For centuries images of The Last Judgment were commonplace – particularly on church walls and in paintings. This is a typical example by Fra Angelico which is thought to have been painted between 1435 and 1440 …
Jesus sits enthroned in glory calling up the dead for judgment. He is surrounded by Saints and Apostles, his right hand pointing towards Heaven and his left to Hell. On one side people wearing their everyday clothes are led up to Heaven by winged angels …
But things are a bit grim on the bottom right. Demons prod and drag the condemned off to Hell where a horned Satan supervises a variety of terrible punishments. Look closely at the damned and you’ll see at least two monks and a bishop wearing a mitre …
The depictions of the Last Judgment I am going to write about are carved in stone and differ from the Fra Angelico composition in a number of ways. The first is in the narthex of St Mary-at-Hill on Lovat Lane (EC3R 8EE) …
Christ holding a banner stands amidst clouds. Satan, a figure with large claws, is being trampled under his feet.
It most likely dates from the 1670s. Its carver is unknown, but it is known that the prominent City mason Joshua Marshall was responsible for the rebuilding of the church in 1670-74 and his workshop may have produced the relief. Exactly where it was originally positioned is uncertain; most likely it stood over the entrance to the parish burial ground and was brought inside more recently.
In close up …
You can see open coffins as individuals respond to the call.The winged Archangel Michael helps people rise again.
The main difference here from the traditional representations is the absence of Hell, so it’s a more optimistic portrayal. Also, people appear naked or just wrapped in a shroud rather than being differentiated by their clothing. Perhaps this signifies everyone is equal when the last judgment comes.
The second stone is just visible from Holborn Viaduct if you look down the steps of the church of St Andrew Holborn (EC4A 3AF) …
Although a bit more weather-beaten that the St Mary-at-Hill version, the figure of Christ’s head has not been damaged and he gazes serenely down as angels sound trumpets to summon the dead. He’s surrounded by little winged figures or putti …
Open coffins lie amongst the chaos as the angels do their work. Under his feet Christ is crushing a dragon-like creature with a long tail, again probably representing Satan …
People emerge, crawling towards the light …
One of the figures here is clinging to an angel and another holds his hands in prayer or supplication …
Once again, apart from Christ and the angels, everyone is naked and there is no representation of Hell. The stone once stood over the paupers’ cemetery in Shoe Lane and was maybe intended to give some succour and hope to those attending the burial of loved ones. It’s thought that this stone also dates from the 1670s but again the carver is unknown.
I am tempted to assume that, after the horrors of the plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666, portrayals of the resurrection were represented more positively by removing threats of Hell and damnation.
I’m always looking out for great London blogs and my publication this week was inspired by the Flickering Lamps blogger Caroline who has written on the same subject. Click here for a link to her website.
By way of light relief in our own difficult times, if you have the chance check out the Herd of Hope elephants at Spitalfields Market …
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The black and white pictures in today’s blog are old glass slides and were taken for the London & Middlesex Archaeological Society. They are held at the Bishopsgate Institute.
First up is St Mary-le-Bow, built by Christopher Wren between 1670 and 1680 after its predecessor was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. It was gutted in the Second World War bombing (all that remained was the bell tower and the walls) but was rebuilt between 1956 and 1964. Incidentally, the church’s predecessor witnessed other dramas, apart from the catastrophic Great Fire.
In 1091 the roof blew off and in 1271 the steeple collapsed, in each case killing several parishioners. In 1284 Lawrence Duckett, an alleged murderer, sought sanctuary in the church, but a mob burst in and lynched him. In punishment for this act of sacrilege, sixteen men were hanged, drawn and quartered and one woman was burned at the stake. In 1331 a balcony collapsed during a jousting tournament casting Queen Philippa and her attendants into the street. Wren placed an iron balcony on the tower to celebrate the event. Next time you walk down Cheapside think of jousting horses galloping past and the rattle of knights’ armour.
Here’s the church in 1910 …
And the present day …
St Andrew Undershaft was so called because the maypole alongside it was taller than the church. The pole was set up opposite the church every year until Mayday 1517 when the tradition was suspended after the City apprentices (always a volatile bunch) rioted against foreign workers. Public gatherings on Mayday were therefore to be discouraged and the pole was hung up nearby in the appropriately named Shaft Alley. In 1549 the vicar of St Catharine Cree denounced the maypole as a pagan symbol and got his listeners so agitated they pulled the pole from its moorings, cut it up and burned it.
Here is a picture of the church around 1910 …
The view today, literally in the shadow of the Gherkin …
St Margaret Pattens is another Wren church, completed in 1702. The dedication is to St Margaret of Antioch and ‘pattens’ refers to wooden clog-like footwear which, strapped to the feet of medieval Londoners, enabled them to wade through the debris of the City with minimal damage to their shoes. The artisans who made them worked nearby in Rood Lane and a pair of pattens were on display at the Museum of London Secret Rivers exhibition in 2019 …
Here’s the church in 1920 …
And today …
St Mary Woolnoth is the only remaining complete City church by Wren’s gifted assistant, Nicholas Hawksmoor. It is also the only City church to have survived the Second World War unscathed. Built between 1716 and 1727 its exterior, with its flat topped turrets, is often regarded as being the most original in the City. Definitely worth visiting if only to see the memorial to the reformed slave trader John Newton whose preaching (from the pulpit still in the church) inspired William Wilberforce. You can read more about him and the church here.
This picture was taken around 1920 …
And here’s how it looks today …
St Stephen Walbrook was rebuilt by Wren in 1672-80 and was one of his earliest and largest City churches. The pains taken with the church are perhaps partly explained by the fact that he used to live next door. The beautiful dome was one of the first of its kind in any English church – a forerunner of Wren’s work on St Paul’s Cathedral. It is not known whether the wonderfully named Mr Pollixifen, who lived beside the church, was placated by the beauty of the building having, during its construction, complained bitterly that it was obstructing the light to his property. You can read more about what can be found inside the church here.
In 1917, when this picture was taken, a bookshop abutted the building …
The same view today from outside the Mansion House …
The dome – a Wren masterpiece …
St Alban Wood street was dedicated to the first English martyr who died in the fourth century. By the 17th century the original medieval church was in a very poor state of repair and was demolished and rebuilt in 1634 only to be destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Christopher Wren undertook its second rebuilding which was completed in 1685.
The church was restored in 1858-9 by George Gilbert Scott, who added an apse, and the tower pinnacles were added in the 1890s. It was destroyed on a terrible night, 29 December 1940, when the bombing also claimed another eighteen churches and a number of livery halls. Some of St Alban’s walls survived but they were demolished in 1954 and now nothing remains apart from the tower – not even a little garden to give it some cover from the traffic passing on both sides. I’ve often been told someone lives there but I have never seen any evidence of it.
Here’s the church in its Wood Street setting around 1875 …
And in splendid isolation today …
I think that’s probably enough for the time being. I will return to the ‘then and now’ theme in a future blog. I am indebted to the wonderful little book London’s City Churches by Stephen Millar for the source of much of today’s information. Many thanks also to the Spitalfields Life blog for the old pictures – you can see them and more here.
Finally, some ‘reasons to be cheerful’.
The Magnolia is in bloom at St Giles …
And the wonderful City gardeners have continued to work tirelessly to keep the City looking its best …
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I was going to write about the unusually narrow frontage of some of Fleet Street’s buildings but ended up writing a short history of the area. I found doing the research fascinating and I hope you enjoy reading what I discovered.
The street is, of course, named after the ancient River Fleet that flows from its sources in the hills of Highgate and Hampstead down to the River Thames at Blackfriars. A major river in Roman times, it gradually deteriorated into an open sewer and even as early as 1290 the Carmelite monks of nearby Whitefriars Abbey were complaining to the King of the ‘putrid exhalations of the Fleet’ which overpowered the incense at Mass.
I have found two very early maps showing Fleet Street and the surrounding areas. The first by Braun and Hogenberg (1560/72) …
The street is not named on the map but it is the main road in the middle of the picture running west to east. You’ll see fields, gardens and orchards to the north and south west but the street itself is already lined with buildings. It proved a convenient link between the Court at Westminster and the commercial City as well as being an ideal location for printing with the growing number of legal and teaching establishments nearby. The wonderfully named Wynkyn de Worde, a colleague of William Caxton’s, moved to the Sign of the Sun near Shoe Lane around 1500 and printed approximately 800 works until his death in 1535. Many more printing enterprises were founded as the century progressed.
Also fascinating is the Agas Map from 1561 (as reproduced in 1633). To the east you can see the Fleet as it continues its flow south to the Thames entering it at Bridewell. Also on the Thames, between Bridewell and The Temple, is the Whitefriars Abbey but the monks were no longer there to complain about the smell. They had been thrown out during Henry the Eighth’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1538 …
The Great Fire in 1666 obliterated two-thirds of the street and its environs but was halted at Fetter Lane to the north and the Temples to the south. The street layout survived the Fire, with rebuilding following the same medieval plots as before, which explains the skinny nature of some of the buildings here in the 21st century. The plot narrowness is very apparent from the 1873 Ordnance Survey Map …
Here are some of the buildings you can see today that have been squeezed in ….
The one on the right was the Kings and Keys pub where the journalists from The Telegraph newspaper next door used to hang out. It closed in 2007.
By the 17th century the area was more urbanised and much of the remaining open space had been developed. To the north the surviving system of alleys and courts came into being, while to the south riverside land was parcelled up into tenements. You can see the growth of developments in the 1676 map by Ogilby and Morgan …
Already a notorious, stinking open sewer, in later years waste from slaughterhouses and tanneries made matters far worse. Observing a flood during a storm in 1710 Jonathan Swift penned the following lines …
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood, Drown’d Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drench’d in Mud, Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops come tumbling down the Flood.
The southern end of the Fleet was finally completely covered over in 1766. I must say, however, that this picture of circa 1750 by a follower of Samuel Scott (1702-1772) makes its entrance to the Thames look positively Venetian. You can see the obvious influence of Canaletto …
Guildhall Picture Gallery.
A few buildings survive from the massive rebuilding that took place after the Great Fire.
The Tipperary pub, circa 1667, on its narrow plot …
The rear of The Old Bell Inn, circa 1669 …
Numbers 5 and 6 Crane Court, circa 1670 (but largely reconstructed after a fire in 1971) …
The Cheshire Cheese pub, a merger of two 17th century houses …
The entrance is down the alley on the left of the picture …
The house built in 1700 where Dr Johnson lived from 1748 to 1759, 17 Gough Square …
Incidentally, Dr Johnson’s favourite cat, Hodge, gazes at his old home from across the Square. He’s sitting on his owner’s famous dictionary having just eaten an oyster …
No history of Fleet Street would be complete without mentioning another survivor from the 17th century, St Bride’s church. Built by Christopher Wren between 1671 and 1678, the famous ‘wedding cake’ spire was added 1701-3 and rebuilt after a lightning strike in 1764 …
It’s still known as ‘The Journalists’ Church’. Photo credit : Pinterest.
The entrance to Crane Court has a plaque celebrating the publishing of the first British daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, on 11 March 1702 …
It consisted of a single page with advertisements on the reverse …
It lasted until 1735 when it merged with the Daily Gazetteer.
Over the next century Fleet Street gradually became more and more commercial and in 1855 the repeal of stamp duty resulted in an immediate drop in the price of newspapers. Readership boomed. New printing works opened up and taverns and ‘gin palaces’ flourished of which the Punch Tavern (built 1894-7) is a good example that is still around today. This is an image from Tripadvisor since the pub is closed at the moment …
Here’s how the Street looked just before Punch’s construction started …
Fleet Street in 1893.
There’s a great ten minute documentary on Fleet Street’s newspaper architecture here, especially worth viewing because it takes you into the magnificent Art Deco interior of the Daily Express building. This has been hidden behind curtains since Goldman Sachs took over the building.
‘Read all about it!’ – 7th May 1937, the day after the Hindenberg disaster. That’s the headquarters of The Daily Telegraph in the background …
Photo credit : Getty images.
The 1980s and ’90s saw the dispersal of the newspaper industry to sites in the Docklands and in other parts of London but some of the old signage remains, next door to St Dunstan-in-the-West …
The last journalists left in August 2016 – they worked for the Sunday Post in the office shown in the photograph.
Do pause at the east end of Fleet Street and look up Ludgate Hill. You’ll be enjoying a view that would have been familiar to every denizen of the City since 1710 – the spire of St Martin within Ludgate piercing the sky between the western towers of St Paul’s Cathedral (although the view was obstructed for a while by a railway bridge!) …
I am indebted to the City of London Corporation’s Fleet Street Conservation Area document for many of my sources and will end with a quote from it, written pre-Brexit …
Today, Fleet Street is a vibrant street enhanced by past religious, ceremonial and institutional associations and its links with the newspaper industry, with one of the longest ensembles of pre-war buildings in the City. It is part of the established processional route and the route of the Lord Mayor’s show.
Let’s hope that its full vibrancy will one day return.
I have written about Fleet Street before and here are links to the blogs:
It was a lovely sunny day last Saturday so I wandered along Whitecross Street to gaze at some of the wonderful art works. Many of these have been produced over the years at the famous Whitecross Street Party. Who wouldn’t smile at this splendid pair of potato heads …
A young girl holding a spirit animal over her head and shoulders by Goya Torres (based on her Children of the Sun series). Read more about this fascinating artist here …
Not sure what this represents but I still like it, dynamic and colourful …
Looking north up the street you get a good view on the right of a mural by Conor Harrington, an Irish artist living and working in London. Incidentally, the church in the background is St Luke Old Street and the unusual obelisk spire is by Nicholas Hawksmoor …
Here is Harrington’s work in more detail. It has weathered quite well considering it was created in 2012 …
This year’s party is scheduled for 10th and 11th July, mid-day to 6:00 pm. Read more on the official website.
The street boasts a number of blue plaques placed there by ‘English Hedonists’ and ‘Mad in England’ …
I have written about the Debtors Prison before but here it is again for those of you who missed it the first time around.
British History Online confirms the Nell Gwynne story mentioned on the plaque but I cannot find another source. It also tells us that …
A man may exist in the prison who has been accustomed to good living, though he cannot live well. All kinds of luxuries are prohibited, as are also spirituous drinks. Each man may have a pint of wine a day, but not more; and dice, cards, and all other instruments for gaming, are strictly vetoed.”
A pint of wine a day doesn’t sound too bad.
The prison was capable of holding up to 500 prisoners and Wyld’s map of London produced during the 1790s shows how extensive the premises were …
Prisoners would often take their families with them, which meant that entire communities sprang up inside the debtors’ jails, which were run as private enterprises. The community created its own economy, with jailers charging for room, food, drink and furniture, or selling concessions to others, and attorneys charging fees in fruitless efforts to get the debtors out. Prisoners’ families, including children, often had to find employment simply to cover the cost of the imprisonment. Here is a view of the inside of the Whitecross Street prison with people meeting and promenading quite normally …
‘Inside the Debtors’ Prison, Whitecross Street, London’ by an unknown artist : City of London Corporation, Guildhall Art Gallery.
Creditors were able to imprison debtors without trial until they paid what they owed or died and in the 18th century debtors comprised over half the prison population. Prisoners were by no means all poor but often middle class people in small amounts of debt. One of the largest groups was made up of shopkeepers (about 20% of prisoners) though male and female prisoners came from across society with gentlemen, cheesemongers, lawyers, wigmakers and professors rubbing shoulders.
It’s over two years since I wrote about this second plaque so here it is again.
It tells us that there once lived here a lady called Priss Fotheringham who had been ranked ‘the second best whore in the City’. This description appeared in 1660 in a serial publication called TheWandring Whore by John Garfield, which described in some detail the antics of London’s prostitutes.
Described when young as a ‘cat-eyed gypsy, pleasing to the eye’, Priscilla Fotheringham (nee Carswell) was a colourful character very famous in her time. It is thought she was born in Scotland around 1615 and little is known of her early life. What we do know is that in 1652 she was sent to Newgate Gaol having been found in a house of ill-repute …
… sitting between two Dutchmen with her breasts naked to the waist and without stockings, drinking and singing in a very uncivil manner.
In 1658 she was still misbehaving and was bound over by a Middlesex Justice of the Peace for …
… being a notorious strumpet … that had undone several men by giving them the foul disease … and for keeping the husband of Susan Slaughter from her and for also threatening to stab said Susan Slaughter … and also for several notorious wickedness which is not fit to be named among the heathen.
She had married Edward Fotheringham, an odious character from a brothel-owning family, in 1656 and he set her up as a madam at the Jack-a-Newberry Tavern on the corner where her plaque now stands. As her looks faded with time she became more ‘creative’ in the way customers were entertained – you can read more detail in her Wikipedia entry. She made enough money to set up her own brothel and died (of syphilis) a wealthy woman around 1668.
The Whitecross Street area was at one time rather notorious, as this 17th century ballad records …
In Whitecross Street and Golden Lane Do strapping lasses dwell, And so there do in every street ‘Twixt that and Clerkenwell. At Cowcross and at Smithfield I have much pleasure found, Where wenches like to fairies Did often trace the ground.
Nowadays the big attraction is Waitrose.
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