Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (10 page)

A
t Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, just north of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children is a large park which can only be entered by adults who are accompanied by a child. We owe this to Thomas Coram (c.1668-1751) who was born in Lyme Regis and worked for 30 years as a sea captain, trading with the North American colonies. By 1720 he had retired and was living in Rotherhithe where he was frequently distressed by the sight of babies abandoned by their mothers often, literally, on heaps of rubbish. Coram drafted a petition to secure a royal charter for a foundation ‘to prevent the frequent murders of poor miserable infants at their birth and to suppress the inhuman custom of exposing new-born infants to perish in the streets’. He spent 16 years from 1721 lobbying for the required political and financial support for his ‘Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of exposed and deserted young Children’, and on 17th October 1739 he was granted a charter for ‘an Hospital for the Reception, Maintenance and Proper Education of such cast off Children and Foundlings as may be brought to it’. He spent most of his own money and raised more from subscribers. The artists William Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds donated many pictures to what became London’s first picture gallery. Many of these may still be seen in the Foundling Hospital Museum in Brunswick Square. The composer Handel conducted an annual performance of
The Messiah
to raise funds.

Thomas Corams park for children

In the 20th century, author JM Barrie was an admirer of the foundation and requested that some Coram Children attend the first performance of
Peter Pan
. He was confident that the infectious laughter of youngsters would influence the primarily adult audience’s reception of the unusual story and he was correct. The first night was consequently a resounding success. Royalties on
Peter Pan
were left to Great Ormond Street Hospital.

On 24th March 1741, the trustees of the Foundling Hospital announced that ‘To-morrow, at eight o’clock in the evening, this house will be opened for the reception of twenty children… no questions whatever will be asked of any person who brings a child.’ Those bringing children to the hospital were requested to ‘affix on them some particular writing, or other distinguishing mark or token’ as some means of identification. The tokens, a collection of which remains in the possession of the Foundling Hospital Museum, included coins, trinkets, a lottery ticket, pieces of ribbon and, occasionally, poems like the following, number 5,312, deposited on 2nd August 1757:

‘Here I am brought without a name Im’ [sic] sent to hide my mother’s shame I hope you’ll say Im’ not to Blame’

The trustees purchased land at Brunswick Square which was occupied from 1745 and remained the home of the hospital until it was moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in 1935. The charity itself is now known as the ‘Coram Family’. Since 1955 parentless children have been fostered or adopted rather than accommodated in children’s homes but the charity continues its work. It works with vulnerable children and sponsors research projects into the welfare of children.

Not all named Moses

On 2nd June 1756 the hospital began the practice of leaving a basket suspended at the entrance to the hospital. The foundling was left in the basket, the mother rang the bell and departed, leaving her infant with its ‘distinguishing mark or token’ to add to the hospital’s growing collection. On the first day 117 children were left in the basket.

Since the children were nameless they were often given names like William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer and Francis Drake. All the children were inoculated against smallpox and a doctor attended in the case of any illnesses which could not be treated by the resident nurse. In the 19th century Charles Dickens lived nearby in Doughty Street and in March 1853 in his journal
Household Words
Dickens wrote ‘this home of the blank children is by no means a blank place… the Governors of this charity are a model to all others’. Thomas Coram died on 29th March 1751, probably aged 83, and his tomb is to be found at St Andrew’s, Holborn, at the southern end of Hatton Garden. Brunswick Square remains the home of the Foundling Museum with its fine collection of paintings and Foundling tokens. Outside the museum stands a statue of Thomas Coram. In 1852 the Great Ormond Street Hospital for sick children was built on neighbouring land. The adjacent land – ‘Coram’s Fields’ – is the park which can be entered by adults only if they are accompanied by a child.

M
ost Londoners know of the four Inns of Court: Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, the Middle Temple and Inner Temple. They date from the 14th century, possibly earlier, the word ‘Inn’ referring to a building in which barristers and those learning to practise the law were accommodated. Each of the Inns of Court, whose gardens are open to the public, resembles an Oxbridge college, consisting of staircases which accommodate the ‘chambers’ of barristers. Anyone wishing to practise as a barrister must be accepted by an Inn of Court, follow a course of study, pass examinations and then be taken on by one of the chambers. Each student also has to attend a certain number of formal dinners in the magnificent dining hall of his or her Inn. That of the Middle Temple contains a long table made from a single oak tree given to the Inn by Queen Elizabeth I and a cupboard made from the timbers of the
Golden Hind
, in which Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the world in 1577-80.

There used to be many more Inns, known as Inns of Chancery which specialised in preparing writs for all the sovereign’s courts. They have all gradually closed or been taken over by one of the four remaining Inns of Court but some buildings survive. Barnard’s Inn (1435), situated in a passage off the south side of Holborn, became the site of Mercers’ School in 1892 and is now the home of Gresham College. Clifford’s Inn (1480) was the home of Leonard and Virginia Woolf but is recalled now only by Clifford’s Inn Passage. Clement’s Inn (1480), remembered by the road of that name running north of the Strand to the west of the Law Courts, was the Inn of Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow.

Doctors dissolved

Doctors’ Commons was the name given to a college (an Inn of Court in all but name) which housed advocates who were qualified in Civil Law (i.e. non-criminal law). Based in Paternoster Row, near St Paul’s Cathedral, they practised in the Court of Arches which sat originally in the church of St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside and dealt with matrimonial matters. Doctors’ Commons advocates also dealt with matters of maritime law and international trade, the most eminent being (later Sir and Saint) Thomas More who was admitted to Doctors’ Commons in 1514. By the 19th century Doctors’ Commons was regarded as outdated and slightly absurd, and was lampooned by Dickens in
David Copperfield
where he described it as a ‘cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed little family-party’. Changes in the legal system led to the dissolution of Doctors’ Commons in 1865 and the sale of its buildings, which had by then been relocated to Knightrider Street. The buildings and the street were demolished in 1867. The former site of Doctors’ Commons is now marked by a plaque on the Faraday Building on the north side of Queen Victoria Street which became the General Post Office’s first telephone exchange in 1902.

I
n 1811 the lease expired on a dairy farm in Marylebone Park and the land reverted to the Crown. The task of redeveloping it was given to John Nash (1752-1835), the favourite architect of the Prince Regent (later George IV) who at that time was reigning in place of his father George III who was stricken by the blood disorder porphyria. Nash, whose plans were as extravagant as those of the Prince himself, proposed to construct a Royal Mile, beginning in the dairy farm which was to be renamed Regent’s Park. It would then run south along Portland Place which took its name from the previous owner of the land, the Duke of Portland. Portland Place owes its generous width to the fact that Lord Foley, the owner of Foley House at its south end (the present site of the Langham Hotel), had a guarantee that no building would ever obscure his view of Hampstead Heath to the north. Portland Place linked with Regent Street and passed to St James’s Park via the new Piccadilly Circus and Carlton House Terrace, the home of the Prince. Regent Street itself divides Mayfair, with its aristocratic residences on its west side from Soho, with its immigrant communities, to the east. Needless to say, when buildings had to be demolished to make way for the new road, it was the immigrants who lost out! The lower part of Regent Street where it curves towards Piccadilly Circus, known as the Quadrant, was arcaded, with one of London’s first parades of shops at street level and flats above. It was designed in this way so that, in Nash’s words, ‘Those who have nothing to do all day but walk about and amuse themselves may do so every day in the week instead of being frequently confined to their houses by rain.’ Were these the very first ‘ladies who lunched’? The shopkeepers complained that the arcade kept out the light and in 1848 they were demolished.

The Royal Mile at Regents Street

Trafalgar Square was created as part of Nash’s design, the area having previously been occupied by the Royal Mews. Nash intended that the space be occupied by learned societies like the Royal Society and the Royal Academy but his design was abandoned in favour of one by Charles Barry, architect of the new Palace of Westminster. It was originally to be called William IV Square in honour of one of our less distinguished monarchs but the name Trafalgar Square was adopted on the suggestion of the long-forgotten architect to the Royal Navy George Taylor (1788-1873).

Nash and pagoda ash

Nash’s designs were both costly and controversial. All Soul’s, Langham Place, which is at the junction of Portland Place and Regent Street, just in front of the BBC’s Broadcasting House, was criticised for its combination of Gothic spire and Classical rotunda. One MP offered to contribute to the cost of pulling it down but it is now cherished as a London landmark. Carlton House, at the bottom of Regent Street overlooking the Mall, was extended as a residence for the Prince Regent and promptly abandoned by him in favour of Buckingham Palace when he became King in 1820. Carlton House was then demolished and its columns used at the front of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where they remain. Nash turned St James’s Park from a swamp into the present charming green space, celebrating its opening by a firework display that set fire to the bridge across the lake and a decorative Chinese Pagoda which has since vanished from London’s landscape for ever.