Old Prisons anywhere. Although it is situated not far from the ruinous vestiges of the palace, it has no connection with the ruin but occupies the basement of a Victorian commercial building by a railway viaduct.

  The name Paris Garden, however, is lost as if it had never been, though it was applied for centuries to a tract of land on Bankside just west of the Bishop of Winchester’s holding. The name seems to come from a very early lessee, Robert de Paris; presumably this origin was forgotten, as later maps sometimes give it the more likely-sounding but misleading names of Parish or Palace Garden. It disappears finally from the records in the early nineteenth century, under glassworks, timber-wharves, and the work yards of the Rennie family, bridge builders.

  Paris Garden and Winchester Park both have a rural sound. Rural indeed they were for centuries, while London became ever more densely built on the opposite shore. Houses did spread from St Saviour’s church and the Bishop’s palace westwards along Bankside, but only gradually and in a piecemeal fashion. For the other fact about the south bank, and a fundamental reason why it took so long to become part of London, is that much of it was low-lying and unpropitious for building.

  Bankside itself seems to have been built in the early thirteenth century as a causeway leading from the Bishop of Winchester’s quays and tide-mills near St Saviour’s, west round the shore line. Initially it would have been constructed in an attempt to keep the river water from invading the meadows, pastures and gardens of the Bishop’s park. But incidentally it served as a landing-stage for boats and thus became a useful location for building. There are indications in early documents that the owners or tenants of the houses that gradually appeared overlooking the water were personally responsible for maintaining the section of causeway fronting their own properties. No doubt, over the course of time, more earth and gravel were heaped on the bank and there was more timber shoring to keep the flood tides at bay: the causeway became higher and more substantial. It was extended further, along the shore line of the Paris Garden and beyond towards Lambeth: that section became known as Upper Ground, presumably a description of its contour, the name it still bears today. After several centuries, according to the earliest ‘road map’ of Southwark, which was drawn in 1618 as part of a legal wrangle about access, Bankside was said to be wide enough to accommodate two carts abreast.

  Another part of the thirteenth-century flood works, that was to become an enduring feature of the landscape and determine later road-contours, was a substantial drainage ditch like a small stream. This was cut roughly parallel with Bankside but further south, through both the Bishop’s Park and the Paris Garden, and looping round at the west end to flow out into the Thames. Other ditches were added later, but the problem was never entirely solved: there were major floods at intervals on the south bank till the nineteenth-century arrival of proper sewers. The Paris Garden end of the parish was particularly vulnerable, since much of the land on that side originally lay several feet below the high water when it lapped at Bankside. Earlier names for the manor referred to withies and willows, and the memory of this was preserved long after, in the eighteenth century, when the western part of the Bankside was known as Willow Street.

  By Elizabeth’s time the Knights of St John had been dispossessed: the willows no longer provided a secure refuge for criminals, but the area remained a popular, if marshy place for clandestine encounters and a kind of pleasure garden was established there. It was said that the tree-cover was so dense that even on moonlit nights ‘one man cannot see another’ and that this created ‘a notable covert for confederates to shroud in’. The words are those of a City of London lawyer, writing of secret political meetings in the Paris Garden between the French Ambassador and the Bishop of Ross – possibly on the matter of Mary, Queen of Scots. Paris Garden stairs, the access point for boats along that part of the Bankside, was, of course, easily reached from any of the Whitehall stairs a little further up river on the opposite shore. Indeed, the Royal Barge was kept on the south side of the river, in what sounds to have been a rather grand building complete with glass windows and gilt decoration.

  Today, in spite of all the bridges, Bankside seems spiritually further from Westminster than it was in the days when the Royal Barge House lay at its western end. However, the trees have returned. Not willows, but rather similar silver birches, they are planted in a grove in front of the Tate Modern-Power Station. Paris Garden sleeps, fathoms deep, beneath the Blackfriars Bridge Road. The Barge House survived, derelict, till the mid-eighteenth century, but by the early nineteenth century it lay beneath a timber yard and a soap works. Only the water-stairs at that point continued to bear the name, which still survives today in a side road behind the Oxo Tower.

  Further east, the medieval Bishops of Winchester solved their excess water problem perhaps more successfully by channelling it into fish ponds. Fish were of major importance in the days when the Church ordained many meatless days but the well-to-do, whether ecclesiastical or lay, still expected to eat lavishly. With ponds, the fish that swam in plenty in the Thames could be coralled, and fattened for the table as required. What could be nicer than a fat pike stuffed with oysters and roasted, basted with claret? After the Dissolution the lands and fish ponds were sold; but by the time of Elizabeth we find some of them apparently restored to the Church and some under Crown control. The mid-sixteenth-century map usually known as the ‘Agas’ map shows three large rectangular fish ponds on the land opposite Mason stairs, where Bankside veered away a little from the shore. This was, I think, ‘the Great Pike Garden’ which had its own elaborate entrance. A little further east, among the newly built bull-and bear-baiting pits, was another set of ponds; these constituted ‘the Queen’s Pike Garden’ or, after the accession of James I, ‘the King’s’. These ponds were leased from the Crown under James, but some of the fish was kept for the royal table. When they were seized again under the Commonwealth, they were said to consist of a wharf and four fish ponds stocked with a hundred pike and eighty carp. Further east again, nearer the Bishop of Winchester’s palace, the Agas map shows us a third garden which was ‘the Bishop’s Pike Garden’ for his own use.

  These ponds we
re the original Bankside ‘stews’. The word comes from the old French word ‘estuve’, a containment place for fish, and they had given their name to Bankside from the days when there was little else but ponds on that shore. Because, at a later period, ‘the stews-bank’ was also associated with brothels, much ink has been expended trying to make out that the brothels were called ‘stews’ because they were heated bathhouses. No evidence for this exists, and plenty of general indications to the contrary. With one or two famous exceptions, the Tudors did not wash much at all. The bathhouse culture that developed in the eighteenth-century Turkish baths of Covent Garden was characteristic of an entirely different era with sophisticated new comforts.

  The fish ponds themselves disappear from maps during the seventeenth century, but hints of their presence continued for a long time. At Mason stairs, where the entrance to ‘the Great Pike Gardens’ had been, there stood till near the end of the eighteenth century a large, old, double-fronted house, apparently Tudor, with twin gables and a cart-entrance in the middle. Its upper walls were decorated with plastered carvings in high relief of dolphins, pikes and other fish. At the top, in the centre, Neptune rode in a shell-chariot drawn by sea horses and attended by Tritons. When this wonderful ‘Fish house’, as it had come to be called, finally disappeared, 49 Bankside had co-existed with it for about seventy years.

  49 Bankside had another, more intimate relationship with the vanished ponds. When it was built about 1710, an area just behind it to the east that was used as a garden, and later as a wood yard, was known as ‘the Pye Garden’. Evidently, by then, the fishy associations of this had passed from memory and people no longer knew this was the last remains of the King’s Pike Garden. It finally disappeared under a lane of cheap tenements with the name ‘Pond Yard’, and this name survived till the site was flattened in the Second World War by a German bomb.