Georgian London: Into the Streets (9 page)

Moorfields had cheap housing and ready access to water, and by the time the Artillery Company was making its presence felt there was a ‘
motley assemblage’ of men and women trying to scrape a living. The surroundings were less than salubrious: for centuries the laystalls (dunghills) of the City had been located in the southern part of the area. Then small shops ‘began to spring up on the outskirts of the Moor … tenanted by botchers
’, many of whom made wheeled walking frames known as ‘go-carts’ for children and the elderly and infirm. Spinning Wheel Alley was given over almost entirely to the go-cart trade. Physical sports such as wrestling and cudgel-play were practised on the open ground. Tenants of the poorest housing included ‘
jobbing tailors
, and renovators of old clothes, always ready to leave their shop boards and to join in the scuffles which went on before their doors’. Under trees planted across the lower part of the moor were stalls of second-hand booksellers, where antiquaries rummaged. The poor writers and the constant threat, or promise, of violence defined the area.

Building was getting under way in the north, and the parish church of the newly created parish of St Luke’s was opened in 1733. The citizens worked on getting rid of the laystalls and installing tree-lined walks. These walks were not always used for the pleasant perambulations their planners had intended, and one in particular was notorious. The walk running along the boundary between Upper and Lower Moorfields also marked the border between the area officially within
the City (Lower), with all its rules, and the area outside (Upper), which was unregulated and known as Sodomites’ Walk. All the different cruising areas of London have their own ‘specialities’, and Moorfields was what would become known as ‘rough trade’. Moorfields may have been the place where this term originated, as Sodomites’ Walk was the destination for those seeking congress with workers in the ‘rough trades’ such as coal-heaving and the river trades. Sodomites’ Walk was officially removed in 1752, when the wall separating Upper and Lower Moorfields was pulled down ‘
as it was a Screen for Thieves and the most obnoxious persons’. These were the same persons who ‘have frequented that Place for many Years, and debauch’d the Morals of ’Prentices and other unguarded Youth
’. Another local haunt of both London’s youths and those who might seek to debauch them was the Perilous Pond, a dangerous bathing hole near Old Street. In 1743 it was transformed into the Peerless Pool, London’s first proper outdoor swimming pool, measuring 108ft by 170ft and used as a skating rink in winter. The Peerless Pool is gone, but Sodomites’ Walk is marked by the south side of Finsbury Square – so it is still possible to walk along it, if the fancy takes you.

The ‘motley’ nature of Moorfields was seen again in 1750, when London experienced a series of earthquakes.
At noon on Thursday 8 February
, those sitting in the Chancery Courts felt a severe jolt, those in Lincoln’s Inn watched their furniture move, and a lamplighter was forced to cling to his ladder in Gray’s Inn.

The usual round of pamphlets and sermons was soon on the way regarding divine disgruntlement against the sinful nature of Londoners. Between 10 and 13 February,
The London Evening Post
published a scientific explanation with no mention of the geological implications of sin. John Wesley, however, was having none of it; he dismissed any ‘
natural explanation’, for clearly ‘God is himself the Author, and sin the moral cause, of earthquakes
’.

It is likely that the earthquake would have been forgotten by busy Londoners soon enough had not, on Thursday 8 March, exactly a month after the first quake, a second one struck. It was little more than a tremor, estimated at having a magnitude of 3.1 (whereas the first earthquake has been estimated at 4.1), but London was in uproar.
The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, droughts and cattle shortages caused by a bovine ‘plague’, as well as the resulting high prices, had all been features of the previous decade. The country was going to the dogs, in a biblical handcart.

On 16 March, the Bishop of London, Thomas Sherlock, wrote an open letter to his people. It was published in large numbers as a pamphlet. It warned against scientists, whom he termed ‘Little philosophers’. These men saw ‘a little, and but a very little’. It was a straightforward rebuke to the people of London for their ungodly ways, and it sold in reams. The Church wasn’t giving away the word of God, even in such spiritually challenging times.

Church sermons spoke of London as the ‘headquarters of wickedness’ and deemed the earthquake a lesson. Bandwaggoners at every level saw money to be made from the earthquake: pamphlets and news-sheets abounded, and lectures were given. All this contributed to a general feeling of panic.

Then, like a match to kindling,
a ‘lunatic lifeguardsman
called Mitchell’ began to walk around London crying a prophecy that London would suffer a huge earthquake on 8 April. The city would be flattened.

Londoners began to clear out. They went to family in the country, or took a holiday. For those unable to leave it was clear that the feeling on the streets was tense. The clergy lambasted the people for cowardice. A man with a foot in each camp was Roger Pickering, pastor of a Dissenters’ church and a Fellow of the Royal Society. On 5 April, he published a sermon ordering Londoners to remain, and take their medicine.

I
adjure
you, by the
Interest
of that
Gospel
you profess, by the
Credit
of that
Faith
on which you rest your Souls, that, with
humble Hearts
, but with
Christian Confidence
, in your respective Stations ON THE SPOT where
Providence
had place you, YE WAIT the WILL OF GOD.

But Londoners had been told for over a month that earthquakes buried both the good and the guilty. Horace Walpole recorded, on the evening of 7 April, that in the past three days ‘
730 coaches
have been counted passing Hyde Park Corner with whole parties removing into the country’. That night, everyone who feared for their lives the coming day
cleared out either to Moorfields or Hyde Park, to take shelter on the open ground. Some took their carriages and slept in them. Others pitched makeshift tents and windbreaks. Moorfields had become the place of refuge on the edge of the City once again. The following morning, after the earthquake had declined to make an appearance, the Moorfields refugees crept back to their undamaged homes and got on with life, no doubt feeling both relieved and foolish.

Close to Moorfields, Bunhill Fields burial ground holds the graves of many religious Dissenters, such as George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement, John Bunyan, the Baptist preacher, as well as that of Susannah Wesley, the mother of John Wesley. The area hosted Wesley’s open-air preaching, and it was just outside Aldersgate, on 24 May 1738, that he noted in his journal how he ‘felt his heart strangely warmed’ at a Lutheran service. A memorial outside the doors of the Museum of London now marks the spot. Wesley worked mainly amongst those who did not attend established churches, and he drew many followers from the dispossessed through his inclusive style of worship. He first occupied a disused foundry just off City Road for his Methodist meetings, but by 1777, he had enough subscribing followers to commission George Dance the Younger to design the City Road Chapel, still in existence. He wrote extensively, not only on religion but also about scientific and medical breakthroughs, and his ideas would have informed his congregations. Through his preaching and writing he embraced members of the community who felt distanced from the rich members of the City churches. He often preached in Moorfields, gathering large crowds.

By the 1770s, the role of Moorfields as open ground for playing, protesting and preaching was declining. In 1777, Finsbury Square was built on some of the drier ground, and the parish of St Luke’s was rapidly growing to cope with a burgeoning population. By the final quarter of the eighteenth century, Moorfields was surrounded on all sides and shrinking; but in 1784, it would have one last hurrah as London’s premier space for the people.

In 1766, Henry Cavendish’s new work on hydrogen had led scientists and madcaps all over Europe to experiment with balloon flight. The concept of little hydrogen balloons for amusement or
communication purposes wasn’t new, but it took a series of adventurers to prove that man could take flight. The most famous of all of these were the Montgolfier brothers whose balloon ascended in Paris in 1783. The following year, the ballooning bug hit London.

Vincenzo (or Vincent) Lunardi came to England as a diplomat, but he was obsessed with the idea of flying. He was a dashing 22-year-old and was determined to gain royal permission to ‘demonstrate’ a manned balloon flight with the help of his partner, George Biggin. This was to take place on the Artillery Ground near Moorfields, in September 1784. The almost impossible number of 200,000 people turned out to see this demonstration, including the royals and a healthy chunk of the nobility.

Lunardi made everything dramatic and packed his cat and dog into the basket with him for company before releasing the tethers, whereupon the balloon rose ‘
with slow and gradual majesty into the air’ to the disappointment of ‘the splenetic’ doubters. ‘He appeared composed, and as the balloon went up, bowed most gracefully, and calmly waved his flag to the admiring and wonder-struck spectators
.’ It wasn’t all glamour, though: the cat got sick and was let out when the balloon touched down briefly in north London before Lunardi finally landed near Ware, to a very surprised reception.

Lunardi bonnets, fans and garters became all the rage, and the charming Italian had quite a fan club. The balloon went on show in the Pantheon on Oxford Street, the great hall of public entertainment designed by James Wyatt, which stood on the plot now occupied by Marks & Spencer. Thousands came to visit Lunardi’s balloon, displayed in the Pantheon’s rotunda, and aerostatic science became the wonder of the age. Allegedly, after seeing a balloon on Hounslow Heath in 1784, Horace Walpole predicted that the whole heath would become ‘
the harbour of the skies
’ – predicting, if not quite prophesying, the arrival of Heathrow. The sense of potential these first balloon ascents created was huge: visible, exciting proof that the world was changing, and almost anything was possible.

After Lunardi, Moorfields would no longer hold the massing crowds and soon disappeared under housing of the meaner Georgian sort, in addition to workshops and cookhouses.
In 1800, it was the site
of an illuminating case of dognapping, illustrating the diversity of the area, when a man venturing into an establishment for a bowl of soup was surprised to find his missing and ‘much-lamented’ bull terrier, Cesar, there under another name. The owner of the cookhouse, Mr Day, explained that the dog, named Charles, could not possibly be Cesar and was, instead, the produce of the costermonger’s dog, Lover of Smut, and the lamplighter’s dog, Rose. Charles had been born in Moorfields on the premises of a ‘horse-boiler’ and raised by a carter, before being purchased for one guinea by Mr Day. Eventually, it emerged that Mr Day had, in fact, purchased the dog from Charley, ‘the milk-man from over the water’.

By the time of Cesar’s restoration to his rightful owners, Moorfields had largely disappeared beneath urban development. It would remain densely populated by the poorer classes before being comprehensively flattened during the Second World War.

The geography of Moorfields and Bedlam is now hidden, but both were linked inseparably with the legend of Grub Street, particularly during the early part of the eighteenth century. To live and work in Grub Street as a writer, either in reality or metaphorically, meant literary prostitution. It was a poor street running from St Giles-without-Cripplegate (the church still standing in the Barbican complex) north to Chiswell Street, in Clerkenwell.

The Moorfields book and ballad sellers were in place by the Restoration, but it was to be a different generation of writers who would create the Grub Street legend. There are many who could lay claim to being ‘the first’ writer of Grub Street, but there are few who could do it with as much authenticity as Daniel Defoe, born the son of a Presbyterian butcher in Fore Street in the scrubby parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, the parish which covered the bottom half of Grub Street.

Defoe would go on to become one of the most important political writers of his day, working for Robert Harley and his Tory faction as
the first ‘spin doctor’. His big breakthrough came in 1701, with his poem ‘The True-Born Englishman’, which satirized the John Bull ideal of the pure-bred Englishman, harking back to his early days amongst the outsiders and immigrants of Cripplegate.

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,

That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman …

Grub Street publishers, unlike their Paternoster Row colleagues, specialized in topical publications and, sometimes, smut. Elizabeth Nutt ran a cluster of shops in the Royal Exchange where she sold her more respectable stock, such as Swift’s
Tale of a Tub
. She was also listed as a ‘
Mercury-woman
’, printing cheap and often seditious or salacious ballads in Grub Street; in the 1730s, she was printing pornography there, aided by her daughters.

In
The Dunciad
, Alexander Pope’s Goddess of Dullness lives ‘near Bedlam’, meaning Moorfields and the Grub Street area, from where she and her agents bring disrepute, vulgarity and imbecility to London. His placement of the seat of Dullness was no mistake. Pope viewed the cheap output of poor literature as one of the chief agents of what he saw as society’s decline.

This attitude did not change over the course of the Georgian period. It became set in literary history when Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, defined Grub Street as ‘a street near Moorfields, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems’.