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The final section of our London walk in Soho
DIRECTIONS
Continue ahead along Brewer Street and turn right into Wardour Street. Pause a little way along on the left to admire the strange beer-barrel shape of the church tower on the left. This is all that remains of St Anne’s Church, where Lucie Manette was married in A Tale of Two Cities.
The church itself was destroyed by bombing in World War Two. It had been dedicated to Queen Anne by her tutor, Henry Compton, Bishop of London, who gave his name to nearby Old Compton Street. It was built by Sir Christopher Wren and its peculiar beer-barrel-shape church tower, was added by the eqaully eccentric sounding Samuel Pepys Cockerell.
On the wall yo the right of the tower is a tablet commemorating Theodore, King of Corsica, "who died in this parish December 11, 1756." Forced from his kingdom, Theodore sought asylum in London but was soon imprisoned for debt. The epitaph on the wall was composed by the writer Horace Walpole, and reads:- The grave, great teacher, to a level brings
heroes and beggars, galley slaves and kings
but Theodore this moral learnt ere dead
fate poured its lessons on his living head
bestowed a Kingdom and denied him bread.
Crime writer Dorothy L Sayers was church warden at the church and her ashes are interred inside the tower.DIRECTIONS
Continue onto Shaftesbury Avenue.
The construction of Shaftsbbury Avenue between 1877 and 1886 resulted in the demolition of some of London’s most squalid slums, the dreadfulness of which Dickens strove to depict in his works. The new thoroughfare was named in honour of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury (1801–86). A largely forgotten figure today, Lord Shaftesbury was one of the most active philanthropists of the 19th Century. As a Member of Parliament he was responsible for several reforming acts designed to alleviate the suffering of the poor. Much of his work was aimed at highlighting the plight of the residents in the slums hereabouts, and their affection for him is illustrated by a delightful story. On one occasion, a gold watch that had been bequeathed him by his family housekeeper, Maria Mills, and which he treasured, was stolen. Shaftesbury advertised its loss, whereupon the local community found the boy responsible and left him, together with the watch, tied up in a sack on Shaftesbury’s doorstep. He subsequently found the boy a place in one of his Ragged Schools. Dickens was one of his most vociferous supporters and applauded Shaftesbury’s Lodging Houses Act of 1851 as ‘the best law that was ever passed by an English Parliament’.DIRECTIONS
Continue over Shaftesbury Avenue along the continuation of Wardour Street and take the first left into Gerrard Street. The vivid colours and vibrancy of Chinatown now engulf you.
On the left, five doors after Macclesfield Street, is No 10, standing on the site of the bookseller’s house where Dickens’s uncle, Thomas Barrow, was laid up with a broken leg, and was visited by his ten-year-old nephew, Charles. Mrs Manson, who ran the bookshop, used to lend Dickens books to read, and for a time he was supremely happy. Thomas Barrow was attended by a very ‘odd old barber out of Dean Street’ who was forever ‘reviewing the events of the last war, and especially of detecting Napoleon’s mistakes, and re-arranging his whole life for him on a plan of his own’. Dickens later told how he had written a description of this old barber but had ‘never had the courage to show it’. The house would later feature as the ‘rather stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want of painting and with dirty windows’ where the lawyer Mr Jaggers lived in Great Expectations.DIRECTIONS
Continue to the end of Gerrard Street. Turn right into the bustling Newport Place, left along Newport Court and, having crossed Charing Cross Road, keep going ahead into Great Newport Street.
Turn left onto Upper St Martin’s Lane and walk straight along Monmouth Street, whose buildings have an early 19th-century look to them.
You have now entered Seven Dials which was the notorious slum district immortalized by William Hogarth in his Gin Lane. By the 1820s the streets of Seven Dials had a fearsome reputation. Prostitutes would lure men into the warren of streets and alleyways, where their confederates would be waiting to rob and possibly even murder them. More than half the violent robberies that took place in London happened as a result of people inadvertently straying into what was the acknowledged ‘thieves quarter of London’. As one commentator put it, ‘The walk through Seven Dials after dusk was an act none but a lunatic would have attempted and the betting that he ever emerged with his shirt was 1000 to 60’. Central to this sordid nightlife was the Crown Tavern, situated at the junction where the modern replica of the original Seven Dials column now stands. This pub, then known as ‘The Clock House’ on account of the timeworn timepiece that it still displays, ‘was a hot bed of villainy’ where the ‘King of the Pickpockets held his nightly court’. The police would stand outside, helpless to intervene, and would ‘no more think of entering therein than into the cage of a cobra’.
Typically, Dickens was fascinated by the sordid squalor of Seven Dials and neighbouring St Giles. According to John Forster, even as a young boy, he had a ‘profound attraction of repulsion’ to them. ‘Good Heaven!’, he would exclaim, ‘what wild visions of prodigies of wickedness, want and beggary arose in my mind out of that place!’. The Crown Tavern, a delightfully snug hostelry resplendent with pictures and etchings of what the neighbourhood was once like, is the perfect environment in which to rest the feet and contemplate how much the reforming zeal of the Victorian slum clearances changed the metropolis for the better.
DIRECTIONS
Keep going along Monmouth Street to the left of the Crown Tavern.
In his Sketches By Boz essay, ‘Meditations in Monmouth Street’, Dickens lauds the fact that, ‘Through every alteration and every change Monmouth Street has still remained the burial-place of fashions; and such, to judge from all present appearances, it will remain until there are no more fashions to bury.’ It is nice to see that the second-hand clothes shops (albeit selling 1960s and 1970s apparel) are still maintaining at least one tradition!DIRECTIONS
Thanks to the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue, most of the Monmouth Street to which Dickens referred was demolished, and it ends abruptly. As it does so, go left over the pedestrian crossings and into St Giles High Street.
The lofty church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, passed on the left, whose name speaks volumes of the long gone rural past of this neighbourhood, has changed little since the 18th century and is worth a visit.DIRECTIONS
Just past the church, go left into Denmark Street and first right into Denmark Place, a narrow thoroughfare that gives some idea of the unwholesome ‘maze of streets, courts, lanes and alleys’ that once gave the district a dubious notoriety. In Nicholas Nickleby, it was in the cellar of a house in the ‘labrinth of streets which lies between Seven Dials and Soho’, that Nicholas and his sister Kate, having lost their way, re-encountered Mr Mantalini, being scolded by his nagging wife to turn the mangle. ‘I am always turning,’ he wearily replied, ‘I am perpetually turning, like a demd old horse in a demnition mill. My life is one demd horrid grind!’
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