Yet sometimes a street will shake off old associations and change its trade. Catherine Street was once known as the quarter for pornographic book-dealers, despite the fact that the saint’s name is derived from the Greek for “purity,” but then in the early decades of the nineteenth century it changed its trade to eating-houses, newsvendors and advertising agents. The Strand was notable for its publication of newspapers before that industry moved eastwards to Fleet Street, and then eastwards again to the newly resurgent Docklands.
Certain parishes were identified by the trades which were continued within them; there were poulterers in St. George’s, lace-men in St. Martin’s, artists in Holy Sepulchre without Newgate and timber merchants in Lambeth. Wheelwrights were to be found in Deptford, millers in Stratford and saddlers at Charing Cross.
Trades sometimes delayed their departure even when the streets themselves were pulled down. “Very curious it is to mark,” Walford wrote in Old and New London, “how old trades and old types of inhabitants linger about localities.” He gave the example of the silversmiths in Cranbourn Street; the street was demolished, together with the adjacent Cranbourn Alley, when suddenly shops in the recently created New Cranbourn Street were “overflowing with plates, jewellery and trinkets.”
The segregation of districts, within London, is also reflected in the curious fact that “the London artisan rarely understands more than one department of the trade to which he serves his apprenticeship,” while country workmen tend to know all the aspects of their profession. It is another token of the “specialisation” of London. By the nineteenth century the divisions and distinctions manifested themselves in the smallest place and in the smallest trade. In Hoxton there grew up the industry of fur-and feather-dressing, for example, and in East London Walter Besant observed that “the number of their branches and subdivisions is simply bewildering”; “a man will go through life in comfort knowing but one infinitesimal piece of work … a man or woman generally knows how to do one thing and one thing only, and if that one piece of work cannot be obtained the man is lost for he can do nothing else.”
So these workers become a small component of the intricate and gigantic mechanism which is London and London trade. A map of the “industrial quarters of north-east London, 1948” shows well-defined patches of light blue for “Camden Town instruments” and the “Hackney clothing quarter” as well as the “South Hackney shoe area.” A dark blue area shows the “Aldersgate clothing quarter” close to the “Shoreditch printing quarter” which is bordered on the north by “furniture quarter” and on the south by “East End clothing quarter.” These areas, comprising many small industries and businesses, were described in The Times London History Atlas as “the successors of long-established crafts which originated in the medieval city.” Then, as if in imitation of the conditions of the city’s medieval origin, other more outlying areas began to specialise in certain trades. Hammersmith and Woolwich were known for engineering and metals, Holborn and Hackney for their textiles.
Certain other professions migrate together, flocking over the centuries to new territories as if by instinct or impulse. It is well known that doctors and surgeons now cluster in Harley Street. But in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries notable medical practitioners inhabited Finsbury Square, Finsbury Pavement, Finsbury Place and Finsbury Circus, while the younger or less affluent doctors took lodgings in the immediate vicinity. They all migrated in the 1840s and 1850s, and Finsbury became a “socially deserted district.” There was a similar movement in the manufacture of hats. They were made in an area of Bermondsey known as “the Maze,” between Bermondsey Street and Borough High Street, together with Tooley Street, but then some unknown migratory instinct pushed “the grand centre of hat manufacture” further westward until it came to reside by the Blackfriars Road; why Bermondsey should thus be abandoned is unknown although it would be fair to guess that it was the result of some hidden mechanism involved in commerce. By some similar process the business of furniture-making removed from Curtain Road, Shoreditch, to Camden Town.
The phenomenon of trading streets and trading parishes can also be recognised on a larger urban scale, with the employment of “land use” maps; these demonstrate that the whole area was once divided into regions marked “built up area,” “clay pits (unproductive),” “market garden,” “pasture,” “mixed farming” and “grain rotations” in a remarkably fluent pattern of organisation. A map of eighteenth-century food markets shows a similar natural pattern, as if the very topography of London was determined by silent and invisible lines of commerce.
Why have the furniture dealers of Tottenham Court Road, still operating in that street after 150 years, in recent times been joined by shops selling electronic apparatus? Why have the clock-makers of Clerkenwell been supplemented by design consultancies and advertising companies? Why has Wardour Street, the home of antique bric-à-brac, now become the centre of the film industry? An intervening period in the late nineteenth century, when Soho became the centre of music publishing, may help to account for the transition but it does not explain it. Like much else in London there is no surviving rhyme or reason to elucidate its secret and mysterious changes.
A London Neighbourhood
A depiction of the “rookery” of St. Giles parish, in 1800; it was perhaps even more noisome and squalid than this sketch suggests. Note the pig.
CHAPTER 12. The Crossroads
The bells of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, according to a church report, “are in very fair condition, and, in spite of their great age, work very well.” They are more than three hundred years old, and yet are still heard every Thursday lunchtime. But the history of this London parish stretches back much further.
In familiar and almost characteristic fashion, there was a Saxon church on the site of the present St. Giles. Drury Lane, once known as “via de Aldwych,” was the main road leading towards Watling Street from the settlement of Lundenwic, or Covent Garden; at its northern end was a village cross and a chapel administered by “John of good memory.” Upon this site, in the first years of the twelfth century, were established a chapel and a hospital for lepers; they were dedicated to St. Giles, himself the patron saint of lepers. The establishments lay among fields and marshes, their contagion kept apart from the city. But St. Giles was also the intercessionary saint for beggars and cripples, for those afflicted with misery or those consigned to loneliness. He himself was lame but refused to be treated for his disability in order that he might practise self-mortification all the more fervently.
The invocation of sorrow and loneliness, first embodied in the twelfth-century foundation, has never entirely left this area; throughout its history it has been the haunt of the poor and the outcast. Vagrants even now roam its streets and close to the church there is still a centre for the homeless.
The grounds belonging to the hospital, which eventually became the parish of St. Giles, are now roughly delineated by the triangle of Charing Cross Road (formerly Hog Lane and, even earlier, Eldestrate), New Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue. It remained a refuge for lepers until the fifteenth century, when it seems that it also made provision for the very poor and the infirm; it was, in the words of a London County Council survey, a “peculiarly London institution.” A village sprang up beside the refuge, with small shops catering to the needs of the inmates; Gervasele Lyngedrap (linen-draper) is one of the late medieval merchants mentioned in the hospital records. At the time of the Reformation the establishment was dissolved, and the chapel transformed into the parish church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. The first post-Catholic building was erected in 1631, but by that time the nature of the district had changed. Always an ambiguous and ill-defined area, hovering between city and country, in the ninth century it had been on the Saxon highway and, as London grew more prosperous, its trade and traffic had increased; there were taverns and hostels for travellers. Another kind of wanderer arrived when, by proclamation of Elizabeth in 1585, many foreigners were ejected from the city itself and settled in the vicinity. These in turn were followed by the vagrant and the impoverished. Meanwhile, the position of St. Giles, outside the city and close to Westminster, attracted various notables who built grand houses among pasture grounds recreated as gardens. By the seventeenth century St. Giles was known for its startling contrasts between rich and poor, the latter clustering to the south of what is now New Oxford Street. It remained in that unsettled state for several centuries. “Numbers of the habitations seem calculated for the depth of misery,” one chronicler of the parish wrote in the nineteenth century, “others for the extremes of opulence.”