Newsletter No 86 May 2018

Obituary:

Francis Sheppard, Gavin Stamp, Iain Bain.... p.2

Notes and News ............................................ p.3

Exhibitions and Events ................................ p.3

Out and About .............................................. p.4

Circumspice ...................................... p.4 & p.14

Changing London.......................................... p.5

A map of Tudor London

by Caroline Barron and Vanessa Harding...... p.5

‘A Place in the Sun’: topography through

insurance policies by Isobel Watson .............. p.6

Parishes, Wards, Precincts and Liberties. Solving

a topographical puzzle by Ian Doolittle .......... p.9

Preserving London’s Film Heritage at the British

Film Institute by Christopher Trowell .......... p.10

Lots Road power station transformed

by David Crawford ...................................... p.11

Reviews and Bookshop Corner .............. p.14-19

Newsletter

Number 86

May 2018

Contents

Marylebone seen from Centrepoint, with All Saints Margaret Street in the centre. Historic England Archives

page 2

Obituary

Francis Henry Wollaston Sheppard

10 September 1921- 22 January 2018

Between 1954 and his retirement in 1983 Francis

Sheppard produced no fewer than 16 volumes of

The Survey of London, transforming what had

been a sporadic and selective record of London’s

historic buildings, area by area, into a model of

urban topographical writing, rich in content,

authoritative, gracefully composed, beautifully

illustrated, and still an unequalled resource for

anyone interested in London’s history and

architecture. No city in the world can boast an

equivalent to The Survey of London series, which

is now well past its 50th volume. It owes its

modern form and reputation to Sheppard, who

may be fairly claimed to be London’s greatest

topographical writer since John Stow, the

Elizabethan historian.

That Sheppard’s name is not better known is

due to his modesty. Disliking fuss, he was

content to be a tiny cog in the municipal machine

that was the London county council, later the

Greater London council, so long as he was

allowed to get on with the job, aided by a small

team of loyal subordinates. Some mornings he

would bound up the stairs of County Hall, not

waiting for the lift, bolt like a rabbit into his office

and nestle between a fan of papers, hardly

emerging before the next draft chapter had been

completed for the typist in his beetling longhand.

On others he might be found head deep in some

record office or private archive, making the

pinpoint-accurate notes from which his texts were

composed.

His first satisfactory job had been in the West

Sussex county record office in Chichester, where

he acquired a taste for archives and for the

makeup of English townscape, which was as yet

little explored. From 1949 to 1953 he was an

assistant keeper at the London Museum, now the

Museum of London, which moved into Kensington

Palace during Sheppard’s time there. Much later

he wrote a history of the museum, The Treasury

of London’s Past (1991). For his doctorate he

chose to study the voluminous parish records of

Marylebone. The result was published as Local

Government

in

St

Marylebone

1688-1835,

published 1958. Inspired by the Edwardian

scholarship of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, it is a

most readable and lucid study of English local

government.

In the 1950s interest in urban architecture and

planning stopped short at the Victorian period.

Sheppard was aware of the need to go further,

and began to do so in his first volume of the

reanimated Survey, on south Lambeth (1956).

But the LCC’s historic buildings division, with

which he and his colleagues were linked in a

sometimes uneasy relationship, was more

concerned with the threat to Georgian buildings

in the West End, which the researches of the

Survey could help to defend. So the series

concentrated its investigations during the 60s

and 70s on St James’s, Soho, Covent Garden and

Mayfair. The impact of these volumes on

conserving swathes of inner London was most

notable in the case of Covent Garden, where the

Survey’s discoveries helped derail the GLC’s own

destructive plans for the area.

Later Sheppard turned his attention to

Kensington, the area where he had been brought

up. Under the influence of his friend H. J. Dyos, a

pioneer of modern British urban history, the

Survey started to treat areas of London in a

holistic way, drawing urban development,

architecture and social and economic history

together. Northern Kensington, published in

1973, was the first volume to feature this fuller

approach. Despite the demands of the Survey,

Sheppard found time to publish in 1971 a first-

rate history of the Victorian metropolis, London

1808–1870: The Infernal Wen, and after his

retirement the broader London: A History (1998).

During all this time he lived not in London but

in Henley-on-Thames, where he was very active in

civic life, becoming the first secretary of the

Henley Society, serving for ten years as a

councillor, and for a year as mayor.

– Andrew Saint

A longer version of this obituary first appeared in

the Guardian.

Obituary

Iain Bain

Iain Bain, whose death has recently been

announced, was a Vice President of the London

Topographical Society and for many years a

Council Member. He was a distinguished expert

on printing techniques and on the engravings of

Thomas

Bewick,

and

former

Head

of

Publications at the Tate Gallery. There will be an

obituary in the next LTS Record.

Important message to all members

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

which takes effect from 25 May 2018, seeks to bring a

new set of ‘digital rights’ for EU citizens. One of the

enhanced protections relates to an individual’s right

for their personal details not to be used by

organisations without their express consent. You will

therefore find a separate paper in this Newsletter

which sets out the Society’s data privacy policy, what

data the Society holds on its members and how such

data may be used, including the list of members which

is contained in the 5-yearly London Topographical

Record. If you agree to having your name and contact

details listed in the Record, please complete the slip.

Notes and News

This year’s Annual General Meeting will take place at

the Senate House, University of London on Monday

25 June. For details see the insert in this Newsletter.

Members attending the AGM will be able to

collect two LTS publications this year, both devoted

to panoramas: Greg Smith, A ‘Connoisseur’s

Panorama’: Thomas Girtin’s Eidometropolis and

other London Views, c.1796-1802, and Hubert

Pragnell, Pat Hardy and Elain Harwood, The Stone

Gallery Panorama: Lawrence Wright’s view of the

City of London from St Paul’s Cathedral, c.1948-56.

And in addition, members will also be given a copy

of the new Historic Towns Trust’s Atlas Map of

Tudor London c.1520 which the Society has

supported (see p.5).

Thanks to much help from our volunteer

members, steered by Simon Morris, the Parish

Maps project is progressing well, with publication

planned for in 2019. This will be a comprehensive,

thoroughly researched catalogue of over 400 maps

of the civil parishes within the old LCC area

(excluding the City of London) based on research

by the late Ralph Hyde, which has been extensively

updated. Work on St Marylebone and Southwark is

complete;

Islington,

Tower

Hamlets

and

Wandsworth are imminent, and the others should

be ready by the end of July.

Our membership has dropped slightly and now

stands at 1179. Members are reminded that unless

their subscriptions are up to date they will not

receive the Newsletter or qualify for the annual

publications. They also need to fill in the form

enclosed with this Newsletter to satisfy current

Data Protection requirements.

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Events and Exhibitions

Two unmissable opportunities to explore aspects of

London, many not usually accessible:

London Open Squares weekend: 9-10 June For

details see opensquares.org

London

Open

House

weekend:

22-23

September For details see opensquares.org

London

Metropolitan

Archives,

40

Northampton St, EC1R 0HB. Forgotten London:

an exhibition of paintings, photographs, maps

and

film

recreating

past

London.

A

demonstration of the range of material available to

the topographer.

21 May-31 October Guildhall Library. The

Worshipful Company of Tylers and Bricklayers – A

Celebration of the 450th anniversary of the

granting of the Tylers and Bricklayers’ Company’s

charter by Elizabeth I in 1568. Highlights include

the Company’s most famous son, the playwright

Ben Jonson, and how the Company was

instrumental in rebuilding the City of London after

the Great Fire.

page 3

Obituary

Gavin Stamp 1948-2017

Gavin Stamp, who died aged 69 on 30 December

2017, was an architectural historian, lecturer,

critic and campaigner whose interest in the

nineteenth and twentieth centuries spanned a

wide field, and whose energy was prodigious. He

grew up in South London, which was also where

he spent the last years of his life, and he had a

profound knowledge not only of London’s

buildings but of how they were portrayed at

different times, as was shown in his ground-

breaking book, The Changing Metropolis, earliest

photographs of London 1839-79, published in

1982, while The Great Perspectivists, also 1982,

explored how buildings were depicted in the days

before

computer

visualisations.

Victorian

Buildings in London 1837-87, an illustrated

guide, written together with Colin Amery, 1980,

provided a valuable introduction for readers

keen to understand and explore the great

nineteenth century landmarks of London.

Gavin’s interest in older buildings was originally

fired by his dislike of contemporary architecture,

and also by a desire to champion the neglected –

hence his Ph.D thesis on the little studied George

Gilbert Scott Junior and the late Gothic Revival,

and his campaign, when he was teaching in

Scotland, to raise awareness of the merits of the

Scots architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thompson. Out

of his research on the Scott family, an enthusiasm

developed also for the next generation: Sir Giles

Gilbert Scott, responsible not only for major works

such as Liverpool Cathedral, but for the familiar

red telephone boxes. Gavin led the campaign for

their preservation, and celebrated them in

Telephone Boxes (Chatto Curiosities,1989). In

addition to his books and articles his witty and

hard-hitting comments as ‘Piloti’ in Private Eye

drew attention to examples of architectural and

planning mismanagement and neglect. From

1983-2007, as chairman of the Thirties Society,

later the Twentieth Century Society, he was in the

forefront of many conservation campaigns, in

London and elsewhere, and as the merits of

twentieth-century architecture became the subject

for debate, he came to appreciate the plurality of

twentieth-century architectural expression both in

Britain and abroad, and the need also to recognise

and defend the best buildings of the later

twentieth century.

He inspired many not only through his writing

but through the memorably energetic walks and

tours which he led for the Victorian Society and

the Twentieth Century Society both in Britain and

abroad. His special enthusiasms also included

railway architecture, power stations, Lutyens, and

the cemeteries of the First World War; his

eloquent short study of the great monument by

Lutyens at Thiepval: The Memorial of the Missing

of the Somme (Wonders of the World, Profile,2006)

was among his most memorable works.

– Bridget Cherry

Out and About

Two memorable examples of public art provide a

polemic on the state of the world today. The Fourth

Plinth at Trafalgar Square is currently home to a

monument defying the destruction in the Middle

East. The powerful statue of Lamassu, the Assyrian

winged bull, is a recreation of the sculpture created

700 BC which guarded the Nergal Gate to the

ancient city of Nineveh. Its glistening surface is

made from flattened date syrup tins, an important

local product before the fighting. The work is by

Michael Rakowitz and forms part of a project to

recreate 7000 lost or destroyed archaeological

artefacts from the Iraq museum. Meanwhile, at St

Pancras Station, Tracey Emin’s 20 metre long

inscription in pink LED writing ‘I want my time

with you’, reaches out in defiance of Brexit with a

message of love to everyone arriving from Europe.

The constant pattern of destruction and

rebuilding in the City can provide unusual glimpses

of hidden buildings. Here is a view of St Mary

Abchurch from Cannon Street, seen beyond a

building site promising improvements to Bank

Station. This atmospheric Wren church is worth

exploring, remarkable for its unique painted dome

over the whole of the nave.

Those of you who are up date with modern

technology may already have discovered a new way

to access information about Londoners while you

are out and about. As you pass selected public

statues you can listen to stories about them on

your phone. The range is wide. Those on offer

include Thomas Coram at Coram’s Fields, John

Wilkes at Fetter Lane, and Dick Whittington’s cat

on

Highgate

Hill.

For

more

details

see

talkingstatueslondon.co.uk And if you want some

inspiration about what to look for beneath your

feet, londonist.com has at time of writing a

fascinating sequence of manhole covers with photos

and text by Laurence Scales. Perhaps you have

some tips on unusual sources of information on

London – let us know.

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Circumspice

Who is this young man and where is he sitting?

Answer on p.14.

page 4

The Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square in 2018

St Mary Abchurch seen from Cannon Street

page 5

Changing London

Grosvenor Square is undergoing a major change

with the departure of the American Embassy to

Battersea. The monumental building of 1957-60 by

Eero Saarinen filling the west side of the large

square, with a diagonal grid plan boldly expressed

by its chequered façade, is to be converted to a

hotel by David Chipperfield for Qatari Investment

Authority. Other sides of the square already have a

scatter of hotels among luxury flats, mostly in

earlier twentieth century buildings of an indifferent

neo-Georgian character. Only No.4 remains from

the 1720s development by Sir Richard Grosvenor,

and only a little (for example the Italian Embassy

on the east side) from the bolder Italianate favoured

in the 1860s. But a new focus may be imminent.

The square is no longer compromised by security

measures for the Embassy, and changes are under

discussion as management is returned from the

Royal Parks to the Grosvenor estate. The existing

rather unimpressive layout has its origins in a

post-war Ministry of Works design after wartime

disruptions were removed; the square was

redesigned in honour of F. D. Roosevelt and opened

to the public. The statue of Roosevelt was later

joined by the Eagle Squadron memorial of the

1980s and some other later monuments near the

Embassy.

As we are reminded by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan in

an article in the latest London Gardener (2017), the

square has a distinguished early design history.

Unusually in the eighteenth century, it was from

the first described as a ‘garden’, equally unusual

was the oval form of its layout in 1729, with a

gilded equestrian statue of George I in its centre.

Longstaffe-Gowan suggests that the inspiration for

this could have been the Campidoglio with the

equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which the

youthful Sir Richard Grosvenor would have seen on

his grand tour when he visited Rome in 1705-6.

Less comparable to Rome was the creation of a

‘wilderness’ of densely planted trees surrounding

the statue, together with shrubs and hedging. The

garden was walled, and intended only for the local

residents. It is now a public space. Could its early

history inspire an appropriate design for the

twenty-first century?

A Map of Tudor London

Professors Caroline Barron and Vanessa Harding,

Trustees of the Historic Towns Trust, explain the

map from which the illustrations on these pages are

taken.

Members of the London Topographical Society

will,

this

summer,

receive

an

additional

publication: a copy of the folding map of London

c.1520 published by the Historic Towns Trust in

their series of Town and City Historical Maps. The

London map, compiled by Colonel Henry Johns and

published in The Historic Towns Atlas: The City of

London from Prehistoric Times to c.1520 volume

edited by Mary D. Lobel in 1989, was republished

by Old House Books in 2008 as a single folded map

in a neat paper pouch. The map proved very

popular and was twice reprinted but when the

rights reverted to the Historic Towns Trust, the

Trustees decided that it would now be appropriate,

after nearly 30 years, to revise the map before

reprinting it once more. The HTA is a charity with

only limited funds, and the cost of revising and

reprinting the map was estimated to cost about

£12,000.

The

LTS

has

made

a

generous

contribution towards these costs and this has

made the new edition possible. In return for this

help, every LTS member will receive a copy of the

revised map at the AGM in June.

The map has been transformed by Giles Darkes,

the Cartographic Editor of the HTT. The map is

larger, now to the scale of 1:2500, and has been

extended to include, to the north, the house of the

Knights of St John at Clerkenwell and the Hospital

of St Mary at Bishopsgate, and to the south, the

Bridgehead section of Southwark showing the Inn

of the Bishop of Winchester and the Priory of St

Mary Overy. Instead of three colours, there are now

16 so that it is possible to indicate different

categories of structures, such as parish churches

Grosvenor Square looking west

Map of Tudor London: around London Bridge

or company halls. The precincts and buildings of

many of the 30 or so religious houses in London

have been revised in the light of recent

archaeological work published by MOLA. The larger

size has also made it possible to indicate the

hundred or so parish boundaries and to include a

map of the London wards on the reverse, where the

Directory of buildings and streets has also been

extensively revised. Until Colonel Henry Johns

created the map of London in 1520, the only maps

of medieval London were sketch maps. His

pioneering work brought the medieval city into

focus and now, with improved technology and

further research (much of it published by the LTS),

it has been possible to sharpen the focus once

more. It is surely appropriate that a society

dedicated to the topography of London has made

this possible. The Trustees of the HTT are

immensely grateful for this support and hope that

all members of the LTS will derive as much

pleasure from studying the map as those who have

been working on it have had in compiling it. Please

take a look at the HTT website to see what else we

do (www.historictownsatlas.org.uk)

– Caroline Barron and Vanessa Harding

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‘A Place in the Sun’: topography

through insurance policies

Isobel Watson has written several books and

articles about London, including Gentlemen in the

Building Line (1989), about South Hackney. She

has been involved with the Place in the Sun project

since its inception, from 2002, by the former London

Archive Users’ Forum, and co-ordinated the

volunteer effort until 2017. She has throughout

learnt a great deal not only about the material lives

of Londoners from rich to poor, but about the shape

of London itself as well as its outlying villages. She

tackled expanding the project nationwide, in the pre-

1793 registers, with some trepidation, but found this

just as fascinating in its own way, and a unique

window on the industrial revolution.

For the last 15 years, a group of volunteers has

been creating an online index to a run of the

insurance policy registers of the Sun Fire Office, a

large number of which survive and are now at

London Metropolitan Archives. Without a policy

number these are however hard to use. This can be

found via the index, which is unique in being, first,

unselective, and second, fully searchable through

the LMA’s online catalogue; an earlier tranche, no

longer kept up to date, is also on the National

Archives website. This article is intended to remind

London readers of the ready availability of this

growing resource, and to highlight some of its

features.

The Sun Fire Office was founded in 1710, and

LMA holds hundreds of registers, for policies

insuring against fire damage, issued between then

and the 1860s. The run of policies indexed online –

more than 380,000, in over 220 registers – begins

in 1782 and ends in 1842, and is being gradually

added to at both ends of the series. London records

were crucial to the development of the index.

Though it was a London foundation, until 1793 the

Sun’s main series of policy registers was

countrywide; by that time its volume of business

was so great that policies sold outside London

began to be entered in a separate series of

registers. So the project, founded by London

researchers with the aid of a Heritage Lottery grant

for a mere 30 registers, started with the early

nineteenth century, when the focus was London; as

earlier registers came to be included coverage

became national. The pre-1793 registers have

particular strengths in certain areas, notably

page 6

Map of Tudor London: the Tower of London

Policy registers. Each register contains abstracts of an average of

1600 individual policies, in numerical but non-consecutive

batches of 100

Scotland and the industrial north-west, Cornwall,

and Plymouth as well as London: but entries can

be found for places in most counties of Great

Britain.

The index captures certain terms only; it is

emphatically not a transcript. Its focus is naturally

on indexable terms – the mantra is ‘People, places,

businesses, occupations’. Thus it will give any

address mentioned in a policy, and occupants if

they are mentioned; but it won’t refer to chattels

kept at the address (sailing vessels and specific

works of art and literature are an exception, so long

as they are identified by name). Once policies

relating to (say) a person, place, partnership or

profession are identified, recourse has to be had to

the policy abstracts themselves to discover what

was insured, where it was kept, and at what it was

valued. This can reveal much about lifestyles as

well as property: some people insured china and

glass, some plate, others clothes, books, musical

instruments or prints, some even jewels. Warren

Hastings insured only his clothing, for the

astonishing sum of £4,000; a neighbour in Wimpole

Street insured hers for £500, the same value as

was put on a house she owned in Kentish Town.

The menagerist Gilbert Pidcock, based at Exeter

Change, insured the cage in which his rhinoceros

was trundled about the country. With buildings,

their construction materials will be mentioned, also

any notable risks such as stoves; the policy may

even indicate that a building was unfinished, which

can help to establish its date (once it had a roof, a

lease was usually obtainable, so the speculative

builder had something to insure).

The range of individuals insured makes this

possibly one of the most socially inclusive record

sources available, certainly at the period before the

national decennial census or civil registration.

There is royalty at one end, and at the other

laundresses, hucksters and ‘higglers’ each insuring

£50 worth of stock. There are householders in all

the central areas and the early, eastern suburbs

who exercised their trades at home; there were also

a lot of ‘gentlemen’ resident in newer suburbs such

as Walworth and Pentonville who may have

exercised trades or professions elsewhere. The

policy may suggest whether someone owned his

house: if he insured it he is likely to have owned it,

or more likely a long lease of it. If he insured its

contents only, he may well have been there as

tenant for a shorter term, and many insurances are

by lodgers (‘at Mr Handy’s’) for their possessions.

Some estates were insured more or less wholesale

by their owners, others required leaseholders to

insure; thus for example the registers provide a

snapshot of named residents on Mary Bowes’

substantial estate at Shadwell (insured by her

executors), and it has been possible to reconstruct

the occupancy of about a third of the Moneyers’

estate at Hoxton from pre-1841 Sun policies alone.

There are numbers of working women, both single

and married; many worked at home. This is the

inference from policies in which a husband may be

described in the same sentence either by his trade

or as ‘gentleman’, followed by ‘his wife a milliner’

(or laundress, or mantua maker). If the latter, an

adjacent

policy

may

describe

him

as

a

businessman (say a chandler or a dealer in tea)

though at a different address. Women can also be

found exercising trades in building and metal work,

as well as all sorts of retail.

There are policies for Mrs Fitzherbert’s lavishly-

equipped houses; for Wellington at Apsley House;

and for the farmhouse which became the site of

Brighton Pavilion as well as the one which gave its

name to Earls Court. Celebrity-hunters will find the

Adam brothers, Jeremy Bentham, Joseph Grimaldi,

Harriot Mellon, George Morland, Dr Parkinson, and

many others, but the great joy of the registers is the

insight they give into the daily lives of ordinary

Londoners. Sometimes these can be traced

throughout a career, as successive policies mirror

the development of a business and various changes

of address, sometimes ultimately the handing-over

to an heir or the reconstitution of a partnership. The

page 7

Windmill public house, Clapham Common. Licensed premises

were amongst the commonest insurances, and victualler a trade

frequently followed by policyholders. Different descriptions of the

property in successive policies could enable changes in these

premises to be tracked over time. (Document reference Ms

11937/327/502474)

Harriot Mellon, Little Russell Street. This policy illustrates a wider

range of insured chattels than was common, as well as high

values. Sun policy values however seem invariable to have

totalled a multiple of £50. (Document reference Ms 11937/437/795647)

uses of the index are many: recently, for example, it

has been used to corroborate other sources about

the development of straw-hat making. There are

sometimes manuscript amendments to policy

details; these are not indexed, being undated, but

they can prove useful once a policy has been

identified (there is a separate series of registers

recording policy endorsements).

Researchers sometimes note that the records of

different insurers vary in their usefulness depending

on their approach. For descriptions of property as

detailed as conveyances, for example, the Hand in

Hand records (also at LMA, which holds the

country’s premier collection of insurance records)

are superior to the Sun, and, unlike the Sun, its

rudimentary contemporary indexes survive. The

Sun registers usually only give a property’s address,

though sometimes the presence of a neighbouring

fire risk is recorded, and there can in these cases be

information about an adjoining building and what

went on in it. Detail about buildings is usually

limited to construction materials, but this may

enable alterations to be dated. Of course, street

numbers or even names given in the registers may

since have been changed, if the street survived into

the mid-nineteenth century, and even then may

take several forms. The Sun Fire Office was so

London-centric that if a street is not given a named

location, it can, almost without exception, be taken

to have been in London.

Larger sites may be described in detail, at least

before about 1800, when (rather like conveyances

of about the same time) the practice of including a

plan was generally adopted in preference to verbal

description. (Sadly there are very few surviving

plans, bound in a separate volume.) Thus policies

can reveal details of what was constructed at places

for which there may not be equivalent detail

elsewhere, such as large breweries or factories, the

Eagle tavern in the City Road, or the curious art-

and-music resort the Bermondsey Spa.

To search the index, bear in mind that it will spell

a person or place as the register itself does:

Rosoman Street, which skirts the LMA itself, has

perhaps the largest number of variant spellings. If

you

are

looking

for

Eleanor

Betjemann,

greengrocer, you may guess she is, at the very

least, a near relative of Elinor Betjeman, tripe

dealer, at the same address in an earlier register.

Archaic names can be found for places as well as

people, and sometimes different spellings even

within the same policy abstract. If you are looking

for Marylebone, Surrey Street, or a hairdresser,

bear in mind that you might find it useful to search

for Marybone, Surry Street, and hair dressers –

though exceptionally, occupations are indexed by

their modern spelling, as are counties (tailor not

taylor; Surrey not Surry). Make use of wild cards

where available, and if the results of a generalised

search are too many, insurance records can be

winnowed out from the rest by adding the term

‘insured’ into the search. Once you find them, LMA

can for a charge supply a copy of the original

register pages, or better still and without cost,

bring you face to face with the register itself.

Further reading:

https://search.lma.gov.uk

www.nationalarchives.gov.uk

P. G. Dixon, The Sun Insurance Office 1710-1960

(OUP, 1960)

H. A. L. Cockerell and Edwin Green, The British

Insurance Business: a guide to its history and

records (Sheffield Academic Press, 1976)

London Metropolitan Archives leaflet no. 48, Fire

Insurance Records, www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-

to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/visitor-infor

mation/Documents/48-fire-insurance-records.pdf

page 8

Forty Hall. Early policies are sometimes reflected in company fire

marks made in lead. As these ceased to be issued in the early

1800s, they are rarely found on London buildings to which they

relate. These, above the main entrance at Forty Hall in Enfield date

from 1718, reflect the financial limits in force at that date,

requiring the insured, Lord Hunsdon, to hold separate policies for

the main building, its outbuildings and its contents

Fire mark 425573. This was not issued for the building on which it

was photographed (113 Clifden Road E5), but for premises in

Shropshire, about a century earlier than the building of Clifden

Road

page 9

Parishes, Wards, Precincts

and Liberties – solving a

topographical puzzle1

Ian Doolittle has been researching the London

property market at the time of the Great Fire. He has

reported on his findings in this Newsletter from time

to time and here brings us up to date with his recent

work. His calendar of the next volume of the Fire

Court decrees is nearly finalised.

London historians have long been frustrated by

the City’s internal divisions. The Square Mile was a

patchwork

of

parishes

and

wards,

whose

boundaries rarely coincided. Add to this the sub-

division of wards by precincts (only sometimes

matching parishes) and the existence of a number

of privileged liberties and you have a recipe for

confusion as well as frustration. I have long been

conscious of this but only recently have I had to

confront the practical consequences.

Readers of the Newsletter may recall that I am

investigating property ownership at the time of the

Great Fire. In the next Record I try to answer the

question ‘Who owned the City of London in 1666?’

For this purpose I need a total number of houses.

The obvious starting point is the magnificent

edition of the London and Middlesex Hearth Tax.2

There are methodological challenges in interpreting

the returns – not least the distinction between

houses and households – but my main obstacle is a

prosaic one. The 1666 returns are incomplete. The

editors provide extracts from the 1662-3 Hearth

Tax returns but acknowledge that, because the

1662-3 lists are by ward and the 1666 ones by

parish, this ‘patching’ does not work very well.3

Was there a way of converting wards into

parishes? Mapping is an answer – readers of LTS’s

A to Z maps will be aware of the parish boundaries

wriggling their way through the wards – but I

blenched at the thought of translating spaces into

buildings! I needed a list of houses but the only

ones I had come across were either by ward or by

parish. I then remembered a later list of ward and

parish houses by John Smart (which I had used for

my thesis long ago). I checked and found that he

did not just break down ward totals into precincts;

he also ‘traced’ parish totals into those precincts.

The result is an interlocking analysis, potentially

just what I needed.

I knew that Smart was a clerk at Guildhall but I

learnt from Professor Beattie that Smart first

compiled his ward lists to support the new Watch

regime in the mid-1730s.4 He revised and expanded

his totals for what became A Short Account of the

Wards, Precincts, Parishes etc. in London in 1742,

but despite getting only what he described,

caustically, as limited assistance from ward

deputies and common councilmen Smart’s figures

seem reliable.5 Certainly they accord pretty well

with other lists and their origin as a means of

payment for a key reform is reassuring too.

The real problem was the gap between 1666 and

1742 (or at best 1735). I reflected however that I

was not really relying on the totals. Smart is of

chief value because he allows you to trace a parish

total into the precinct(s) and vice versa. And in so

far as totals are important it is their relation to one

another that matters. Here I took comfort from

what I currently believe to have been the relative

stability of house numbers within the walls.

Perhaps numbers fell somewhat after the Fire, as

houses were redeveloped, but there was probably

no significant imbalance between parishes/wards,

at least in the central areas. The real changes after

1666 occurred outside the walls and there is

certainly a need to recognise that the differences

within parishes/wards which ‘straddled’ the walls

may have widened.

I was however sufficiently encouraged to see if I

could solve my problems. The results so far are

encouraging. Two examples will indicate how

Smart’s figures can help. The returns for All

Hallows London Wall for 1666 are missing. The

editors provide extracts from 1662-3 for All Hallows

precinct in Broad Street ward. The entries add up

to 234.6 Smart confirms that most of the parish

houses were indeed in that precinct; but he also

lists (in a total of 273) 33 in Aldgate Ward (4th

precinct), 21 in Bishopsgate Within (St Ethelburga

precinct) and 20 in Lime Street (4th precinct). For

Bishopsgate and Lime Street I need to look at those

parts of the 1662-3 returns (which were not

transcribed), but at least I know from Smart what

kind of numbers to expect. For Aldgate I may have

to find a substitute, since parts of that ward are

missing from the 1662-3 records.7 I have identified

all the 1660s assessments in the London

Metropolitan Archives and I hope to be able to fill

the gap and get to an overall total which is

consistent with other sources for the parish.

The second example concerns the Liberty of St

Martin le Grand. The editors skilfully established

that one set of the 1666 totals relates to the

parishes of St Anne Aldersgate, St John Zachary,

St Leonard Foster and St Mary Staining outside the

Liberty, while another relates to the Liberty itself.

They were not however able to differentiate between

the four parishes. Smart helps to untie this knot.

He makes clear that only houses from St Anne and

St Leonard were (partly) in the Liberty;8 and I can

use his totals (54 and 114) to ‘split’ the 1666 total

of 216,9 producing 69/147. Outside the Liberty the

1666 total is 263.10 I have allocated this to the four

parishes according to the ratios represented by

Smart’s totals of 95, 93, 52 and 41. The result is

89, 87, 49 and 38. By this process I get to 158 for

St Anne, 87 for St John, 196 for St Leonard and 38

for St Mary Staining. St Leonard is somewhat

higher than in other (later) lists but other three

totals are reassuringly similar.

Smart will not solve all such problems;11 and care

must be taken not to rely heavily on his figures

outside the City (where he resorted to round

numbers). He also made an obvious mistake with

St Giles Cripplegate. I am ready to be told that

there is an easier and/or more reliable approach;

but in the meantime I shall continue with what I

rashly call my Smart work and present my findings

in the next Record.

– Ian Doolittle

1. I am grateful to Vanessa Harding for her generous help.

2. Eds. Matthew Davies et al., British Record Society,

vols 129-30 (2014).

3. Ibid., 28.

4. J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London

1660-1750 (2001), 194-6. Beattie assumes Smart

was a ward deputy by confusing him with John Snart.

5. There is a copy of the first version in the Guildhall

Library: A.4.6 no. 40 (2). The later version in the

Rawlinson collection in the Bodleian has a note that

the work was never printed for sale: 4o. Rawl. 300.

6. London and Middlesex Hearth Tax, 1641(part)-46.

7. Ibid., 287-91 (a painstaking reconstruction of the

returns). There is no transcription after IRN 1733

(ibid., 1813), the relevant place.

8. The editors say a small part of St John Zachary was

covered too: ibid., 270.

9. Ibid. 309.

10. Ibid. 304.

11. He does not provide what might be called a spatial

(or mapping) answer, as J. M. B. Alexander appears

to

have

concluded:

‘The

Economic

and

Social

Structure of the City of London, c.1700’ (London

School of Economics, Ph.D thesis, 1989), 11.

l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l

Preserving London’s Film Heritage

at the British Film Institute

Christopher Trowell, BFI Trusts and Foundations

Coordinator reports on progress with the London on

Film project.

In 2016 the London Topographical Society

generously supported the BFI’s London on Film

project,

a

ground-breaking

archival

and

preservation project digitising film material that

captures the changes and hidden histories of the

nation’s capital. As well as supporting the project,

London Topographical Society members also helped

the BFI identify the locations for a number of films,

including the 1983 public information film Cyclist

Turning Right. Society member Graham Hewett

observed that in the early 1980s the two visible bus

route numbers could only be seen together in

Haydons Road, Wimbledon. Thank you to all those

members who contacted us.

The Britain on Film Project

This project was a strand of the BFI’s wider Britain

on Film programme, which has made archive

material from across the UK available for free

through BFI Player. Through this service we have

received over five million views from across the UK

and urban living is a key factor in the most popular

films, with the 1970s construction boom holding

particular fascination. The most watched film in

the project is currently the utopian Milton Keynes:

A Village City (“The most exciting thing going on in

Europe, if not the world”) produced by London

Television Service in 1973. Unearthing regional

stories from across the UK is crucial to the project,

but London holds a unique fascination for

audiences and early filmmakers and London film

material is frequently the most popular on our

video on demand service.

Both the 1936 newsreel The Battle of Cable Street

(part of the Jewish Britain on Film collection) and

documentary short Changing Face of Camberwell

(1963) rank in the project’s most-watched films. The

most popular material supported by the Society

includes the Pathé Frères newsreel of Emily

Davison’s Funeral. For this event in 1913, organised

by the Women’s Social and Political Union, 5,000

suffragettes marched through the streets which

were lined with upwards of 50,000 people. The film

provides views of Hart Street as it approaches

Nicholas Hawksmoor’s St George’s church, and the

short film captures the sadness and political

potency of the occasion. Elsewhere in the collection

audiences have found a perverse pleasure in London

as the ‘City of Dreadful Night’ (Topical Budget 694-

2) where an almost imperceptible Trafalgar Square

is obscured by London smog.

page 10

The funeral of Emily Davison

Topical film poster

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