View in Highgate Cemetery The old "Mother Red Cap," in 1746 The Assembly Rooms, Kentish Town, 1750 St. Pancras Church in 1820 St. Pancras Wells and Church, in 1700 Dr. Stukeley's Plan of the Camp at St. Pancras . The "Brill," Somers Town, in 1780. The Polygon, Somers Town, in 1850 Gateway of the Foundling Hospital Interior of the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital The Dust Heaps, Somers Town, in 1836 Highgate, from Upper Holloway The Roman Road, Tufnell Park, in 1838 The Gate House, Highgate, in 1820. Highgate Archway Gate and Tavern, in 1825 Lauderdale House, in 1820 Andrew Marvell's House, 1825 Staircase of Cromwell House, 1876 Cromwell House, Highgate Ivy Cottage, Highgate, 1825 451 312 The "Upper Flask," about 1800 456 313 John Keats 457 319 324 325 Tottenham Church, 1880 Views in Tottenham, 1880 Edmonton Church, 1790 Old Bow Bridge 558 "Tis hard to say-such space the city wins--Where country ends and where the town begins." "Prolusiones Paulina," 1876. Prefatory Remarks-The Building of the District-De Moret, and his Flying-machine-Nature of the Soil of Belgravia-" Slender Billy"-The Spanish Monkey "Mukako" and Tom Cribb's Fighting Dogs-The Grosvenor Family-Enormous Rent-rollsBelgravia and Bethnal Green compared-Lanesborough HouseSt. George's Hospital-Old "Tattersall's "-St. George's Place -Liston, the Comedian-Pope's School-days-The Alexandra Hotel-The Old Toll-gate at Hyde Park Corner-Grosvenor Place-The "Feathers" Tavern," and how George Prince of Wales was made an Odd Fellow there-Arabella Row-A Witty Lord Chancellor-The "Bag o' Nails "-The "Three Compasses" -- Belgrave Square- "Gentleman Jones"- Eccleston Street-Sir Francis Chantrey-St. Paul's Church, Wilton Place -The Pantechnicon-Halkin Street-Upper and Lower Belgrave Streets-Suicide of Lord Munster-Eaton Square-Chester Square-Ebury Street-Lowndes Square-Cadogan PlaceWilliam Wilberforce-The Locality in Former Times. YYAVING, in the previous volume, completed AA our peregrination of what may be called the interior gyrus-the innermost circle-of the great metropolis, we may now venture on a somewhat wider journey afield, and roam over that portion of the next circle-but still far from the outermost of all-which, not above as a sobriquet to Belgrave and Eaton Squares and half a century ago, certainly was not London, but as certainly now forms part of it. We hope, at all events, to find much that will be interesting to our readers even in modern "Belgravia;" but Knightsbridge and Paddington, Chelsea and Kensington, are each and all old enough to have histories of their own; and the two last-named villages have played a conspicuous part in the annals of the Court under our Hanoverian sovereigns, and in those of the aristocracy for even a longer period. We purpose, therefore, to traverse in turn the fashionable area which has its centre fixed about Eaton and Belgrave Squares; then the undefined region of Knightsbridge, and that portion of Hyde Park which lies to the south of the Serpentine, and formed the site of the first Great Exhibition of 1851. Then across Pimlico to Chelsea, rich in its memories of Sir Hans Sloane and Nell Gwynne; to look in upon the household of good Sir Thomas More; and to speak of Chelsea's famous bun-house, and its ancient china-ware. Next we shall visit Brompton, the "Montpelier" of the metropolis; and then be off to the "old Court suburb" of Kensington, familiar to all Englishmen and Englishwomen as the home of William III., and of most of our Hanoverian sovereigns, and dear to them as the birthplace of Queen Victoria. We shall linger for a time under the shade of the trees which compose its pleasant gardens, and call up the royal memories of nearly two centuries. Then, bearing westwards, we shall look in upon the long galleries of Holland House, and see the chamber in which Addison died, and the rooms in which Charles James Fox and the leading Whigs of the last three reigns talked politics and fashionable news; thence to Percy Cross, and Walham Green and Parsons' Green, and to Fulham, for a thousand years the country seat of the Bishops of London both before and since the Reformation. Then we will saunter about the quaint old suburban village of Hammersmith, with its red-brick cottages and cedar-planted lawns, and so work our way round by way of Shepherd's Bush and Notting Hill -two names of truly rural sound-to Paddington and St. John's Wood-once the property of the Knights of St. John-and so to Kilburn, Hampstead, and Highgate, and Camden and Kentish Towns, till we once more arrive at St. Pancras. With these few words by way of preface to the present volume, we again take our staff in hand, and turning our back on the "congestion" of traffic at Hyde Park Corner, which has lately been an object of legislation in Parliament, we turn our faces westward, and prepare to go on our way. The name of "Belgravia " was originally applied the streets radiating immediately from them, but is now received as a collective popular appellation of that "City of Palaces" which lies to the southwest of Hyde Park Corner, stretching away towards Pimlico and Chelsea. The district was first laid out and built by Messrs. Cubitt, under a special Act of Parliament, passed in 1826, empowering Lord Grosvenor to drain the site, raise the level, and erect bars, &c. "During the late reign-that of George IV.," observes a writer in 1831-"Lord Grosvenor has built a new and elegant town on the site of fields of no healthy aspect, thus connecting London and Chelsea, and improving the western entrance to the metropolis, at a great expense." Where now rise Belgrave and Eaton Squares, the most fashionable in the metropolis, there was, down to about the year above mentioned, an open and rural space, known as the "Five Fields.” It was infested, as recently as the beginning of the present century, by footpads and robbers. These fields formed the scene of one of the first, but unsuccessful, attempts at ballooning in London. De Moret, a Frenchman, and a bit of an adventurer, proposed, in 1784, to ascend from some tea-gardens in this place, having attached to his balloon a car, not unlike some of the unwieldy summer-houses which may be seen in suburban gardens, and even provided with wheels, so that, if needful, it could be used as a travelling carriage. "Whether," says Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "M. Moret ever really intended to attempt an ascent in such an unwieldy machine, has never been clearly ascertained. However, having collected a considerable sum of money, he was preparing for his ascent, on the 10th of August in that year, when his machine caught fire and was burnt; the unruly mob avenging their disappointment by destroying the adjoining property. The adventurer himself made a timely escape; and a caricature of the day represents him flying off to Ostend with a bag of British guineas, leaving the Stockwell Ghost, the Bottle Conjurer, Elizabeth Canning, Mary Toft, and other cheats, enveloped in the smoke of his burning balloon." ... There was a time, and not so very distant in the lapse of ages, when much of Belgravia, and other parts of the valley bordering upon London, was a "lagoon of the Thames ;"* indeed, the clayey swamp in this particular region retained so much water that no one would build there. At length, Mr. Thomas Cubitt found the strata to consist of gravel and clay, of inconsiderable depth. The clay * In this lagoon there were many islands, as Chelsey, Bermondsey, &c. Belgravia.] THE WEALTH OF THE GROSVENORS. he removed and burned into bricks, and by building upon the substratum of gravel, he converted this spot from the most unhealthy to one of the most healthy in the metropolis, in spite of the fact that its surface is but a few feet above the level of the river Thames at high water, during spring-tides. 3. Cribb himself, who had a lancet hidden in his hand, with which, under the pretence of rendering the bitten and bruised dogs help, he contrived, in a frank and friendly way, to open the jugular vein. A good many of the Prince Regent's friends were Slender Billy's also. Mr. Slender Billy died, however, much more regretted than the Regent, being a most useful and trusty member of a gang of forgers." The Grosvenors, as already mentioned by us,* are one of the most ancient of the untitled English aristocracy, their ancestor having been the chief hunter (Le Gros veneur) to the Dukes of Normandy before the Conquest. It was not till a century ago that they condescended to bear a title, but since that time their growth to the very foremost rank in the peerage has been steady and wellearned, if personal worth and high honour, combined with immense wealth, are to be reckoned as any claim to a coronet. The chief wealth of the Grosvenors, prior to the marriage of their head with Miss Davies, of Ebury Farm, was drawn out of the bowels of the earth in the north of England. Hence Pope writes "All Townshend's turnips, and all Grosvenor's mines." Manor of Ebury, the Duke of Westminster enjoys There can be little doubt that, in right of his in the kingdom. The current rumour of the day one of the largest rent-rolls, if not the very largest, sets it down at £1,000 a day, or £365,000 a year. Other noblemen, especially the Dukes of thought to approach very nearly to a like rental. Sutherland, Buccleuch, and Northumberland, are As far back as the year 1819, the head of the Grosvenors was returned to the property-tax commissioners as one of the four richest noblemen in This mine of wealth-the present suburb, or rather city, of Belgravia, for such it has become passed into the possession of the Grosvenor family in 1656, when the daughter and sole heiress of Alexander Davies, Esq., of Ebury Farm, married Sir Thomas Grosvenor, the ancestor of the present Duke of Westminster. This Mr. Davies died in 1663, three years after the Restoration, little conscious of the future value of his five pasturing fields. "In Queen Elizabeth's time," observes a writer in the Belgravia magazine, "this sumptuous property was only plain Eabury, or Ebury Farm, a plot of 430 acres, meadow and pasture, let on lease to a troublesome 'untoward' person named Wharle; and he, to her farthingaled Majesty's infinite annoyance, had let out the same to various other scurvy fellows, who insisted on enclosing the arable land, driving out the ploughs, and laying down grass, to the hindrance of all pleasant hawking and coursing parties. Nor was this all the large-hearted queen alone cared about; she had a feeling for the poor, and she saw how these enclosures were just so much sheer stark robbery of the poor man's right of common after Lammas-tide. In the Regency, when Belgrave Square was a ground for hanging out clothes, all the space between Westminster and Vauxhall Bridge was known as 'Tothill Fields,' or 'The Downs.' It was a dreary tract of stunted, dusty, trodden grass, beloved by bull-baiters, badger-drawers, and dog-fighters. Beyond this Campus Martius of prize-fighting days loomed a garden region of cabbage-beds, stagnant ditches fringed with pollard withes. There was then Penitentiary at Millbank, no Vauxhall Bridge, but a haunted house half-way to Chelsea, and a halfpenny Bridgewater, the annual income in each case being haunted house half-way to Chelsea, and a halfpenny in excess of £100,000. No other peers exceeded hatch, that led through a cabbage-plot to a tavern that sum at that time; but now, owing to the known by the agreeable name of 'The Monster.' increased value of land in London, and the steady Beyond this came an embankment called the Willow Walk (a convenient place for quiet murder); and at growth of the productiveness of the agricultural Walk (a convenient place for quiet murder); and at and mining industries, the owners of the above one end of this lived that eminent public character, properties have much larger rent-rolls; and the Mr. William Aberfield, generally known to the sport probability is that there are ten or, perhaps, a ing peers, thieves, and dog-fanciers of the Regency dozen other peers whose incomes would reach the as Slender Billy.' Mr. Grantley Berkeley once had the honour of making this gentleman's acquaintance, and visited his house to see the great Spanish monkey 'Mukako' ('Muchacho') fight Tom Cribb's dogs, and cut their throats one after the other-apparently, at least-for the 'gentleman' who really bled the dogs and the peers was Mr. no the kingdom, the three others being the Duke of Northumberland, the Marquis of Stafford (afterwards Duke of Sutherland), and the Earl of above-mentioned standard. of things, it must be said, from that which prevailed A very different state when Charles II. was on the throne, if Macaulay may be trusted when he writes of the year 1683 :"The greatest estates in the kingdom then very • See Vol. IV., p. 371. little exceeded twenty thousand a year. The Duke its new purposes. A report of the governors for of Ormond had twenty-two thousand a year. The the year 1734, for which we are indebted to Duke of Buckingham, before his extravagance had Maitland, tells us that "the hospital is now fitted impaired his great property, had nineteen thousand up, and made much more complete than could six hundred a year. George Monk, Duke of have been expected out of a dwelling-house. It Albemarle, who had been rewarded for his eminent will at present contain sixty patients; but, as the services with immense grants of crown land, and boundaries of their grounds will admit of new who had been notorious both for covetousness and buildings for several spacious and airy wards, the for parsimony, left fifteen thousand a year of real subscribers propose to erect such buildings as soon estate, and sixty thousand pounds in money, which as their circumstances shall enable them." These probably yielded seven per cent. These three extra wards have since been supplied at a condukes were supposed to be three of the very siderable expense, and in process of time the richest subjects in England." The building of this entire building has been reconstructed. From great city of Belgravia, for such we are compelled its commencement the hospital has been mainly to call it, fully justified William IV. in bestowing dependent upon voluntary contributions, not being on his lordship the territorial title of "Marquis of richly endowed like Guy's, St. Bartholomew's, and Westminster," which has blossomed into a duke- St. Thomas's. Fifty years after its foundation, the dom under Queen Victoria. subscriptions amounted to a little over £2,000 a year. The hospital was aided by one-third of the proceeds of musical entertainments in the Abbey. In its first half century it had numbered 150,000 patients. The present edifice was commenced towards the end of the reign of George IV., by William Wilkins, R.A., the architect of the National Gallery, University College in Gower Street, and other important buildings; but several additions have since been made to the original design, the latest being the erection of a new wing on the south-west side, in Grosvenor Crescent, which was completed about the year 1868. Viewing the great metropolis as a world in itself, as Addison and Dr. Johnson, and, indeed, all observant and thoughtful persons for these two centuries past have done, Belgravia and Bethnal Green become, both morally and physically, the opposite poles of the sphere of London-the frigid zones, so to speak, of the capital: the former, icy cold, from its stiff and unbending habit of fashion, form, and ceremony; the other, wrapped in a perpetual winter of never-ending poverty and squalor. But it is now time for us to proceed with our perambulation. Close by Hyde Park Corner, at the north end of Grosvenor Place, stands St. George's Hospital. It was built upon the site of a pleasant suburban residence of the first Lord Lanesborough, who died in 1723. Here he was out of the sound of the noisy streets, and could enjoy in private his favourite amusement of dancing. The reader will not forget the line of Pope, in which he is immortalised as "Sober Lanesborough, dancing with the gout." Mr. Jesse writes: "So paramount is said to have been his lordship's passion for dancing, that when Queen Anne lost her Consort, Prince George of Denmark, he seriously advised her Majesty to dispel her grief by applying to his favourite exercise." But this may be possibly a piece of scandal and a canard of the day. Lord Lanesborough's house was beyond the turnpike gate, and Pennant says it was his lordship's "country house." The principal front of the hospital, facing the Green Park, is now nearly 200 feet in length, and forms a rather handsome elevation. The building contains a lecture theatre and an anatomical museum. The expenses of the institution are defrayed by voluntary contributions, and by the interest of funded property arising from legacies. In the year 1880, including some special gifts, its income amounted to upwards of £23,000; and the number of persons benefited during the year was above 20,000. Mr. John Timbs, in his "Curiosities of London," mentions an "ingenious telegraph," which has been devised here for the transmission of orders through the different wards. "In the hall," he writes, "is a column three feet high, with a dial of engraved signals, and on the walls of the different wards are corresponding dials; so that when the pointer to the hall dial is moved to any signal, all the others move accordingly, and a little hammer strikes a In 1733, Lanesborough House was converted into bell, by which means about fifty signals are transan infirmary by some seceding governors of West-mitted daily to each ward, without the possibility minster Hospital. The old house for many years of error or the least noise." formed the central part of the hospital, two wings having been added to it when it was converted to The Atkinson Morley Convalescent Home at Wimbledon is connected with this hospital, and |