Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London (11 page)

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any London streets took their names from the people who built them or the families which owned them. Thus the Bloomsbury area of London has many names which reflect the fact that this area, near the British Museum, was originally owned by the Dukes of Bedford (Bedford Square) whose family name is Russell (Russell Square and Great Russell Street); whose home is Woburn Abbey (Woburn Square and Woburn Walk); and whose eldest son is the Marquis of Tavistock (Tavistock Square). The name ‘Bloomsbury’ itself refers to the manor, or ‘bury’ of Blemond, William Blemond having bought it in the 13th century. Street names in Mayfair and Belgravia like Grosvenor Square remind us that in the 1720s the area was developed by Sir Richard Grosvenor. In 1677 his father had wisely married the heiress Mary Davies (hence Davies Street) who had inherited much of what is now Mayfair. In the 19th century Thomas Cubitt drained the swamps south of Hyde Park to create Belgrave Square (named after a Grosvenor family property in Leicestershire), Eaton Square (the family home in Cheshire) and Lupus Street (Lupus Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster, 1825-99).

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ther street and district names have earlier origins. Aldwych is one of the most ancient names in London. It is an Anglo-Saxon name which means ‘Old settlement’ and reflects the fact that it was a trading post outside the walls of the City itself on the way to the separate community to the west of the City which became known as Westminster. King Alfred granted Aldwych, with its valuable trading post, to the Danes as part of the settlement that ended his wars with them. Many places owe their names to royal connections. The King’s Road in Chelsea was so called because it was originally a private road which Charles II used to drive to Hampton Court and until 1830 it could be used only on production of a copper pass inscribed ‘The King’s Private Road’. Pall Mall was laid out in 1661 so that King Charles II could play a game imported originally from Italy called Pallo a Maglio (Ball to Mallet, rather like croquet), close to St James’s Palace. The road was officially called Catherine Street, after Charles’s Queen Catherine of Braganza but soon took on the name of the game for which it was designed. South of the Strand are a number of streets whose names between them spell out the name of the Stuart courtier and landowner the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, ‘George Villiers of Buckingham’. These are George Court; Villiers Street; Of Alley (since renamed York Place); and Buckingham Street.

St Jamess Palace

Soho was from 1536 a royal hunting park for Whitehall Palace, ‘So-ho!’ being a contemporary hunting cry. Smoothfield which lay just outside the City boundary became Smithfield, a place of execution before it became a live cattle market noted for its disorderly character. In 1866 the present meat market was designed by Horace Jones, the architect also of Tower Bridge.

Hug a Huguenot

Other names have more obscure origins. Bedlam, a synonym for an asylum, took its name from the Priory of St Mary Bethlehem in Bishopsgate, founded in 1247 and later used for accommodating the mentally ill. In 1815 the hospital was moved to Lambeth where its premises were later occupied by the Imperial War Museum. The nearby Elephant and Castle probably owes its name to the Infanta of Castile (the eldest daughter of the then King of Spain) who was at one time engaged to Charles I. Spitalfields also has foreign associations, having become the home of immigrant Huguenot silk weavers in the late 17th century. The word spital is a shortened form of ‘hospital’ and the area takes its name from the St Mary Spital, a hospital founded in the 12th century. Finsbury to the north of central London owes its name to the fact that it was once part of the Great Fen, a marshy area which lay just outside the City walls.

In 1849 the humorous magazine
Punch
suggested some street names which reflected the insanitary state of the capital in the pre-Bazalgette years.
Punch
suggested Open Sewer Street; Slaughter House Buildings; Shambles Place; Knacker’s Yard; Graveyard Crescent; Charnel Square; Typhus Alley; Scrofula Lane; Consumption Alley, and so on.

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any London placenames have their origins in water supplies. Marylebone is an abbreviation for Mary-le-bourne, the word ‘bourne’ meaning a spring. Its water was conducted in a lead pipe to the Great Conduit at Cheapside in the City in 1236 from which citizens could draw water free of charge. Conduit Street, off Regent Street, and Lamb’s Conduit Passage in Holborn were also the location of water conduits. Holywell, near Liverpool Street Station, Clement’s Well near the Monument and Clerkenwell all mark the sites of former wells as does Sadler’s Wells. The last of these became a fashionable spa in the 18th century and the original well may still be glimpsed through a glass floor panel behind the scenes at Sadler’s Wells theatre. New River Head, next to Sadler’s Wells in Rosebery Avenue, marked the terminus of the New River Company. The brainchild of Hugh Myddleton, Welsh silversmith and City entrepreneur, the New River was built between 1609 and 1613 to bring water by gravity from the Chiltern Hills near Ware to the city. It now stops short at Stoke Newington where it feeds into the London Ring Main and continues to supply Londoners with water four centuries after its construction. In the abandoned stretch beyond Stoke Newington it survives in small lakes and the original waterworks and cistern may be seen off Rosebery Avenue. Cold Bath Square in Clerkenwell marks the site of a facility which flourished until 1878 and is now close to the home of the Royal Mail’s main sorting office at Mount Pleasant. Teddington, west of London, was originally called ‘Tide-end-Town’, a reference to the fact that it is the place where the Thames ceases to be a tidal river, now marked by Teddington Lock.

The Great Conduit

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any of London’s most elegant shopping streets were designed for residential purposes and did not acquire a significant number of shops until the 19th century. In the early 17th century a tailor called Robert Baker made a fortune from selling a stiff collar of his own design known as a picadil. In 1612 he built himself a fine mansion in Great Windmill Street, close to the present junction of Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue. Envious aristocrats who resented the wealth of this arriviste dubbed his new home Piccadilly in reference to the source of his wealth and the name became associated with the road on land that Baker also owned. Later in the century the nearby Jermyn Street drew its name from Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans who received the land by a grant of Charles II whose exile he had shared during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. A building on the corner of Jermyn Street and Bury Street has a relief, dating from about 1680, showing the king presenting the deeds to Jermyn. Four years later a property developer called Thomas Bond began to develop Bond Street as a smart residential quarter which accommodated such ‘celebrities’ as Jonathan Swift, Edward Gibbon and Horatio Nelson.

The first purpose-built shopping precinct was Burlington Arcade, opened in 1819 for Lord George Cavendish. Its smart, uniformed beadles in their top hats and capes are in effect a private constabulary and pre-date the Metropolitan Police by ten years. Rather like school monitors they are responsible for maintaining good behaviour amongst those who walk through the arcade and particularly for ensuring that there is no whistling, singing, running or carrying of opened umbrellas.