London's 100 Strangest Places: London's 100 Strangest Places

CORAM’S FIELDS

GUILFORD STREET, WC1

No Unaccompanied Adults

Calling itself ‘seven acres of freedom’, this central London park and playground is unusual in that adults are allowed in only if accompanied by a child. But then perhaps that’s only as it should be, since the park we see today occupies a small part of the 56-acre site acquired by a wealthy seafarer for another famously child-focused enterprise, the Foundling Hospital. There is a relic of the hospital in this pillar by the entrance, a structure which once held a revolving niche containing what old Captain Thomas Coram called his All-Comers Basket. Using this, mothers keen to avoid legal entanglement or moral censure could simply deposit their unwanted infants anonymously, rather than leaving them ‘to die on dunghills’ as the good Captain put it.

It was an inspired idea, but proved too successful for its own good and on the first day of its operation in 1742 a staggering 117 babies were left in precisely this manner. In the next few weeks, another 425 arrived and before long this chaotic (if well-meaning) admissions policy had to be abandoned. Instead, a balloting scheme was introduced to decide who gained entry: a white ball admitted the child once he or she had passed a medical examination; a red ball secured a place on the waiting list; a black ball indicated rejection, meaning alternative arrangements would have to be found elsewhere.

Demand for places continued to outstrip spaces, however, so that new rules were instituted allowing, for example, only one baby per unmarried mother to be admitted, and then only when the child was under 12 months old, had been deserted by its father, and where the mother had been of good character before her ‘fall’.

The expense of running such an establishment was naturally considerable, but the Foundling Hospital was fortunate in that it enjoyed the patronage of a number of high-profile supporters. These included not just Coram’s original committee of twenty-one ladies ‘of Nobility and Distinction’ who petitioned the King for support, but also the artist Hogarth – who became a governor and with other artists contributed a number of valuable portraits – and G.F. Handel who presented an organ to the hospital chapel and raised an incredible £7,000 through his own performances here of his Messiah.

Eventually the hospital went, however, moving to Berkhamsted in 1926 when the valuable site was sold for development. Happily, a new band of benefactors (led by the newspaper proprietor Viscount Rothermere) was able to rescue a small portion of it, and when Theodore Jacobsen’s hospital buildings were cleared away what remained was laid out to give local children somewhere to play. A place, should they so choose, where they could treat their parents to green and grassy pleasures.

NEW RIVER COMPANY

MYDDLETON SQUARE, WC1

London’s Own Aqueduct

Problems with water supply are nothing new. In Elizabeth I’s time, the Thames and its tributaries were already badly polluted, the City still had no sewerage system separate from its water supply, and London generally was evil smelling and clearly very unhealthy.

People were nevertheless still getting their water from open water courses. Some depended on water-bearers to bring what they needed in barrels from the various rivers, while others – generally the richer ones – obtained water from shallow wells which tapped ground water supplies or through primitive pipes known as quills. Even these sources were soon contaminated, however, and in 1606 and 1607 two Acts of Parliament were passed permitting the Commonality of the City of London to run a channel to bring fresh water in from two clean Hertfordshire springs.

The task fell to Hugh Myddleton, a goldsmith and well-heeled entrepreneur, who, despite fierce opposition from those landowners across whose estates the channel would pass, agreed to complete the job in just four years. In fact, he struggled until James I agreed to help out financially – Myddleton was well connected and had dealings with the King as a goldsmith – in return for half the profits.

Four years later water flowed from the villages of Great Amwell and Chadwell into the Round Pond by Sadler’s Wells, arriving via an open channel 10ft wide, 4ft deep and just under 40 miles long. Before long the New River Company had four such reservoirs, each 10ft deep and up to 2 acres in area, with water being piped into the City through wooden pipes. Then as now up to 25 per cent was lost owing to pipe bursts and other leakages, but Myddleton was rewarded for his efforts with a baronetcy.

Unfortunately, the public showed less regard for his work and before long, as noted in a hastily commissioned monograph entitled A Microscopic Examination of the Water Supplies for the Inhabitants of London, the problems of having an open channel were made obvious. The people of London, it said, ‘use it as a resort for bathing in summer and at all times as a receptacle for refuse, animal and vegetable matter’. In short, it was soon as toxic and as disgusting as the Thames water it was meant to replace.

The solution was to import filter beds and filtration works, these being installed at Hornsey and Stoke Newington, which eventually became the London termini of the New River. Closer to town the magnificent headquarters can still be seen on Roseberry Avenue, complete with the lavishly panelled seventeenth-century Oak Room which has been reconstructed within the later building (now apartments). In Claremont Square, there is also one surviving reservoir, railed off and looking for all the world like a prehistoric tumulus.

The course the original river took can still be discerned, however, much of it now landscaped as the New River Walk and turned into public parkland. There is also the evidence of the New River Estate, most of which was sold to Islington Council in the mid 1970s; Colebrook Row and Duncan Terrace, for example, would originally have faced each other across that first channel excavated by Sir Hugh.

ADELPHI

STRAND, WC2

Lottery-Funded Loser

Having grown organically over the centuries (which is to say haphazardly), as a rule elaborate, large-scale planning schemes do not fare well in London – and the fate of the Adam brothers’ imposing riverside Adelphi is no exception.

Concerned that their work had hitherto been on too small a scale, or limited to less prestigious commissions outside London, John, Robert, James and William Adam took a ninety-nine-year lease on a substantial plot of land between the river and the Strand in 1768. Paying the Duke of St Albans £1,200 per annum for it, they set about building a quay and several storeys of warehousing in extensive vaults set back from the river.

Relying on cheap labour from their native Scotland – pipers were brought in to keep the workers happy – they planned a series of streets above; two parallel to the river, two running perpendicular to it, with the centrepiece a royal terrace of eleven four-storey stucco and plastered houses overlooking the Thames.

They quickly ran into difficulties, however. Initially, the Corporation of London blocked the development, claiming all rights over the river bed. Then distance from the fashionable West End proved an issue when it came to attracting the right class of tenant (this despite the high-quality interiors by Angelica Kaufmann and G.B. Cipriani). Finally, they suffered a funding shortfall, when the government declined to rent the massive vaults for storing gunpowder for fear of flooding at high tide.

Fortunately, the brothers were not without influence and a special Act of Parliament in 1773 allowed them to rescue the scheme by holding a lottery. The following year 4,370 tickets were offered at Jonathan’s Coffee House on Cornhill, at a hefty £50 a throw.

Certainly, once completed, the forty-one-bay development was (if only briefly) highly impressive when viewed from the river, with an attractive centre and the façade closed by the projecting terraces in Robert and Adam Street. Admittedly the crisp neo-Classicism and decorated pilasters of the eleven houses did not appeal to the architectural establishment, but the artistic elite liked what it saw immensely and David Garrick, Thomas Hood, John Galsworthy and others subsequently moved in.

By 1870, though, the construction of the Victoria Embankment had cut off the warehouses from the river. These quickly fell into disuse, providing what a contemporary chronicler called a dismal haunt for street thieves, a place where ‘the most abandoned characters pass the night, nestling on foul straw’. Two years later the terrace was cemented over and had its ironwork removed, before eventually it was torn down and replaced by the block we see today. Somewhat inappropriately, this too is called the Adelphi, meaning, of course, ‘brothers’.

Today, sadly, just small fragments of the original remain, including 7 Adam Street, 1–3 Robert Street and 4–6 John Street, alongside the pretty Royal Society of Arts. Some of the vaulting can also be seen from Lower Robert Street, but it is still hard to get a fair impression of the very considerable scope and scale of the brothers’ short-lived achievement.

ASTOR HOUSE

TEMPLE PLACE, WC2

Faked, but with Finesse

Originally the London estate office of William Waldorf Astor – the first Viscount Astor was nicknamed ‘Walled-Orf’ after taking the necessary steps to prevent members of the public strolling through his Cliveden estate – 2 Temple Place these days provides a welcome relief from the brutal presence of the monolithic Howard Hotel nearby.

For Astor, the 1895 building formed an important part of his English Plan, a bid to revert to his European roots after recognising that while his native America was a fine place to do business, ‘why travelled people of independent means should remain there more than a week is not readily to be comprehended’.

To this end, created for one duke, let to another, rebuilt by a third and inherited by a fourth (respectively Buckingham, Gloucester, Sutherland and Westminster), Cliveden was just the ticket. Perfect for an American as hell-bent as Astor on acquiring the titles and trappings of an English toff, it had been designed by Sir Charles Barry and built high above the loveliest stretch of the Thames on the very spot where ‘Rule, Britannia’ was first performed.

Crucially, it was also for sale: the Duke of Westminster already having a seat when he was given Cliveden by his mother-in-law – but being badly in need of money. Astor, of course, had plenty of this – an estimated $175 million from his father – but needed a seat. Accordingly, £250,000 changed hands, giving Westminster the liquidity he required and Astor the great house and its contents. (Later the Duke realised he had left some valuable paintings behind, which Astor promptly returned, though he retained a 200-year-old visitors’ book which he insisted went with the house.)

Other acquisitions rapidly followed as Waldorf and then his son cemented their foundations in London and English society. These included 18 Carlton House Terrace, Hever Castle in Kent, a fleet of horse-drawn carriages controversially painted in the same chocolate-brown livery favoured by the royal family, the Observer newspaper and the influential Pall Mall Gazette. Also, in time, another grand ducal establishment in St James’s Square – now home to the Naval & Military Club, but originally built for the first Duke of Kent – and the 55-carat ‘Sanci’ diamond which at various times had been the property of Charles the Bold, Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, and Louis XIV.

Together with his extensive US holdings, it was a considerable real-estate and business empire, all of which the Astors controlled from this small but robust Portland stone castle with its charming early Elizabethan styling.

Designed by John Loughborough Pearson, its Great Hall and Library were located on the first floor to take advantage of the river views. Astor’s money meant the elaborate detailing continued inside too, with an ornate gallery of ebony columns and silver-gilt panelling, carvings of many literary figures and lavish glazing with ornate stained glass. Finally, and in recognition of a family which had crossed the Atlantic in such triumph, the gilded, beaten-copper weathervane above the roof includes a representation of the Santa Maria, the caravel which carried Christopher Columbus on his pioneering voyage across the same great ocean.

GOODWIN’S COURT

ST MARTIN’S LANE, WC2

Predating Savile Row

It is tempting to think that, in the summer of 1763, Samuel Johnson must have had in mind humble little backwaters like this one when he encouraged his companion Boswell, newly arrived in London, to ‘survey its innumerable little lanes and courts’.

These days very much an accidental discovery for the strolling visitor to Covent Garden, the buildings of Goodwin’s Court are charming rather than architecturally important, intimate rather than impressive. Nevertheless, the short walk from one end to the other gives one a fine impression of another Covent Garden, one far less grand or planned than the Earl of Bedford’s nearby piazza, which was a truly radical innovation for London in its day.

By comparison, to most visitors, Goodwin’s Court must seem positively Dickensian. Although that said, with its blackened timbers, worn steps, comically bulging windows and bowed walls, it actually predates Dickens (even his earliest writings) by well over 130 years. In fact, it makes its first appearance in the rate books in 1690, being described then as a row of tailors.

Having on its south side an intact row of eight narrow, yet desirable, late eighteenth-century shopfronts with two floors of living accommodation provided above, it is certainly wider and considerably more salubrious than nearby, quite nasty Brydges Place (which at its narrowest is barely more than a foot and a half wide). It is nevertheless still rather more of an alleyway than a court, and, as such, is a highly unusual survivor in an area such as Covent Garden, which has seen more than its fair share of reshaping and redevelopment since the Earl’s man, Inigo Jones, was first at work here in the 1630s.

Inevitably much of its charm depends on it being so easy to miss: the entrance from St Martin’s Lane being no more than a doorway off the street with a couple of steps down. As a result, most people simply never stumble upon it, but for those who do it is worth studying in detail.

With working gas lamps outside No. 1 and the attractive clock face over the archway giving on to Bedfordbury, it makes a fine contrast with its self-consciously much grander surroundings. Notice too, the metal plates or ‘fire-marks’ affixed to the buildings, dating from a time before the various privately paid-for groups of watermen and firefighters amalgamated to form the London Fire Engine Establishment. Until this was reformed into the publicly funded London Fire Brigade we know today, at the height of a blaze these plates would have indicated which buildings were insured against fire, thereby encouraging the firemen to concentrate on saving them rather than any adjacent, uninsured properties. It presumably worked, hence Goodwin Court’s happy survival into the twenty-first century.

HOLBORN–KINGSWAY SUBWAY

LANCASTER PLACE, WC2

A Tunnel for Trams

It would be nice to think that the last of London’s 2,500 tramcars might have been accorded the honour of