Notes and News ............................................ p.2
Obituaries .................................................... p.2
Our new website, by Mike Wicksteed ............ p.3
Links with other organisations ...................... p.4
Exhibitions and Events ................................ p.4
Changing London: Victoria Tower Gardens,
by Dorian Gerhold ........................................ p.5
Circumspice, by Tony Aldous.................. p.3 & 6
Alexander Pope’s Grotto, by Robert Youngs .. p.7
City Women in the eighteenth century,
by Amy Louise Erickson................................ p.9
The London Dock Company and Wapping Street,
1800-1810, by Derek Morris........................ p.10
Remembering Ruskin, by Laurence Marsh .. p.14
Vinyl Revival, by David Crawford ................ p.16
Reviews ...................................................... p.18
Newsletter
Number 88
May 2019
Contents
Tillemans river view
A Prospect of Twickenham (courtesy of the London
Borough of Richmond upon Thames Art Collection).
Alexander Pope’s villa by the Thames features
prominently in this attractive river view by Peter
Tillemans, of c.1725. The house has since been
rebuilt but work is in hand to repair Pope’s famous
grotto. See p.7.
page 2
Notes and News
The Society’s Annual General Meeting will be held
at 5.30 pm on Tuesday, 2 July 2019 at St Andrew
Church Holborn – for details see the centre insert
in this Newsletter. The Society continues to
flourish, with over 1,200 members, and much
active work in progress by our editor Sheila
O’Connell. We are grateful also to our secretary
Mike Wicksteed for all his work on the new website,
which he explains below. Sadly, we have an
unusually large number of deaths to report: our
Vice President and former editor, Ann Saunders,
our printer Graham Maney and several of our
members. We also include an obituary of our Vice-
President Iain Bain, whose death was announced in
a previous Newsletter.
Obituaries
Ann Loreille Saunders, MBE, PhD, FSA
London historian, editor and
lecturer died on 13 February
2019 at the age of 88.
Ann was closely involved
with the London Topographical
Society for many years. From
1980-2015 she was editor of
the
London
Topographical
Record
(vols
24-31)
and
supervised
the
Society’s
annual publications during
this period, among them the A-Z volumes on
Edwardian London and the London of Charles II.
Ann combined an editor’s wise judgement and
meticulous attention to detail with a broad
knowledge of London. Her own books included a
history of Regents Park (1969), the subject of her
PhD and an area which she knew well from the
time when (initially as Ann Cox-Johnson before her
marriage to Bruce Saunders) she was Borough
Archivist at Marylebone Public Library. The City of
London was also a special interest. She contributed
to as well as edited the LTS volume No. 152, The
Royal Exchange (1997), and co-authored a History
of the Merchant Taylors’ Company (2004). St Paul’s,
the story of a cathedral, was published in 2001,
new edition 2012. Her wide ranging knowledge of
what London had to offer was demonstrated
comprehensively by The Art and Architecture of
London, 1994.
Ann lectured in many London educational
establishments, was an Hon. Fellow of University
College London and a governor of Bedford College.
She served as President of both the Camden
History Society and the St Marylebone Society, and
was a Council Member of the Society of
Antiquaries. Her interests extended into other
spheres; from 1967-2008 she was Hon. Editor of
the Costume Society. The recreations she listed in
Who’s Who reveal her energy and enthusiasms:
‘reading, walking, embroidery, cooking, studying
London, going to exhibitions and theatres, visiting
churches’.
Ann took a great interest in all her students and
friends and made practical arrangements to further
their studies and careers. Even in recent years
when she had plenty to worry about with her own
health, she would still recommend cures and offer
to provide sustaining meals. She organised
memberships and suggested useful contacts. She
enhanced all our lives.
A fuller obituary will appear in the next volume of
the Record.
Graham Maney
3 June 1941 – 6 December 2018
Graham’s grandfather, W. S.
Maney, had started a printing
business back in 1900, and
by the late 1980s, when I
started
working
for
the
company,
the
business
premises were in Harehills,
Leeds. The offices and printworks were far from
glamorous, but the books produced over the years
were of the highest quality and Graham was
involved at every stage of production: from meeting
authors and editors, and discussing layouts, to
checking printed sheets and bound copies. This
one site in Leeds was responsible for the editing,
reproduction, proofs, printing and binding of many
superb volumes, including The London Surveys of
Ralph Treswell, edited by John Schofield, and Jean
Imray’s The Mercers’ Hall, edited by Ann Saunders.
The world of printing and publishing has changed
enormously over the intervening years. What did
not change was Graham’s dedication to each and
every publication, whether at Maney’s or, later,
Outset Services. Academic editors could rely on
him to lead them through the production process,
offering guidance whenever needed, from first
meetings, often at a table covered in manuscripts
and photographs, to the delivery of the books, and
he was especially helpful to Ann Saunders in her
final years as Editor. London Topographical Society
members will recall that at each AGM, Graham
would travel down to London for the day, keeping
in contact with the book delivery van driver and
guiding him to the hall, then unloading the books
and helping with distribution to members. He was
rewarded with a supper at a favourite fish
restaurant within a ten-minute dash to Kings
Cross, but his contribution was much greater.
Graham balanced his work life with an
enthusiastic involvement in a variety of outdoor
pursuits: from sailing and skiing to hill walking.
His sailing took him to the Caribbean and the
Mediterranean, in the company of family and
friends. As for the walking – he was a member of
several walking groups, and spent many happy
hours in the Lake District and the Brecon Beacons,
not to mention more recent walking holidays in
North America and northern India.
After Graham left W. S. Maney in 1999, he joined
the Bench, and served as a magistrate for 13 years,
becoming Chairman of the Bench, and also
mentoring new magistrates. Thereafter he joined
the Prison Monitoring Board of Wetherby Young
Offenders Institution, and a colleague wrote:
“[Graham] made an excellent chairman for his
three
years
and
guided
the
team
very
thoughtfully… We also had some excellent post-
meeting evening meals in Wetherby!”
Throughout his life, whether at work with W. S.
Maney or Outset, walking in the Lakes, or sailing in
the Mediterranean, three words seem apt: honesty,
dedication and enthusiasm. He will be sorely
missed by his colleagues, not only for his
professional abilities, but also for his friendship.
– Linda Fisher
Iain Bain
1934 – 1918
Iain Bain, Vice President and former Council
member of the London Topographical Society,
became well known in his youth as a Scottish
Hammer Champion, both at school and university,
where he studied English. During his National
Service he was involved in action both in Kenya and
in Suez. His involvement in the world of printing and
books began with a job with Unwin Brothers,
followed by appointment as production manager at
Bodley Head. From 1972-94 he was head of
publications at the Tate Gallery. Special interests
were the history of copperplate printing and the
discovery of the original woodblocks and plates used
by artists such as Gainsborough and Bewick; on the
latter he became a world expert, and President of the
Thomas Bewick Society. Among many other
distinctions he was a Fellow of the Society of
Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts,
and President of the Printing Historical Society.
Joyce and Donald Cummings
Those of you who have been members for more than
ten years will be sad to read that our AGM tea lady
Joyce Cumming has also died. Before institutions
started insisting that all refreshments served on
their premises were supplied by their approved
contractors, Joyce would provide a mountain of
cakes herself and other members would bring their
own offerings – buttered fruit loaf was always my
favourite. Joyce and her husband Donald moved into
the Sunrise home in Purley when Donald had a
stroke in 2008. Donald’s membership stopped then
but the Society elected Joyce as an honorary
member in recognition of her past contributions.
When their son Andrew telephoned me to say
Donald had died, I asked after Joyce and he told me
that in fact Joyce had died a few years ago.
We also report the deaths of Peter Jefferson
Smith, a stalwart of the Clapham Society, Sonia
Crutchlow in Fulham and Ashley Barker, former
GLC Surveyor of Buildings.
Our future publications
There is much to occupy our hardworking editor,
Sheila O’Connell, and her helpers, which has
required a little rearrangement of publication dates.
The Society’s 2019 publication will be Dorian
Gerhold’s fascinating study: London Bridge and its
houses, c.1209-1761. It will be printed in a
landscape format and contain 125 illustrations,
including a number of reconstructions.Work
continues on the ambitious London Parish
Maps project, coordinated by Simon Morris, which
is now scheduled for 2020. We hope that The
Record Vol XXXII will also appear in 202 0.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Circumspice
Can you identify this rural scene? See p.6 for the
answer.
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Our new website
Following a rather longer gestation period than
expected, the Society’s new website has now gone
‘live’. The website’s address hasn’t changed and is
still: www.londontopsoc.org
Our new website replaces one that served us
extremely well for nearly a decade. A combination
of the availability of new web technology and, more
importantly, a lack of technical support for the old
site meant that the need for a replacement had
become inevitable.
Much of the content from our old site has been
transferred across, although it’s now presented in a
different way. The aim has been to improve ease of
navigation along with the provision of a modern
and, I hope you agree, a more interesting
appearance. Wait a few seconds and you can watch
the map details change on the new homepage –
click on the map and you can see the original; use
your +/- button and the detail is amazing.
Apart
from
the
opportunity
to
purchase
page 3
page 4
publications and manage membership, the website
also offers up the prospect of expanding our
knowledge of the historical aspects of the Society
and its works.
The ‘Complete List of LTS Publications’ section is
now more than a catalogue of our 181 publications.
To my surprise, I discovered that many volumes of
The Topographical Record, from 1901, and its
predecessor the three-part Illustrated Topographical
Record of London, from 1898, had been digitised by
universities in America and – after a bit of to-ing
and fro-ing – we are now able to read them online.
The work of identifying and linking to digitised
copies of our publications is still on-going but a
good start has been made.
So, the web viewer can now read the minutes from
all the Society’s early AGMs and see how close it
came to closure after its first couple of decades. And
read articles from The Topographical Record on the
history of the Society such as ‘The London
Topographical Society: A Brief Account’ [1980] by our
then Hon. Secretary and current Vice President,
Stephen Marks FSA, or ‘Walter Godfrey – The
Society’s Chairman and Honorary Editor 1928-1960’
[1965] by the late Marjorie B. Honeybourne who
succeeded him as our Hon. Editor. Walter Godfrey
was an amazing man who almost single-handedly
kept the Society afloat during World War II.
Similarly, the old ‘Related Links’ has been
expanded into a ‘Websites with a London Focus’
section, of which there are, not surprisingly, a large
number. Slightly more surprisingly, maybe, is that
those selected are interesting and informative.
From being able to view one of the Society’s earliest
publications, the fabulous Kensington Turnpike Trust
Plans 1811 [LTS No. 8, 1899-1903] on the British
Library’s website, to the Vision of Britain through
Time set up by the University of Portsmouth, or
Britain From Above, which includes the largest
number of aerial photos of Britain taken before
1939, website users may find themselves glued to
their screens for longer than they had anticipated.
Delving into this treasure trove on our new
website has the potential to provide hours of
fascinating – possibly unplanned – reading and
viewing. Be warned!
– Mike Wicksteed
Links with other organisations
It is good to learn that the Charles Close Society
was delighted with the response from LTS members
to the special offer in our last Newsletter of a 1934
London Passenger Transport Map published by this
society concerned with the maps and history of the
Ordnance Survey (see charlesclosesociety.org).
Another productive link we have made is with the
Historic Towns Trust, who at our last AGM
provided our members with copies of their newly
revised map of Tudor London, in return for the
grant to the Trust made by the LTS. If you would
like to buy the fascinating Tudor London map as a
gift for a friend, or if your appetite has been
whetted for interpretive historical (as opposed to
historic) maps of other places, you may like to look
at the website Historictownsatlas.co.uk The
atlases and maps cannot be ordered online, but
you can order them from your local retailer by
quoting their ISBNs. At under £10 the maps (recent
ones include Winchester and Hull) are very good
value. The atlases are much more expensive, but
splendidly informative. The early volumes which
are now out of print are available on line.
Exhibitions and Events
The Medieval Port of London Saturday May 18.
Conference at the Museum of London organised by
the Docklands History Society. Eight speakers will
discuss the port, merchants, ships, waterfront
buildings, the Hanseatic steelyard and the
character of the Thames. To book a place see
docklandshistorygroup.org.uk
Sir Thomas Gresham (1519-1579): Tudor,
Trader,
Shipper,
Spy.
Guildhall
Library
Exhibition, 3 June to mid-September
Sir Thomas Gresham is one of the most over-
looked sixteenth century merchants and financiers.
Gresham served four Tudor monarchs, managed to
keep his head, and all the while made money.
When he died, he was widely reputed to be the
wealthiest man in Europe. He brought the idea of a
‘bourse’ to England from Antwerp, the Royal
Exchange, as well as the ‘shopping mall’.
This exhibition will celebrate the quincentenary of
his birth, and coincides with the release of a major
new biography by Tudor historian Dr John Guy.
Museum of London. The Museum’s important
new acquisition, the Prévot panorama of c.1815
which featured in our last Newsletter, is now on
display, and can also be seen on the museum’s web
site: museumofLondon.org.uk
Secret Rivers: London’s Historic Waterways
Museum of London Docklands 24 May-27 October.
Free exhibition exploring the stories of London’s
rivers,
streams
and
brooks
through
art,
archaeology, photography and film.
London Open Garden Squares weekend, 8-9
June, organised by the London Parks and Gardens
Trust. With the purchase of a weekend ticket, you
can explore a huge variety of gardens which are
usually closed to the public – For details see
opensquares.org .
Women traders in Cheapside, an outdoor
exhibition, 21 September – 18 October 2019 (see
also see p.9)
London Open House weekend. Visit some of
London’s best buildings. 21-22 September. See
Londonopenhouse.org
l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l
Changing London
Victoria Tower Gardens and
the Holocaust Memorial
Victoria Tower Gardens is the open space next to the
Thames just south of the Palace of Westminster,
providing wonderful views of the Palace framed by
large plane trees, as well as an area of calm in a
busy part of Westminster. It has become a site of
controversy since the then Prime Minister, David
Cameron, announced in January 2016 (without any
public consultation) that the UK’s Holocaust
Memorial would be built in the Gardens and the
subsequent decision (without any announcement)
that the Holocaust Learning Centre would be built
there too. A planning application was submitted to
Westminster City Council in December 2018. Many
of the arguments both for and against the plans are
rooted in the area’s history.
The government argues that the Memorial and
Learning Centre should be located next to
Parliament. At first this was so that it would be ‘a
permanent statement of our values as a nation’
(David Cameron, 2016). This was hard to defend,
given the record of Parliament on Jewish refugees
in the 1930s and its longer record of religious
intolerance, and more recently the justification has
been to encourage people to hold Parliament to
account for its decisions, or (more vaguely) ‘as a
permanent reminder that political decisions have
far-reaching consequences’. The problems for the
government are that the UK Parliament had no
direct role in the Holocaust, and that the main
principle embodied in Parliament is not protection
from racial and religious hatred but that
governments should be accountable, which has
little relevance to the Holocaust. The other
argument for the site is that the Gardens already
contain several monuments to liberty and can
become ‘a Garden of our Nation’s Conscience’.
Unfortunately the three existing monuments are
rather miscellaneous: one (the burghers of Calais)
embodies the royal prerogative of mercy, one (the
statue of Emmeline Pankhurst) is about political
liberties within Britain, and one (the Buxton
Memorial) commemorates the abolition of slavery
overseas (but not the slaves themselves). The
Holocaust Memorial, recording the murder of six
million people elsewhere in Europe, will hardly
form a coherent series with these.
Opponents of this use of the Gardens have
consistently argued that the project is the right one
but in the wrong place. They have emphasised the
loss of green space, the transformation of the
Gardens from park to sombre civic space, the
probable damage to the mature trees, the blocking
of views of the Palace of Westminster, the traffic
and security implications, and the precedent set by
commandeering an urban park for a government
project.1 Royal Parks has objected strongly. But
there are also objections and obstacles which arise
out of the history of the Gardens as an open space.
Research is currently in progress on the site
occupied by the Gardens, and is likely to appear in
due course in the Society’s Record. The eastern
part − roughly a third − of the Gardens was
reclaimed from the Thames when the open space
was created. The western part has a longer history.
page 5
Victoria Tower Gardens view
Up to the Dissolution, the northern end of it was
part of the Palace of Westminster, consisting
mainly of gardens, the central part belonged to the
Abbey, consisting of a slaughterhouse, a mill
(opposite what is now Great College Street) and a
close, and the southern part was marshland. After
the Dissolution it all belonged to the Crown. Much
new land was reclaimed in the late sixteenth
century, and between 1597 and 1611 the Crown
sold the whole area apart from the slaughterhouse.
By the mid-seventeenth century there was a
continuous row of wharves and houses.
Much of the land sold in 1611 was bought back by
the Crown under an Act of 1837 and forms part the
present Palace of Westminster. Worries about the
fire risk from adjacent properties prompted an Act of
1867 under which the Crown acquired the
properties as far south as what is now Great Peter
Street. There was no clear plan for the future of this
land, but in 1879 W. H. Smith donated £1000
towards laying it out as an open space, on condition
that it remain an open space for ever, and the first
part of the Gardens was created soon afterwards.
The southern part of the Gardens, on which the
Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre are
proposed to be built, was acquired by London
County Council under an Act of 1900. The LCC
scheme involved widening and realigning Millbank,
taking a small amount of land from the existing
Gardens, and in return the Commissioner of Works,
in whom that land was vested, insisted that the new
land should be transferred to him (so that the whole
of the Gardens would be under unified control) and
that the Act should provide for the new land to
remain an open space for ever.2 Westminster Vestry
(later Council) made a large financial contribution
which was also conditional on the land remaining
open. Consequently the Act provides that the land
should remain ‘a garden open to the public’.3 That
part of the Act has never been repealed. Remarkably,
the government remained unaware of it until very
recently.4 What impact it will have on the
government’s project is not yet clear.
Objections can still made to the planning
application, as it is not likely to be considered until
June at the earliest, and they are helpful in
demonstrating the extent of opposition. To carry
weight they should concentrate on the planning
aspects, such as those noted above. The planning
application can be found here: tinyurl.com/SaveVTG
– Dorian Gerhold
Notes
1. See www.savevictoriatowergardens.co.uk/
2. The papers are at London Metropolitan Archives,
LCC/CL/IMP/01/048.
3. London County Council (Improvements) Act 1900,
section 8 (1).
4. Parliamentary written answers, 229626.
5. Photograph by Andreas Praefcke –
self-photographed, CC BY 3.0, commons.
wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15586567
Circumspice (see p.3)
It is a truth, which ought to be universally
acknowledged among London Topographers, that
the NEW RIVER is neither a river nor particularly
new. Dating from 1613, it is an artificial waterway
designed to bring fresh drinking water from springs
in Hertfordshire to a City of London then dependent
on increasingly polluted sources including the tidal
Thames.
The water moved by gravity very gently, more or
less following the 100ft contour; this meant that
though the Hertfordshire springs and the city were
only about 20 miles apart, the length of the
meandering New River was almost twice that. The
section shown in our picture, with one of the New
River Company’s twin 1830s reservoirs close
behind it, makes the point. In its determination
slavishly to follow the contour, the ‘river’ runs half
a mile east from the north-east corner of Finsbury
Park, then does a little pirouette and runs a similar
distance south-west alongside the two reservoirs.
These still supply water to London, nowadays
under the management of Thames Water, but this
one – Stoke Newington West Reservoir – is also a
place for boating; the east reservoir – renamed
Woodberry Wetlands – is a London Wildlife Trust
nature reserve, with myriad water-loving birds and
boardwalks along the rushes. The LCC’s 1940s
Woodberry
Down
housing
estate,
replacing
substantial nineteenth century houses built on
what was the northern edge of London, has now in
turn been largely replaced by a cluster of Berkeley
Homes’ glittering, glass-clad towers – all amid very
civilised landscaping which, as it nears the New
River, becomes decidedly rural.
The New River Path, with signposts topped with
the letters ‘NR’, runs from Amwell in Hertfordshire
to New River Head in Clearkenwell. Much of the
river in London is now in pipe or culvert, but round
the Woodberry loop you walk alongside open water
– except on one very muddy stretch you may (as I
did) gracefully skid, and less gracefully sit down.
Another
feature
to
note
is
the
Frumious
Bandersnatch – a box of tricks which travels along
a gantry and (apparently untouched by human
hand) lowers claws to scoop up rubbish before it
can enter and block the ensuing pipework. The
Bandersnatches (there are at least two of them) do
this discreetly and in near silence. Come to think of
it, unlike Lewis Carroll’s Bandersnatches, not
frumious at all. But if you go there, watch out!
– Tony Aldous
page 6
The Newsletter Editor welcomes suggestions from
readers for items in the Newsletter.
The deadline for contributions
to the November Newsletter is 16 October 2019.
For contact details see the back page.
page 7
Alexander Pope’s Grotto
The house built by the poet Alexander Pope became
one of the most famous of the eighteenth century
rural villas on the banks of the Thames around
Twickenham, appearing prominently in our cover
picture. Although the house no longer exists, the
famous grotto survives, built to provide a link
between the house and Pope’s much cherished
garden. Robert Youngs, a Trustee of Pope’s Grotto
Preservation Trust, describes its character and the
progress of the conservation work that will make it
accessible to the public.
When Alexander Pope moved from Chiswick to
Twickenham in 1719, he had recently completed
and published his translation of Homer’s Iliad. This
had brought him considerable fame and fortune,
allowing him to realise his vision of a garden with a
classical landscape and a water-side Palladian villa.
He began to build his villa in 1720.
The villa was on the river side of Cross Deep, the
main road from London to Hampton. The six rooms
of the cellar were at ground-level facing the river
road. To gain private access to his five-acre garden
across the road, he obtained a licence to extend the
centre two rooms of the cellar into a tunnel under
the road and then he started laying out his five acre
garden. At some point he decided to establish his
first grotto, furnishing it with shells, mirror-glass,
flints, iron ore and a lamp made of alabaster. In a
1725 letter to his friend Edward Blount he wrote:
“When you shut the doors of this grotto it becomes a
Camera Obscura. A lamp (of an orbicular figure of
thin alabaster) is hung in the middle...” It is said
that his camera obscura was able to project images
of boats on the Thames on to a wall at the back of
the grotto. Two sketches by William Kent show
Pope in his grotto studying by the light of his lamp
but Samuel Johnson was not impressed: “…Pope’s
excavation was requisite as an entrance to his
garden, and, as some men try to be proud of their
defects, he extracted an ornament from an
inconvenience, and vanity produced a grotto where
necessity enforced a passage.”
Pope had completed his villa by 1725 but was
dissatisfied with its river frontage. In 1732, he
commissioned Kent to design a more imposing
front. Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, did not
approve: “I have considered your front and am of
opinion that my friend Kent has done all that he
can, considering the place.” This would have been
the first sight that his many visitors would have
had as they disembarked from their boat and led by
Pope to his grotto and thence to his garden. This
was the first complete garden in what we now call
the English Landscape Garden style.
Towards the end of 1739 Pope visited Hotwell
Spa on the banks of the Avon. He became
entranced by the geology of the gorge and its
colours to such an extent that he resolved to
redesign the grotto as a museum of mineralogy
and mining. He began to decorate his grotto with
ores, spars, fool’s gold, stalactites, crystals,
alabaster, snakestones and spongestone. At the
end of each following season Pope claimed that he
had finished his grotto, but he never did: he died
on 30 May 1744 and is buried in the nave of St
Mary’s Church in Twickenham.
The villa, garden and grotto passed to Sir William
Stanhope and then four further owners before
Conjectural plan of Pope’s Grotto in 1725
Plan of the garden from A plan of Mr Pope's garden, 1745 by John
Serle, published by Robert Dodsley
Pieter Rysbrack, An Exact Draught and View of Mr Pope’s House
at Twickenham 1735, courtesy of the London Borough of
Richmond upon Thames Art Collection
Baroness Howe of Langar moved in from a nearby
property. However, she was so troubled by visitors
demanding to see the famous house that she
demolished
it
in
1808 and built a
house next door –
an act of wanton
destruction
for
which
she
was
named ‘The Queen
of the Goths’.
Fortunately
for
future generations,
Baroness Howe had
left the grotto intact
to allow access to
the garden across
the road, as did
subsequent owners.
In the 270 years
since Pope’s death,
the layout of his
grotto has remained
largely unchanged,
though many of his
minerals have been
removed by souvenir
hunters – a fate
which was predicted by Robert Dodsley in 1745:
“Then, some small Gem, or shining Ore, Departing,
each shall pilfer, in fond hope To please their
Friends, on every distant Shore, Boasting a Relick
from the Cave of Pope.” Since then, the villa has
been rebuilt, the tunnel has been lengthened to
accommodate a wider road above and Pope’s view
of the river has been obscured by a 1930s brick
building.
Ownership of the grotto passed to Radnor House
School in 2010 when a trust was formed to
promote interest in Alexander Pope and, most
importantly, to conserve his grotto and to make it
more accessible to the public. In 2015, the Trust
commissioned a conservation management plan
and a lighting plan, completed archaeological
surveys, created detailed costings and obtained
planning permission. Conservation and lighting
work on the South chamber was completed in
2017, leaving the remainder of the grotto, about
80%, to be conserved when funds are available. At
the time of writing, the Trust is applying to the
National Lottery Heritage Fund for a grant to
complete the conservation.
When finally conserved, the grotto, which is the
last remaining part of this once-famous villa, will
serve as a monument to one of the most influential
literary figures of the eighteenth century and an
instigator of the English landscape garden
movement.
You can find more information about Pope, his
grotto
and
our
project
on
our
website:
popesgrotto.org.uk .
– Robert Youngs
page 8
Plan of the grotto from A plan of Mr Pope's garden, 1745 by John
Serle, published by Robert Dodsley
The conserved South Chamber in 2018, courtesy of Damian Griffiths, Donald Insall Associates
page 9
City Women in the
Eighteenth Century
Amy Louise Erickson, from Cambridge University
History Faculty, writes about her research on
eighteenth century women traders, which will be the
subject of an outdoor exhibition in Cheapside in the
autumn.
In the eighteenth century, as now, the area
around Cheapside from St Paul’s in the west to
the Royal Exchange in the east was known for
luxury goods. Unlike the shops today, however, in
the eighteenth century most of those goods were
made
on
the
premises,
and
among
the
manufacturers and shop owners were thousands
of women. They have been identified in the
records of the Livery Companies and in the British
Museum’s collection of trade cards – those
ornamented business cards which served to
announce a business move or change of owner in
the eighteenth century, but which would later
dwindle into the text-only business cards we know
today. One of the best known is the card that
William Hogarth created for his sisters, Mary and
Ann, when they moved their shop around the
corner at St Bartholomew’s Hospital: ‘from the old
Frock-shop the corner of the Long Walk facing the
Cloysters, Removed to ye King’s Arms, joyning to
ye Little Britain-gate, near Long Walk’.
Women
traded
as
printers,
fan-makers,
silversmiths,
goldsmiths,
and
many
other
occupations. Textile and clothing trades made up
the largest section of London’s manufacturing
industry, both male and female. The City of London
required civic freedom of women as well as men to
trade; it means that we can trace mistresses as well
as masters more easily there than in all other
English cities and towns which excluded women
from the guilds, requiring payment of a fine to
trade instead (the records of which have long since
been lost). There were approximately 80 guilds or
companies in London in the eighteenth century.
But there were more occupations than companies,
and the trade practised by guild members was not
necessarily that of the company to which they
belonged. The English system of coverture in
marriage, whereby a wife lost her property and legal
identity to her husband, meant that a married
woman could not hold company membership
separately from her husband. So the milliner Lucy
Tyler traded under the authorisation of the
Clockmakers’ Company because her husband was
a member of that company. Her apprentice Eleanor
Mosley, one of six apprentices that Lucy took
between 1715 and 1725, was duly enrolled in the
Clockmakers’ apprenticeship register and took the
freedom of that company at age 24, remaining a
member for the next 20 years while trading as a
milliner in Gracechurch Street and taking seven of
her own apprentices.
Milliners
were
elite
clothing
dealers
and
producers in the eighteenth century. ‘Milliner’ did
not acquire its current meaning of hat maker until
the end of the nineteenth century. Lower down the
social scale were seamstresses and mantua
makers, who kept that name long after the late
seventeenth-century fashion for mantua dresses
had passed. The ‘dressmaker’ only appeared in the
nineteenth century.
Like Lucy Tyler and her husband, many couples
followed different trades. When Mary Sleep married
John Sansom in 1743, they created a trade card for
their new household advertising his business of
turner and handle maker and hers of fan maker.
She was careful to note her training with her
mother (‘from Mrs Sleep’s’) because otherwise she
lost the name recognition when she took her
husband’s surname, which was a peculiar English
habit associated with coverture.
An exhibition on ‘Women, Work, and the City of
London’ at the London Guildhall Library in the
winter
of
2018-19
showed
some
of
the
apprenticeship and freedom registers in which
women like Mosley and the Sleepes were recorded.
The upcoming exhibition will feature trade cards
from the British Museum’s collection belonging to
local tradeswomen, enlarged on display stands in
Paternoster Square and along the 700-metre length
of Cheapside and Poultry to the Royal Exchange in
the east. Views of Cheapside as it appeared two or
three centuries ago will enable visitors to imagine
the old street in which manufacturing as well as
© The Trustees of the British Museum
commerce was carried out, by women as well as
men. Where possible, posters of trade cards will be
displayed in shop windows when we know the exact
location of a trader and it can be matched to a
current building. This on-street exhibition will
shine an entirely new light on women’s economic
role in the City.
For more on women traders in eighteenth-century
London, my academic work appears in articles in
Continuity & Change, History Workshop Journal,
and Eighteenth-Century Life, and shorter notices in
the London Metropolitan Archives Newsletter are
freely available at:
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-
metropolitan-archives/the-collections/Pages/
women-and-freedom.aspx and
www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-
metropolitan-archives/the-collections/Pages/
mrs-lma.aspx
For more information please contact:
Amy Erickson, ale25@cam.ac.uk or
Tijs Broeke, Common Councilman for Cheap
Ward, Tijs.Broeke@cityoflondon.gov.uk
The London Dock Company and
Wapping Street, 1800-1810
Derek Morris follows his article in Newsletter 84
(May 2017) with further revealing details about the
character of Wapping before the creation of the
London Docks.
On the north bank of the Thames from Wapping to
Limehouse were hundreds of enterprises that
supplied mariners with essential services and
materials:
sails,
ropes,
masts,
anchors,
navigational instruments, victuals, and other
necessities, together with pilots, seamen and sea
captains, and Francis Holman’s painting of the
Wapping waterfront reflects the complexity of the
properties erected there, together with their
wharves and cranes. The London Dock Company
(hereafter the LDC) had a well-thought out series of
administrative processes which guided its purchase
of properties in Wapping and St George-in-the-
East, before the construction of the docks could
begin in 1800, and an earlier article described the
individual house owners in Virginia Street, which
provided a new insight into the people and
properties affected by the development of the
London Docks.1
The LDC archives contain a great deal of
information on many aspects of trade and
industrial premises, taverns, chapels, and other
properties along the river bank in Wapping and
Shadwell, and show that some very considerable
businesses
were
being
displaced
by
the
construction of the docks.2 In addition, the archive
contains details of the annual sales and profits for
a number of traders, including Richard Francis
and Sons, hat makers at 86 Wapping, Richard
Barry, a map and chart seller at 290 Wapping, and
James Powell, a slop seller at 291 Wapping:
information rarely surviving in eighteenth-century
business accounts. The LDC was particularly
concerned with property in and near Wapping
Street, that ran along the north bank: land to be
used for the two entrance basons at the Hermitage
and Bell Dock.
The Hermitage Entrance to the London
Docks
The LDC purchased 1 to 3 on the north side of
Wapping Street, 363 to 367 Wapping Street, which
backed on to the Thames, together with the
Hermitage Dock, where the LDC benefited from
over 550 years of development. As early at 1233
this was the site of the extensive Crash Mills, which
took advantage of a stream that possibly rose near
Well Close Square and ran through the Wapping
Marsh to the Thames. By 1347 there were two
water mills, and later in 1575 there was a a mill
house, wharf and dock.3
From 1665 to 1773, a site immediately to the
north west of the Hermitage Dock (between the
page 10
© The Trustees of the British Museum
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