It functioned, then, as both entrance and exit; it greeted arrivals and harboured those who had been expelled from the city. It was in every sense a crossroads. A gallows and, later, a “cage” or “pound” were placed on the spot where now Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street and New Oxford Street meet. Beneath St. Giles Circus, as it is called, exists the crossroads of the “Northern” and “Central” lines of the Underground system. St. Giles has also been the crossroads between time and eternity. “For a shroud for a poor woman that dyed in the cage,” reads one notation in the churchwarden’s account. Even after the gallows had been removed, in the late fifteenth century, St. Giles was still the guardian of the threshold to death; all malefactors on their way to the “Tyburn tree” halted at the aptly named “Resurrection Gate” of St. Giles-in-the-Fields where they were given a bowl of ale to comfort them on their journey. It might almost be described as a local celebration, since St. Giles was remarkable for nurturing the hangmen of the day, as well as being the second largest source of those who were hanged. In the words of an old lyric: “St. Giles’ breed, better hang than seed.”
That final drink upon the rite of passage was appropriate in another sense, also, since the parish was celebrated or condemned, according to taste, for the number of taverns and the incidence of drunkenness. The White Hart, established in the thirteenth century, survives in name at least by the corner of Drury Lane, but many others have crumbled to dust-the Maidenhead in Dyot Street, the Owl Bowl in Canter’s Alley, the Black Bear, the Black Jack, the Black Lamb, the Vine and the Rose. The Maid in the Moon, off Drury Lane, has now been curiously succeeded by the Moon Under Water along the Charing Cross Road. There is another connection with alcohol; the present Grape Street is aligned with the old vineyard of the hospital.
This is also the neighbourhood where William Hogarth set Gin Lane. The tradition of the last drink or “the St. Giles bowl,” according to John Timbs, the author of the nineteenth-century Curiosities of London, had “made it a retreat for noisome and squalid outcasts.” But no description can match the outrage and despair of the eighteenth-century engraving. Hogarth has established the essential spirit of the place where vagrants still sit in small groups drinking ale from cans-the emaciated young man, the drunken woman with syphilitic sores, the suicide, the hasty burials in situ, the child about to fall to its death, all these reflect in exaggerated detail the reality of St. Giles as a centre of death-dealing drink but they are also uncannily prophetic of the early nineteenth-century slums known as the “Rookeries” which would arise on the identical spot some fifty years later.
Another calamity was visited by drink upon St. Giles-in-the-Fields in 1818. A great vat of the Horseshoe Brewery, situated just north of the crossroads, exploded and released approximately ten thousand gallons of beer; stalls, carts and walls were washed away in the flood and the beer quickly filled the cellars of the vicinity, drowning eight people. Gin Lane and Beer Lane met in confluence.
The cellars that proved so fatal have their own history. “To have a cellar in St. Giles” was a catchphrase for squalor and misery. As early as 1637 the churchwardens’ accounts refer to “the great influx of poor people into this parish … persons that have families in cellars, and other abuses.” These lower rooms acquired their reputation for foulness because of the locality itself: St. Giles-in-the-Fields was known for being “damp and unwholesome.” A parliamentary Act of 1606 had condemned Drury Lane and its environs as “deepe foul and dangerous to all who pass those ways.” A report by Christopher Wren complained of its “noisomnesse,” as it was surrounded by marshland, conduits and open ditches; and in the same period an inquiry at Westminster complained that the area “was very much overflowed with water” and had become “exceeding miry, dirty and dangerous.”
was dangerous in more than one respect since, from Drury Lane and the little courts beside it, emerged that pestilence which became known as the Great Plague of London. In the last weeks of 1664 the first people to be visited by that contagion were living at the northern end of the lane, opposite the Cole Yard where the fourteen-year-old Nell Gwynne dwelled. The outbreak “turned people’s eyes pretty much to that quarter,” as Daniel Defoe put it in his Journal of the Plague Year, and the sudden increase of burials in the parish led everyone to suspect “that the plague was among the people at that end of the town.” So this unlucky spot was the source of the great distemper which threatened to destroy the greater part of London’s citizens before being purged by fire. Many of the houses were closed down, and in his diary for 7 June 1665 Samuel Pepys noticed “much against my will” the red crosses daubed upon the wooden doors. The area was in a curious way blamed for the virulent disease-“that one parish of St. Giles at London hath done us all this mischief” Sir Thomas Peyton wrote-and it seems likely that its ambiguous status as a resort for the wretched and the outcast was now responsible for its dire reputation. The refuse of the city were, in a most threatening form, coming back into the city.
Yet this was not the end of St. Giles’s unhappy history. Waves of poor settlers generally inhabited its large buildings which over the years were converted into tenements and cellars. It is not too fanciful to suggest that the spirit of St. Giles himself influenced the journey of the poor to the parish of St. Giles since, as a direct consequence of its earlier history as a hospital, it was known for the scale of its charitable relief. The mid-seventeenth-century accounts of the parish note: “Gone to Tottenham-court Meg, being verie sicke, 1s. 0d…. Geven to the Ballet-singing Cobler 1s. 0d…. Gave to old Fritz-wig 0s. 6d…. Pd a year’s rent for Mad Bess £1 4s. 6d.” There are many references to relief granted for “poore plundered Irish,” to families “that came oute of Ireland,” and in fact that nation was to maintain its hold upon the area for two centuries. But the French also came, and those expelled from the city for vagrancy, as well as black servants reduced to beggary who were known as “St. Giles blackbirds.” In this quarter there emerged a tradition of mendicity which it has not wholly exorcised; as early as 1629 there were calls for “idle persons” to be taken up and within a generation complaints that the parish was the resort of “Irish and aliens, beggars, and dissolute and depraved characters.” Three generations later the area was considered to be “overburthened with poor.” The whole history of London vagrancy can be understood by proper attention to this small territory.