Other names can be enlisted in light of this radical connection. Tom Paine, whose Rights of Man became the unofficial bible of eighteenth-century radicalism, lived at No. 77 Fetter Lane. William Cobbett wrote and published his Political Register from No. 183 Fetter Lane. Keir Hardie lived at No. 14 Nevill’s Court, off Fetter Lane, at the beginning of the twentieth century. For 6s 6d a week he lodged in one of the oldest houses in London, a “late-medieval, half-timbered five-storey tenement building”; so he was inhabiting the history of Fetter Lane, although perhaps unaware that Cobbett and Paine had trod the same street before him. As if in implicit homage to that past, the statue of John Wilkes, the great London radical, now stands at the place where Fetter Lane and New Fetter Lane converge. It has the incidental merit of being the only cross-eyed statue in London, adding to the ambiguous status of its locale.
In the nineteenth century the lane suffered a fate similar to many other streets of the period; it was overwhelmed by the size of London, seeming somehow to become smaller and darker. “Those who live in Fetter Lane and the adjoining streets,” one church report stated, “are of the poorest and most irreligious class. The neighbourhood is simply a labyrinth of business premises.” This was the condition of many streets close to the ancient centre of London. The Inns were demolished; in their place were constructed a workhouse and a great General Records Office. Of the buildings which were to be destroyed by that Office, an anonymous surveyor commented that “Those in Fetter Lane are principally occupied by persons not concerned in lucrative business, and it is believed that none of the leases are for a longer period than 21 years.” It was always the character of Fetter Lane to have a migrant population. Except for the Moravian settlers, who knew that on this earth there is no abiding city, the pattern is one of transience.
And yet, in the city, there are always other patterns within the general pattern. In a street directory of 1828 there are no fewer than nine taverns listed; the relatively large number in so relatively short a street is an indication of early nineteenth-century London, but it also suggests elements of a mobile and perhaps anonymous population. In the commercial directory of 1841 there is a preponderance of printers, publishers, stationers, engravers and booksellers-some nineteen altogether-rivalled only by the proprietors of coffee houses, hotels and eating-houses. These are all trades reliant upon passing taste and what might be considered “news.” It might be imagined, therefore, that Fetter Lane was not a stable or a settled place but one which participated in the City’s usual uproar.
In a street directory of 1817 no fewer than three “oil and colour men” are listed. In the Post Office directory of 1845 are two painters and an “oil amp; colorman” and in 1856 an “oil and colour warehouse” appears; in one of his sketches, Charles Dickens describes a certain “Mr. Augustus Cooper, of Fetter-lane” as “in the oil and colour line.” Dickens may have discerned a remarkable coincidence of trade. Alternatively he was somehow divining the spirit of the lane in his usual fashion. He also mentions that “over the way” from Augustus Cooper was “the gasfitters”; curiously enough in the directory for 1865 appears a “brass finisher amp; gasfitter.” In that charmed urban space where reality and imagination mingle it may also be noted that, in a street where Lemuel Gulliver was a surgeon, two other surgeons are listed in the 1845 directory.
A sketch of 1900, showing the west side of Fetter Lane, reveals that many houses were of seventeenth-century date; but it is also clear that the thoroughfare was lined with ground-floor shops. One representative section, in a street directory of 1905, manifested in sequence a butcher, a dairy, an ironmonger, a tool-maker, a watch-maker, an electric bell manufacturer, a pub, a baker, a printer, a coffee house, another pub, another coffee house, a hairdresser and a map-mounter. Yet down the courts and alleys-Blewitt’s Buildings, Bartlett’s Buildings, Churchyard Alley and many others-there were tenants and lodgers who were often registered as “Poor,” “Can’t Pay” or “Won’t Pay” in the local rate books. In Nevill’s Court, where Keir Hardie lodged, once spacious houses were divided into tenements. Some predated the Great Fire, while others were built immediately after the conflagration, but they were characterised by small front gardens. In a report for the London Topographical Society, in 1928, Walter Bell noted how well tended these gardens were and suggested that “it is the poor man who keeps intact for us this fragment of London’s older self.” In that sense the vicinity was reclaiming its sixteenth-century identity, as a place of straggling courts and gardens. But in the early twentieth century “You rub your eyes and wonder. Can this really be the City-this hidden place, where people live their lives, and tend their flowers, and die? It is false that no one dies in the City.”
In Fetter Lane they do not die; they move on. It is clear from the records of the parish and the post office that businesses remained only for a short period and then dissolved. At No. 83, over a period of seventy years, there was in turn a razor-maker, an eating-house, a beer retailer, a coffee room, a printer and a dairy man, all passing away into the fabric and texture of the street. In the dwelling today, on the ground floor, can be found Tucker’s Sandwich Bar.
The pattern of small businesses persisted until the Second World War, when in 1941 firebombs razed the area. When it arose again, Fetter Lane reasserted itself as a street of stationers, printers and cafés. But all the inhabitants had gone. Now the remaining courts and alleys are lined with office accommodation and business premises, while in the lane itself the sandwich bars are a present reminder of the coffee rooms and eating-houses which were once so familiar a presence. But the principal sights, and sounds, are those of demolition and rebuilding in this lane of perpetual change.
CHAPTER 23. To Build Anew
In 1666 many of the citizens immediately returned to the smoking ruins, in order to discover where their houses had once stood; they then laid claim to the area by erecting some kind of temporary shelter. On the very day that the Fire was extinguished Charles II was informed that “some persons are already about to erect houses againe in the Citty of London upon their old foundations.”
Three days later the king issued a proclamation to the citizens in which he promised that rebuilding would proceed quickly but declared that no new work could begin until “order and direction” had been introduced. He then went on to formulate certain principles, the chief of which was that all new dwellings were to be built of brick or stone. Certain streets, such as Cheapside and Cornhill, were to “be of such breadth as may with Gods blessing prevent the mischief that one side may suffer if the other be on fire, which was the case lately in Cheapside.” The monarch also showed some concern for the health of his subjects by declaring that “all those Trades which are carried on by smoak,” such as brewers and dyers, should “inhabit together.”
Certain schemes had already been propounded, most notably by Wren and Evelyn, in which the reconstruction of London was planned upon a grand and elaborate scale. Wren proposed a series of intersecting avenues on a European model; Evelyn’s new city resembled a giant chessboard dominated by twelve squares or piazzas. None was accepted, none acceptable. The city, as always, reasserted itself along its ancient topographical lines.