Todays walk starts outside the Royal Exchange. In Georgian times this place would have been a centre of trade and commerce. It’s during this era that London became the largest city in the world, some of the City’s inhabitants grew wealthier and moved to the new fashionable area west of the city. Further afield, whilst the sea routes widened and British expansion took place overseas in North America, the West Indies and India, at home it was a time of great political unrest…
The Society of Lloyds (insurance company) moved here in 1713 from the original shop in Lombard Street, which is now a Sainsbury’s Local.
It would have been a popular place for sailors, merchants and ship owners to meet and get reliable shipping news. Shipping merchants would also discuss insurance deals here and from this grew the leading insurance company known as Lloyds of London.
In 1764 the first Lloyd’s Register of Shipping was published and was a list of all ships over 100 tons. Ships hulls were registered by vowels and their masts and rigging by numbers. Ships listed as ‘A1’ were the best, and this is where the saying comes from.
The Royal Exchange was possibly England’s first shopping mall of sorts. It features a bell tower crowned with a huge grasshopper, which is the Gresham family emblem.
We see this emblem again in Change Alley and Lombard Street later on our walk.
The building known as the Bank of England is just across the street from the Royal Exchange.
In 1734, the Bank of England had relocated from Grocer’s Hall to Threadneedle Street. By 1772, to meet its expanding needs, the Bank acquired many nearby properties, including coffee houses.
The situation in Europe after the French Revolution, Britain’s ongoing war with France, and the threat of riots on London’s streets meant the Bank needed to be both secure and fireproof.
The original building was designed by Sir John Soane and built between 1788 and 1833.
The complex arrangement of corridors, courts, top-lit banking halls, storage and offices lay concealed behind a fortified, curtained screen wall. The public still able to access the banking halls to collect dividends and trade stocks.
As a result of the enormous damage wreaked by the Great Fire, in 1708 the Government passed the Parish Pump Act, ordering that every parish in London must have a water pump and designate men to extinguish fires.
About a minute’s walk up Cornhill, by Change Alley is the location of the first mechanically pumped water supply in London, and was known as ‘The Standard’.
Recently restored and recoloured from blue to beige , the pump can be spotted in Bridget Jones’s Diary movie, where Bridget has her first kiss with Mark Darcy after he buys her a new diary from the Royal Exchange.
The first stocks and shares were traded in Jonathan’s coffee house in Change Alley (originally known as Exchange Alley) very near to the Royal Exchange.
The coffee house was a place to discuss politics, read the ten London newspapers of the day, and make one’s appointments. Oh, and to drink coffee!
The London Stock Exchange was formed in 1773 and was sited at Sweetings Alley. The regulation of London Stock Exchange came in 1801 when it moved to Chapel Court with its own coat of arms featuring the now famous ‘My word is my bond’ motto (dictum meum pactum)
There were around 150 coffee houses in the City of London in 1820. That’s a lot of coffee being drunk! Thomas Garraway was the very first person to retail tea in England in 1660, at a cost of £10 a pound! Note the Gresham grasshopper again! He gets everywhere!
Deja vu?
Round the corner, the church of St Mary Woolnoth looks like it is wedged into a triangle. It is one of the twelve (of fifty originally planned) Queen Anne Churches actually built after the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches. It was financed by the Coal Tax of 1711 and built by Nicholas Hawksmoor, once an apprentice assistant of Wren. It is said that the postmodern 1 Poultry building on the opposite side of Bank junction was designed to mirror its facade.
Reverend John Newton was rector here. He had once become a slave ship master after being rescued from Sierra Leone. In 1788 he wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ when, after trying to steer a ship through a storm he had ‘a great deliverance’ where Gods grace had seemed to save him…
He wrote his own epitaph:
‘John Newton, Clerk, once an infidel and libertine, a servant of slaves in Africa, was by the rich mercy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, preserved, restored, pardoned, and appointed to preach the faith he had long laboured to destroy…’
St Mary’s north elevation looking very grand, with three elaborate baroque niches with curved entablatures above blind window openings. (Thank goodness for Pevsners book on church architecture). The lack of windows on this wall would have helped to insulate the noise from Lombard Street on which it stands.
We descend the steps into Bank Underground station to avoid crossing Bank junction with its heavy traffic. On reaching daylight again, we are facing a very grand building known as Mansion House.
Built on the former site of the Stocks Market which once sold livestock and other goods from ‘trusted’ merchants, the Mansion House became the home of the Lord Mayor of London in 1752. It was built by George Dance the Elder during a Palladian revival in architecture.
In a close off Old Jewry, Frederick’s Place is a fine example of five Grade II listed terraced merchants houses built by the Adam brothers in 1776. The Building Act of 1774 had outlined new regulations for new house building after the Great Fire. There were to be no eaves, window frames were to be set back, sash windows were to be installed, and there were new regulations on party walls.
Outside this office are original railings, a gas lantern and two torch snuffers.
We walk onwards to discover the ‘Hindoo Gothic’ architecture of the Guildhalls porch as the earliest example of Indian influence in England. Designed in 1788 by George Dance, this time the Younger, it features the City of London’s coat of arms and Latin motto – domine dirige nos which translates to ‘God guide us’.
There are plenty of monumental statues inside the Great Hall to the good and famous.
A monument to Nelson depicted rather absurdly with an arrangement of allegorical figures.
Two monuments – father and son on opposite sides of the hall facing each other of William Pitt the Older and Younger.
A monument to William Beckford, son of a wealthy Jamaican sugar planter who became Lord Mayor of London twice, features a celebrated speech defending the liberties of the City on its plinth. Beckford died a millionaire by Georgian standards, however, there was conflict between this wealth, which was gathered from the spoils of slavery and his own reputation as a fine upstanding civic figure.
We exit the grand Guildhall building and turn onto Cheapside. Once the Georgian City’s main shopping thoroughfare it was slowly replaced by the more fashionable Oxford Street, Bond Street, Strand and Piccadilly in the West End.
In St Paul’s churchyard is a life-sized statue of John Wesley, which stands at just 5 feet 1 inch tall. He holds a bible in this right hand as befitting to the founder of the Methodist movement. He would have worshipped inside St Paul’s.
The Georgian era was dogged with some religious battles and in 1778 the government passed the Catholic Relief Act which gave Catholics new rights including the ability to purchase land and the right to join the army. This was not popular and it eventually led to the Gordon Riots in 1780 and culminated in the looting and damage to Catholic chapels and houses in the City, Newgate and other prisons, the Old Bailey and Bow Street police station. Even the Bank of England was attacked…
The gates to the City were removed in 1760, all with the exception of Temple Bar. Two new bridges were built across the Thames in order to accommodate crossings.
In 1769 Blackfriars Bridge opened and a new London Bridge opened in 1830
The old Reuters building is in Fleet Street, known as the ‘Street of Ink’ and home of the newspaper printing trade.
Near here in Bolt Court, the first steam-driven cylinder press was built in 1812. The Times was first printed here by steam at the rate of 1,100 sheets per hour! At the time, its daily sale was around 5,000 copies.
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese was rebuilt after the Great Fire.
Alcohol consumption was somewhat of a problem in the Georgian era, and something called ‘gin mania’ thrived in London.
Gin became a popular drink in England during the reign of William III, as an alternative to French brandy. The average consumption (including children) was around two pints a week! This coined the saying:
‘Drunk for a penny; dead drunk for tuppence.’
The Gin Acts of 1736 and 1751 aimed to stop the trade, as consumption of gin was causing social and criminal problems.
17 Gough Square was the home of Dr Samuel Johnson, known mainly for his Dictionary of the English Language, the first of its kind printed in 1755. Here is his unusual dictionary definition for oats:
OATS. n.s. [Saxon] A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
Our walk finishes in Fetter Lane at the boundary of the City and at a monument to the man who was once said to be the ‘ugliest person in England’
John Wilkes was an MP, a journalist who campaigned for the freedom of the press (sounds familiar?), a member of the famous ‘Hell Fire Club’ and who was prosecuted for libel after he published an article mocking George III.
He was also Lord Mayor of London eventually in 1774 after having lost the election two years running and was said to have had the grandest of processions with people lining both sides of the Thames to show support for ‘liberty’. Understandably, many notable people including Dukes, the Chancellor, Archbishops, Bishops and the Secretaries of State did not attend his banquet.
It it doesn’t get any more ugly than that…….
I wonder if he drank coffee?
Capital Jaunts 