King’s College – everystreetinlondon

Day 60 – Tower Bridge Road – Tanner Street – Tooley Street

If all goes to plan this will be the penultimate post documenting this project. Recording a journey through the streets in the far south-eastern corner of the designated target area, this one covers the part of the capital stretching roughly from Bermondsey Square to Butlers Wharf going south to north and intersected by Tower Bridge Road. The walk took place on another glorious spring day with the sun beaming down and the cherry blossom out in full force. It was also the day the UK was supposed to be cutting itself adrift from the European Union, notwithstanding the postponement of which the hordes of Mordor still descended on Parliament Square. But let’s return swiftly to the sunlit and verdant streets of SE1.

We begin on the east side of Tower Bridge Road with Grange Walk. The south side of the street is home to a number of listed houses dating from the late 17th century and, on the corner with Grigg’s Place, the former Bermondsey United Charity School for Girls built in the 1830’s.

A short way further along is another converted schoolhouse, the Grange Walk Infants School of late Victorian vintage.

The north side of the street marks the southern end of the massive St Saviours Estate which we dip into briefly by way of Fendall Street before continuing east on Grange Walk as far as Bridewain Street.

Bridewain Walk connects Grange Walk with Abbey Street as do, moving back westward, Maltby Street and The Grange. From the northern end of the latter we return along Abbey Street to the former and continue on its northern section down to Millstream Road which after a brief diversion into Stanworth Street takes us under the railway arches and into Druid Street.

The plaque you see in the photograph above commemorates the WW2 bombing of the railway here which took seven lives. We head back under the railway via Tanner Street and wander up Rope Walk which runs alongside the arches on the west side. A timely celebration of London’s international diversity here.

We loop back to Tanner Street taking the final stretch of Maltby Street and turn west which takes us past Ugly Duck a for-hire venue for creative projects housed in a former Victorian warehouse and polythene bag factory. (bit of a cheat here – some of the photos in the sequence below were taken in 2017 when I was helping out with an installation for an exhibition).

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From here we snake round Pope Street, Riley Road and Purbrook Street to get back on Tower Bridge Road just north of where we started out from. Just beyond Stevens Street on the corner with Abbey Street a plaque fixed to the side of the end house of a row of council properties marks the site of the 11th century Cluniac priory that evolved and expanded to become Bermondsey Abbey. The priory and then the abbey played host to a number of notable royal occasions until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII (yes that again) instigated its eventual break up. The newly crowned King Henry II and his Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, held court here at Christmas in 1154 shortly before the birth of their second son. Elizabeth Woodville, the widow of Edward IV and the mother of the young princes murdered in the Tower at the behest of Richard III, registered as a boarder at the Abbey in 1487, after retiring from the court of Henry VII (who had defeated Richard and also married her daughter, Elizabeth of York). She died there on 8 June 1492. Today all that remains of the Abbey is a small section of the medieval gatehouse which forms part of the structure of some of those 17th century houses on Grange Walk.

Just beyond the junction with Abbey Street we cut back through Bermondsey Square, where the weekly antiques market is underway, to the eastern end of Long Lane.

Across the road is the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen Bermondsey. The church itself we discussed in the last post. The churchyard, which stands on part of the site of Bermondsey Abbey, is now an open space having been largely cleared of gravestones after closing as a burial ground in the mid 19th century. A few large chest tombs remain along with an obelisk which commemorates the granting of the space to the vestry of Bermondsey in the 1880’s. There is also a typically Victorian (though it dates from 1902) shrine-type fountain, a gift of one Colonel Bevington.

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After crossing the churchyard we head briefly south again to the waggishly named Long Walk which dog-legs between Tower Bridge Road and Abbey Street and must be all of 50 metres from one end to the other. Final stop off on Abbey Street is Radcliffe Road and then it’s back to Tower Bridge Road and a good leg stretch north back to Tanner Street.

So we head west on Tanner Street (with a short diversion to take in Archie Street) and find ourselves briefly on Bermondsey Street from where we make a circuit of Whites Grounds and Brunswick Court before ending up back on Tower Bridge Road. Continuing north there are some splendid examples of the cherry blossom, we referred to at the outset, leading up to Roper Lane which runs once again beneath the railway.

At the end we turn right on Druid Street and follow this east across TBR and alongside another set of railway arches that are largely occupied by specialist motor vehicle service providers (car mechanics to you guv’).

We make a left next onto Coxson Way and at the end of this follow Fair Street back to TBR. A few paces further north and we arrive at Tooley Street which takes us eastward again. Almost straight away we pass the Dixon Hotel which has made its home in the 1906 edifice that formerly served as the Tower Bridge Magistrates Court. The hotel takes its name from John Dixon Butler who was the architect of the Grade II listed Edwardian building.

We continue east as far as Three Oak Lane and then use this, Lafone Street and Boss Street to weave our way back west between Tooley Street and Queen Elizabeth Street. Horselydown Lane then takes us further north as far as Gainsford Street where we switch east again before taking a left on Curlew Street which carries us down to Shad Thames, Butler’s Wharf and the river. Butler’s Wharf was built between 1865 and 1873 as a shipping wharf and warehouse complex dealing in commodities such as grain, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, rubber, tapioca and tea. The warehouse used for the latter was reputedly the largest of its kind in the world. The buildings gradually fell into disuse during the 20th century and their original commercial purpose was finally redundant when the Port of London closed in 1972.

In the 1970’s artists such as David Hockney, Andrew Logan and Derek Jarman used the empty buildings as a space for the creation of video and performance art. Then in 1981 Terence Conran led a consortium that bid successfully to redevelop the Grade II listed site for mixed use. The renovation of Butler’s Wharf was a 20 year project that involved renovating and developing six buildings: the Butlers Wharf building itself, and the renamed Cardamom, Clove, Cinnamon, Nutmeg and Coriander warehouses. Conran’s pet project the Design Museum was included alongside the residential, retail and restaurant developments (though it has recently moved to a new building in Kensington).

In an earlier post we talked about the Barclay Perkins Brewery on Bankside which was also known as the Anchor Brewery. Well they obviously had trouble coming up with original names back in the 18th century because when John Courage founded his eponymous brewery in 1787 he gave it the exact same alternative monicker. At first his brewery consisted of just a small building on the foreshore, adjacent to what would be the southern end of Tower Bridge when that was built in 1886, but he and his son (after his death) rapidly built up the surrounding site. Some of the land had to be surrendered when the bridge was constructed and then in 1891 a spark in the malt mills caused a fire that razed the brewery to the ground. It was rebuilt to what were at the time state-of-the art specifications and was soon producing 300,000 barrels a year. The Courage family were still in full control of the business at this time even though it had floated on the stock market in 1889. By 1955 however it was forced to merge with the Barclay Perkins Brewery and in 1972 the combined entity was acquired by Imperial Tobacco. The writing was probably already on the wall by then and it 1981 both the Anchor Breweries were closed down. The Bankside site was demolished completely but in the case of the Courage Brewery the riverside frontage was retained (including the chimney which you can see in the picture above) while the buildings to the rear were torn down for redevelopment. As of 2017 the Courage brand is in the possession of Marston’s Brewery.

It’s fitting then that today’s pub of the day is the Anchor Tap on Horselydown Lane which was the Courage Brewery’s Tap (though it claims to originate from 1761 a couple of decades and some before John Courage set up). It’s now part of the Sam Smith’s estate and provided me with a very decent pint of cider and an excellent B.L.T.

On leaving the pub we go back down Tower Bridge Road as far as St John’s Church park on the west side. Cutting through this brings us back onto Fair Street and then Tooley Street again.

Continuing west we visit a sequence of streets that run off Tooley Street to the south – an orphan section of Druid Street, Banham Street and Shand Street. At the end of the latter we turn onto Holyrood Street, another that skirts the rail lines out of London Bridge.

We double sharply back down Magdalen Street to return to Tooley Street, dipping into Gibbon’s Rent and Bursar Street en route. Then it’s west on Tooley Street as far as Bermondsey Street where we negotiate its northernmost section that includes the long tunnel under the railtrack and finishes at the junction with St Thomas St. We’ve visited St Thomas Street before of course but on that previous occasion I overlooked the London Science Gallery which is sited on part of the Kings College campus by Guy’s Hospital and only opened last September (2018) with a mission to connect art, science and healthcare. The photos below are from a video work that forms part of the current (until 12 May 2019) exhibition Spare Parts which explores the art and science of organ transplantation and tissue regeneration.

The other reason for trekking all the way along St Thomas Street for a second time is that although it has loomed large in the background of many of the photographs in this and previous posts we haven’t yet dealt properly with the elephant in the city that is the Shard. So here, in no particular order, are the facts. It’s the tallest building in the UK and the European Union (which at the time of writing are still one and the same thing). Construction began in 2009 and it topped out three years later at 309.7 metres. It is 95 storeys tall with 72 habitable floors the uppermost of which at 244 metres incudes the UK’s highest viewing gallery. Floors 53 to 65 are taken up with residential apartments while the Shangri-La Hotel occupies floors 34 to 52 and the rest is mainly offices. These floors are served by a total of 36 lifts which can travel at speeds up to 6 metres a second. Its exterior is covered by 11,000 glass panels – equivalent in area to eight football pitches or two and a half Trafalgar Squares. The lead architect was the Italian, Renzo Piano who also designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Towards the end of construction a fox was found up on the 72nd floor; nicknamed Romeo by staff, the fox is believed to have survived on food left by construction workers.

And finally, in a nod to the opening comments above I should mention that some people like to refer to The Shard as the Tower of Mordor.

Day 58 – Southwark Cathedral – Borough Market – Guy’s Hospital

Back after an extended hiatus with a fairly brief excursion just south of the Thames but as you can see from the title there’s quite a bit packed into this short space. Inevitably that includes more Shakespeare and Dickens but we’ve also got Geoffrey Chaucer, Francis Drake and John Keats in the mix along with a (literally) cracking legend.

Starting point for today is on Bankside, just to the east of Southwark Bridge and we kick things off by heading eastward along Clink Street towards the Clink Prison Museum. This area was once the site of Winchester Palace, built in 1144 for Henry of Blois, brother to King Stephen, which contained within its grounds two prisons; one for men and one for women. The name ‘Clink’ which eventually became a synonym for houses of incarceration in general seems to have been attributed to the prison here in the 14th century. One suggested derivation is the of the sound of a blacksmith’s hammer closing the irons around the wrists or ankles of the prisoners. Alternatively it could come from the Flemish word ‘klink’ meaning ‘latch’ (on a jail door for instance). The Clink suffered several attempts to destroy it during medieval times, principally during the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 and Jack Cade’s rebellion of 1450, both of which resulted in its rebuilding. The latter rebuilding survived until 1780, when Lord George Gordon, dissatisfied with the favours granted upon Catholics during the ‘Papists Act’ assembled The Protestant Association and broke into The Clink, releasing all of the prisoners before burning it to the ground. Today, all that remains of Bankside’s once most notorious prison is the stonework of Winchester Palace that has been preserved within The Clink Prison Museum.

At the end of Clink Street we take a right into Stoney Street and then a left down Winchester Walk which leads into Cathedral Street at the western end of Southwark Cathedral. It is believed that there was a community of nuns living on the site of the cathedral as far back as the 7th century and by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 this had developed into a some form of church. In 1106 the church was ‘re-founded’ by two Norman knights as a priory, whose members lived according to the rule of St Augustine of Hippo. The church was dedicated to St Mary and later known as St Mary Overie (‘over the river’). Perhaps the most famous resident of the priory was the court poet John Gower who lived there at the start of the 15th century and was a friend of Chaucer whose Canterbury Tales begin in Southwark (more of that later). When Henry VIII dissolved the Monasteries in 1539 the church became his property, and he promptly rented it back to the congregation. It was re-named St Saviour’s, though the old name remained in popular usage for many years. Shakespeare was a resident of the parish of St Saviour’s and his brother Edmund who also lived in the parish died in 1607 at the age of 27. A payment of 20 shillings was paid for his burial (possibly by William) at St Saviour’s “with a forenoone knell of the great bell”. His ledger stone is situated in the Cathedral Choir. In 1611 during the reign of James I a group of merchants from the congregation, known as ‘the Bargainers’, bought the church from the king for £800. Having gone through as series of repairs and alterations in the 17th and 18th centuries and a major restoration in the 1820’s St Saviour’s Church became Southwark Cathedral in 1905. The diocese which it serves stretches from Kingston-upon-Thames in the west to Thamesmead in the east and Gatwick Airport in the south. It has a population of two-and-a-half million people, served by over 300 parishes.

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On leaving the Cathedral we continue north on Cathedral Street through Winchester Square and past Pickfords Lane down to the river and the replica of Sir Francis Drake’s “Golden Hinde“. The original was the vessel on which Drake and his crew circumnavigated the globe during 1577-1580 (though it was called “The Pelican” at time of departure). A fleet of five ships in all sailed south to the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa before crossing the Atlantic to Brazil then traversing the straits of Magellan to reach the Pacific. By then the other ships had been either lost or returned to England the way they came leaving the Golden Hinde to complete the round trip alone via the East Indies and the Cape of Good Hope. In the 17th century, the original Golden Hinde which had been kept at the Deptford dockyard rotted and was broken up. 400 years later naval architect Loring Christian Norgaard was commissioned by The Golden Hinde Limited of San Francisco, a company formed by two other Americans, Albert Elledge and Art Baum, to design a replica. All components were handcrafted using traditional techniques and materials from the 22 cannons to the furniture and the hinde figurehead and in 1973, the new The Golden Hinde was launched. After crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific in the 1970’s the ship completed a “second circumnavigation” in the 1980’s (this time with the aid of the Panama Canal) before being retired here to St Mary Overie Dock in 1996 to operate as a museum.

Beside the ship, and I have to confess to never having properly noticed this despite passing this way umpteen times, is a plaque commemorating the Legend of Mary Overie (her that Southwark Cathedral was once named after if you were paying attention earlier). It’s a cracking story so I make no apologies for copying it out (almost) in full here.

“Legend suggests that before the construction of London Bridge in the tenth century a ferry existed here. Ferrying passengers across the River Thames was a lucrative trade. John Overs who, with his watermen and apprentices, kept the “traverse ferrie over the Thames”, made such a good living that he was able to acquire a considerable estate on the south bank of the river. John Overs, a notorious miser, devised a plan to save money. He would feign death believing that his family and servants would fast out of respect and thereby save a day’s provisions. However, when he carried out the plan, the servants were so overjoyed at his death that they began to feast and make merry. In a rage the old man leapt out of bed to the horror of his servants, one of whom picked up a broken oar and “thinking to kill the Devil at the first blow, actually struck out his brains”. The ferryman’s distressed daughter Mary sent for her lover, who in haste to claim the inheritance fell from his horse and broke his neck. Mary was so overcome by these misfortunes that she devoted her inheritance to founding a convent into which she retreated.” (see above).

After that diversion we retrace our steps to the Cathedral and skirt round the north side via Montague Close before ascending the steps up to where London Bridge meets the west side of Borough High Street and from here we head south down to Borough Market. Borough Market is reputed to have existed in one form or another for around 1,000 years since, roughly, 1014 the date used as the basis for the Market’s millennium celebration. This was a prime location for a market at the time due to its position at the southern end of London Bridge—for centuries, the only route across the river into the capital. The market incurred the wrath of the authorities across the river by undercutting the City of London’s own traders such that in the 1270s the City forbade its citizens to go to Southwark to buy “corn, cattle, or other merchandise there”. As a consequence, over the course of the following three hundred years, the market fell increasingly under the aegis of the City thanks to a series of royal charters, culminating in 1550 with Edward VI selling Southwark to the City for around £1,000. As London grew in size and stature, the bedlam on Borough High Street began to arouse significant opposition within the corridors of power and in 1754 a bill went before parliament declaring that as “the market obstructs much trade and commerce”, it would have to cease trading by 25th March 1756. Residents of Southwark then began petitioning to be allowed to start a new market, independent of the City and a second act was passed through parliament declaring that the parishioners of St Saviour’s could acquire land away from the main road and set up a market of their own, and that this market would “be and remain an estate for the use and benefit of the said parish for ever”. The market expanded rapidly in the 19th century becoming a major hub of the wholesale fruit and vegetable trade. The present buildings were designed in 1851, with additions in the 1860s and an entrance designed in the Art Deco style added on Southwark Street in 1932.

By the latter date it is estimated that 1,750,000 bushels of fruit and vegetables were sold here from 188 pitching stands let to 81 different wholesale companies, with a further 203 stands in the uncovered periphery manned by farmers from the Home Counties. Borough Market’s days as a vital wholesale hub were ended in part by the construction of New Covent Garden market in Vauxhall in the 1970s, but mainly by the relentless growth of the supermarkets which, by killing off independent greengrocers, destroyed the ecosystem in which fruit and vegetable wholesaling had thrived. The market’s renaissance into its present incarnation was inspired by the boom in artisan foods which kicked off in the 1990’s. A regular specialist retail market started on a monthly basis at the end of the decade, swiftly becoming a weekly occurrence and then the six days a week operation that exists today. In the process BM has reinvented itself as possibly the most well-known food market in the country and a tourist hotspot. We traverse the market by way of Bedale Street and Rochester Walk before returning to Borough High Street via some more of Stoney Street.

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Historically the east side of Borough High Street has been associated with coaching inns, many of which dated back to the medieval period. There were once 23 in total with their own courtyards surrounded by multi-tiered galleries. Many of the yards still remain and retain the names of the inns to which they gave access. However of these only Kings Head Yard and George Inn Yard are still home to eponymous hostelries. The George Inn in its current form dates back to 1676 when it was rebuilt following a fire that destroyed the 1542 original. It is the last surviving galleried coaching inn in London. Naturally enough it claims both Shakespeare and Dickens as former regulars though since it gets a reference in Little Dorrit the latter at least should be conceded with good grace.

Both White Hart Yard and Talbot Yard are now pub-free. The latter however was once the site of the Tabard Inn from whence (as we learned earlier) Chaucer’s pilgrims set off on their way to Canterbury in April 1386.

Bifel that in that season on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

The Tabard was also burnt down in the 1676 fire and it too was rebuilt, though renamed the Talbot, hence the name of the yard. The Talbot, like most of the other coaching inns, failed to outlive the coming of the railways and was demolished in 1873. The plaque below was unveiled by Monty Python’s Terry Jones in 2003.

Opposite Talbot Yard is the St Saviours Southwark War Memorial with its bronze sculpture designed by Philip Lindsay Clark who won the Distinguished Service Order in WW1.

Next we take a brief excursion away from Borough High Street to the east looping round Newcomen Street, Tennis Street and Mermaid Court. On our return we find ourselves opposite Maya House which since 2007 has been embellished by Ofra Zimbalista’s climbing Blue Men.

Continuing south on the east side we arrive at Angel Place another of London’s misnomered alleyways. You wouldn’t get many angels down here unless they were caught very very short. It is however the site of the old Marshalsea Prison (as we alluded to in the post before last) where Dickens’ father was incarcerated and which features heavily in Little Dorrit. Part of the old prison wall is still standing on one side of the alleyway and there is somewhat low-key memorial in the form of illustrated pages from the novel.

Across from Borough tube station, on the corner of the High Street and Great Dover Street stands the church of St George the Martyr. This is believed to be the third church on this site and was built in a Classical style to the designs of John Price between 1734 and 1736. Several of the major City Livery Companies and the Bridge House Estates gave their support to the project and their arms decorate the nave ceiling and some of the stained glass windows. The rather blingy ceiling painting of gilded cherubs breaking through a clouded sky accompanied by texts on a ribbon was created by Basil Champneys (1842 – 1935) in 1897. Champneys was principally an architect and designed a number of college buildings in Oxford and Cambridge.

On the north side of the church Tabard Street cuts through from the High Street into Long Lane which we follow east as far as Crosby Row. Here we head back north to reach Guy’s Hospital, the third and final member of the triumvirate of major central London hospitals following St Barts’ and St Thomas’ (though it should be noted that Guy’s and St Thomas’ are twinned as a single NHS Trust). The hospital dates from 1721, when it was founded by philanthropist Thomas Guy (1644 – 1724), who had made a fortune from the South Sea Bubble and as a publisher of unlicensed Bibles. It was originally established as a hospital to treat “incurables” discharged from St Thomas’ Hospital and the first hospital building was situated just to the south of St Thomas Street. This was soon complemented, in 1738, by the construction of a courtyard known as the General Court with an east wing. In 1780 a west wing comprising the chapel, the Matron’s House and the Surgeon’s House was added on the other side of the courtyard. The site was then extended to the south in 1850, the new buildings being named after one of the governors, William Hunt, who had made a bequest of £180,000 twenty years earlier. All of these buildings now form part of the Guy’s Campus of Kings College London which also incorporates a further group of buildings erected yet further south in the early part of the 20th century. These include Henriette Raphael House opened in 1902 – the first purpose built nurses’ home in London; the Hodgkin Building, named after Thomas Hodgkin, the demonstrator of morbid anatomy and best known for the first account of Hodgkin’s disease and Shepherd’s House, completed in 1921. Guy’s Campus sits to the west of the Great Maze Pond, which is the street that cuts through the extended hospital site. All medical services are now provided in the new buildings on the east side which were mostly constructed in 1974, including the 34 storey Guy’s Tower and 29 storey Guy’s House. The former, now dwarfed by the Shard, was for a brief time the tallest building in London and for a much longer time the tallest hospital building in the world.

We follow Great Maze Pond past the modern hospital buildings down to Collingwood Street where we turn left and then left again into the heart of Guy’s Campus. Having completed a circuit of the main campus we cross over Collingwood Street and go through the colonnade that runs between the two courtyards of 1850. In the eastern courtyard is a round-hooded Portland stone alcove which was originally part of, and is one of the surviving fragments of, the old London Bridge that was demolished in 1831. It now houses a statue of John Keats who studied at Guy’s Hospital from 1815 to 1816 to become an apothecary. (And whom some waggish student has inducted into the festive spirit). In the western courtyard is a statue of William Morris, 1st Viscount Nuffield, another major benefactor of Guy’s Hospital. Continuing north we arrive in the General Court with the brass statue of Thomas Guy by Peter Scheemakers standing in the centre upon a pedestal with bas-reliefs of “Christ Healing the Sick” and the “Good Samaritan”.

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We exit the hospital grounds onto St Thomas Street and complete today’s journey by heading west back towards London Bridge. On the way there is just time to pause for a look at (but not inside) the Old Operating Theatre Museum & Herb Garret which is housed in the attic of the early eighteenth-century church of the old St Thomas’ Hospital. The original timber framed Herb Garret was once used to dry and store herbs for patients’ medicines and in 1822 an operating theatre was included. Predating anaesthetics and antiseptics, it is the oldest surviving surgical theatre in Europe. So perhaps worth a visit another time.

Day 54 – South Bank – Waterloo Bridge – Blackfriars Bridge – Stamford Street

Today’s perambulations are mainly about the riverfronts either side of the Thames between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge with a particular focus on the South Bank though, as you can see, we do venture a bit further south of the river in the latter stages. It’s an area I’m mostly more than familiar with as, when I could be arsed to walk, I passed through here on my way from Waterloo to an office near St Pauls for many years.

Before we kick off however here’s a bit of bonus material relating to the previous post in which we featured the London Eye. As coincidence would have it, just a couple of weeks after that walk I found myself actually aboard the Eye (for the first time in many years)courtesy of a family visit – and here are the pics from on high.

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Right, back to the business in hand. We start out this time from Waterloo Station once again and having crossed York Road make our way along Concert Hall Approach towards the Royal Festival Hall. The RFH was built in 1951 as part of that year’s Festival of Britain. As London’s new main concert hall it would be the only permanent structure amongst the temporary pavilions and constructions on the Festival’s south bank site. The architects were Sir Robert Matthew and Dr Leslie Martin and the hall took 18 months to build at a cost of £2 million. Initially it was run by the LCC and then its successor the GLC but on the demise of the latter in 1986 responsibility was devolved to the Arts Council. Two years later the building was granted Grade 1 listed status.

Following a public appeal for assistance with the recovery of lost artworks, Peter Laszlo Peri’s Sunbathers sculpture, which was originally installed outside Waterloo underground station during the Festival, was retrieved from the garden of the Clarendon Hotel in Blackheath, restored and re-hung in the foyer of the RFH. That was in 2017 and it was originally only intended to stay there for one summer – but, as you can see, it’s still in situ. The bust of Nelson Mandela outside the western entrance to the hall was commissioned by Ken Livingstone’s GLC, sculpted by Ian Walters and initially unveiled in 1985 by the then ANC leader Oliver Tambo. Unfortunately, following what was described at the time as “politically-motivated vandalism” the sculpture had to be re-cast and was re-installed in 1988.

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The “brutalist” Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room were added to the South Bank site in 1967 adjacent to the RFH. These smaller venues were designed to play host to chamber orchestras and other smaller musical ensembles. Then in 1968 the Hayward Gallery, named after the late Sir Isaac Hayward, the then leader of the London County Council, was opened. The gallery’s first exhibition was a major retrospective of the paintings of Henri Matisse. All three venues were re-opened in 2018 after a two year refurbishment programme. The slideshow below includes shots of the Lee Bul exhibition that was showing at the Hayward when this walk took place.

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The area beneath the concrete walkway joining the RFH with the QE Hall (known as the Undercroft) has, for decades now, been used as a semi-officially sanctioned skateboard and BMX park. After fending off the latest threat to close and redevelop the site the users of the Undercroft have recently won a £700,000 grant from City Hall to enable the park to be extended and improved.

From the Hayward Gallery we ascend the steps up on to Waterloo Bridge. The current bridge, built to a design of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (the creator of the red telephone box if you remember), was “officially opened” in 1942. Not great timing as you can imagine and somewhat ironically this was the only bridge across the Thames to suffer damage from the German bombing campaign. As a consequence it was only fully completed in 1945. The bridge is sometimes referred to colloquially as the Ladies Bridge due to the fact that when the Irish labourers who had been working on its construction went back to Ireland at the outbreak of WW2 they were largely replaced by women.

Having crossed the bridge we head east along the Victoria Embankment towards Blackfriars Bridge. In the previous post we noted that the benches on the Albert Embankment use a swan motif in their metalwork supports while their counterparts on the Victoria Embankment incorporate camels and sphinxes into their design. And here’s the evidence.

About half way along this stretch of the Embankment is HQS (formerly HMS) Wellington which acts as the Livery Hall for the Honourable Company of Master Mariners (Merchant Seamen in other words). The vessel is open for boarding at the moment due to an ongoing exhibition on the role of mercantile shipping in WW1; which was fortunate because as soon as I’d got below decks the heavens opened. HMS Wellington is the last surviving convoy escort ship from the Second World War. She was built at Devonport Dockyard in 1934 and initially served in the Pacific mainly on station in New Zealand and China. When war broke out she was fitted with anti-aircraft guns and loaded with depth charges for use against submarines and went on to conduct convoy escort duties in the North Atlantic. She shared in the destruction of one enemy U boat and was involved in Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of troops from Dunkirk. The Master Mariners, who had been given their Royal Charter in 1926, acquired the Wellington in 1947.

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A short way further on is the monument erected in 1935 to celebrate King George V’s silver jubilee which I suspect most people walk past without giving a second glance. Much like…

And so on to Blackfriars Bridge which in its present incarnation was opened in November 1869 by Queen Victoria (hence the statue). It was built to a design of Joseph Cubitt and is comprised of five wrought iron arches. On the piers of the bridge are stone carvings of water birds by sculptor John Birnie Philip and the ends of the bridge are shaped like a pulpit in a reference to Black Friars.It is owned and maintained by the Bridge House Estates, a charitable trust overseen by the City of London Corporation. Blackfriars Bridge became internationally notorious in June 1982, when the body of Roberto Calvi, a former chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, was found hanging from one of its arches with five bricks and around $14,000 in three different currencies in his pockets. Calvi’s death was initially treated as suicide, but he was on the run from Italy accused of embezzlement and in 2002 forensic experts concluded that he had been murdered by the Mafia, to whom he was indebted.

As you walk south across the bridge the view is dominated by No.1 Blackfriars a 52 storey tower comprising 274 private flats that was completed in 2018. The site was formerly occupied by the headquarters of Sainsbury’s but had lain empty at least throughout all those years I walked past it. Then no sooner had I retired than construction started.

Having reached the southern end of the bridge we turn right past the Doggett’s Coat and Badge pub. Named after the world’s oldest rowing race, contested between apprentice Thames watermen since 1715, Doggett’s is one of only a handful of riverside hostelries in central London and, as such, does very well for itself.

We proceed along the river passing in front of Sea Containers House and the Oxo Tower. The latter was originally constructed as a power station to supply electricity to the Royal Mail post office towards the end of the 19th century. In the 1920’s it was acquired by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, manufacturers of Oxo cubes, for conversion into a cold store. The building was largely rebuilt to an Art Deco design by company architect Albert Moore between 1928 and 1929. Much of the original power station was demolished, but the river facing facade was retained and extended. Liebig wanted to include a tower featuring illuminated signs advertising the name of their product. When permission for the advertisements was refused, the tower was built with four sets of three vertically-aligned windows, which “coincidentally” happened to be in the sequential shapes of a circle, a cross and another circle.

Continuing west we pass by Bernie Spain Gardens (named after Bernadette Spain, a local housing campaigner in the 1980’s), Gabriel’s Wharf and the rear of the IBM and ITV HQ buildings before arriving at the National Theatre. After many years of debate and lobbying the NT was founded in 1963 and was based at the Old Vic until its new purpose-built home was opened in 1976. This latest addition to the South Bank’s modernist skyline, designed by architects Sir Denys Lasdun and Peter Softley and structural engineers Flint & Neill, divided opinion; Sir John Betjeman was an unlikely fan but, less surprisingly, Prince Charles referred to it as “a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting”. That was in 1988, the year that Sir Peter Hall relinquished the post of Artistic Director having succeeded Sir Laurence Olivier in that role in 1973. The building houses three separate theatre spaces, the Olivier Theatre, the Lyttleton Theatre and the Dorfman Theatre (formerly the Cottesloe). It’s been Grade II listed since 1994 and regularly appears simultaneously on publicly-surveyed lists of London most-loved and most-hated buildings.

The sculpture above is London Pride by Frank Dobson (1886 – 1963). This was originally exhibited in plaster cast form at the Festival of Britain but after Dobson’s death was re-cast in bronze and in 1987 donated by his wife Mary to be exhibited in front of the National Theatre. Just to the west of this is the statue of Laurence Olivier (as Hamlet) that was unveiled in 2007.

Adjacent to the NT and effectively right underneath Waterloo Bridge is the BFI Southbank (previously known as the National Film Theatre – its cinemas are still called NFT1, 2 & 3). The BFI (British Film Institute) was founded in 1933 and operates as a charity under Royal Charter. The BFI maintains the world’s largest film archive, containing more than 50,000 fiction films, over 100,000 non-fiction titles, and around 625,000 television programmes. In addition to the Southbank site it also runs the nearby London IMAX and the annual London Film Festival each October. The National Film Theatre was initially opened in a temporary building (the Telekinema) at the Festival of Britain and moved to this present location in 1957. In addition to the main three cinemas the building also incorporates the BFI Reuben Library and the Mediatheque which are both free to access. The upper level includes a gallery space which is currently displaying exhibits tying in with the ongoing Working Class Heroes season.

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Turning away from the river up past the BFI we arrive at Upper Ground and head back eastward passing, in sequence, the home of the Rambert Ballet Company, the front entrance of the IBM HQ and the ITV London Studios and Tower. The latter were constructed in the early 1970’s, when independent television was still provided by a plethora of separate regional operators, as a new studio complex for London Weekend Television (LWT). It was originally called The South Bank Television Centre (a name that lasted until the early 1990s) and at the time was the most advanced television centre in Europe. LWT was acquired by Granada in 1994 and a decade later Granada was merged into Carlton Communications to form ITV plc. As well as being the main studios for ITV’s entertainment shows the complex has also been used by the BBC and Channel 4 as well as several independent production companies. Good Morning Britain, The Graham Norton Show, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway and The Jonathan Ross Show are amongst the shows it has to bear some of the responsibility for. In April 2018 ITV closed the site for 5 years of large-scale redevelopment that will result in the loss of most of the studios space.

Doubling back a bit we head south next down Cornwall Road then turn right to take a trip up and down Doon Street which runs along the back of the Franklin-Wilkins building (named after Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin two of the pioneers who contributed to the discovery of the structure of DNA). This is now part of King’s College’s Waterloo Campus but it was built between 1912 and 1915 as a reinforced-concrete headquarters, known as Cornwall House, for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. However before HMSO could move in the building was requisitioned for use as a military hospital during WW1. As the King George Military Hospital it accommodated, at its height, some 1800 patients on 63 wards. Cornwall House had been built with underground tunnels connecting it to Waterloo Station and these tunnels were used by the hospital to transfer wounded soldiers arriving by train from the Front.

At the junction with Stamford Street we turn left and then take another left up Coin Street back to Upper Ground. Resuming eastward we stop for lunch at the slightly insalubrious but generously-priced House of Crepes at the top of the Gabriel’s Wharf marketplace of “independent eateries and boutiques”. The actual Gabriel’s Wharf building (in the background below) was formerly used as a scenery store by ITV.

We return to Stamford Street via Duchy Street and then take the next left turning, Broadwall, back to Upper Ground. We continue east as far as Bargehouse Street which loops round the back of the actual Bargehouse, a 4-storey former factory building, which is now an exhibition and event space forming part of the OXO Tower Wharf development.

After a quick look at the northern section of Hatfields we end up back by the river courtesy of another stretch of Upper Ground and Marigold Alley. Turning right we revisit the steps up to Doggett’s and then it’s a few paces along Blackfriars Road before the final bit of Upper Ground and Rennie Street return us to Stamford Street. We switch westward briefly before turning south down Paris Gardens and then cutting east through the churchyard of Christ Church Southwark. The first church on this site was built in 1670 bit that sank into the Lambeth Marshes after about seventy years and had to be demolished. Its replacement lasted a bit longer but failed to survive the 1941 bombing. The current building dates from 1959 and has an interesting (and secular) selection of stained glass windows depicting local trades and history.

On the other side of the church we revisit Blackfriars Road and drop south as far as Meymott Street where we take a westerly turn and look in on Colombo Street before using the longer stretch of Hatfields to return to Stamford Street. This building on Meymott Street always caught my eye on those journeys to work on account of its modest art deco stylings but I’ve been unable to find anything out about its history or current situation. Incidentally, Hatfields derives its name from the fact that this area was once used for drying animal skins that were made into hats.

Just around the corner as we turn left onto Stamford Street is the London Nautical School, founded in 1915 as a consequence of the official report into the loss of the Titanic (according to their website though it doesn’t elaborate). Let’s assume it was something to do with the creation of the “nautical ethos” which they still promote to this day.

Another section of Duchy Street is the next turning to the south and this is then linked to the southern section of Coin Street by Aquinas Street. The north side of Aquinas Street consists of a very nice three storey Victorian terrace. If you fancied living here though even a one bedroom flat is listed at more than £550k.

After a final visit to Stamford Street we take the southern section of Cornwall Street down to Theed Street where we make an eastward circuit also involving Whittlesey Street. Then a further block south down Cornwall Street we turn east again along Roupell Street home to today’s pub of the day, the Kings Arms. After a quick pint of cider we carry on down to the end of Roupell Street then double back and cut through Windmill Walk by the side of the pub to reach Brad Street. Turn west here and we’re back to Cornwall Street and duck left through the railway arch to Sandell Street. This is the first of a series of streets that cross between Cornwall Street and Waterloo Road, the others being Alaska Street, Exton Street and Secker Street. The last two of these combine to circle round St John’s Church. The church was originally built to the designs of the architect Francis Octavius Bedford in 1824. It was struck by a bomb in 1940, when the roof and much of the interior was destroyed. The building stood open for ten years until it was restored and remodelled internally by Thomas Ford in 1950. In 1951 the Church was rededicated as the Festival of Britain Church. The interior isn’t much to write home about but the church is imbued with a very strong community spirit and has an extremely cosmopolitan congregation. It’s also home to the Southbank Sinfonia an orchestra formed anew each year through the 33 annual fellowships granted by its charitable foundation. The orchestra performs a series of Free Rush Hour (6pm – 7pm) concerts at St John’s throughout the year and I can testify as to the excellence of these.

Just across from the church in the roundabout at the nexus of Waterloo Road, Stamford Street, Waterloo Bridge and York Road stands the BFI IMAX (as mentioned earlier). Built in 1999, this houses the largest cinema screen in Britain (20m high and 26m wide). It has a seating capacity of just under 500 and a 12,000 Watt digital surround sound system. Since 2012 Odeon Cinemas have operated the IMAX under licence.

It just remains to cross over at these lights to Tenison Way and from there take the escalator up to Waterloo Station and that’s one more out of the way.

Day 36 – Chancery Lane – Fetter Lane – Fleet Street

“If you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this great City you must not satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts..” These words, which could stand as a mission statement for this blog, were spoken by Dr Samuel Johnson, creator of the first proper dictionary of the English language and the man who also coined the immortal aphorism “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life”. We visit Dr Johnson’s house in Gough Square towards the end of today’s itinerary but before we get there we have to wend our way through the labyrinth of streets and squares and courts that huddle in between Chancery Lane and Farringdon Street as well as picking out the major points of interest along the north side of Fleet Street.

Before all that though here’s a quick update on how much of the designated target area we’ve now covered overall since beginning this a year and a half ago..And I thought I’d be done in six months !

Anyway back to today’s route..

Starting point is on Chancery Lane by the eastern gate of Lincoln’s Inn. From here we head north and take a right into Southampton Buildings where we find the former home of the Patent Office, purpose built at the turn of the last century some fifty years after the founding of the Patent Office in 1852. In 1991, having outgrown these premises, the Patent Office (now called the Intellectual Property Office) was relocated to Newport in South Wales.

Just around the corner is Staple Inn which is the last of the so-called Inns of Chancery to survive largely intact. The building dates from the the second half of the 16th century and the original half-timbered Tudor frontage still adorns High Holborn in incongruous fashion. The rest of the building behind this was pretty much fully reconstructed in 1937 though the courtyard and garden at the rear retain their original structure. Since 1887 it has been the London home of the Institute of Actuaries and was Grade I listed in 1974.

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Once out onto High Holborn by Chancery Lane tube station we turn right briefly then venture south down Furnival Street. Next turn is into the dog-leg that is Took’s Court where the early 18th century property at no.15 has been renamed Dickens House, not because this was another of the writer’s residences but because this building featured in Bleak House (under the guise of Cook’s Court).

Took’s Court emerges onto Cursitor Street where we turn right and come out onto Chancery Lane again; opposite a blue plaque installed by the Cromwell Association in commemoration of John Thurloe (1616 – 1668). Thurloe joined Cromwell’s government after he seized power, first as Secretary of State then as Head of Intelligence and finally as Postmaster General. In 1660 following the Restoration he was arrested for high treason but never tried (he was released on condition that he assist the new government on request). He died at Lincoln’s Inn in 1668 and was buried in the chapel there.

After a quick detour to Quality Court (which doesn’t really live up to its name) we double back down Cursitor Street, nip back up Furnival Street and then swing right into Norwich Street. This takes us into Fetter Lane where we head north to Holborn Circus then switch south again down New Fetter Lane. Cut back westward along Plough Place then continue on Greystoke Place before Mac’s Place takes us through to Breams Buildings. (This area was hit particularly hard in the Blitz so there was a lot of post-war rebuilding which has been undergoing redevelopment in recent years). Anyway just here on Breams Buildings is what remains of the overflow burial ground for St Dunstan-in-the-West Church (which we shall come to later) dating back to at least the 17th century.

Turning right on Breams Buildings returns us to Chancery Lane where to south you have the Law Society’s Hall on the west side and King’s College Maughan Library to the east. The Law Society is the professional association representing the interests of the UK’s solicitors (barristers have the Bar Council). It was founded in 1825 then acquired its first Royal Charter six years later as “The Society of Attorneys, Solicitors, Proctors and others not being Barristers, practising in the Courts of Law and Equity of the United Kingdom”. No doubt to everyone’s relief, a further Royal Charter in 1903 changed this to simply “The Law Society”. Women members were first admitted in 1922. It’s not entirely obvious from the pictures below but today the building is also home to the swanky 113 Restaurant.

The neo-Gothic Maughan Library building was originally built between 1851 and 1858, to a design of architect Sir James Pennethorne, in order to house the Public Record Office. The PRO had been formed in 1838 to streamline the maintenance of government and court records. The Domesday Book was one of the records transferred here, in 1859 from Westminster Abbey. It now resides at the National Archives in Kew, the successor to the PRO, formed in 2003 when that merged with the Historical Manuscripts Commission. King’s College took over the building in 2001 to create the largest new university library in Britain since WW2 with a £35m renovation. The library is named after, Sir Deryck Maughan, an alumnus and major benefactor of King’s College.

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The library contains a dodecagonal reading room which features in The Da Vinci Code (I’m sure the University is delighted with that !). The bronze statue of Confucius in the garden was donated in 2010 by the Confucian Academy to mark the official launch of the Lau China Institute.

Entering Fleet Street from Chancery Lane and turning east we reach the aforementioned St Dunstan-in-the West church. There has been a church on this site since around the turn of the first millennium, named in honour of St Dunstan who was elected as Archbishop of Canterbury in 960 and was instrumental in bringing about peace with the Danes. That original church lasted right up until the early 19th century when it was rebuilt in 1831. The most well known feature of the church is its clock, which dates from 1671, and was the first public clock in London to have a minute hand. Figures of two giants strike the hours and quarters, and turn their heads. The courtyard also contains statues of King Lud, the possibly mythical ruler of pre-Roman times, and his sons. Lud gave his name to Ludgate, one of the original gateways to the City of London, where these statues stood before they were moved to the church. Above the porch where they hide away is a statue of Queen Elizabeth I from 1586, the only one known to have been carved during her reign.

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As well as being an Anglican church, St Dunstan’s is home to the Romanian Orthodox Church in London. The beautiful iconostasis (altar screen) was brought here from a monastery in Bucharest in 1966. The high altar and reredos are Flemish woodwork dating from the seventeenth century. The church hosts classical music recitals on Wednesday lunchtimes so I was fortunate enough (along, sadly, with only about half a dozen other people) to hear a young pianist from the Guildhall giving the ivories a proper working over.

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Fleet Street is of course synonymous with the newspaper and magazine publishing industry even though the actual printing presses and the businesses that ran them have long since departed. In the pictures of the exterior of the church you will have seen glimpses of its next door neighbour, the London office of Dundee-based D.C Thomson, best known as the publisher of the Beano and the Dandy. Thomson also print a number of Scottish regional newspapers and when in 2016 they relocated the two London-based correspondents for their Sunday Post paper its was perceived as being the very final end of newspaper journalism on Fleet Street.

Heading back up Fetter Lane we pass, on the corner with Rolls Buildings, a statue to the radical English parliamentarian John Wilkes (1725 – 1797). Wilkes was expelled from Parliament on several occasions for his outspoken views but he was far from your typical social reformer. As well as being a member of the Hell-Fire Club, infamous for its debauched gatherings and Black Mass rituals he was also not beyond voter bribery in his efforts to get elected to the Commons. In 1754 he stood for election in the constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed and was unsuccessful despite bribing a ship’s captain to land a boatload of opposition voters coming from London in Norway instead of Berwick.

Forking right into New Fetter Lane and following this to its northern end we then turn tight into the heart of the modern developments I referenced previously. So we can move rapidly through Bartlett Court, Thavies Inn, St Andrew Street, the upper part of Shoe Lane, New Square, Great New Street, Nevil Lane, West Harding Street and Red Lion Court with nothing to detain us apart from this, frankly quite unexciting, water feature in New Square.

So now we’re back on Fleet Street and the next little alleyway to the east, Johnson’s Court, will via a rather torturous route take us appropriately up to Gough Square where we finally encounter the house occupied by Dr Samuel Johnson (1709 – 1784) while he was compiling his dictionary. That was during the years from 1747 until 1755 when the dictionary was published. It wasn’t the first dictionary of the English language produced but it was far greater in scope and erudition than any of its predecessors. Its pages were nearly 18 inches (46 cm) tall, and the book was 20 inches (51 cm) wide when opened; it contained 42,773 entries and it sold for the (then) extravagant price of £4 10s. Not surprisingly therefore it didn’t sell terribly well and Johnson and his publishers were forced to rely on subsequent abridged versions to make any money from it. Johnson had married Elizabeth Porter, who was 20 years his senior, in 1735 and when she died in 1752, Francis Barber, a former slave from Jamaica, joined his household as a servant along with his wife and children.. He lived with Johnson for more than 30 years and was ultimately named as his heir.

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On the opposite side of Gough Square is a statue of Dr Johnson’s favourite cat, Hodge, unveiled in 1997 by the Lord Mayor. The statue shows Hodge sitting next to a pair of empty oyster shells on top of a copy of Johnson’s dictionary, with the inscription “a very fine cat indeed”. Unlike today, in Johnson’s time oysters were plentiful around the coasts of England and so cheap that they were a staple food of the poor (and cats).

Moving on we wind our way through Pemberton Row, East Harding Street, Gunpowder Square, Hind Court, St Dunstan’s Court and Bolt Court dipping in and out of Fleet Street until we reach the Grade II listed Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese pub at no.145. Reportedly there has been a pub here since 1538 and according to the sign outside the current hostelry dates from 1667 when it was rebuilt after the Great Fire. Inside the pub is a warren of numerous wood-panelled rooms all deprived of natural lighting which lends a sombre, conspiratorial air even when the several open fireplaces are lit in the winter. Past patrons of the pub are said to include the ubiquitous Charles Dickens along with Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, P.G Wodehouse and G.K Chesterton. Dr Johnson must also have been a regular though his writings coyly neglect to mention it by name.

Running up the side of the pub is Wine Office Court at the entrance to which is affixed this handy resumé of its history (from where you will see I nicked the opening to this post).

We follow Wine Office Court up to Printer Street and then return to Fleet Street via Little New Street and the lower section of Shoe Lane (shown below).

Now we’re right in the epicentre of Fleet Street‘s historic association with the Fourth Estate as we emerge in between Peterborough Court, the former home of the Daily Telegraph at nos. 141-135 and the Daily Express building at 128-121. These two very different looking buildings are both icons of the Art Deco age and both Grade II listed. Peterborough Court, with its “monumental facade” and Egyptian themed decoration, was built in 1927-8 and designed by architect Thomas Smith Tait. The Telegraph group decamped in the 1980’s post-Wapping and this is now the European HQ of mega-Investment bank Goldmans Sachs (who reputedly pay rent of £18m a year to the Qatari owners of the building).

The slightly younger Daily Express building with its striking black vitrolite panelling was built in 1931-2 and designed by architects Ellis and Clarke with the assistance of Sir Owen Williams. The flamboyant lobby, designed by Robert Atkinson, includes plaster reliefs by Eric Aumonier, silver and gilt decorations, a magnificent silvered pendant lamp and an oval staircase. The drawn curtains on the ground floor ensure that this, one of the very finest masterpieces of British Art-Deco, is invisible to the public except on Open House weekend. If you’ve never seen it I would urge you to seek out that opportunity (as I did many years ago though I couldn’t locate the photographs I took at the time so the one below is courtesy of http://manchesterhistory.net/architecture/1930/dailyexpress.html.)

The Express Group left the building in 1989 and following a major redevelopment of the site in the nineties it was also let to Goldman Sachs in 2000.

Beyond the Daily Express Building we turn north again up Poppin’s Court into St Bride Street from where we criss-cross into Farringdon Street via Harp Alley, Stonecutter Court and Plumtree Court before finishing up under the Holborn Viaduct whence we shall return in the not-too-distant future.

Day 35 – Victoria Embankment – Aldwych – Somerset House

Not that many actual streets ticked off today but a reasonable distance covered and yet again a wealth of material to relay. It was also a fabulously bright (if cold) day as you will gather from the photographs. We start with a stroll through Victoria Embankment Gardens before doubling back and then dodging the joggers on the riverside promenade up to Waterloo Bridge. After that we head north to Aldwych and circle round to get back to Somerset House before ducking down onto the Embankment again and continuing eastward as far as Temple tube.

The Victoria Embankment, as you might surmise from the name, is one of the great engineering feats of the Victorian era. The driving force behind this was the desire to improve the capital’s sanitation system by the creation of a new super sewer running west to east into which all other sewers would empty rather than into the Thames. This scheme gained the backing of Parliament when the dry summer of 1858 created what was known as “the Great Stink” with the raw sewage building up in the river making the atmosphere in the Houses of Parliament intolerable. Work began in 1864 and was completed in 1870. Embankment walls were built close to the low-water mark and the area behind them filled in, making made space not only for the sewer but also for a road and for the new, partially underground, District Line. It also allowed for the creation of Victoria Embankment Gardens where our journey today begins.

Prior to the construction of the Embankment this gateway on the topside of the gardens stood on the north bank of the river. Known as the York Watergate it was built in 1826 for our old friend George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham and, as we have reported previously, King James I’s “favourite”. Built as a point of access from Villiers’ garden to the river, the Watergate was created by Sir Balthazar Gerbier who modelled it on the Fontaine de Medicis at the Palais de Luxembourg.

First of several statues in the gardens is that of Robert “Rabbie” Burns (1759 -1796) to all intents and purposes the national poet of Scotland. This is the only statue of Burns in England whereas there are 16 in the USA and 9 in Canada. Oddly the Soviet Union was the first country to put him on a commemorative stamp (in 1956). There is also a crater on Mercury named after him.

In the middle of the gardens stands this memorial to the Imperial Camel Corps which was comprised of battalions made up of British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian soldiers and formed part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in WWI. In total the brigade deployed around 4,800 camels which, fully loaded, could cross the desert at between three and six miles an hour. The corps was disbanded after the war.

Continuing east through the gardens there are further memorials to : Sir Wilfred Lawson (1829 -1906) Liberal politician and temperance campaigner; Robert Raikes (1736 – 1811) philanthropist and founder of the Sunday school movement and Sir Arthur Sullivan (of popular duo Gilbert & Sullivan) who we have encountered before hereabouts. On the south side there is also Portland stone monument (listed grade II) designed by Edward Lutyens (1869-1944), erected to the memory of Major General Lord Cheylesmore, soldier, administrator, and philanthropist which incorporates a small water garden complete with Koi carp (and very popular with the local pigeons). On the north side in contrast there’s a rather odd little lilting hut whose function is not entirely clear. All in all the collection of memorials in the gardens is pretty random; though none the worse for that.

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Leaving the gardens and heading back west along the Embankment we pass the monument created by Blomfield and Victor Rousseau as an expression of thanks to the British nation from the people of Belgium for this country’s part in the liberation of Europe in 1944-5.

Back at Embankment tube station we cross the road to the riverside walk. You have to feel a bit sorry for W.S Gilbert (the other half of Gilbert & Sullivan) since, whereas his musical partner gets a full bust job with a half-naked floozy draped across the plinth, all he gets is this somewhat unremarkable plaque on the wall by Hungerford Bridge.

In 1878 Victoria Embankment became the first street in Britain to be permanently lit by electricity. The lampposts with their distinctive entwined fish (sturgeons apparently) on the bases were designed by George John Vulliamy.

Vuilliamy also designed the faux-Egyptian cast- bronze Sphinxes that flank the most famous landmark on this stretch of the north bank of the Thames, Cleopatra’s Needle. This hieroglyph covered obelisk was created in the Ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis around 1450 BC. It stands 21 metres tall and weighs 224 tons. So it was no mean feat to transport it over to England in 1877 from Alexandria (where Cleopatra had had it moved by the Romans in 12 BC). The sponsor of this enterprise, at a cost of £10,000, was the renowned anatomist Sir William James Erasmus Wilson. The Needle was housed inside a massive iron cylinder which was then converted into a kind of floating pontoon, named Cleopatra, so that it could be towed by ship, the Olga to be precise. Disaster struck when a storm in the Bay of Biscay caused the pontoon to list uncontrollably and the rescue boat sent across from the Olga capsized with the loss of its volunteer crew of six. Cleopatra was left “abandoned and sinking” but remarkably stayed afloat and was found four days later by Spanish trawlers and then towed into port by a Scottish steamer. Its journey was eventually completed in the wake of the paddle tug Anglia, under the command of one Captain David Glue.

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As you can imagine the tribulations of Cleo’s transportation were front page news at the time as you can see here daily-news-19-october-1877-cleopatras-needle.

The presence of cormorants along the river attests to the cleanliness of the water in the Thames these days and the concomitant increase in fish stocks.

As we reach Waterloo Bridge there is yet another memorial, this time to the Victorian novelist and historian Walter Besant (1836 -1901). These days little more than a footnote in literary history, Besant’s work was extremely popular in his own lifetime. His novel, All Sorts and Conditions of Men, about the working-class inhabitants of London’s East End slums sold 250,000 copies and introduced a vogue for so-called “slum fiction” in the last decades of the Victorian era.

Climb the steps up onto Lancaster Place and head up to Aldwych on the other side of the road from Somerset House.

The Waldorf Hotel on Aldwych was established in 1908 by William Waldorf Astor of the fabulously wealthy and well-connected Astor Family who had arrived in England in the late 18th century from Walldorf in Germany (natch !) before heading west to America. At the time he had the Waldorf’s namesake in New York built in 1890 Astor was reputedly the richest man in America.

Opposite the Waldorf, now part of the Hilton empire, stands India House; home to the Indian High Commission in London (or embassy if you prefer). Designed by Sir Herbert Baker the building was inaugurated in 1930 by King George V. The decorations on the outside of the building represent the various states of India, as they were under the Raj. The closest one in the picture below signifies Madras. Every time I go past here there seems to be some form of demonstration going on but I didn’t manage to ascertain what this one was about.

Duck round the corner down the steps into India Place where there is a bust of Nehru which was unveiled by John Major in 1991. That year also saw the fatal stabbing of 26 year old D.C Jim Morrison, just yards away, trying to arrest a thief while off duty. His killer has never been found.

India Place morphs into Montreal Place and emerges on the Strand opposite to north entrance to Somerset House.

Turning east we almost immediately pass by the church of St Mary-le-Strand which now sits on a traffic island in the middle of the Strand (stranded you could say). This is another one of the churches built at the start of the 18th century under the “Commission for the building of fifty new churches”. The steeple was completed in September 1717, but the church was not consecrated for use until 1723. Bonnie Prince Charlie is alleged to have renounced his Roman Catholic faith here in favour of Anglicanism during a secret visit to London in 1750.

Beyond the church we turn left up Melbourne Place then left again to arrive at the front of Bush House. The building, opened in 1925, was designed by the American architect Harvey Corbett and financed by an Anglo-American trading organisation headed by Irving T. Bush, hence the name. By the end of that decade Bush House had been declared the ‘most expensive building in the world’, having cost around $10 million. The BBC World Service (or the Empire Service as it was then), with which the building is indelibly associated, first moved some of its operations here in 1940 and had fully taken the place over by the late 1950’s. Given the nature and purpose of the World Service the inscription made above the main portico by the original owners, “to the friendship of English-speaking peoples” was always something of an embarrassment to the BBC. By 1972 more than 750 hours of programming a week in 40 languages from French to Somali were being broadcast from Bush House. In 2012 the BBC departed and World Service staff were transferred to new offices on the Broadcasting House site. The building has been taken over by King’s College as an extension to its Strand campus.

Doubling back round the arc of Aldwych brings us to Australia House which is, yes you’ve guessed it, the home of the Australian High Commission – both the oldest Australian diplomatic mission and the longest continuously occupied foreign mission in London. Construction of the building began in 1913 but it was only fully completed just after the end of WWI (for obvious reasons). The two sculptural groups that flank the entrance are named The Awakening of Australia and The Prosperity of Australia and are the work of the Australian artist Harold Parker. The flashing chap on the roof is Phoebus driving the horses of the sun the creation of another Australian sculptor, Bertram Mackennal. The building’s luxuriant interior (merely glimpsed below) was used at the setting for Gringott’s Wizarding bank in the first Harry Potter film.

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Turning the corner back onto the Strand we pass what was the entrance to the now disused Aldwych tube station (originally called Strand station). The station sat on a branch line of the Piccadilly Line and although there were various plans to extend this it remained just a single-stop shuttle from Holborn up until closure in 1994 (having only operated during peak hours for the 32 years previous to that). Due to its self-contained nature (and the fact it was closed most of the time) the station was always in high demand for film and TV productions. This has continued post-closure with Atonement, 28 Weeks Later, Mr Selfridge and Sherlock amongst the productions to have shot scenes here.

Next block along is the rather unlovely main campus building of King’s College.

And once past that we’re back at the northern entrance to Somerset House. This riverside site was once occupied by a palace built by Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset in 1547 and lived in by Elizabeth the First during the five years prior to her coronation. When Anne of Denmark (wife of James I) moved in in 1603 it was renamed Denmark House in her honour. The palace survived the ravages of the Great Fire but after decades of neglect following the departure of its last royal resident, Catherine of Braganza, in 1693 it was demolished in 1775. Within a year work had started on a replacement designed by Sir William Chambers. The new Somerset House (initially just the North Wing) opened in 1779 with the Royal Academy of Arts as its first occupant. The South Wing was completed in 1786 and the East and West Wings two years after that. At which time the Navy Board and the Stamp Office moved in. 1836 saw the establishment of the General Register Office, responsible for the recording of births, deaths and marriages, with which Somerset House became synonymous. Then in 1849 the Inland Revenue was created from the merger of the Board of Taxes and the Board of Excise and took over Somerset House for the next 15o years or so. The Registry Office actually moved out as long ago as 1970 and HMRC finally left for good in 2011. In between times the Courtauld Gallery moved into the North Wing in 1989 and in 1997 the Somerset House Trust was established to preserve and develop Somerset House for public use. The Riverside Terrace was first opened to the public in 2000, the same year that saw the first installation of a temporary ice rink in the piazza that was once, ignominiously, relegated to the status of a car park for Inland Revenue employees.

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Arriving to find the dismantling of the ice rink in full flow I initially cursed my sense of timing (again) but on reflection the photographs are probably more interesting than they would otherwise have been. The (free) exhibition on in the South Wing – until 26 February 2017 – is the Eye of Modern Mali a retrospective of work by the late Malian photographer, Malick Sidibe, and is highly recommended. Superb accompanying music as well.

p1060324 — View across the Thames from River Terrace

Leave Somerset House via the Riverside Terrace and head down the steps on the east side of Waterloo Bridge to return to the Embankment. At the intersection with Temple Place stands this sadly rather obscured memorial to the godfather of Civil Engineering, Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806 – 1859).

Veer left up Temple Place and then again into Surrey Street which features some splendid red-brick terrace houses dating form the late 1760’s.

In the bottom right of the picture above you can see the entrance to Surrey Steps which leads down into Strand Lane which, according to the signage, is the site of a “Roman Bath”.

The provenance of the bath appears to be a matter of debate but most sources believe it actually originated as the feeder cistern for a grotto-fountain built in the gardens of the first Somerset House for Anne of Denmark in 1612 (some time after the Romans left Britain I think it’s fair to say). Shortly after the construction of the Georgian terraces, the owner of no.33, a Mr James Smith , converted the derelict cistern into a spring-fed cold bath which he opened to the public. It was only in the 1830’s when the management of the bath was taken on by one Charles Scott that the spurious Roman connection began to be advertised. The National Trust took possession of the Bath in 1948 and opened it to the public in 1951 following restoration. Nowadays visitors are only by appointment, otherwise you just have to peer through the very murky basement window to get a view of the bath (that’s if the outside light switch is working).

Back on Surrey Street is the old Norfolk Hotel which was patronised at different times by both the agents of the Special Operations Executive French Section and Joseph Conrad, author of The Secret Agent.

At the top of Surrey Street we turn right then head south again down Arundel Street. The Arundel House which now stands at the end of the eastern side of the street is a 19th century Tudor revival-style building which is currently the HQ for the International Institute of Strategic Studies. It takes its name from the Arundel House which occupied this riverside site in the middle ages and was the townhouse of the Bishops of Bath & Wells.

We’ve now arrived at Temple tube station and the small elevated garden which sits on top of it affords good views of the Thames down towards London Bridge and the back of Arundel Great Court a 1970’s carbuncle that is in the throes of a long-running demolition and re-development project. In front of the garden on Temple Place is one of the so-called Cabmen’s Shelters. These green huts dotted around central London were originally put up between 1875 and 1914 by an eponymous charity with the aim of providing drivers of hansom cabs with somewhere they could get refreshments (non-alcoholic) without having to leave their vehicles prey to theft. Because they were situated on public highways the huts were not allowed to be larger than a horse and cart. All of the remaining huts are Grade II listed.

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So after all that it’s one final scoot along the Embankment back to Waterloo Bridge and we’re done.

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