London Urban Legends (12 page)

The eighteenth-century Fort George, on the coast between Nairn and Inverness in Scotland, was apparently designed to be invisible from the sea, but when the architect rode out to view this on completion (why not before?) he could still see one small piece of the fort and so reached for a handy pistol nearby to shoot himself.

The most famous error of this type is the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, which is said to have been built the wrong way round with a modest entrance for the public at one end and two imposing turrets for the back entrance. It is said that when the architect discovered the error, he leapt to his death from the building. In truth, of course, the building had not been built backwards and the architect probably does not haunt his cursed building. Frank Crocker, however, is said to haunt the hotel he built on Aberdeen Place in NW8. It was built not the wrong way round but in the wrong place. Crocker believed that the terminus for the Great Central Railway would arrive at St John’s Wood, and so he went about building the Crown pub and hotel on Aberdeen Place between 1898 and 1899, in anticipation of the masses. It was a fine building with a marble bar and fireplace and guest rooms with imitation Jacobean plaster. Adding another layer to the myth is the Shady Old Lady blog, which says the sly architect of the building managed to get his dig in by including a bust of the Emperor Caracalla in the pub, a Roman emperor known for his ‘architectural excesses and his complete insanity’. Caracalla is remembered for his massacres and the exuberant public baths he is said to have commissioned in Rome. However, the London terminus for the line ended at Marylebone, not St John’s Wood. And so, ruined financially with nothing to show except a grand hotel with no customers, Crocker jumped out of a high window and the pub’s name changed from the Crown to Crockers Folly. The Doctor Johnson pub in Barkingside, east London, has the same story to explain its size: it was built to service the users of a new road in and out of London which never arrived.

As Antony Clayton points out in
The Folklore of London
, the Doctor Johnson pub is so large because it is an ‘improved’ public house to serve the growing housing estates on the edge of London. The Crown Hotel, aka ‘Crockers Folly’, was completed about the same time as Marylebone station, and so was not positioned on Aberdeen Place by mistake. While Frank Crocker died relatively early at the age of 41, his death was of natural causes.

The sculptor or architect’s mistake, followed by suicide, is a story that must always be hanging in the air, waiting to attach itself to a large building or statue or when something is out of place or missing, like Charles I’s saddle girth. The narrative is then inevitable: the grand project, some hubristic pride, the realisation of the error and then the shameful ending.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

W.H. Auden, The Secret Is Out

T
HE BEST WAY
to find the devils of Cornhill is to walk north from London Bridge, up the west side of Gracechurch Street, through the city of London toward Liverpool Street station. Just before you get to the corner shared with Cornhill is one side of St Peter upon Cornhill Church. Its white stone is caked with a layer of grime and three tousle-haired cherubim, with wings round their necks like ruffs, gazing aloof and detachedly across the street. You then turn from Gracechurch Street into Cornhill, glance up, and leering down at you is a red terracotta demon with a dog-like body and a yowling, distended maw. It also has breasts, and a demonic face, its arms and chest are human. On the apex of the building crouches another larger demon, smirking to himself as he watches the passers-by on Cornhill. He looks as if he is preparing to launch himself onto an unsuspecting city worker or passing vicar below. It’s a busy street, but I suspect few people feel comfortable loitering at this particular spot.

The story is of a nineteenth-century vicar at St Peter upon Cornhill who noticed that the planned new building on 54-55 Cornhill impinged on the church’s land by 1ft. The vicar, or verger, disputed this and successfully stopped the building’s construction. The builder, or architect, had to re-draw their plans and, as his revenge, he raised three devils (there’s a smaller one beneath the top demon) onto the building overlooking the church and street to glare down on churchgoers and passers-by. In her own retelling of the story, the Shady Old Lady blog says that ‘the devil closest to the street apparently bears more than a passing resemblance to the unlucky rector’ as an extra twist. The oldest versions of the legend I have found date back to 1950, about fifty-three years after the building’s construction. One, from 22 February of that year, is in Peter Jackson’s compilation of
London Evening News
cartoons of London history and ephemera, titled
London is Stranger than Fiction
. It says: ‘Crouching high up on an office building in Cornhill, stone devils glare down at the church of St Peter, below. They were put there by an architect who had just lost a dispute with the church authorities and erected them as a small token of his displeasure.’

William Kent’s 1951 book,
Walks in London,
says: ‘If we look across the road at this point we shall see high up on No.54 a devil in stone. A legend says a builder had a feud with the Church and told them to go to the devil. A curse was laid upon him, but defiantly he erected this figure.’

In 1988, estate agents Baker Harris Saunders published details of 54-55 Cornhill when letting it, which included this urban legend as a piece of local colour. ‘Legend has it that following a disagreement between the owner of the land and the adjacent church […] the owner sought retribution by adorning the building with a crouching devil and a chimera.’ The truth of the legend is fudged and the leaflet gets the church wrong, claiming the dispute was with nearby St Michael’s Cornhill and not neighbouring St Peter’s.

The idea of a curse only appears in Kent’s book. And was it the landowner, builder or architect who had the devils erected? Is the story true at all? The position of St Peter’s is a strange one, with the entrance to the church squashed between offices and a sandwich shop for city workers. To our twenty-first century eyes, having places of commerce built into sacred places seems odd but it was common in the City in earlier times. An image of nearby St Ethelburga’s Church on Bishopsgate, held at Bishopsgate Institute, shows shops built into the front of the church. At present, St Stephen’s Walbrook and St Mary Woolnoth each have a Starbucks built into their flanks.

The Builder
is a trade magazine for the building industry and lists every legal dispute to a building project, but does not mention St Peters or 54-55 Cornhill in its index over that period. The 1889–90 vestry minute book of St Peter Cornhill does list interactions between the church authorities and the architects of the current, devil-infested building, Walker & Runtz. They had recently acquired 54-55 Cornhill on behalf of a client, Mr Hugh H. Gardener, and they had found the original building to be ‘somewhat shallow’. On October 1891 they wrote to St Peter’s requesting a lease for 578ft of land where the old vestry building and lavatories stood, into which they could extend 54-55 Cornhill in exchange for £290 per annum. Walker & Runtz suggested that this money could be used to build a new vestry on another part of the site. After considerable discussion, the request was passed to the rector and churchwarden, who were ‘of the opinion that no sufficient reason has been shown to justify them in recommending the scheme for the favourable consideration of the vestry’.

On 19 April 1892, Walker & Runtz served St Peter’s with a party wall notice. Such a notice is given in a dispute over a boundary wall when it encroaches too far onto someone’s property. The vestry were concerned enough to consider the cost of moving their wall back. So a dispute took place before the current 54-55 Cornhill was constructed; so far so mythical.

Walker & Runtz applied for the chance to buy 111.5ft of land to the west of the vestry, and this time the proposal was entertained. The money raised from the sale funded a new secure strong room for the church in which to keep their communion plate (before then a warden was taking it home to keep it safe) along with other improvements. After a meeting regarding the sale, the Ecclesiastical Commission made the decision to use the funds for the ‘aid of the living’.

Pages 110–119 of the minute book have a report on the whole process of the sale, signed off by the rector on 25 October 1895. Once the Ecclesiastical Commission had approved the sale everything went smoothly: the Corporation of London approved it, and after the old building on 54-55 Cornhill had been demolished, the area of land was re-measured and sold. The report states that St Peter’s has benefitted from the sale of ground that was previously used to keep lumber with its new strong room, improved lavatories and cloisters, as well as a fund to aid the living.

And that, as far as St Peter’s minute book is concerned, is that, until 9 April 1901 when they received £150 for an increase in height of 54-55 Cornhill. There is no further mention of 54-55 Cornhill, and no mention at all of its devilish decorations.

Enter the Ceramicist

The man who sculpted the demons was William James Neatby (1860–1910). Neatby was an architect who turned to ceramics, creating some amazing tiles and building façades. He is most famed for the tiles entitled
The Chase
, which depicts various hunting scenes in the meat hall in Harrods, including speared ducks and captured boars. He could also do symbolic images, such as the
Spirit of Literature
on the front of the Everard Building in Bristol, a former print works. The spirit, in the form of a woman, has Guttenberg and his successor, William Morris, on either side of her. A grotesque dragon hangs from one drainpipe.

Neatby could also do the bizarre. The Turkey Cafe in Leicester is just that: his signature blending of Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts-style ceramics with a regal turkey perched at the top, its tail feathers radiating from its rear like sunbeams.

Neatby is a fascinating and mostly forgotten figure, but he is often praised in architectural journals. In
The Studio,
J. Burnard enthuses about his ‘vivid imagination a handicraftsmen who has thoroughly mastered the ways and means of his materials’.

Louise Irvine, writing in the
Architectural Review
in 1977, declared that ‘many terracotta buildings in London and elsewhere reveal his influence and could even be him but, as yet, the necessary documentary evidence has not yet come to light’.

Neatby himself comes across as an enigmatic character; passionate but somehow severe. He could not see the point of impressionism and his style is a robust yet sensual combination of pre-Raphaelite, Art Nouveau, Art & Crafts and more. He used his first wife Emily, described as having ‘delicate features and slender figure’, as the model for his ‘almost burlesque’ tile decorations for the Winter Gardens in Blackpool. But Irvine twice tells, in different journals, the story that he was so jealous of other possible suitors for his wife that he kept her locked up at home with the blinds down.