Just a few lines to let you know I am quite well and in the best of health I will write as soon as possible

loving hubby George xxxxx

Down below I will get around to supplying the answers to last week’s Underground quiz.

First, I’m going to feature some old postcards. These really were the WhatsApp of their day. The above example was a First World War postcard and would have taken longer to arrive. But within London, during the early years of the twentieth century, the postal service was so efficient - with multiple deliveries a day - many missives could be exchanged in a day, completing a whole conversation, just like WhatsApp.

“Dear Wife” above might seem a bit short and flippant but the red stamp means that it was passed by the Military Censor in 1918 and contains no references to George’s location or duties. George is telling the missus that he is still alive.

To Miss Coverdale, 134 Holmesdale, South Norwood - 31 March 1918

My dear Pet, Hope you are well at 134, glad to say I am quite fit in spite of living in a disused stable. It is also raining furiously which does not add to the comfort but I don’t mind so long as you are all going strong. Fond love Dad.

Again the censor has done their work with a big red stamp saying PASSED. Dad might be living in a disused stable but we will not know exactly where that stable is - apart from France.

Others were not so lucky. H Brown is in a German prisoner of war camp in Bayreuth. But he’s allowed to send notice to home that he’s alive.

Are we Downhearted? Very probably on the Western Front but chin up!

Away from the ravages of war, here’s some London-focused ones. Some postcard front designs were absolutely spectacular.

The number 20 bus took quite a route across town from Hammersmith to Norwood. There’s a board showing the Japan British Exhibition at White City which was held between May to October 1910. I would have loved to have received that postcard. I wonder what was written on the back?

This is rather charming and there’s a sign saying “The centre of this road is the boundary of the borough of Southwark”. Where could that be?

If you had the means, you could create your own postcard designs like these folk based at 19A Loraine Road, Grove Park, W4 in 1907. That father has a very thin head.

Hundreds of wonderful postcards are available online and in books such as Postcards From The Past which started as a Twitter account by Tom Jackson.

I could go on forever but I have quiz answers to impart. If you didn’t see the quiz, this is the ultimate spoiler. If you want to do the quiz, go back one post to the one published on 21 August 2026 and don’t look any further down here.

The Cryptic Tube Challenge - Some answers:

Angel → Celestial messenger

Archway → Curved passage

Baker Street → Pâtissier's thoroughfare

Barbican → A tin of Ken’s mate

Barking → Woof!

Becontree → - Come hither arboreal plant!

Belsize Park → Campanologists will know how small this green space is

Blackfriars → Dark monks

Blackhorse Road → Lloyds Bank’s favourite street in London

Boston Manor → Cheers! Massachusetts is where I’m from originally

Brent Cross → You’ve offended Ricky Gervais

Brixton → 1000 kilograms of building material

Burnt Oak → Quercus in ashes

Canada Water → Hudson Bay

Canary Wharf → Songbird on a dock is happier than one in a mine

Canning Town → Heinz manufacturer's place

Chalk Farm → Arable land common in the Chilterns

Cockfosters → Rooster keepers

Colindale → The valley of Mr Firth, actor

Colliers Wood → Coal miners might do so

Ealing Common → Being cured and getting better is becoming normal

Earl’s Court → Nobleman’s tribunal

East Ham → Oriental pork

Eastcote → My cloak is suitable for wearing at sunrise

Edgware → Kitchen goods like plates and dishes

Elephant & Castle → Pachyderm’s fortress

Euston → We have a problem

Fairlop → I’ve been arrested for pruning a bush but I think that’s OK

Goldhawk Road → Bird of prey glisters on this thoroughfare

Grange Hill → School of Tucker, Benny and Sudhamani

Green Park → Verdant garden

Greenford → Avocado Cortina

Gunnersbury → Marksman eats what he forages in the early autumn

Hammersmith → Bludgeon the forge

Hanger Lane → A byway to store items for your wardrobe

Hatton Cross → Bonnet atops an intersection

High Barnet → Tall hair

Holland Park → Dutch garden

Kentish Town → Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Dartford and Gravesend for instance. Definitely not Canterbury or Dover

Kew Gardens → Where snooker players go outside with their implements to rest for a while

Kilburn → Mackerel? Badger? Well, this one isn’t awesome

Lancaster Gate → Rod Stewart's missus stands at the entrance to her garden

Maida Vale → I created the bride’s headpiece

Manor House → Where I live in my home suburb

Mile End → Terminus of a thousand paces

Neasden → - The opposite act of Mother Brown once the song finished

Oval → Ellipse

Oxford Circus → Billy Smart sets up in the Thames Valley

Paddington → Peruvian bear

Parsons Green → Clergymen’s lawn

Perivale → Later on, Kathy Burke’s character married Batman’s ex

Pimlico → See “mackerel” but this one is “badger”

Pinner → Someone who posts notes on a community board in a supermarket

Redbridge → Crimson river crossing

Royal Oak → Regal tree

Russell Square → Cattle stealing in a quadrangle

St John’s Wood → No letters in common with mackerel

Seven Sisters → Sussex cliffs

Shadwell → Played by John Sparkes in Naked Video

Shepherd’s Bush → Herder’s shrubbery

Snaresbrook → Crafty entrapment of the Test vice-captain

South Ealing → All the vowels and only five of them

Stanmore → Can’t get enough of Spiderman’s creator

Stockwell → Farm animals can only get up from their watery home in a bucket

Surrey Quays → They might unlock the secrets of Guildford or Esher

Swiss Cottage → Low fat cheese from Zurich

Theydon Bois → - Laced up boots and corduroys? But these lads are from Essex!

Tooting Bec → - Blow that horn, Golden Balls!

Tottenham Hale → Flag down a taxi near White Hart Lane

Tufnell Park → Phil the former cricketer’s green space

Turnham Green → Zack Polanski helped do this to the voters of Gorton and Denton

Turnpike Lane → Dad’s Army character changes course in a byway

Upney → - Instructions for Mother Brown

Wapping → Used to be the biggest station on the East London line

Waterloo → Aqua toilet

Watford → Which particular Cortina are you after?

West Ham → That thespian family of Samuel and Timothy: bad actors according to me!

Westminster → Occidental abbey

White City → Pale metropolis

Woodside Park → Forest edge garden

More postcards

Postcard London: https://www.facebook.com/groups/414317558656834

Myoldarndtlilley: https://www.myoldarndtlilley.com

Once, in a pub quiz, the question “Which tube station’s name might refer to the hairstyle known as a ‘beehive’?” came up. To many groans from the participants, the answer of course was High Barnet.

It was clever as you’d need to know both your Mari Wilson and rhyming slang.

Well, I had a spare afternoon. Here are 80 tube stations in the same cryptic style. You might need some London words and pronunciations in your loaf.

To save you getting really stumped, the answers (but not the questions) are in alphabetical order. The final one is also the final tube station alphabetically. But the first one isn’t - Acton Town was too difficult to create a clue from!

The High Barnet answer is given in the list so at least you’ll know where the H section is.

(Two of the following are now Overground stations, just to add to the trauma. But both are ex Underground stations).

Good luck! Answers soon

Celestial messenger

Curved passage

Pâtissier’s thoroughfare

A tin of Ken’s mate

Woof!

Come hither arboreal plant!

Campanologists will know how small this green space is

Dark monks

Lloyds Bank’s favourite street in London

Cheers! Massachusetts is where I’m from originally

You’ve offended Ricky Gervais

1000 kilograms of building material

Quercus in ashes

Hudson Bay

Songbird on a dock is happier than one in a mine

Heinz manufacturer’s place

Arable land common in the Chilterns

Rooster keepers

The valley of Mr Firth, actor

Coal miners might do so

Being cured and getting better is becoming normal

Nobleman’s tribunal

Oriental pork

My cloak is suitable for wearing at sunrise

Kitchen goods like plates and dishes

Pachyderm’s fortress

We have a problem

I’ve been arrested for pruning a bush but I think that’s OK

Bird of prey glisters on this thoroughfare

School of Tucker, Benny and Sudhamani

Verdant garden

Avocado Cortina

Marksman eats what he forages in the early autumn

Bludgeon the forge

A byway to store items for your wardrobe

Bonnet atop an intersection

Tall hair (Answer: High Barnet)

Dutch garden

Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Dartford and Gravesend for instance. Definitely not Canterbury or Dover

Where snooker players go outside with their implements to rest for a while

Mackerel? Badger? Well, this one isn’t awesome

Rod Stewart’s missus stands at the entrance to her garden

I created the bride’s headpiece

Where I live in my home suburb

Terminus of a thousand paces

The opposite act of Mother Brown once the song finished

Ellipse

Billy Smart sets up in the Thames Valley

Peruvian bear

Clergymen’s lawn

Later on, Kathy Burke’s character married Batman’s ex

See “mackerel” but this one is “badger”

Someone who posts notes on a community board in a supermarket

Crimson river crossing

Regal tree

Cattle stealing in a quadrangle

No letters in common with mackerel

Sussex cliffs

Played by John Sparkes in Naked Video

Herder’s shrubbery

Crafty entrapment of the Test vice-captain

All the vowels and only five of them

Can’t get enough of Spiderman’s creator

Farm animals can only get up from their watery home in a bucket

They might unlock the secrets of Guildford or Esher

Low fat cheese from Zurich

Laced up boots and corduroys? But these lads are from Essex!

Blow that horn, Golden Balls!

Flag down a taxi near White Hart Lane

Phil the former cricketer’s green space

Zack Polanski helped do this to the voters of Gorton and Denton

Dad’s Army character changes course in a byway

Instructions for Mother Brown

Used to be the biggest station on the East London line

Aqua toilet

Which particular Cortina are you after?

That thespian family of Samuel and Timothy: bad actors according to me!

Occidental abbey

Pale metropolis

Forest edge garden

I was having a drink outside the St George Wharf concrete monstrosity and taking a look at Vauxhall Bridge. You can’t help but notice that all of the statues underneath the bridge are female figures. According to my on-the-fly Google query, they are “allegorical statues, four by Frederick Pomeroy on the upstream side (Agriculture, Architecture, Engineering, Pottery) and four by Alfred Drury on the downstream side (Science, Education, Fine Art, Local Government), installed in 1907, a year after the bridge itself opened. Each is bronze, roughly twice life-size, and weighs about two tonnes.”

As it was 1907, the female depiction came between Sarah Siddons and Florence Nightingale. But these were made-up women so it doesn’t count.

Four bridges downstream and we arrive at Waterloo Bridge.

Standing midway across, it’s one of the great views of London - St Paul’s thataway, the Houses of Parliament thisaway and the curve of the Thames laid out like it’s showing off.

Thames tourist boat pilots have long told their passengers that the white bridge ahead had been built by women. It sounded like the kind of story tour guides invented but it wasn’t. The story of the construction of Waterloo Bridge was nearly written out of history entirely.

The original Waterloo Bridge opened in 1817. Claude Monet painted it from the window of his room at the Savoy Hotel. He was a bit obsessive about the view of Westminster too, which he also painted from the same window.

By the 1920s it was sinking.

Uneven settlement of the piers had left it structurally unsound, and after years of make do and mend, London County Council decided in the 1930s to tear it down and start again. Architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott - him again! - was brought in to design a replacement.

Work started in 1937, but in 1939 the Second World War arrived, and with it the problem that almost every man qualified to build such a bridge was suddenly needed somewhere else.

The construction industry solved this the way most British industries did - by asking for ‘green labour.’ Nobody wanted to say the word women out loud, so they invented a euphemism that let everyone avoid saying it.

By 1944 around 25,000 women were working across the UK’s construction industry, and on Waterloo Bridge specifically, historians now estimate that as much as 65% of the workforce was female.

These were women in overalls doing the skilled, physically demanding work that bridge-building requires - operating cranes, welding girders with acetylene torches, pouring and finishing concrete, dismantling the old structure piece by piece before the new one could be built. A witness who later came forward, whose father had worked alongside them, remembered “two grades of ladies”. Most were in dungarees doing the heavy manual work, and there was a smaller, more senior group in all-in-one overalls who were trusted to operate the vehicles and machinery.

The new Waterloo Bridge opened on 10 December 1945, five months after the war in Europe had ended. The Deputy Prime Minister, Herbert Morrison, stood up and declared that “the men that built Waterloo Bridge are fortunate men.” The official record of Waterloo Bridge’s construction contained no women at all.

Can I be charitable for a moment? The contractor, Peter Lind & Company, went out of business, and much of its archive was scattered or destroyed in the process. There’s no evidence of a deliberate cover-up - nobody sat in a room and decided to erase women from the record. Nobody thought their contribution was worth recording in the first place.

Thames boatmen did keep telling tourists that there was a rumour that Waterloo Bridge was largely built by women. The rumour might have stayed a rumour forever if it weren’t for Christine Wall, a historian who began investigating the story in the early 2000s alongside filmmaker Karen Livesey.

Together they made a documentary, The Ladies’ Bridge, tracking down elderly Londoners with any memory of the construction and combing archives for evidence. Accounts of women in munitions factories or on the railways were everywhere, but construction work, it turned out, had been documented almost nowhere.

In 2015, Wall found what she’d been looking for in the archive of the National Science and Media Museum: a photograph, taken by the Daily Herald in 1944, showing women working as acetylene welders on the bridge. From the interviews conducted for the project, she also found other evidence of the women of Waterloo Bridge.

The discoveries mattered enough that Waterloo Bridge was given an upgraded Grade II* listing specifically to recognise the women’s role in its construction. It’s a strange kind of retrospective justice - a bridge re-classified by Historic England because a photograph caught up with the actual story.

The photograph Wall found in 2015 shows a woman doing her job, welding torch in hand. It's not a dramatic photo but it's what took seventy years to surface in an archive nobody had thought to search properly, until Dr Wall went looking.

There’s an ongoing campaign, backed by the Women’s Engineering Society, to install a blue plaque somewhere on the bridge.

Notes

Across the UK and US combined, there are fewer than ten memorials specifically dedicated to women’s contribution to the Second World War. London’s most prominent, the Monument to the Women of World War II on Whitehall was unveiled only in 2005.

It’s on the junction of Cambridge Heath Road.

On the 1750s John Rocque map this junction was marked by a turnpike - Mile End Gate - crossing the main road. The Mile End Gate actual name ain’t on the Rocque map so don’t go looking for it.

Before proceeding in the eighteenth century, you’d get down from your seat, park Dobbin (your horse) with a nice nosebag and perhaps some water and go into the Blind Beggar for a quick tipple, pay the tollkeeper, get Dobbin ready and be on your way. Actually often you’d stay the night at the inn, only continuing the next day. Coming in from Essex was a tiring business and why not face the busy city traffic afresh the next morning?

Tollbooths nearly always had a pub/inn beside them for just this sort of trade. These are often still here - the Roebuck on Great Dover Street is another tollbooth pub as are the hostelries of Notting Hill Gate - but the tolls have gone away.

As usual the John Rocque map shows a quite eccentric version of eighteenth century London. The majestic-sounding Cambridge Heath Road was then called Dog Row - we can see the DO at the top of the map. We have a ducking pond somewhere behind the modern Whitechapel station. South of the main road east Lady Leek has made an impression on road namers - Lady Leek’s Grove and Lady Leek’s Walk.

Speaking of road names the ‘Mile End’ name is everywhere on the map of the 1750s - Mile End Old Town and Mile End Green.

That’s because the turnpike was the site of the original Mile End. The term Mile End was recorded as early as 1288 and the mile was related to the distance as measured from Aldgate.

These days Mile End is thought of as a lot further east - around the station of that name. In between Whitechapel station and Mile End station nowadays, the area is known as Stepney Green.

Zooming out and putting Mile End Gate itself in the bottom left of the map, we can see Mile End as it was - the area east of the turnpike and not west of the modern Mile End station.

Let’s travel slowly towards Essex and look at stuff on the Rocque map as we do.

Above the D of MILE END OLD TOWN on the map, there’s a building.

This was the Vine Tavern - here it was, photographed in 1870. The sign promises that it WILL be rebuilt. Let’s hope that it was to everybody’s satisfaction.

The Vine Tavern was situated on a site in the middle of Mile End Road, theoretically at number 31. There were references to the Vine Tavern by 1625. The pub was closed and demolished in 1903 as it was in the way of traffic. A bust of General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army marks the former site of the pub.

On that same map between Lady Leek’s Walk and the main road, there’s a house with a courtyard in front (beneath the TO of Mile End Old Town).

This was Captain James Cook’s house, now numbered 88 Mile End Road. Opposite his house were the Trinity Green Almshouses which are still there. These were built in 1695 and intended for “decay’d Masters & Commanders.”

A couple of fields are opposite Camel Row before a turning into Mile End Green (with this road confusingly also called Mile End Old Town - now called ‘Stepney Green’). Down this lane are The 13 Houses. They sound lovely.

The Wickham family originally operated as drapers, conducting their business from 69, 71, and 73 Mile End Road - where Camel Row is on the Rocque map. The adjacent property at No. 75 was occupied by the Spiegelhalter family, who were clockmakers and jewellers. The family had moved on from the mirror-making trade that their surname implies. In approximately 1892, the Spiegelhalters agreed with the Wickhams to relocate from No. 75 to 81 Mile End Road, allowing the Wickhams to expand their shop into the newly-vacated space.

Over the course of 35 years, the Wickham family gradually acquired the entire block, except for the Spiegelhalters’ shop at No. 81. Their plan was to expand their store, and they attempted to purchase the Spiegelhalter property from the next generation. Negotiations for a mutually acceptable price failed, resulting in the Spiegelhalters’ shop becoming a holdout. The new Wickhams store was constructed around the Spiegelhalter shop. The contract for the stone façade had been awarded before it became clear that the Spiegelhalters were unwilling to sell. To accommodate this, the right wing of the building was shifted to the right by the width of the Spiegelhalters’ land. The buildings are all still there but assigned now to various owners.

The fields of Mile End Green were known as the Mile End Waste. This was the site where William Booth preached against the dangers of alcohol in the 19th century. His sermons there led to the founding of the Salvation Army, an organisation dedicated to helping the poor and destitute who gathered in the area.

The Mile End Waste had long been used for political and religious meetings and gatherings. After a brief meeting with the king the previous day, the Essex part of the Peasants’ Revolt met here just before they gathered to move onto London itself.

On the corner of Globe Lane (now Globe Road) Stepney Green station opened in 1902. As we travel east along Mile End Road, we pass the White Horse Inn which lent its name to White Horse Lane, which still exists.

North of Mile End Road is the Jews’ Old Burying Ground. This was established in 1657 and was the first Jewish cemetery in the whole of Britain after Oliver Cromwell allowed Jews back into the country. They had been expelled 267 years earlier by Edward I. The cemetery was put here since Mile End was completely rural then and away from urban London.

The 1657 burial place gave rise to what became Mile End Old Town. The area was largely Jewish by the time the suburb was officially recognised in 1690. That name fell out of fashion and the Jewish community later moved into Spitalfields leaving their cemeteries stranded amongst gentiles.

There’s still a very wonderful little turning called Mile End Place leading up to the southern wall of the Jews’ Old Burying Ground. Behind its archway, it’s an island of tranquillity in an otherwise bustling area. Mile End Place was built for Charrington Brewery workers. It was situated amongst three of the Jewish cemeteries and opposite a Jewish hospital. A kink built into Mile End Place means that Mile End Road cannot be seen from the cul-de-sac of cottages here, even today leaving a rural atmosphere

Our Rocque map extract continues past Bencroft’s Hospital (almshouses) and the Jews’ New Burying Ground. The People’s Palace would later be built on the site of the former, and Queen Mary University in time would surround the latter.

Francis Bancroft founded Bencroft’s Hospital but John Rocque the mapmaker was a bit cavalier with the spelling.

The People’s Palace was the 1887 site of the very first people’s palace which provided local people with a library, education and recreation.

Walter Besant, a Victorian novelist, visited the site in 1882 and described it in his All Sorts and Conditions of Men. The story is of a dream he had, in which a great “Palace of Delight has been erected, where the lower classes gather for instruction and amusement” The story inspired several philanthropists and charities to fund this fictional dream into reality.

It was designed by Edward Robson and it was heated by hot water and lit by gas. The octagonal library could hold 250 000 books. It employed women librarians at the suggestion of Sir Edmund Hay Currie who was the chair of the trustees. The first two women librarians were called Miss Black and Miss Low. There was an iron spiral staircase that allowed access to the galleries and books could be sent down on wires.

The building was destroyed by a fire in 1931, and a new People’s Palace was opened on the current site in 1937, immediately adjacent to the former. The People’s Palace was acquired by Queen Mary (QMUL) in 1954.

Queen Mary college took over the deconsecrated Jews’ New Burying Ground and its gravestones are scattered nowadays in an area of students eating their lunches. QMUL built its Mile End campus around the old cemetery.

East again we reach the Regent’s Canal. I can’t show this on the 1750s map as it wasn’t yet dug. So here’s the Open Street Map of the area - the People’s Palace is at the bottom left.

The Regent’s Canal Act was passed in 1812. Noted architect John Nash was a director of the company. In 1811 he had produced a masterplan for the Prince Regent, to redevelop a large area of central north London – as a result, the Regent’s Canal was included in the scheme.

This Camden to Limehouse section opened on 1 August 1820. It allowed goods from the Thames to reach the canal network from east of the City of London, negating the need to pass through the chaotic Pool of London.

Beyond the canal we have the 32 hectare Mile End Park which is bounded on the east side by the Mile End Road/Grove Road/Burdett Road junction.

60 000 ‘Men of Essex’ camped here and met Richard II on 14 June 1381, during the Peasants’ Revolt. We met those fellows earlier in this tale.

Mile End Park was created after the area was devastated by Second World War bombing. After the Blitz had done its work, the first V-2 rocket in the area hit the Grove Road railway bridge in 1944. The 1944 blast killed six people, injured 42, and entirely disrupted the local rail line. An English Heritage Blue Plaque is mounted on the bridge to mark the exact spot.

Post war planners decided to create a park instead of recreating housing and industry.

The difference that the park has made to the area is quite stark.

The Green Bridge - a pedestrian bridge over Mile End Road to the west of the main junction - opened in July 1999.

East of the junction we have the location of Mile End station. The station is really in the area beyond Grove Road which should be called Bow. Mile End — the modern area - extends only so far west of the canal before us modern folk start calling it Stepney.

Mile End station is a mile again from the original Mile End Turnpike. It should be Two Mile End really.

Shameless Plug 1

Yes, yes, yes I write articles about London history on Substack. On YouTube meanwhile I’m walking between every London Underground station. Here’s my latest edited walk between Liverpool Street and Aldgate East. Historian Ruth Goodman makes a cameo appearance though I didn’t notice her and she didn’t notice me either!

Shameless Plug 2

I tend not to use Substack to sell merch. But should you want an Underground-themed mug for your coffee, well I do have a shop for that. But I won’t go around endlessly plugging the shop. Actually I’m not sure I’ll continue for too long with it as it costs me more to run than mugs are sold!

Not only are current stations featured but closed ones, lines that never happened, renamed stations and retro mugs for stations that changed lines. Enjoy Turnpike Lane then but you could be enjoying a cup of tea out of Elstree (South).

The Underground Map mug shop on Shopify

NOTE: This all started five years ago when I discovered that the roundel, typeface and other design features of the London Underground are definitely TfL copyright but that station ‘ticks’ and junctions aren’t, And that there’s a Windows font called ‘London Tube’ designed by somebody which is really really like Johnson Bold but isn’t quite.

Walk down St Mary’s Road in Peckham today and you’ll find flats where, in 1935, one of the most radical social experiments in British health history began.

The Pioneer Health Centre - nicknamed the Peckham Experiment - was the brainchild of doctors George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearson. Their idea was startlingly simple, yet ahead of its time: rather than waiting for people to fall ill, why not study health itself? Local families paid a shilling a week to join, gaining access to a striking modernist building with a glass-walled swimming pool, gymnasium, nursery, and cafeteria, all wrapped around a central hall where members could simply be observed going about ordinary life.

It wasn’t a clinic. It was a living laboratory - part social club, part health survey and part architectural statement. Children played, parents socialised, and doctors quietly logged patterns of wellbeing rather than disease. The project anticipated ideas about preventative medicine and community health that wouldn’t become mainstream for decades.

The Second World War forced its closure, and it never fully reopened. The building still stands, now converted to housing, a quiet architectural clue to Peckham’s unexpectedly experimental past.

The very first Underground railway in the world opened on 10 January 1863. After that date, the Metropolitan Railway could take you from Paddington almost to the City of London.

While the London Underground since then has been a continuum, much distant historically from us here in 2026 was still in the future when the London Underground opened:

• The American Civil War had 18 months left to run; slavery remained legal in the US until the 13th Amendment (Dec 1865). And Abraham Lincoln hadn’t yet given the Gettysburg Address (Nov 1863).

• The Suez Canal didn’t exist yet (opened 1869).

• Canada wasn’t yet a country (Confederation was 1867).

• Karl Marx was still in the British Museum Reading Room writing Das Kapital (Vol. 1 published 1867) — he lived in London and could theoretically have ridden the new line.

• Big Ben’s tower (now the Elizabeth Tower) was finished, but the Metropolitan Police hadn’t yet formed a detective force worth the name. Scotland Yard’s CID came later (1878).

• The Fenian dynamite campaigns hadn’t started but would later specifically target the Underground itself (1883 bombings).

• Dr Barnardo hadn’t yet opened his first home for destitute children (1867).

• The Second Reform Act, which widened the franchise, was still four years off (1867).

• Public executions outside Newgate were abolished in 1868 - but not before they had become one of London’s most popular spectator events, attracting crowds of 40 000. The last public hanging was of Michael Barrett. The campaign to abolish them was partly driven by the behaviour of the crowds, not sympathy for the condemned. So early Met Railway passengers really could have travelled to a public execution by Underground.

Broadhurst Gardens in West Hampstead may not be a household name, but back in the day it was the home of Decca Recording Studios which rivalled EMI’s Abbey Road Studios as the country’s leading recording facility.

Many popular songs and albums were recorded at Decca Studios. David Bowie recorded his first single, Liza Jane, at the studio in 1964. The studios also saw the formation of the original Fleetwood Mac, under the aegis of then-Bluesbreakers guitarist Peter Green, after John Mayall bought him studio time as a birthday present.

Neil Aspinall drove the Beatles down from Liverpool to London on New Year’s Eve 1961; he lost his way, and the trip took ten hours.

They arrived in London at 10pm “just in time to see the drunks jumping in the Trafalgar Square fountain”, as John Lennon described it.

John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Pete Best arrived at the audition in Broadhurst Gardens, formally known as a ‘commercial test’, to be headed by Mike Smith with Decca staff, on 1 January 1962 at 10am. Smith was late, suffering from a New Year’s party hangover as well as cuts and bruises from a car crash three days before Christmas, slightly delaying the start of the audition.

At the audition, the Beatles performed 15 songs chosen by Brian Epstein. Apparently they were rubbish and Decca turned them down as artistes.

Decca was founded on the original site of West Hampstead Town Hall at 165 Broadhurst Gardens, near the junction with West End Lane – built in 1886.

By the early 2000s, the building was home to the English National Opera.

Just down the road, on the corner with West End Lane, the Railway pub was the venue for Jimi Hendrix’s first London gig.

One of the (hidden) features of the road is the Broadhurst Gardens Community Meadow – a private area open only to the residents of the houses which surround it.

And underneath one end of the road, lies the original course of the Kilbourne Stream, a tributary of the River Westbourne.

The Herd of Hope is a permanent-feeling but originally temporary public art installation by artists Gillie and Marc, made up of 21 life-sized bronze elephants, a matriarch leading 20 smaller ones representing real orphaned elephants. They’re a fundraising and awareness piece for the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s elephant conservation work in Kenya.

The herd stood at Marble Arch for a year from December 2019 before moving to Old Spitalfields Market - mainly Bishops Square - in early 2021, and rather than leaving as originally planned, they’ve now continued to be part of the streetscape. What was meant to be a temporary trail became a fixture.

Each elephant carries a plaque and QR code with the real orphan’s rescue story, and Sheldrick Wildlife Trust UK runs free guided walking tours through the herd, launched as a recurring series in Spitalfields Market.

Thus a herd of African elephants has effectively ‘migrated’ across London (Marble Arch to Spitalfields) and quietly become part of the street furniture many passers-by don’t think twice about.

https://www.theherdofhope.com/

Eighteen years later, in 1915, a bronze Florence Nightingale was unveiled in Waterloo Place, and the newspapers of the day declared her statue the first of its kind - to a woman for goodness sake! - seemingly unaware that Siddons had beaten her to it.

103 years after the Florence Nightingale statue was erected, a volunteer editor attempted to create a draft Wikipedia article on 23 May 2018 about a woman called Donna Strickland. A Wikipedia reviewer declined the draft, leaving a moderation message stating: “This submission’s references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article-that is, they do not show significant coverage... in published, reliable, secondary sources.” At the time, Strickland was associate chair of the physics department at Waterloo, and a past president of the Optical Society, but she failed to clear Wikipedia’s strict academic ‘notability’ threshold.

Strickland won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with French scientist Gérard Mourou for their co-invention of chirped pulse amplification. Mourou had possessed a Wikipedia page since 2005, while Strickland’s contributions to the exact same work were deemed non-notable until 2018. Within 90 minutes of the Nobel Prize announcement, community editors successfully created and published her Wikipedia biography.

At the time of her 2018 Nobel win, only about 17.8% of biographies on English Wikipedia were about women.

We might scoff at the rampant statue sexism of the 19th century. But Strickland’s rejection happened in 2018 - in an encyclopaedia anyone can edit, about a woman who’d already co-invented a Nobel-winning technology. If that’s how fragile recognition still is, what chance did the women of Victorian London ever have?

Caroline Herschel’s path to astronomy started, by her own account, as something closer to conscription. Born in Hanover in 1750, she survived childhood typhus that stunted her growth and left her with vision loss in one eye, and her mother, illiterate herself, was vehemently opposed to educating girls, believing they should work only at home. Her brother William escaped to England in 1766 to work as a musician; in 1772, at twenty-two, Caroline followed him to Bath, training as a singer and performing as a soprano - a career she had little intention of giving up.

She didn’t get the choice. William’s hobby - astronomy - swallowed up the household. After his discovery of Uranus in 1781 won him a royal pension and a music-free life as the King’s astronomer, he assumed Caroline would simply transfer her labour from his choir to his telescope. She described her early months as an assistant astronomer as miserable and lonely, recalling that she was “trained for an assistant astronomer” and given a telescope “to sweep for comets.” She ground and polished mirrors in sessions lasting up to sixteen hours without a break, transcribed William’s observations, and ran the calculations that turned his raw sightings into usable data.

She became extraordinary in her own right. In 1783 she independently discovered three nebulae, including what’s now known as M110, a satellite galaxy of Andromeda. In 1786 she became the first woman to discover a comet, and went on to find seven more over the next decade - one of them, the periodic comet now called 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, still bears her name and is due to return in 2092. In 1787, King George III granted her a salary of £50 a year, making her the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist, and the first woman in England to hold a government position.

After William’s death in 1822, she returned to Hanover and spent her final decades finishing the work that would prove most lasting: a reorganised catalogue of 2500 nebulae and star clusters, built on William’s observations and her own. The New General Catalogue still used by astronomers today is largely based on her work. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her its Gold Medal for the achievement - no woman would receive it again until Vera Rubin, 168 years later, in 1996. In 1835 she and Mary Somerville became the Society’s first female honorary members, since full fellowship for women remained out of reach.

None of it seemed to soften her own verdict on her worth. As her great-niece recorded, Caroline described herself in later life as “nothing,” insisting all her knowledge and achievement belonged to her brother - “I am only the tool which he shaped to his use - a well-trained puppy dog would have done as much.” It’s a brutal line to leave on the page, not because it was true, but because so many of her contemporaries were quietly encouraged to believe exactly that about themselves.

Ada Lovelace’s connection to London is easy to miss - she’s buried in Nottinghamshire, beside the father she never knew, Lord Byron - but she lived her final years at Fordhook House in Ealing, and it’s there, working at the edges of mathematics rather than the centre of it, that she made her case for a kind of machine intelligence nobody else had yet imagined. In 1843, translating an Italian paper on Charles Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine, she didn’t just render it into English; she appended her own notes, longer than the original article, that argued the machine could process more than numbers - that it could manipulate symbols, music, language, anything reducible to pattern. Note G, buried in those pages, is now recognised as the first published computer algorithm. She signed the whole thing only with her initials, A.A.L. For well over a century afterwards, historians argued about how much of the insight was really hers, and how much was Babbage’s - a question rarely asked with such suspicion of a man working alongside a male collaborator.

Mary Anning never lived in London, but her discoveries did - wrenched from the cliffs at Lyme Regis and carried, sold, and exhibited in the city’s institutions, credited to the gentlemen who bought them. She found her first ichthyosaur skeleton at twelve, the first complete plesiosaur at twenty-four, and Britain’s first pterosaur a few years later, all while teaching herself the anatomy and geology that the Geological Society of London wouldn’t let her formally study, because the Society didn’t admit women as members, or even as guests at its meetings, in her lifetime. William Buckland and William Conybeare took her finds, and sometimes her own sketches and observations, into papers and lectures before that same Society; her name, when it appeared at all, often did so as an afterthought. She died in 1847, and the Society’s president gave her a posthumous eulogy at his annual address - a courtesy the institution itself wouldn’t formally extend to a living woman as a member for another fifty-seven years.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson grew up in Whitechapel and decided, in 1859, that she wanted to be a doctor - a profession with no female practitioners anywhere in Britain. Every medical school she applied to turned her down. She talked her way into nursing classes at Middlesex Hospital instead, sitting in on lectures meant for male students until complaints from those students got her barred. She found a loophole in the Society of Apothecaries’ rules, which didn’t explicitly exclude women, and qualified through them in 1865 - at which point the Society promptly closed the loophole so nobody could follow her through it. Still refused entry to the official Medical Register, she taught herself French and earned a medical degree in Paris instead. By 1872 she’d opened the New Hospital for Women, and by 1874 she’d co-founded the London School of Medicine for Women so that other women wouldn’t have to fight the same battle from scratch.

The Brontë sisters never lived in London, but their reckoning with it came to a head on a single July weekend in 1848, inside a publisher’s office at 65 Cornhill. Charlotte and Anne had written as ‘Currer' and ‘Acton’ Bell, masculine enough to dodge the prejudice they knew would meet women’s names on a title page, and it had worked rather too well: a rival publisher was now spreading the rumour that Currer, Ellis (Emily) and Acton Bell were a single author, trying to pass off a new book under a name that wasn’t really separate at all. To kill the story, the sisters travelled overnight from Yorkshire, walked to Smith, Elder & Co. lost for over an hour because they were too shy to ask directions, and produced for their startled publisher George Smith the letters he himself had addressed to Currer Bell. He asked for a signature and it matched. Even then, stepping back out onto Cornhill, they resolved to keep the secret from everyone else - “to all the rest of the world we must be ‘gentlemen’ as heretofore.” The pseudonyms had done their job too well to abandon.

Mary Ann Evans chose her pseudonym George Eliot for a more deliberate reason than the Brontës’ shyness: she didn’t want to be read as a ‘lady novelist,’ a category she considered a ready-made excuse for critics to patronise rather than judge. As George Eliot, working and living in London through her most productive decades, she built a body of work - Middlemarch, Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss - that’s still argued over as some of the finest fiction in English. The name held even after readers worked out who was behind it; it was easier, evidently, for the work to be taken seriously as long as the byline stayed male.

Sarah Siddons got her statue. Caroline Herschel got a medal nobody else would win again for over a century and a half. Mary Anning got a eulogy only after she was safely dead. Every woman in this piece did the work. London's institutions just preferred to wait.

Notes

• All images used are public domain

• As regards Caroline Herschel and her medal, the RAS didn’t admit women as full Fellows until 1916. Royal Society fellowship was structurally barred to her. Women weren’t admitted to fellowship until 1945 (Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson were the first). It wasn’t a personal rejection of her specifically - it was a blanket exclusion of women from the institution itself. Her brother William, of course, sailed into Royal Society fellowship in 1781 with no such barrier.

• I have to thank Sandi Toksvig for inspiring me to write this. During a presentation at this year’s Hay Festival she imparted the Wikipedia 17.8% biography fact. It made the audience gasp.

• Mary Wollstonecraft - Mary Shelley’s mother and buried in St Pancras Old Church cemetery - was one of history's founding feminist philosophers and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her entire life and career were profoundly shaped by the severe legal, financial, and social constraints placed on women in the late 18th century. Since she wasn’t a 19th century story I decided to keep the dates a bit tight and not go back through time.

You will know no doubt be very pleased to know that I’ve found the Queen’s Club. Hurrah! It’s hidden away in the back streets of Barons Court in west London.

If you move your eyes up to the swath of land which the dual-carriageway of the A4 ruined, you can maybe spot the mini roundels which Google Maps has added of Barons Court station (top centre) and West Kensington station (top right).

Sir William Palliser owned the land hereabouts during the 1860s. It was all vegetables - carrots, lettuce and green leaf things back then.

The map below dates from 1867 and is on exactly the same footprint as the Google Map shown above. Nothing 2026 is obvious - well, maybe the word Fulham on the workhouse. The road names here are unfamiliar - North End Lane, Old Greyhound Road and Great Church Lane. Locals back then would called the area ‘Fulham’ if it had a name at all

All those dotty fields are market gardens and orchards. I assume the Ordnance Survey are representing uniform sown fields of vegetables and equally-spaced apple trees with the graphic. William Palliser owned a good deal of the fields depicted.

Palliser’s thoughts hadn’t all turned to cabbages. He donated some land to establish Hammersmith Cemetery in 1868. This had its name changed to the Margravine Cemetery.

The London sprawl to the east was expanding, vastly helped by the accessibility which the Metropolitan’s first 1863 underground railway demonstrated. The District Railway - later the District line - got in on the act and they ran a railway through the area of our maps. On 9 September 1874, the District Railway opened an extension from Earl’s Court (opened as a terminus in 1871) to Hammersmith.

Somehow, the railway company decided that they didn’t like the village name North End. The railway opened a station on North End Road in 1874. The word ‘Kensington’ had a cachet as a name and the station became called West Kensington despite not being in Kensington or indeed, if it was, west of it.

The new trains on the new line sped on from ‘West Kensington’ to Hammersmith.

Palliser decided that his land would be better value as housing and he started to petition the District Railway to build a new interim station. There was a stately home in Ireland called Baronscourt. It is assumed that Palliser looked at the station name Earl’s Court and decided to call his potential new suburb ‘Barons Court’ in a play on words. It sounded posh.

It took until 1905 until a new station called Barons Court was opened, once housing had covered the area.

I’ve adapted the 1867 Ordnance Survey map to show where Barons Court station (BC) and West Kensington station (WK) would be built.

I’ve outlined the 1868 Margravine cemetery land in purple.

As for the green outline. Well, in 1883 and 1884 the vicar of nearby St Andrew’s church on Star Road (West Kensington), the Reverend John Cardwell, was granted permission to play some cricket matches there. St Andrew’s Cricket and Football Club was formed.

Palliser soon decided to sell this tranche of former turnip fields to entrepreneurs Evan Charteris, George Francis and Algernon Grosvenor. St Andrew’s Cricket and Football Club was evicted.

The three new owners founded the Queen’s Club there in August 1886. It was the world’s second multipurpose sports complex (after the Prince’s Club which ended up in Knightsbridge and lost its field in the process). As Barons Court followed Earl’s Court, the Queen’s Club followed the Prince’s Club. Theoretically the club is named after Queen Victoria, its first patron, but that naming is all rather convenient as an origin story. It had been a marketing ploy.

Among the initial sports offered at the club were real tennis, Eton Fives, rackets, football, rugby, cricket and athletics.

According to the Wikipedia, the first lawn tennis courts were opened on 19 May 1887, and the first sporting event was held on 1 and 2 July 1887 when Oxford played Cambridge. The club buildings were opened in January 1888.

The Queen’s Club went from strength to strength and is now the precursor during June to the annual Wimbledon tennis championships.

But there’s more to this green-outlined field.

The Reverend John Cardwell was no doubt a bit miffed about the eviction of St Andrew’s Cricket and Football Club.

Ever resourceful (apparently - I wasn’t around to verify), St Andrew’s began to migrate to a series of local venues without ever settling down. The team began to concentrate on association football rather than cricket and called itself Fulham Football Club.

On the banks of the River Thames there was a cottage. It burned down in 1888.

Fulham FC was once again looking for an area for a new ground and found the very overgrown area around the burnt-out shell of Craven Cottage in 1894 to its liking. It had to clear all the brambles to make space for a pitch. Fulham started playing at Craven Cottage in 1896, their first game against now-defunct rivals Minerva. Fulham FC has been there ever since.

One obscure patch of market gardens has given the world two famous sporting venues - the Queen’s Club which stayed there and Fulham Football Club which didn’t.

NOTE

In due course a road called Baron’s Court Road was laid out. Baron’s Court Road has an apostrophe but Barons Court the station doesn’t have an apostrophe, whereas Earls Court Road doesn’t have an apostrophe but Earl’s Court station does have an apostrophe. That’s quality London trivia — where else do you get trivia like that? (Answer: lots of other places)

It was a balmy evening, and the three of us walked from Tower Hill through hordes of people kitted out in Arsenal shirts. The football folk were decanting into various pubs to watch their team play PSG in local pubs. We meanwhile were headed for Ottolenghi in Artillery Lane.

As we turned a corner with the restaurant in view I realised that I recognised the building up ahead. Ottolenghi Spitalfields, it turned out, is the same building as the ‘Titanic newsagent’.

As I wrote here on Substack a couple of years ago, a mysterious figure called C.A. Mathew came out of Liverpool Street station carrying his camera. He walked around the streets of then-Jewish Spitalfields on Saturday 20 April 1912 - some days after the Titanic disaster - took some photos, had them bequeathed to the Bishopsgate Institute and disappeared out of the historical narrative again.

As Mathew’s 1912 Spitalfields tour continued, the local children increasingly gathered in front of his camera.

Enlarging a detail from the original photo shows why I’m calling the shop on the corner the ‘Titanic newsagent’. A headline is enticing passers-by to buy a newspaper describing the tragedy which had occurred just days before.

In 2026, this shop is the Ottolenghi delicatessen with the main restaurant situated to the right. It looks in 1912 that this was a house to the right and not yet a retail establishment.

We had our meal in the two hours it took for PSG to beat Arsenal on penalties and decided to spend some time lining up some shots from 1912 in 2026. I’m mentioning football as the 2026 shots have some people dressed in red and white.

It’s remarkable in 2026, how little has changed from 1912. The buildings are mostly the same although the owners are different. Street lighting has moved on. Artillery Lane before 1895 only started at the newsagent/deli - hence the legacy roadname sign on the corner. Until 1895, the street where the photos were taken from was called Raven Row, after that absorbed into Artillery Lane.

We found that the guttering could still be used to line up the modern shot (top right of old and new photos).

We set off to see what else had survived the years on other C.A. Mathew shots.

At the other end of Artillery Passage - the alleyway leading straight ahead from the newsagent/deli - we reach Widegate Street. Turn about face and we see the view the other way, back towards the passage.

Again it’s a case of the same buildings but modern people - certainly no children out on their own during the Jewish sabbath as it had been in 1912. Modern signage, a lick of paint, many more places to eat, pedestrianised streets.

The next location is particularly satisfying.

We are now at the corner of Sandy’s Row and Frying Pan Alley, one block south. Artillery Passage is the alleyway on the right in the distance as Sandy’s Row bends. I’m almost sure that only the buildings immediately before Artillery Passage survive but the road pattern is the same. The new buildings of Bishopsgate are in the modern shot.

Sir Rowland Hill devised the London postal area in 1856 on a system of compass points. So it’s Frying Pan Alley, E on the sign in 1912. During the First World War, the postal areas were further subdivided into compass points plus numbers so it’s Frying Pan Alley, E1 in 2026.

In the modern world Middlesex Street (a.k.a. Petticoat Lane) has been driven through the area and you can now walk it to Bishopsgate, cross the main road and look back down the street you walked along.

The flanking buildings of Middlesex Street (2026) and the former Widegate Street (1912) are the same, surviving all the changes and The Blitz. Further along Middlesex Street/Widegate Street, the new building marks the new Middlesex Street junction but the angle is the same as in 1912. The tower block is very different. I love the bus leaving the older shot.

The final view, in a way, brings us full circle. This is the other end of Artillery Lane featured in the first shot reaching Bishopsgate.

Looking down the lane from Bishopsgate, the building on the right is the same. That on the left corner is different but on the same footprint. The lane leading away from us I think are changed buildings but can’t be sure.

This was the end of our tour but we decided to perhaps do some more matching up in the future in different parts of London.

NOTES

• NASA, NASA, NASA! The USA so dominated the space industry in the west from the 1950s onwards that when many Brits (and other Europeans) think about rockets and spacecraft, NASA involvement is often assumed. But there’s a rich European tradition of astronomical discovery and astronautics - ESA (the European Space Agency) for instance has been going since 1975. is responsible for the excellent Substack, doing its best to showcase space endeavour from this side of the Atlantic .

• Back on the topic of Spitalfields, I decided to do a little experiment below. No current plans to proceed down this AI route

As with the Beatles’ A Day In The Life, where John and Paul both contributed snippets of a song without a home to create a new work, I have dozens of snippets lying around in draft form waiting for somewhere to use and include them.

Today is Snippet Day.

I have used three historic map sets of London and looked at the development of London docks. I was waiting to write about Tilbury and containerisation but that can wait.

Rocque - 1750s

On John Rocque’s map, the Thames in the Pool of London, upstream to Lambeth, downstream to Bermondsey and beyond is a working river in the most literal sense. Trade happens on the water. Ships anchored mid-stream for days, sometimes weeks, waited their turn at the legal quays - a handful of licensed wharves clustered tightly east of London Bridge where customs officers could keep watch. Lighters shuttled cargo ashore. On the map, the riverbank is dense with shipyards and repair yards, but there are no enclosed docks, no controlled basins. The river itself is the port, and it is overwhelmed.

Greenwood - 1820s

By the time Charles and John Greenwood surveyed London in 1829, something fundamental had changed. The West India Docks had opened on the Isle of Dogs in 1802, followed by the London Docks at Wapping in 1805 and the East India Docks at Blackwall in 1806. On the Greenwood map you can see these new geometries cut into the north bank - rectangular basins, straight-edged and deliberate, quite unlike anything Rocque recorded. St Katharine Docks, blasted out of a dense residential neighbourhood immediately east of the Tower, had just opened the previous year, demolishing over a thousand homes in the process. The principle of the enclosed wet dock - ships floating at a constant water level, loading and unloading in an orderly, secure environment - had been proven. Much of the activity is going east - downriver but the transformation is underway, not complete.

Stanford - 1860s

Edward Stanford’s 1862 map shows where that logic was leading. The West India Import and Export Docks dominate the northern end of the Isle of Dogs, Millwall Docks are under construction and the whole peninsula has been surrendered to the enterprise of organised trade. The Surrey Docks have further developed. Further east, the Victoria Dock - the first built to accommodate the new steam-powered iron ships -has opened a new chapter beyond Bow Creek - beyond the limit of the above map. What Rocque mapped as a chaotic, organic river port has become, in little more than a century, one of the most heavily engineered landscapes in the world.

The wharves are still there on the Stanford map, still lining the river. But that way was no longer enough. The wet docks replaced the wharves. In the 1960s, containerisation replaced the wet docks further out into the estuary in Essex. History - never the end; always a continuum.

Notes

Malcolm McLean, from North Carolina, was sitting in a traffic jam at Hoboken, New Jersey in the 1930s. He was watching longshoremen laboriously unloading individual items from a ship and transferring them to trucks, and had the insight that the entire truck trailer body could simply be lifted onto the ship, cutting out all the handling in between. The idea sat with him for years before he acted on it.

In 1956 he converted a tanker, the Ideal X, to carry 58 metal containers on its deck on a voyage from Newark to Houston. That’s generally considered the birth of the modern container shipping industry. He’d sold his trucking company to fund it, which was either visionary or reckless depending on your perspective, and built it into Sea-Land Service, one of the dominant container lines.

The standardisation came later and was a battle in itself - McLean’s original containers weren’t the universal standard. The ISO standard that eventually won out, agreed in the 1960s, gave us the Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU) as the base measurement. The standard sizes are:

• 20ft — 6.1m long, 2.44m wide, 2.59m high

• 40ft — 12.2m long, same width and height

• High cube 40ft — same footprint but 2.89m high

Port and ship capacity is still measured in TEUs today. A large modern container ship carries around 20,000+ TEUs.

Containerisation didn’t come from the shipping industry at all - it came from road haulage. The incumbents (the dock companies, the shipping lines, the dockers’ unions) were largely hostile to it, which is why it took so long to be adopted in the UK. Tilbury got its first container terminal in 1967, over a decade after the Ideal X voyage, and the London wet docks were essentially dead within a few years after that.

Most people who see it have no idea why there is a monument to a Russian tsar on a scruffy stretch of south-east London riverbank. Most people who live nearby couldn’t tell you much about what happened here three hundred and twenty-eight years ago, when Peter the Great arrived in Deptford for a stay that lasted 105 days and left one of London’s finest gardens in ruins.

The Tsar Who Came Incognito

Peter was twenty-five years old when he arrived in England in January 1698, and he was already, by some distance, the most physically remarkable man most Londoners had ever seen. He stood six feet eight inches tall in an era when the average sallow Londoner was five and a half feet. He travelled, officially, incognito - under the alias Peter Mikhailov, a minor Russian nobleman on a study tour - a fiction that required his entire retinue to maintain it with a straight face.

His entourage numbered several hundred people. It included four chamberlains, three interpreters, two clockmakers, a cook, a priest, six trumpeters, seventy soldiers (selected specifically because they were as tall as their master), four dwarves (quite the opposite), and a monkey. The Calendar of State Papers records, apparently without irony, that “The Czar is very much incognito here, and above all things desires to be so.” (The Calendar spelled him ‘Czar’ and I’ll spell him ‘Tsar’ just because I can).

Peter had come for a purpose. Russia in 1698 was a land power without a credible navy, and Peter had fixed on the construction of a modern fleet as the project that would transform his empire. The Dutch had the most sophisticated shipyards in Europe, and he had already spent time in Amsterdam learning their methods - only to discover, frustratingly, that the Dutch worked by instinct and tradition rather than written principles. They could not teach what they did not know how to explain. England was different. English shipbuilding ran on ‘art and science’, on technical drawings and documented methods. Peter wanted those methods, and he wanted them badly enough to cross Europe and sand timber himself to get them.

King William III - a Dutchman on the English throne, already keen to encourage trade with Russia - was delighted to help. He put the full apparatus of the English state at the Tsar’s disposal: access to the Royal Observatory, the Royal Mint, the Arsenal at Woolwich, the naval fleet at Portsmouth. He also arranged somewhere to stay.

The House in Deptford

The party landed at York House Watergate, the ornate riverside entrance just off what is now the Embankment, then still meeting the Thames directly. They installed themselves initially at a house on Norfolk Street. Then, in February, they moved to Deptford - to be next to the dockyards, which was the whole point.

The house was called Sayes Court. It belonged, technically, to John Evelyn, one of the great diarists of the age, a founder member of the Royal Society, and a man who had spent forty years creating what was considered one of the finest private gardens in England. The centrepiece of that garden was a holly hedge - four hundred feet long, nine feet high, five feet thick - on which Evelyn had lavished two decades of devoted attention.

Evelyn was not living there in 1698. He had leased it to a naval officer named Captain John Benbow, with strict conditions about maintaining the garden. Benbow, in turn, sub-let to the Russians when William III made clear it would be convenient. The first Evelyn heard of any of this was a letter from his steward, John Strickland, written in February: “There is a house full of people, and right nasty.”

105 Days

In the mornings, Peter went to the dockyard. He did not merely observe. A journeyman shipwright who worked there recalled in later years that “the Tsar of Muscovy worked with his own hands as hard as any man in the yard.” He had himself enrolled as a ship’s carpenter. He studied technical drawings, learned to read plans, acquired the vocabulary of English naval architecture in a foreign language. He was, by every account, an exceptional student - ferociously curious, physically tireless, and entirely uninterested in the social niceties that might have slowed a lesser visitor down.

In the afternoons and evenings, things were different.

Peter’s idea of leisure was vigorous. He visited the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where he observed Venus through a telescope with the Astronomer Royal, John Flamsteed. He went to the Royal Mint at the Tower of London four times - where the Warden was one Isaac Newton, though whether they actually met in person remains unlikely, Newton apparently having sent Edmund Halley as his deputy on at least one occasion. He attended the Royal Society. He visited the Arsenal at Woolwich, Oxford, and the naval fleet at Portsmouth, where the English laid on a mock sea battle specially for his entertainment.

He also, at some point, went to a Quaker meeting house. This is perhaps the most unexpected detail in the whole visit. The Tsar of All the Russias, a man who would later deal with insubordinates using methods that made his contemporaries blanch, sat quietly through a Quaker meeting in Deptford and then another in Gracechurch Street, apparently genuinely curious about their theology. He discussed with William Penn and Thomas Story the Quaker position on military service. No record survives of what he concluded.

The encounters with Halley were more characteristic. Newton, it seems, found reasons not to attend on the Tsar personally, sending Halley - then famous as an astronomer and scientist, not yet immortalised by the comet that bears his name - in his place. Halley and Peter, by all accounts, got on extremely well. They bonded over science and brandy, in roughly equal measure. According to one account, one evening found both men comprehensively drunk in Deptford, at which point Halley commandeered a wheelbarrow and pushed the Tsar of All the Russias through the garden at speed.

Whether it was through Evelyn’s celebrated hedge is not recorded. It would not have mattered by then. The hedge was already gone.

The Damage

What Peter and his party did to Sayes Court over 105 days constitutes one of the most spectacular acts of houseguest vandalism in recorded history. The bill was eventually calculated by Sir Christopher Wren, in his capacity as royal surveyor, and came to £305 9s 6d - a very considerable sum. It is worth itemising, because the scale of destruction has a certain hallucinatory quality.

Every floor in the house was covered with grease and ink; three new floors had to be laid. All the tiled stoves, door locks, and paintwork had to be replaced. The curtains, quilts and bed linen were torn to pieces. Every one of the fifty-odd chairs in the house was either broken or had vanished - almost certainly burned on fires. Three hundred window panes were broken. Twenty paintings were torn from their frames, the frames broken, the canvases perforated - apparently used for target practice. The bill specifically itemises £3 for ‘wheelbarrows broke by the Tsar.’

Evelyn’s pride, his life’s work, the four-hundred-foot holly hedge, was destroyed. The Russians had discovered the wheelbarrows (which had not yet reached Russia, and were apparently a novelty) and devised an entertainment in which one member of the party sat in the barrow while another ran at maximum speed directly into the hedge. Judging by the final state of the hedge, the game was played many times, with great enthusiasm, by a large number of participants. Peter also knocked a hole through the garden wall to create a direct shortcut to the dockyard, which at least had a practical justification. The hole remained.

Peter departed on 21 April 1698, leaving behind a ruin. He also left behind, according to various accounts, somewhere between sixty and five hundred English craftsmen, engineers and specialists who had agreed to travel to Russia and enter his service - the human cargo he had actually come for. He gave his mistress, Letitia Cross, £500 as a parting gift. She told him it was not enough. He told her she was overpaid.

The Meetings That Never Happened

The strangest thread running through the whole visit is the gallery of encounters that almost were - the moments when the trajectory of history bent close and then curved away.

Peter walked through the Royal Observatory where Edmund Halley worked. He visited the Royal Mint four times while Isaac Newton was its Warden. He stayed in the house of John Evelyn, Fellow of the Royal Society, diarist, one of the most perceptive observers of his age. He passed within reach of Christopher Wren.

He met almost none of them. Evelyn never came to Sayes Court while the Russians were there, which - given what they were doing to it - was perhaps prudent, but meant that one of the great diarists of the century recorded nothing of the most remarkable visitor London had seen in a generation. Newton sent Halley instead of coming himself, and whether Peter and Newton ever stood in the same room remains unresolved. Wren only appeared after Peter had left, to add up the bill.

Five years later, when Newton became President of the Royal Society, he sent Peter a copy of the Principia Mathematica. It was a gesture across the distance that the visit had somehow failed to close.

What Happened Next

Sayes Court never recovered. After Evelyn’s death in 1706, the estate was broken up. The house passed through several hands and ended its days as a workhouse, which it remained until the 1840s. Then it was demolished. Where one of the finest private gardens in seventeenth-century England once stood, there is now a public park - Sayes Court Park - with a small plaque and a surviving mulberry tree of uncertain age. Nearby, as a further memorial, is Czar Street.

Peter went home and built a navy. He won the Great Northern War against Sweden. He built Saint Petersburg - a city conceived partly from what he had seen in London and Amsterdam - on a marsh at the mouth of the Neva, founding it formally in 1703. He forced his noblemen to shave their beards. He became, to history, Peter the Great.

The Deptford dockyard where he worked, which built some of the ships that defeated the Spanish Armada and launched the vessels of the East India Company, closed in 1869. It is now a leisure centre.

And the statue stands by the creek: tiny-headed, pipe in hand, the squat companion at his side. The companion, it turns out, is probably meant to be Evelyn - a small bronze figure of the man whose house Peter destroyed, placed for eternity beside the man who destroyed it. The original design, according to the Russian inscription on the plinth, called for several dwarves baring their buttocks. The final version is slightly more restrained.

Sayes Court Park is in Deptford, SE8, a short walk from Deptford Bridge DLR. The statue of Peter the Great stands on Glaisher Street at the confluence of Deptford Creek and the Thames. Czar Street is around the corner. The mulberry tree may or may not have been planted by Peter himself - but it has survived everything else, so perhaps it deserves the credit.

First of all, you can now use the friendly URL:

www.theundergroundmap.com/1862

to access it. Well, that’s much easier to remember. Just a reminder that I’ve georeferenced this map and put it online on my website. I told the story in my previous post.

In this post I’m going to start with the same map but at another angle of attack.

Tracing the buried River Effra

The River Effra - now almost entirely underground - once flowed north from the hills of Upper Norwood and Dulwich to join the Thames near Vauxhall.

I’m going to use the desktop version of the map on my website to show the final course of the River Effra. If you’ve no access to a PC or Mac, don’t fret. I’ll illustrate with maps embedded in this article. Website instructions will be placed into italics which you can skip over if you’re not sitting upstairs at your desk.

Here’s the URL if you are playing along:

www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=4026

The red marker pinpoints the mouth of the river in 1862. Though the Effra is these days completely culverted, some of the outflow still reaches the Thames under the St George Wharf development (which came along in 2001-2010). As an aside, I once stayed in St George Wharf for a week and properties there seem to be mainly owned by folk who are investors. Most of the other windows at night were dark which made for a lonely sort of a stay.

There are other markers on the website map which are clickable. But let’s not do any marker clicking.

The name Effra is of uncertain origin and appears to have been applied to the stream no earlier than the late eighteenth century. Early nineteenth-century gazetteers gave it no name at all, and a map of 1744 calls it simply The Shore. The most plausible explanation, advanced by the Lambeth borough archivist in 2016, is that the name derives from Heathrow, a manor of around 70 acres south of Coldharbour Lane, which by the 1790s had turned into the name Effra Farm.

I can imagine how Londoners can turn Heathrow into Effra. Just drop the h and turn the th into an f sound. I fink that’s ‘ow you do it, any’ows. In another world we’d have Effra Airport.

Above: at any time when the website map isn’t full screen, you can use the slider thing top right to cause the modern Open Street Map to fade in to get our modern whereabouts. Drag it left: OpenStreetMap. Restore it right, 1862 map. In between, a mélange.

There are people who insist Effra derives from Celtic, Latin, Celtic or Anglo-Saxon roots. These hypotheses are now regarded as products of nineteenth-century antiquarianism.

For those playing along, you can make the map full screen by clicking FULLSCREEN MAP at the top. And go back again by pressing Return. I’m agnostic about how you may want to view the map if you are at a PC/Mac.

The history of the course of the River Effra is rather weird. In the medieval period, the lowest reach of the river was flowing to the Thames in Bermondsey not Vauxhall. There were flooding disputes between the monks of Bermondsey Priory and neighbouring landowners.

The way this was resolved was by some clever geological shenanigans in the Kennington area. Before this intervention, the river’s course had run into Walworth Marsh - subsequently drained to become Walworth Common - and into the Earl’s Sluice. After diversion, the lower channel ran directly west from Kennington to the Thames at Vauxhall. John Ogilby’s ‘Britannia’ of 1675 referred to this northern stretch as the ‘New River.’ This made flooding an issue in Vauxhall instead but those wistfully wanting to dig up the Effra and make it flow as it once did should remember it didn’t come this way originally at all.

On the 1862 map, following the river upstream from its Vauxhall mouth and it disappears into non-existence at Vauxhall Cross.

Let’s change the map.

Click that ‘piles of paper’ control top right and then click next to 1830

The 1830 mapping (actually the 1829 Greenwood map) shows the River Effra still above ground. From Vauxhall Cross in a London yet without railways the river runs in a channel in front of a road called Vauxhall Place before turns sharp east at a house called The Hermitage and up to the Oval.

The arrival of Vauxhall station helped the culverting effort to happen - i.e. the lack of a river you see on the 1862 map. The railway bridge over South Lambeth Place had had a river in the way.

Vauxhall Place was demolished and absorbed into South Lambeth Road in due course. On South Lambeth Road is the building of the British Interplanetary Society. Go into their basement and you can hear a gushing sound from somewhere.

The Hermitage corner became Lawn Lane and the river in 1830 was flowing across open fields to the Oval. Now it’s under but just to the north of Lawn Lane, SW8.

Drag the (1830) map so that the Oval is in the centre.

A tiny tributary starts at the South London Water Works north of the Oval. The water works became the gas works on the same footprint and gave us cricket’s Gas Works End.

By 1829, the Oval had been separated from Kennington Common by its royal landowner - the Duchy of Cornwall. There was a surrounding road around the new oval-shaped area which was built to attract development.

South of the Oval, the meandering course of the River Effra is visible. This flows past St Marks Kennington church but then at the top of Brixton Road disappears back into a culvert under the new suburb of North Brixton.

The Effra reappears curving around market gardens - that distinct meandering shape - but Substack is warning me that this article is ‘nearly too long for email’. So that’s a map tale for another day.

But as a text summary:

The Effra was fed by several tributaries meeting above Brixton. The main branch rose near Harold Road in Upper Norwood Recreation Ground and flowed through West Norwood. A second branch rose south of Gipsy Hill, running via Croxted Road into West Dulwich. Springs in Dulwich Wood fed a branch through Belair Park to Herne Hill, while a tributary called the Ambrook rose in Sydenham Hill Wood and passed through Dulwich Park, where its landscaped channel remains visible. The longest and most easterly tributary ran from Eliot Bank and Horniman Park in Forest Hill.

Until around 1850, the stretch of Brixton Road that followed the stream’s course was known as the ‘Washway’ By that time, increasing development had made it heavily polluted with domestic waste, and by 1821 it was classified as an open sewer below North Brixton. Repeated flooding caused residents of Brixton Road and South Lambeth to complain of inundated houses. In 1847 the Surrey and East Kent Sewers commissioners, under surveyor Joseph Gwilt, culverted the Effra as far upstream as Herne Hill.

When Joseph Bazalgette designed London’s sewerage system in the mid-nineteenth century, he incorporated the Effra into its southern division. The Effra Branch Sewer, some three miles long and costing around £19 400, carried much of the river’s surface water from the Norwood area to join the Southern High Level Sewer at Croxted Lane.

The Southern High Level ran eastward under Peckham and New Cross to Deptford, where it joined the Southern Low Level Sewer. Together they formed the Southern Outfall Sewer, running beneath Greenwich and Woolwich to Crossness.

A pumping station was built in 1897 near the point where the Effra Culvert intercepted the Southern Low Level Sewer, necessitated by flooding in the low-lying lands of Battersea and Vauxhall.

The construction of the Thames Tideway Tunnel in the 2020s brought further changes to the river’s outfall arrangements. An interception chamber was built into the Thames at Albert Embankment to divert overflow into the Tideway Tunnel, with a new outfall retained for use during sewer surges. The top of the chamber was landscaped for public access and is now known as the Isle of Effra.

But the map nerd in me wants to revisit the Oval and damn the Substack email warning. Back to the 1830 and we had:

The Effra is clearly visible.

Knowing the 1830s course of the Effra we can spot it on the 1860s map. It’s just that on the Edward Stanford map it is nearly invisible - so I took a cartographic diversion. It re-emerges from its Vauxhall Cross culvert at Langley Lane, turns the same corner at Lawn Lane and then follows the administrative boundary. Church Crescent (long gone) and Hanover Gardens (still here) trace the winding course of the culverted river. But hard to see on the map.

Surrey Cricket Ground - the new tenant - made a no-doubt pleasant-to-see use of the open field of The Oval. Then they built grandstands and it was ‘goodbye green view’.

Notes

• The Duchy of Cornwall - a.k.a. Prince William at time of writing - still owns the Oval. This is why there are little fleurs-de-lis everywhere on the ground.

• My rendering of the 1862 Stanford Map of London is very much a work in progress. It’s well dodgy on a mobile phone. The slider thingy is temperamental too. I’m using AI Anthropic Claude code to help me fix my original 2015 programming but it’s finding my ten years ago effort a bit of a challenge even so. I did know how to use JavaScript once upon a time. And I’m now too lazy to stare at code myself when AI can sometimes do it better.

It is available here: www.theundergroundmap.com/article.html?id=5496

(In due course I’ll create a friendlier URL but this one will remain working even when I do)

The geographic extent of the full map runs from Highgate and Hampstead in the north to Streatham and Balham in the south, and from Hammersmith in the west to Greenwich in the east.

To view the map, go to the URL above and you can use your mouse to drag the map to where you want to be in London. It’s best on a PC or Mac until I improve the mobile phone interface.

The plus and minus symbols at the top left of the map itself allow you to zoom in and out.

If you are bored with the 1860 map, the control at the top right of the map allows you to change historical decade.

I have been busy reviving the map, but fans of SW London below Clapham will have to wait a tad longer - I only have so many hours in a typical day! There are also just a few glitches and colour changes which I’ll iron out as the weeks go by.

Stanford’s Library Map of London and its Suburbs (1862)

Edward Stanford was born in 1827 and educated at the City of London School, developing his interest in maps after working for the map and stationery dealer Trelawney Saunders. He became Saunders’s partner in 1852, then set up independently the following year. By 1862 he had an ambitious project in hand: nothing less than the most accurate map of London ever made.

Stanford’s Library Map is one of the great maps of London. It shows the city at a key time in the development of the metropolis and the impact of the railway. The method of production was methodical and expensive. Stanford took the Ordnance Survey’s twelve-inch-to-the-mile Skeleton Survey sheets - prepared for the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers and showing only outline and elevation - and despatched his own surveyors into the streets to gather the immense quantity of additional detail for which the map became notable. The result was not simply a reprint of government data but a genuinely new work of urban cartography, combining the geometric rigour of the Ordnance Survey with street-level observation across the entire built-up area.

The finished map was published in 24 sheets at a scale of six inches to the statute mile. Each sheet measures around 14 by 16 inches, and together they cover central London and its rapidly expanding suburbs with exceptional granularity - naming individual streets, marking public buildings, recording the railway network, and plotting omnibus routes. Parks, commons, enclosures, and cemeteries accessible to the public are picked out in green; railway stations in red; omnibus routes in a sort of yellowy-brown; and spot heights in feet above Ordnance datum are noted in small figures across the sheet.

Designed for libraries, institutions and professionals, the geographic extent runs from Highgate and Hampstead in the north to Streatham and Balham in the south, and from Hammersmith in the west to Greenwich in the east: the full spread of mid-Victorian London caught at a moment of extraordinary change, just as Joseph Bazalgette was beginning the great sewer works which created the embankments, the Metropolitan Railway was being driven under the streets, and entire new neighbourhoods were rising on land that had been fields a decade earlier.

Chief cartographer John Bolton worked with Stanford to produce the map, and the verdict from the Royal Geographical Society was unambiguous: it was “the most perfect map of London that has ever been issued.” The map was issued in several revised editions through to at least 1878,.

The name Stanfords became prominent in 1862 precisely because of this map, and the Library Map of London remained in print for well over a century. The famous map shop in Long Acre grew out of the project.

As a snapshot of Victorian London at the height of its transformation, the Stanford map has no equal.

There’s a case to be had for the various royal locations: Richmond Palace for instance. And indeed Hampton Court with its connections to Henry VIII, Thomas Wolsey and Lucy Worsley.

Greenwich figures bigly. Its own former royal palace but also the observatory and 0° longitude.

But I’m going to make a case for Shoreditch.

This map slab of modern Shoreditch isn’t so interesting. Off to the top right of the modern map, we’d have the Boundary Estate - one of the pioneering efforts of social housing by London County Council. We could mention how Shoreditch station on the East London line became Shoreditch High Street station on the Overground. Lots of warehouse living these days in the area. Shoreditch has a lot going for it but so do other areas.

The 1750s map of the same area is a lot more interesting to modern eyes. What is a vinegar yard? (though we could guess). And who was Mr Witanoom who owned the vinegar yard at the bottom left of the map with his very odd name?

There’s a tenter ground next to the vinegar yard. This was an area used for drying newly manufactured cloth. The wet cloth was hooked onto frames called tenters and stretched taut using tenterhooks, so that the cloth would dry flat and square.

The area of Shoreditch I’m about to concentrate on is a lot smaller and includes no vinegar.

Zoomed in we have a lot of ancient courtyards north of Holywell Lane. They all disappeared before the end of the eighteenth century. Even King John’s Court is not the modern King John Court - it was slightly west of the new version and on the modern map, Great Eastern Street would plough diagonally through the middle of it. There’s a mysterious road called The Curtain on the map.

Let’s attend first to Holy Well Mount.

This implies a rather grand elevation. Imagine being dwarfed by lofty heights and escarpments with goats clinging on the precipices above you. No, none of that.

It was a non-descript hillock. Its slight elevation is now buried beneath the eastern end of Luke Street, near the point where Holywell Lane meets Curtain Road.

The name recalls a holy well that supplied water to the medieval Holywell Priory founded around 1127. The priory was a significant religious institution in Shoreditch until its surrender in 1539 during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.

There was a spring rising from Holy Well Mount and this was the main source of the River Walbrook, one of London’s notable lost rivers. Up until Tudor times, the Walbrook ran in open country from here until it reached an arch in the London Wall and then flowed between the two main hills of the city: Ludgate Hill to the west and Cornhill to the east and on to the Thames. I wrote earlier about the great dam in the London wall at Moorgate through which the Walbrook flowed (with difficulty). This article isn’t about the Walbrook even though it’s in our small area of interest.

The local urban streetscape in the Holywell area dates from just before 1800 but the Rocque map shows it as it was half a century before. Half a century later, during construction of the Middle Level Sewer in 1863, it was forgotten enough for Victorians to be surprised to find evidence of both Holy Well Mount and the Walbrook.

Located outside the city walls, Holy Well Mount served as a burial ground for centuries, and during the Great Plague of 1665–66 it saw extensive use as a plague pit. London lost more than 15% of its population in those two years, with around 100 000 deaths. As parish churchyards filled, emergency pits were hastily dug in open ground across the city, and Holy Well Mount was among them.

The name ‘Shoreditch’ is thought to derive from this unpleasantness. The area was originally known as Soersditch - meaning ‘Sewer Ditch’ - most likely a reference to the marshy course of the Walbrook as it descended from the gentle slope of Holy Well Mount through a wonderfully-inviting landscape of diseased corpses.

A builder and part-time actor called James Burbage lived in a house connected to the priory’s former brewhouse, beside a walled garden known as The Curtain. This gave its name to the road The Curtain on Rocque’s map. It was a name derived from the priory’s curtain wall. The Walbrook ran as a small ditch along the western edge of the road.

In 1572 the Mayor and Corporation of London banned plays as a precaution against an earlier plague, reluctant to draw crowds of strangers into the City. By 1575 they had gone further, formally expelling all players from within its boundaries. The effect was to push theatrical activity not too far beyond the city’s jurisdiction but legally far enough - here into the liberties of Halliwell/Holywell in Shoreditch.

On leased land that had formed part of the dissolved priory, Burbage began erecting a building he called The Theatre in partnership with his brother-in-law, John Brayne. It was the first structure in London purpose-built for ‘scenic exhibitions’, which is what the word ‘theatre’ originally signified. Situated on a footpath running from Finsbury Fields at the later junction with New Inn Yard, it was the first dedicated playhouse in England, and its success gradually shifted the meaning of theatre to denote any playhouse.

Brayne financed the construction and in return received a share of the profits and an interest in the property. The surrounding area was known informally as the ‘suburbs of sin’ and had a reputation for brothels, gaming houses and licentious behaviour of all kinds. When the Curtain Theatre was built nearby the following year, the district became London’s first dedicated entertainment quarter.

Burbage and Brayne never committed their arrangement to a formal contract, which proved a persistent source of dispute. They fell repeatedly into debt with one another during construction of The Theatre, resorting to various schemes to keep the project afloat. Construction reportedly cost £700.

The Theatre opened in autumn 1576 and was a polygonal timber building with three galleries surrounding an open yard, from one side of which extended a stage - a design possibly derived from the inn-yards that players had previously used. The structure had a tiled roof. The yard was cobbled and open to the sky, offering standing room for a penny; a second penny admitted spectators to the galleries, where a third would secure a stool. One gallery was partitioned into private compartments for wealthier patrons.

James Burbage opened a second venue in 1577 on land with a different lease. The Theatre stood some way north of the Holywell Lane junction; some hundred metres further south along the street called The Curtain he opened The Curtain. Excavations by the Museum of London Archaeology department in 2012 uncovered the remains of The Curtain theatre, revealing it to be rectangular rather than the polygonal form more typical of early playhouses.

From 1594, Richard Burbage (James’s son) led the Lord Chamberlain’s Men acting company back at The Theatre; William Shakespeare was also in their employ, and several of his early plays received their premieres at The Theatre. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet received its first performance at The Curtain.

At Christmas 1594, Richard Burbage, William Kempe and Shakespeare were summoned to perform before the queen at Greenwich Palace, the first of many royal appearances. Kit Marlowe and Robert Greene weren’t before the Queen at that time, despite the insistence of the Upstart Crow sitcom.

Trouble with the landlord, Giles Allen, surfaced towards the end of 1596. The lease James Burbage had taken in 1576 ran for only twenty years, and when it expired Allen insisted the building be used for theatrical purposes alone for a further five years - a condition the Burbages contested. I’m not sure what they proposed alongside the plays. Perhaps a nice evening or two of bear-baiting.

James Burbage died in spring 1597 before the dispute was resolved, leaving his sons Richard and Cuthbert to pursue it. In the meantime the Lord Chamberlain’s Men relocated to the nearby Curtain.

The situation was further complicated by a lawsuit brought by Margaret Brayne, widow of John Brayne, and his former business partner Robert Myles, following Brayne’s death in 1586. The Burbages had stopped making payments to Margaret after Brayne died. When she and Myles appeared at The Theatre demanding half its contents, Richard Burbage physically ejected Myles, and the pair left empty-handed. Myles brought two further lawsuits, both of which failed. Meanwhile, Cuthbert Burbage moved to buy out the lease for £30, placing it solely in his own name and effectively cutting Margaret Brayne out of any claim on the grounds that the lease had never been in John Brayne’s name and therefore gave her no standing.

But this lease on The Theatre’s land expired anyway after Giles Allen insisted on his ‘plays only’ rule, despite the shady shenanigans noted above. The site was due to revert to the landowner. The Theatre then stood empty, prompting the satirist Edward Guilpin to write in Skialetheia of “the unfrequented Theatre” walking “in dark silence and vast solitude.”

The Burbage brothers took matters into their own hands in a very derring-do manner. I’m not sure I much admire the two brothers - especially nasty Cuthbert - so the following chutzpah is added for completeness and shouldn’t be admired. Well, perhaps a little.

During the night of 28 December 1598, aided by their friend and financial backer William Smith, master carpenter Peter Street and a gang of ten or twelve workmen, they dismantled the theatre piece by piece and carted the timber away. It was cold that December and the Thames was frozen over. Some accounts have the miscreants transporting all the wood over the ice. But, interesting though this story is, that’s a tall tale too far. It all went instead to Street’s yard near Bridewell. When the weather improved the following spring, the material was ferried across the Thames and reassembled on the south bank as The Globe.

The Curtain meanwhile continued as a venue well into the seventeenth century and was reported as still standing in 1698. By 1700 the street had taken the garden’s name, and by the following century had become Curtain Road.

This small area of Shoreditch then, gave the English language the modern definition of the word theatre. It wouldn’t be the last word London gave to the world but those stories are for another time.

Notes

1. Link to the eBook I cited: www.gutenberg.org/files/22397/22397-h/22397-h.htm

2. Joseph Quincy Adams (1881–1946) - he of the other map I used - was a distinguished American Shakespearean scholar and the first director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. He is no relation to the 6th US President, John Quincy Adams. His parents nabbed the presidential middle name to, no doubt, give their offspring some gravitas.

3. Bottom right on the second John Roque zoomed in map we had Briant Street - an ancient street demolished to make way for Bishopsgate railway station in 1839 - one of London’s earliest railway demolitions. But I can’t cover everything in this post…

Many local newspapers and specialist publications abounded in the final years of the 19th century. The Ealing Gazette and West Middlesex Observer was one of those. It was founded in 1898, just in time to witness Ealing receiving borough status at the turn of the twentieth century.

Ealing was just a rural village with a surrounding parish. Thanks to the 1838 arrival of a Great Western Railway station at what had been a small settlement better known as Haven Green, improvements in communications with London shifted the local economy to market gardening and eventually to suburban development.

Much to the pride of the new borough, Ealing received its first electric trams on 10 July 1901. By 1902, Ealing had became known as the ‘Queen of the Suburbs’ due to its large houses, remaining greenery and fantastic transport options.

South Ealing was a lot sleepier than the Ealing Broadway area. Central Ealing was booming by the 1860s whereas South Ealing didn’t yet even have a name.

Of course, South Ealing is also notable for the two hit songs written about it. There’s Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop The Ealing and the much more racy Sexual Ealing by Marvin Gaye.

This post will equally fall into two parts:

• How South Ealing’s rural paths survived against all the odds

• Railway shenanigans

Rights of way

At the time of the 1860s-era map below, the future South Ealing had scattered housing and market gardening fields. Booming Ealing itself was just to the north and the nearest local name was Little Ealing - a hamlet to the west of Ealing Lane (now called South Ealing Road).

With all this open land to the south, Ealing parish - it was not yet a borough - had created a new cemetery for its burgeoning population. It remains a beautiful and peaceful place.

Ealing Cemetery (now South Ealing Cemetery) is depicted at the top of the above map. There’s a large house called Clayponds House at the bottom of the map. Skirting the west of the grounds of the house is Clayponds Lane (still there but now reborn as Clayponds Avenue). This runs up to, and through, the middle of the cemetery before it continues north. Going south, Clayponds Lane reached the Thames near Brentford Ait.

Clayponds House must have been a lovely spot, even after the coming of the railway (now known as the Hounslow Loop line) on its southern edge.

Old maps seem to always offer a mystery or two. What oh what are “Deadmen’s Graves” when they’re at home?

The grounds of Clayponds House are now known as Carville Hall Park and Junction 2 of the M4 has been hammered through the park. Perhaps not quite so lovely nowadays.

Anyway, we’ve drifted far south (but for a reason). Let’s follow Clayponds Lane/Clayponds Avenue north back towards the subject of this post.

In 2026, Clayponds Avenue stops being a road at the southern edge of South Ealing Cemetery but a path crosses the cemetery along the same line as the road. This crosses Pope’s Lane and becomes a road again - Olive Road. Right at the top of the above map.

North once again and Olive Road continues to follow the direction of Clayponds Avenue until it reaches the Piccadilly line. Here there’s a footbridge and a footpath called Roberts Alley continues.

Roberts Alley once followed the line of Olive Road. It was called always called Roberts Alley although it wasn’t an alley in the nineteenth century and - before the coming of the cemetery - Roberts Alley ran all the way south to Clayponds Lane/Avenue and then on to Brentford.

Footpaths and rights of way appear all over the British countryside. Robert’s Alley was one but it’s a mystery perhaps why it was needed at all with a perfectly decent South Ealing Road mirroring it just yards to its west. Its purpose seems to be the serving of St Mary’s Church, and maybe the Rose and Crown pub, with a congregation/drinkers from the south - from Claypotts and Brentford. It was a particularly long rural path and all of it remains in one form or another even after the coming of housing and roads which is quite remarkable.

Former rural footpaths and rights of way have tended to disappear in London. Sometimes they were made up into roads such as Clayponds Avenue and Olive Road. Other times they were simply buried under new housing.

Roberts Alley - the remaining section - was saved by a railway.

The Metropolitan District Railway (Hounslow Branch) came to the area in the 1880s. A station called South Ealing was opened. On the way west to the new station, the District Railway respected the Roberts Alley right of way and built a footbridge over the line. South of the railway, the path became called Olive Road and Olive Road was connected to South Ealing Road as its housing arrived.

Roberts Alley to the north nearly became a new road too. Church Gardens was laid out (see merged map above) but the walls behind the back gardens of the Church Gardens houses faced Roberts Alley and a school was built on the eastern side. Behind the school were the Ascott Allotments.

Flanked by back gardens and a school, there was no incentive to develop Roberts Alley further into a road. There was no profit in the idea.

More curious still, as a survivor, is Ballies Walk.

This also began as a rural path, connecting the same St Mary’s Church with Ealing Common.

It can be seen on the 1860s map leading east from the church, skirts the rear gardens of the then brand-new Ranelagh Road and turns north to Guys Lane (now Warwick Road).

Baillies Walk is also a relic of a rural right of way which was neither made up into a road nor abolished.

It too was a result of the coming of the railway. The District railway tracks (now the Piccadilly line) created an area to its north. The fields were cut off from their farm and the former market gardens and arable fields between Baillies Walk and the District/Piccadilly Line were turned into the Ascott Allotments. These 12 acres are still the second largest allotment site in Greater London with 310 individual plots occupied by around 240 plotholders. They were set up in 1886 as St Mary’s Allotment.

Ranelagh Road was built parallel to, and to the north of, Baillies Walk during the 1860s and the new houses had generous gardens backing onto Baillies Walk. The end garden walls of the Ranelagh Road houses survive to this day and form the northern boundary wall of the walk.

As Baillies Walk heads suddenly north at Queen Anne’s Gardens, it remains a pathway which local builders respected as a right of way. For over fifty years it marked the eastern edge of the 1860s development which stopped just beyond Richmond Road until a large house called Elm Grove was given up for building after the First World War, allowing further residential development.

The original pathway in its rural days met and ended at Guy’s Lane - Guy’s Lane became Warwick Road and the curious Baillies Walk pathway still comes to its conclusion here.

Railway shenanigans

1932 was a major year involving the laying out of additional Piccadilly line tracks adjacent to the District Line on the Hounslow branch with the consequent rebuilding of road bridges and stations.

Piccadilly line services began serving South Ealing from 29 April 1935. From this date, the Hounslow branch was operated jointly by both lines until District line services were withdrawn on 10 October 1964.

In particular, land was found for the building of a new train depot for the Piccadilly line immediately west of Northfields station. This necessitated the Northfields station platforms being moved to the other side of Northfield Avenue and a new Holden-designed station building being built.

A situation now arose where the South Ealing station platforms faced the new Northfields station platforms under 300 yards from each other.

No one in planning the stations had seemed to be too concerned that the two stations - Northfields and South Ealing - were now so close to each other until London Underground senior management paid a site visit and were dismayed to see what had happened with extra-close stations on the same line.

They proposed that South Ealing station should be closed and a brand new station built nearer Acton where the Ascott Avenue road bridge is and which could serve the newly built council estate south of the railway.

Local residents - and in particular the South Ealing Road shopkeepers - were very upset at this proposal. To pacify people, London Underground built a nearer-to-South Ealing additional entrance to Northfields station on Weymouth Avenue - a rather curious affair with a ticket office and a long elevated walkway to the Northfields platforms, part of the remains of which can still be seen today.

When London Underground in 1935 conducted a survey they found that most people preferred their station to be nearer where they shopped than to where they lived. In addition far more passengers were now found to be using South Ealing because Brentford FC had been promoted to the first division of the football league. So South Ealing station had a reprieve. The Ascott Avenue station didn’t materialise.

It wasn’t until 1988 that a ‘proper’ South Ealing station was built. South Ealing had never had a Charles Holden designed station like the other 1930s Piccadilly Line stations. So the 1988 new station had a small “Holden style” tower added.

Notes

• Who was Baillie? Who was Robert? Who was Olive? You’re not alone.

I have just returned home from a month-long trip, three weeks of which were dedicated to walking the Bakerloo line of the London Underground in both directions.

A month away is a very long time. Since arriving home this last Sunday I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my mornings drinking coffee in the postage stamp sized garden. Just being in one place and not having to get a bus anywhere and film something has been particularly relaxing.

Since the death of my partner in September, I have been dedicating much of my time to travel at her suggestion. “You like going places and you like making videos. Don’t you dare mope around the house after I’m gone feeling sorry for yourself! Travel and make YouTube videos!”

She was right on the whole.

Since December, once my moping around the house phase finished, I’ve seen a lot of new places: Melilla - a Spanish enclave surrounded by Morocco; Narva - an Estonian town where quite a narrow river separates the EU and NATO from Russia; Helsinki - where I spent my birthday just on a whim.

Alongside writing London history on this Substack, I was already spending some leisure time on a bit of a ‘travel and YouTube’ mission. I’ve been doing station-to-station tube walks in a very piecemeal way since 2022. As I explained in a previous post I started these for no real reason after an idea to do so one sunny March morning. Later in 2022 I had a brush with prostate cancer which was a close-run thing. As I recovered from that, my partner was stricken with cancer and wasn’t so lucky. This focused my attention on these walks having a purpose. They are raising money for MacMillan:

www.macmillan.org.uk

Earlier this year I decided that I should start focusing on longer trips to the capital and concentrate on perhaps trying to finish a line completely each time.

I chose the Bakerloo since it is not only first alphabetically but it has no pesky branches to worry about. Also in my piecemeal efforts, I’d largely done the central London sections. I only had to worry about Harrow & Wealdstone to Queen’s Park in a contiguous styley. There were some odd bits to finish elsewhere but nothing much.

The Bakerloo is known as the Cinderella of Underground lines. Underinvestment and older tube stock are some of its issues. It lacks a personality out in the sticks since it mirrors what is the Overground’s Lioness Line. Stations with wide tracks either side with noisy non-stop trains occasionally disturbing the piece and quiet. Beyond Stonebridge Park it’s quite a dull line too - there’s only so-much semi-detached mock-Tudor a boy can take.

Despite a terrible cold which hit midway through the trip and had me trapped for a week within my AirBnb, I did finish the Bakerloo line completely and did some random other tube walks as well.

But I spent three weeks largely within an area bounded by Harrow and Maida Vale and this is what I found out:

• London seems very car-addicted. I tended to start each day on a bus trip to get to a station. The mile or so between Wood Lane and Willesden Junction on the trusty 220 took at least forty minutes whatever time of day I got on. Foolishly I ended a day out on one Sunday in Walthamstow deciding that buses all the way to W10 would be a relaxing end to the trip. I was stuck in Tottenham en route for at least an hour and the whole trip took three.

• At the same time there are many many more cyclists. I am a part-time non-London cyclist myself and this is a Good Thing. In some places there are decent and new-looking cycle lanes to separate them from the traffic jams full of cars. In many other places, the infrastructure is woeful. My most annoying example of this for me in March was not on a road but on the towpath on the Grand Union twixt Stonebridge Park and Harlesden. All Brent Council needs to do is paint a white line down the middle of the towpath and indicate cyclists this side and pedestrians that side. But this hasn’t been done and it’s dangerous for all concerned. There’s a culture war online in London: car drivers versus cyclists. This is misplaced - the other party is not your enemy. The enemy is inadequate infrastructure. The two types of commuter need to be separated and not sharing one lane. Cyclists on pavements, endangering pedestrians, is partly due to how dangerous being on a road is when you’re on two wheels in the capital. (Partly also, selfish cyclists)

• High streets (Wembley Central, Wealdstone, Harlesden - I’m looking at you) are full of food outlets in place of the more normal shops I used to see. There’s a definite upside to this. Even if you don’t require fried chicken - every second food outlet sells fried chicken btw - the variety of food in the ‘burbs is quite amazing. Brazilian barbecue? Gotcha. Greasy spoon caff? Just over the road. How about Nepalese? Niche, yes, but it’s here too.

• I’m used to getting across the road at official crossings where I currently live only to find cars and cyclists weaving around me as I traverse the street. Londoners respect zebra crossings. Everybody stops to let pedestrians over the road. This is comforting.

• There’s a lot of noise from people shouting into their mobile phones. Yes I’m older and grumpy now but “grrrr”. Earpieces have been long invented you noisy b*stards.

So these are my findings. One of my walks these past three weeks was a random (i.e. non Bakerloo) one in the Holland Park area. Since I’ve finished editing it, you get to see it below, including my overuse of the word “lovely”. It was a sunny day and the cherry blossom was out, so “lovely” was the correct word.

But the effort has resumed.

I have chosen to stay in an AirBnb for the month which is not quite London Underground connected. Every station is just a little bit too far away to want to walk to. I’m aware that this is a walking holiday but that’s extra walking.

The 220 bus from Wood Lane gets me up to Willesden Junction when the ‘WJ mood’ overtakes me. The good old number 7 will, Bakerloo line-wise, deposit me in Paddington from the Highlever Road stop.

But, not being able to pop into the tube station next door, means that I have discovered the neighbourhood that I am in, in a little bit more detail than I would have done. The local Tesco Express has been my go to for ‘chicken ding’ (the AirBnb has a microwave). The owner of Mick’s Fish Bar, indifferent to me on my first visit, has started to ask how I am (eating too much fried food is how I am). I got a great - if a bit short - haircut along with a hot towel shave from the Kurdish barber.

All of these establishments plus a post office, shawarma takeaway, a health food store, flower seller, a nail bar and more are positioned along a rather short stretch of road called exotically North Pole Road.

North Pole Road starts in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea at the St Quintin Gardens triangle and runs to the southwest under a railway bridge to Wood Lane by which time it has changed both borough (to Hammersmith & Fulham) and postal area (W10 to W12).

North Pole Road has given this area a microname: North Pole.

I’m sure but not certain that there are just two places called North Pole on Earth. One at the top of the world and this one here in London.

During the days of my heavy cold I still made a point of getting out every day and took my iPhone camera along.

If you have a bit of time on your hands - and access to old maps - every picture you take tells a story. London is a huge subject and even when you concentrate on 100 metres of it, it’s still a huge story. What a rewarding city!

This area got its name North Pole quite by accident despite the best efforts of nineteenth century property developers. More of that later. Let’s go back to the lay of the land around the year 1800.

It’s a classic 1800 case of “Nothing to see here. Move on sunshine”. Not quite. The road on the left of the map running into ‘Wormwood Scrubbs’ (sic) is the future Wood Lane. There’s a path from Wood Lane which crosses two branches of a stream called Counter’s Creek before it reaches a large farmhouse called Knolton Barn Farm.

Seventy years later and changes are afoot on the map above. Part of Wormwood Scrubs has been turned into a rifle range. This gun club was situated behind where Burlington Danes School now stands.

To take advantage of the club participants, a pub called the Rifle Pavilion has been established where Wood Lane and the new North Pole Road meet. Scrubs Lane is the name for Wood Lane north of the junction.

A railway line has been built and, beyond it, a second pub called The North Pole stands at the junction of North Pole Road and Latimer Road (the Latimer Road name is not marked on the map). The pub gardens stretch down to one branch of Counter’s Creek and North Pole Road stops dead at the stream.

Next to the North Pole pub along Latimer Road are Globe Villas and this hints at an endearing piece of naming history.

The North Pole was originally called ‘The Globe’ when it was built in 1839 as a single storey inn. Globe Villas was next door along Latimer Road. In the 1920s, a few doors along at 298 Latimer Road the ‘Globe House Laundry’ was established, a clear reference to the original name.

Not a lot of money was spent on the original 1839 pub sign for the Globe. Its depiction of a globe weathered away leaving only the North Pole visible. Locals began calling the pub the North Pole informally and the name stuck. This caused the road outside to be renamed. Now that’s how history works!

Incidentally, the pub was built here in 1839 to serve the attendees at the north western edge of the Hippodrome racecourse which stretched over Notting Hill. The Hippodrome closed in 1842.

By the 1890s, further development is taking place. Knolton Barn Farm (later Notting Barn Farm and hence the Notting Hill/Notting Dale names) has gone.

The path to the farm has been built up into St Quintin Avenue.

An effort to rename the rather common North Pole suburb name with a new posher-sounding name of St Quintin Park has arrived along with a new railway station on North Pole Road: St Quintin Park and Wormwood Scrubs. This station opened in 1871 but was bombed in 1940 and never reopened. Mildmay Overground trains run over the bridge without stopping at what would be a very useful reopened station.

The North Pole name won out and St Quintin Park is now used by nobody for the area.

Some photographs then.

This is Wood Lane, W12 running south from the North Pole Road junction. Charitably it might be described as non-descript. There’s the 220 bus stop on the right towards Willesden Junction. The new builds in the distance have replaced what was the White City stadium area. One interesting thing maybe is that Wood Lane - in the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham - is architecturally quite like many other places in London. Once we’re over the border into Kensington & Chelsea in North Pole Road there’s another ‘West London stucco’ style stretching over to Paddington which is unique in London. The border here between boroughs and postcodes is a real border.

Corner of Scrubs Lane/Wood Lane/North Pole Road. I assume there’s another North Pole Open Space on Earth at 0 degrees north. The white pub in the background is still called the Pavilion after all these years which is comfortingly consistent.

New flats here (off camera, left) are on the site of the old station. An architect with a sense of history has kept the St Quintin name. Under the bridge and we’re in W10 and a new borough.

Under the bridge and Marion the hairdresser was used by my aunt in the early 1950s. It doesn’t appear to be still running sadly.

Mick’s Fish Bar and the former North Pole pub. In summer 2012 it was bought by Riding House Properties who quickly closed the pub, leasing the ground floor to Tesco Express and converting the upper floors to residential flats.

View from Mick’s window across Latimer Road. Now Latimer Road - which gives its name to an underground station but now runs nowhere near that station - is another London story for another time.

Notes

A fantastic read: northkensingtonhistories.wordpress.com/2020/08/02/the-fourteen-pubs-of-latimer-road-and-norland-road/