Aug 20, 2010 Hidden away from sight in a side room next to an underground car park is one of the more important remains of the old London Wall that actually dates from before the wall was built.
When the Romans first started to settle in London (Londinium), a garrison fort was built to the North West of the town. Built with stone walls, it is thought to have had four gates and a barracks for around 1,000 soldiers.
When the London Wall was built around 80 years later, two sides of the fort were incorporated into the Wall and strengthened. Eventually, the two inner walls of the fort were lost, leaving just the London Wall with its famous gates. The northern gate into the former fort became known as Cripplegate.
However, the western gate was lost to history for some reason, and wasn’t rediscovered until the 1950s.
It was to see the remains of this gate that had me wandering over the Museum of London for one of their occasional tours of the site.
Next to the museum – as I am sure you know – are some remains of the London Wall, although most of what you see is actually medieval and Victorian repairs to the wall. King Henry II add the towers and the Victorians used the wall as a “free” fourth wall for warehouses to cut down on building costs.
What we were to see though is totally Roman.
Going down the ramp that runs next to the wall – and avoiding the taxi driving the wrong way down a one-way street, there is a rather nondescript alley under the road leading to the car park, where you might notice a locked door marked private.
In here lies the remains of the Western gatehouse.
A rather musty smell inside adds to the atmosphere, but is due to the rainwater drains in the road above leaking into the room, and is nothing to do with the ruins themselves.
What has been excavated is part of the wall, the gatehouse and the remains of part of the arches that marked the entrance to the fort itself.
The gatehouse had two arches – presumably one side for inbound traffic and the other for outbound – but for some reason, one of the arches was blocked off at some point very early in its history. It is possible that the blocking of the gate is part of the reason why it never became one of the city’s major gates – Ludgate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate, Bishopsgate, and Aldgate, although no one is really sure about this.
We were also shown the post hole which would have held the upright pole that hinged the main gates as well as the flat runner for the portcullis.
Also noticeable is the entry stone for the gatehouse, which has been worn down by people walking over it. The two groves are probably from two bolts that went down into a hole in the stone to lock the doors. Over time, the bolts carved out a groove in the stone.
Although the fort was made of stone walls, it was not a castle-grade fortification as the walls were quite thin. Romans preferred to fight in the fields rather than engage in sieges. However, when the London Wall was later built, it was much thicker, and you can see the gap between the fort wall (left) and the substantial works added to strengthen the wall (right).
Apart from this small room with old stones, there isn’t a lot to see, but it is still one of the more important Roman remains in situ within the City and worth spending half an hour visiting.
The visit also means I can tick off one more item from my list of Subterranean London places I want to visit.
The next tours are Sept 15th; Oct 19th; Nov 18th and Dec 15th. Tours are free and limited to 20 people. Collect a ticket from the main desk inside the museum about 10 minutes before the tour starts. Tours are at 2:30pm and 3:30pm.
I’ve also rather cheekily scanned in a sheet they handed out as I think it is rather good:
The part of the fort we went to see is the dark red line that runs right under the modern London Wall road.
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london, london wall, museum of london, roman
Aug 11, 2010 Another from my archive of the Illustrated London News – this time a really good one!
In 1845, the newspaper gave away a hand drawn panorama of the Thames running roughly from Vauxhall in the West to just past Greenwich in the East.
An original document is quite rare and when one comes up for sale, they usually go for prices that would deplete my wallet. Fortunately, a reprint made for the newspaper’s 150th anniversary, tends to be more affordable, and I recently acquired a copy – which has been annotated with additional explanatory text.
The scanned copy is huge (6GB) – sadly too huge for my feeble computer to cope with, but I have managed after some pleading with the laptop to deploy a moderate sized version.
The drawing itself is presented as two separate drawings, and I have joined them together in the middle to form a single long strip.
Enjoy!
I present several versions.
Firstly is this Google Maps style presentation.
Click to open this in a new window
The software used to create the above display was supplied by the ever excellent Digital Urban blog.
More conventional formats
(click on images for larger versions)
The full panorama as a single image
The Top Half
The Bottom Half
Maybe one day I will be able to upload the really high resolution version – after I get a deluxe computer (and a pay rise to pay for it). Thanks to my flatmate and a friend who works at an office with a good scanner for assisting in preparing the images.
Other blog posts you might like:
Map of London and its Toll Gates from 1857
Jul 18, 2010 If you are a typical website for an organisation or venue that expects people to visit you, then a page with guidance on how to find you is de-rigueur.
Most will have an address, maybe a few lines of directions of how to get to the place from local train stations (or airports if pretentious) – and usually a map.
Sometimes the map will be a simple line drawing made up by the graphics team. Sometimes it is a gloriously produced map drawn up by a specialist map company – and sometimes it is a simple, but effective link to Google Maps or similar.
Just occasionally – you get something wonderful.
Cecil Court is an alley in central London lined with antiquarian booksellers and as befits a location with considerable heritage, their find us page doesn’t rely on a crude modern map.
They have actually collected ten maps, ranging from a 1572 plan of London to a 1935 map displayed inside the local Leicester Square tube station and put the whole lot onto a single page on their website.
Not only does it convey the physical location in a visually pleasing manner, it also reminds people of the long heritage of the shopping street.
It also results in map geeks like me getting rather excited and blogging about it.
Frankly, it is a genius way to explain how to find a venue.
In unrelated news, this coming weekend, there will be a festival of silent film related events happening along the street.
Jun 1, 2010 We are at war with the Catholics, we have always been at war with the Catholics.
In a move which would impress George Orwell, the politicians of 1780 were seeking to change the above statement so that the British were no longer treating Catholics as second-class citizens, and in doing so would trigger what are probably the worst riots that London has seen for around 500 years.
In the process, not only would Catholic Churches be torched, Newgate prison would be totally destroyed, the Bank of England attacked and the Fleet and Clink prisons would be severely damaged.
The army would be called out and by the time things calmed down, nearly 300 people would be dead and many hundreds more injured.
The political temperature started rising in early 1780 when Lord George Gordon became the leader of the Protestant Association and strove to overturn the Papists Act, which had been passed a couple of years earlier in 1778.
This particular act had been designed to overturn the anti-catholic laws passed in 1698, which were frankly largely ignored anyway. However, the old adage about letting sleeping dragons lie applied more strongly here than at almost any time as the abolition itself became an opportunity to awaken dormant anti-catholic feelings in England.
Lord Gordon was a populist who made some completely outrageous claims, such as that there were 20,000 Jesuits hiding in tunnels under the River Thames waiting for an order from Rome to rise up and attack London. He was however widely believed and a mob formed to support his aims to introduce anti-catholic laws.
The destruction of Newgate Prison was the most egregious of the many acts of the rioters, and their actions have been recorded in the six-part series, Old and New London – of which I recently acquired three copies.
Exactly 230 years ago – on 2 June 1780 a huge crowd, estimated at 40,000 to 60,000 strong, assembled and marched on the Houses of Parliament, and attempted to force their way into the House of Commons, but without success. Lord Gordon, petition in hand, and wearing in his hat the blue cockade of the Protestant Association, entered the Commons and presented the petition.
Over the next few days, various acts of riotous behaviour occurred, including rampaging through the Irish Catholic slums in Moorfields.
The most significant attack though took place when the mob came pouring down Holborn on the evening of the 6th June 1780 bearing three prominent flags with Protestant slogans. A sailor named Jackson had just hoisted one of these banners in Palace Yard, when Justice Hyde unleashed horsemen to repel the rioters. Their failure lead to the sacking of the Justice’s house, and the mob moved on from the Old Bailey to Newgate Prison.
From New and Old London - my own copy
The mob attacked the prison gates using ironmongery stolen from blacksmiths in Dury Lane and Long Acre but were unable to penetrate the gates. They then piled up wood against the doors and despite the repeated efforts of the turnkeys inside to put the fires out, the heat eventually melted the lead solder than held the hinges in place.
The prisoners released, the mob then went down to attack the Fleet prison and later to burn the House of your correspondent’s namesake, Lord Mansfield in Bloomsbury Square.
Over the next few days, the mob variously sacked the Catholic chapel in Lincoln’s Inn Fields; the house of Sir George Saville in Leicester Square (next to the Empire today); the house of the blind magistrate, Sir John Fielding of Bow St Runners fame; various smaller “benches” where prisoners where held, and attacked, but were repelled at the Bank of England.
A slightly light-hearted moment occurred when a mob went to attack Kenwood House, the home of the Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, who was suspected to have Catholic sympathies. However, they stopped at the nearby Spaniard’s Inn where the innkeeper plied them with so much beer that they got drunk – and were subsequently arrested by the King’s Men.
The army was finally given orders to fire upon groups of four or more who refused to disperse on the 7th June. About 285 people were shot dead, and several hundred more were wounded. Of those arrested, about twenty or thirty were later tried and executed. Lord Gordon was arrested and charged with high treason, but was found not guilty.
The proclamation signed by The King is available on the London Gazette [pdf file] website.
It is estimated that the damage from the riots cost £180,000 to put right. That is equivalent to over £230 million in today’s money – based on purchasing power.
The riots had a profound impact across Europe which had always been wary of the English form of Parliamentary democracy and killed off English attempts to forge a European alliance against French assistance during the American War of Independence.
The riots also lead to calls for a formal police force, a radical concept at the time when police forces were seen as an arm of an absolutist state. The wariness of the idea lingered for many decades, and the Met Police were not finally formed until 1829, although local constables and a river police had existed before.
Lord Gordon was imprisoned in The Tower and later tried for his crimes, but found not guilty. In a bizarre twist though, a man who sacked London in support of the Protestant religion moved to Birmingham and converted to Judaism.
In 1787 he was convicted of defaming Marie Antoinette, and sentenced to five years in the very prison his mob had destroyed – the now rebuilt Newgate Prison. He died there in 1793.
May 25, 2010 On this day, marking the first Queen’s Speech delivered by a coalition government to Queen Elizabeth II, I take time to reflect on an earlier Queen’s Speech, when there was not so much a Coalition Government as a single-party state.
In the run up to the Crimean War, such was the popular demand for war, that all political parties effectively became one grand coalition, to which there was no official opposition of any significant sort. Although the official government was a Peelite-Whig coalition under Lord Aberdeen, one of the leading Peelites, it had such strong support from the Conservatives that many people asked if party politics was about to die.
Rather than dying, the government would collapse in 1855 following the disastrous War that was about to unfold and the return of two-party politics would return in force a decade later as the famous battles between Gladstone and Disraeli came to dominate the period.
When the coalition government of 1854 collapsed the following year, after much debate, Lord Palmerston formed his first government. Thanks to subsequent elections delivering ever larger majorities, the subsequent decade has been referred to by some as the Dictatorship of Lord Palmerston.
In an echo of today’s coalition government, Lord Palmerston began his parliamentary career as a Tory and ended it as a Liberal (an alliance of Whigs, Peelites, Radicals). He was also the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to die in office, which considering their respective ages, is probably an honour that Nick Clegg and David Cameron are happy to leave with him.
As a further echo of today’s Queen’s Speech which remarked on constitutional reform, the speech give by Queen Victoria in 1854 also talked of reforms, although nothing would happen until 1867 when the Second Reform Bill was passed. Doubtless modern politicians will be aiming for a slightly swifter timescale than their predecessors!
The below is taken from the Illustrated London News of February 1854.
OPENING OF THE PARLIAMENTARY SESSION BY HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN.
The second Session of Queen Victoria’s fourth Parliament was opened, and by her Majesty in person, on Tuesday the 31st ult. The real importance of that brilliant though sedate spectacle is to be found in the fact that the head of the State was proceeding , through the streets of the capital — those streets being crowded by an excited populace — to summon the State to sanction and to strengthen those measures which she had taken, upon the advice of her Ministers, but in the absence of Parliament to resist the aggression of one of her allies upon another of her allies — those measures leading, in all probability, to a European war, of which, once begun, no man could foresee the result this great fact is, in our time, a new fact; and in the face of such probabilities, the Session then opened must be pronounced as transcending in importance every other session of the Parliaments called in the present reign.
Even were the Russian, question not in presence, there are other circumstances which would render the opening of the session of 1854 an epoch.
The Royal Procession Passing Whitehall
The speech from the Throne which declared conditional war against the Czar, announced, also a Reform Bill — a measure which may produce as great gradual changes as were produced by the Bill (of which this is a complement and a continuation) of 1832 — a measure from which undoubtedly we shall date in our constitutional history. We remember the reign of William IV. solely for the Reform-bill, in the passing of which he was the reluctant agent; and, whatever may be the other memorable episodes reserved by fate, it would so far appear to be certain that posterity will principally commemorate Victoria for the measures which made trade free, and the measure which struck a death-blow at the system, peculiar to our Constitution, of electoral corruption and simulacrous party representation.
For still other reasons must we regard and record the initiation of the new Session with no ordinary interest.
Fortunately for a people threatened with a great war, and to whom the Sovereign appeals to undertake a great struggle, the Parliament assembled on Tuesday is, in the loftiest sense, a “National Council,” since it meets at a moment when “party” has for the present disappeared, if it has not been permanently destroyed; and the curious yet gratifying circumstance is noticeable that this Parliament, whom the Queen, with the national approval, has invited to “Reform” itself, is a Parliament in the first place in unusual accord with the Government, and in the next place is a Parliament in which, so far as the conduct of a war would be concerned, the people would appear to place the most unbounded — it may be said — unparalleled confidence.
The Norman Porch - Her Majesty Proceeding to the Robing-Room
That is to say, we have not only a Coalition Government, but a coalition House of Commons, in which — national danger impending, and national respectability (by the adoption of a Reform Bill) having to be secured — individual differences are indiscriminately suppressed. Perhaps the theory that “government by party” is the only Government applicable to a mixed Constitution like that of England may be quite sound; but at any rate it is obvious that the Ministers of Queen Victoria are not just now in face of any tangible body to be termed “Her Majesty’s Opposition.” That there are, and will be, varieties of opinions upon varieties of subjects, is as certain as that there are 654 members of the House of Commons. But the House of Commons is, for the present, without any of those party organisations which indicate the continuance of Government by party. We may return to the ancient ways of watching, or waiting for our freedom, and arranging our prosperity; but, for the present, the National Council is unconstitutionally unsymmetrical — there are no “sides.” And such a tact is to Englishmen at such a time a subject for congratulation.
All was not, however, covleur de rose in the splendours of Tuesday’s ceremonies. There were more people along the line of the Royal procession than have been seen on any like occasion since the Queen went to open the Crystal Palace in 1851 — certainly a greater number than have attended any opening of Parliament since the inauguration of her Majesty’s first Parliament.
The New Houses of Parliament - St. Stephen's Porch
This crowd collected partly because of national excitement in the apprehension of a great European war, but chiefly because of the pre valence of what Lord John Russell termed in the evening of the same day, an “honest delusion” — a delusion, however honest, discreditable to the sagacity and good taste of those who encouraged it. It is undoubtedly a fact that all proper precautions were taken in anticipation of a possible manifestation of unpopularity.
The whole of the Horse Guards were out — an unprecedented thing, we believe; and every available policeman that could be obtained by Sir Richard Mayno was drafted to duty along the line of the procession. There was no hissing to an extent to render such precautions necessary; and, on the other hand, there being more people than usual, there was an unusual cheering — the few hisses arousing indignant loyalty. The signs of disapprobation were very partial in the Park; but in Parliament-street they were unmistakeably evident, and the cheering which suppressed them enables the loyal to afford to admit their existence.
In other respects, the procession was as usual. The crowd, respected and “chaffed” the Guards; cheered, with ironical cheers, that special Briton, the Beef-eater; admired the horses of the Royal carriages; and wondered at the beautiful women, beautifully dressed, who, in brilliant equipages, flashed past, on their way to the Peeresses’ boxes and the galleries in the House of Lords. When the carriage of the Turkish Ambassador appeared, solitary, and attracting all eyes by the peculiar livery of his servants, he was at once recognised, and, of course, heartily cheered. The scene was a complete political ovation, which will be talked about for months to come at Constantinople and by the soldiers of the army on the Danube. “Will the Russian Ambassador appear ?” was a general question; but M. de Brunnow showed his tact and stayed at home. The liveries of the French Minister were recognised, and His Excellency received a gratifying intimation that the Anglo-French alliance is a highly popular one.
The attendance at the House of Lords was both larger and earlier than usual. Long before the hour appointed for the opening of the doors, a protracted line of carriages connected the Victoria Tower with Charing-cross; and numerous ladies, wisely impatient of the delay occasioned by getting the vehicles up in turn, descended in all their full-dress glory, and made their way on foot to the humble entrance provided for them. The Royal Gallery — by which name is known the magnificent hall through which the Queen passes from the Robing-room to the House, and which is lined on each side with seats, row over row — was very soon filled; and lucky was the new arrival whose good looks, or pertinacity, procured her a seat twenty minutes after the doors were opened, though it was then nearly two hours before the Queen would arrive. Nor were the yet more favoured lady occupants of the North Gallery (that usually set apart for less interesting strangers) much later; and this “highly advantageous locality?” was speedily adorned with a goodly show of youth, beauty, and irreproachable millinery. The body of the House filled somewhat more slowly; but the numbers of Peeresses and their friends at length appeared to be much larger than ordinary, and they even entrenched upon the single marginal bench reserved for the ermine bars. The gallery to the left of the throne was also completely occupied, but that on the right was not filled. It only remains to remark, with the utmost respect, that the fair spectators, as usual, looked to far greater advantage at the opening of Parliament than at its close, and the fresh faces and healthy complexions spoke of country rides and sea breezes, rather than of the midnight mazurka and the crowded supper-room.
The Peers were late. There was a large assemblage of Judges (who clustered together in the centre of the House), and several members of the Episcopal Bench. The Ambassadors, as they arrived, did not take their places behind the Bishops, but joined in groups near the Throne, and their various uniforms and glittering decorations helped the striking picture presented by the scene. It was, of cour se, matter of speculation whether the Russian Ambassador would be present; and searching were the glances directed at each bedizened diplomat, to discover the representative of the Power whose misdeeds were expected to be exposed. But Baron Brunnow, if present (which we doubt), escaped observation. The Turkish Ambassador was there, and came in quite radiantly, having been tremendously cheered by the people.
Stairway of St. Stephen's Porch
The distinguished assembly seated itself, the ceremony of packing being performed with considerable dexterity, as well as courtesy, by the much-entreated officials ; and a few minutes before two the usual signal was given, and scarfs, opera mantles, and shawls, fell with a gentle rustle. A brief pause, and then come the guns, and then the subdued clangour of the military; music. A few minutes, and the picturesque procession, with its heralds, and nobles, and pages, entered — and then the Queen. The entire assembly rose, and remained standing until Her Majesty, having taken her seat upon the throne, graciously requested their Lordships to be seated. The Queen wore a splendid tiara of diamonds and a diamond necklace, a white satin dress, and a train of rich claret-coloured velvet. The ensigns of State, borne by the great officers, were duly posted to the right and left of the Sovereign. The Prince Consort took his seat; and word was given to summon the Commons. The ordinary and somewhat protracted delay ensued, but a trampling of feet and cries of “Order” were heard at last, the tall form of the Speaker appeared at the bar, and the members surged up behind him, and, let us add, manifested a strange lack of self-restraint, frequently causing portions of the Speech to be lost by the noise they made. Once, indeed, an enthusiastic member so far forgot himself as to cry “Hear, hear,” at a passage which, it may be presumed, strongly reflected his own political tenets.
Her Majesty The Queen Ascending The Throne in the House of Lords
Her Majesty then read, with her usual clearness and emphasis, the following Speech :-
…and here I leave the transcription for now.
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