London's Markets E-Book

Stephen Halliday

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 286

Beschreibung

London is a city of markets: markets in meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, money, insurance, shipping and, occasionally, in stolen goods. As both a major port and the nation's capital, it was almost inevitable that commerce became the bedrock on which the city has risen to be one of the world's greatest modern marketplaces. Many of today's street names remind the observant pedestrian of the commercial centres that were to be found in them in times past: Bread Street, Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane; London's market history is all around us. Stephen Halliday's book is a comprehensive account of the long, lurid and often controversial history of London's markets, from Roman Londinium to the London of Boris Johnson, as well as a guide to visiting them (and emerging with a bargain). He explores the historic markets still in existence, and the sites of those that no longer exist, and recounts the fascinating stories of the famous, not-so-famous and sometimes infamous Londoners who have populated them, both as buyers and sellers, through the ages.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title

Introduction: The City of Markets

1 Smithfield: London’s Meat Market

2 From Copenhagen to Bermondsey: New Caledonian Market and ‘hot gear’

3 Leadenhall Market: From Fruit and Veg to Harry Potter

4 Sir Thomas Gresham and the Royal Exchange; London’s Financial Centre

5 ‘Our Word Our Bond’: The Baltic Exchange and the World’s Shipping

6 Famous for Fish and Foul Language: Billingsgate

7 ‘My Word is My Bond’: The Stock Exchange and the Financial Markets

8 The Coffee House Exchange

9 The New Stock Exchange

10 The Stock Exchange at War

11 The Post-War Stock Exchange and the Big Bang

12 The London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE)

13 The London Metal Exchange: The Last ‘Open Outcry’

14 Lloyd’s of London: Spreading the Risks to Shipping and to a Moustache

15 Covent Garden

16 The Markets of the East End

17 London’s Food Markets

18 Portobello Road Antiques Market

19 Camden Markets: Not One But Six

20 London’s Lost Markets

Postscript

Chronology

Copyright

Introduction: The City ofMarkets

London is a city of markets. It always has been. The earliest was in the Roman Forum, dating from AD 70. It was part of a civic centre that included arcades to shelter market traders and customers from the inclement Londinium weather. The foot of one of the supporting columns may still be seen in the basement of hairdressers’ Nicholson and Griffin at No. 90, Gracechurch Street, close to the site of Leadenhall Market that lies at the heart of the Roman city. One of the oldest place names in London is Aldwych. It means ‘old market place’ and was granted to the defeated Danes by Alfred the Great as a place where they could trade on the fringe of the City of London. Mediaeval London contained hundreds of markets selling everything from meat, fish, fruit, vegetables and cheese to clothing, precious metals, religious artefacts and timber. Many of today’s street names remind the observant pedestrian of the markets that were to be found in them in the time of Richard Whittington: Bread Street, Milk Street and Ironmonger Lane are still visible but some have disappeared such as Fish Street off the present Knightrider Street. Some of London’s markets have also disappeared. John Stow, in his Survey ofLondon written in 1598, tells his readers of ‘Cornhill Ward, so called of a corn market, time out of mind there holden’ though he informs us that it was also a market for ‘old apparel’, presumably second-hand clothing.

John Stow (1524–1605)

Stow was born in Cornhill, the son of a prosperous tallow chandler. Although there is no record of his education at school or university he became a collector of manuscripts, particularly on the history and customs of London, and a fluent writer. He was at one time suspected of Catholic sympathies but never prosecuted and he gained the support of such influential courtiers as the Earl of Leicester and Archbishops Whitgift and Parker, the latter himself a collector of ancient manuscripts. Stow became a member of the Merchant Taylors Livery Company and his Survey ofLondon, published first in 1598, is a definitive account of events, customs and personalities in London in the late sixteenth century and remains in print. His tomb in the City church of St Andrew Undershaft, off Leadenhall Street, has a striking monument to him, quill pen in hand.

Cornhill was also the site of a famous pillory that was primarily used for dealers in sub-standard goods, though it was once occupied by the author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, for writing a satirical work, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which offended the government. Samuel Pepys’s Diary contains many references to the pleasures he derived from ‘marketing’ (or as we would say ‘shopping’) and many of the markets he used, like Leadenhall and Smithfield, may be visited today. The Port of London, which for centuries was the world’s largest, was itself a huge market for produce from throughout the world. In the Tudor era London started to become a major centre for financial markets such as insurance, currency trading and investment funds. It remains one of the world’s leading financial markets. In the reign of Victoria antiques markets began to emerge, one of the world’s largest, at Portobello Road, starting to trade at that time. Markets, from conventional food and clothes markets to those that specialise in the sale of stolen valuables (‘hot gear’), have flourished throughout London’s history; they are the reason for London’s existence and continuing prosperity.

The Aldwych, whose grand buildings now occupy the site of a market granted to the Danes by Alfred the Great. (Wikimedia Commons, gohsuket)

Ronnie, Reggie and George

Many of these ancient markets still prosper in new locations. Covent Garden remains a market though the fruit and vegetable wholesale market which it formerly accommodated has moved to Lambeth. Billingsgate’s fish market, which began to trade in mediaeval London, moved to a site in the shadow of Canary Wharf in 1982. The former market building still exists, a fine example of Victorian civic design by the architect of Smithfield Market and Tower Bridge, Sir Horace Jones. It once provided employment for such diverse characters as the writer George Orwell and the infamous Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, and the building is now used for city conferences and musical events. Other markets with long histories have survived on or close to their original sites: Smithfield, Lloyd’s, Borough Market (which predates William the Conqueror) and Petticoat Lane are examples. Some historic markets have seen their sites occupied by new users. The former site of the Baltic Exchange, destroyed by a Provisional IRA bomb in 1992, is now occupied by the City’s celebrated Gherkin, itself a trading centre for financial markets. The Baltic Exchange has moved to a new home next to the Gherkin. The Victorian halls of Spitalfields Market, which originated in the thirteenth century as a market for fruit and vegetables, now accommodate sellers of fashion, art and antiques.

Each of the markets described in the pages which follow has a long, fascinating and often controversial history and most still exist though fires, wars and developments in fashion and technology have often wrought changes which would make them unrecognisable to their original occupants. A short section is devoted to markets which have disappeared though in some cases they are remembered by street and place names. Most of the markets mentioned here can be seen and visited though in some cases visiting times are restricted and in others the advent of computerised trading means that their activities are in the land of virtual reality where they may not be glimpsed. Details of times for visiting are included where relevant though it is wise to check them via their websites since they do change. Many offer real bargains to a discerning buyer so, like Samuel Pepys, start ‘marketing’ now!

In writing this account of London’s markets I have been assisted by many people but two of them I single out for services beyond the call of duty. My friends Peter Clark and Martyn Webb, who between them have over eighty years’ experience of London’s stock market and Lloyd’s insurance market respectively, were kind enough to read the drafts of those two chapters and correct a number of errors. I am in their debt. Any errors that remain are my own.

1

Smithfield: London’s Meat Market

In the Middle Ages the expanse of grass beyond the city walls was known as the ‘Smooth Field’ and its use for grazing cattle and sheep made it a suitable location for the City’s livestock market, which existed a century before the Norman conquest. Some local street names like Cow Cross Street derive from this use while others, like Cock Lane, tell us that poultry was sold there. In 1123 some nearby land was granted to King Henry I’s jester, Rahere, for the site of the Priory and Hospital of St Bartholomew, London’s oldest, which benefited from the right to hold a weekly fair selling cloth: hence the nearby street name Cloth Fair. In 1133 the right was granted to hold an annual Bartholomew Fair beginning on St Bartholomew’s day, 24 August and continuing for four days. So celebrated, and eventually notorious, was this event that Ben Johnson wrote a play called Bartholomew Fair in 1613. The City authorities finally suppressed the fair more than seven centuries later, in 1855, because of the mounting crime, mayhem and debauchery that accompanied it. In 1174 the chronicler William Fitzstephen had recorded the ‘smooth field where every Friday there is a celebrated rendezvous of fine horses to be sold and in another quarter are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with their deep flanks and cows and oxen of immense bulk’. By the time of John Stow in the late sixteenth century, Smithfield had become associated with the sale and racing of horses, ‘strong steeds, well limbed geldings whom the buyers do especially regard for pace and swiftness; the boys which ride these horses, sometimes two, sometimes three, do run races for wagers …’ The first recorded race meeting in England took place at Smithfield in 1174, in the reign of Henry II, and, a few years after Stow wrote his account, James I introduced horse racing to Newmarket, where it remains. In Henry IV Part II, Shakespeare has Falstaff say of Bardolph, ‘He’ll buy me a horse in Smithfield’. Stow went on to explain that, in addition to horses, ‘fat swine, milch kine (dairy cows) sheep and oxen’ were also being sold at Smithfield.

Martyrs, Fire, Gluttony and a Scottish Hero

In the meantime the Smooth Field had acquired a more sinister reputation as London’s principal site for the execution of criminals and dissidents. Protestant martyrs were burned at the stake, forgers were boiled alive and a plaque marks the spot where the Scottish hero William Wallace was executed in 1305. In 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt reached its bloody climax here when the Lord Mayor, William Walworth, stabbed its leader, Wat Tyler. In 1666 it marked the north-western boundary of the Great Fire that had consumed the City, the conflagration finally burning itself out at Pye Corner at the junction of Cock Lane and Giltspur Street, the event being still marked here by a small statue of the Golden Boy of Pye Corner. An inscription beneath the statue attributed the fire to ‘the sin of gluttony’, a reference to the meat pies and other produce consumed at the market.

Bulls in a China Shop

Amidst all this the livestock market continued to prosper. John Carpenter’s Liber Albus in his section on ‘Customs of Smithfield’ recorded that it cost one (old) penny to sell a cow or ox there and the same fee for twelve sheep. Moreover ‘foreign dealers’ (by which he meant merchants from beyond Middlesex) trading between St Martin’s day (11 November) and Christmas had to give their ‘third best beast’ to the market bailiff in return for trading there. Presumably this reflected the fact that ‘foreign’ merchants came from outside the capital to take advantage of the Christmas trade. Carpenter also recorded that freemen of the City had the right to show beasts for sale at Smithfield free of charge.

TheLiber Albus

Also known as the ‘White Book’, the Liber Albus was compiled in 1419 by John Carpenter, clerk to the City of London, during the last mayoralty of Richard Whittington (c. 1354–1423) and is a detailed record of the customs, regulations and privileges of the City, gathered from records going back to the years before the Norman Conquest, many of the records now lost. It is an invaluable source of information on London during the mediaeval period, with detailed accounts of its commerce, taxes and penalties for such misdemeanours as selling bad fish or loaves deficient in weight or quality.

Old Smithfield Market, 1824. (Wikimedia Commons, Jacques-Laurent Agasse)

As London grew, so did the market, which by the late eighteenth century was no longer an isolated pasture but increasingly surrounded by shops and dwellings. In 1710 a wooden fence was built to contain the livestock and prevent them from encroaching on nearby streets and other markets like Cloth Fair whose entrance, on market days, was protected by a chain. By the 1840s over two hundred thousand cattle and one and a half million sheep were annually, in the words of a contemporary Farmer’s Magazine, being, ‘violently forced into an area of five acres, in the very heart of London, through its narrowest and most crowded thoroughfares’. The Lord Mayor complained about the multitude of ‘loose, idle and disorderly persons’ that the market attracted and the situation was not helped by drovers who amused themselves by goading the terrified animals into a state of panic in the hope that they would run amok and destroy neighbouring properties, giving rise to the phrase ‘bull in a china shop’. There were also cases of ‘wife-selling’ of the kind that began Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor ofCasterbridge.

‘Horrid abominations’

For Londoners in the mid-1800s the existence of the live cattle market had become a source of concern on the grounds of public health. One writer complained in 1843 that, ‘Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place West Smithfield in the very heart of the most Christian and polished City in the world’ while at the same time the poet Thomas Hood penned an Ode to the Advocates for the Removal ofSmithfield Market. In Oliver Twist, published in 1838, Charles Dickens described Smithfield as ‘Ankle deep in filth and mire, a thick steam perpetually arising from the bodies of the cattle’ and surrounded by ‘unwashed, unshaven, squalid and dirty figures’. He continued to condemn the market, writing in 1851 that, ‘A beast market in the heart of Paris would be regarded an impossible nuisance … One of these benighted frog-eaters would scarcely understand your meaning if you told him of the existence of such a British bulwark’. In response to such complaints Parliament, in 1852, authorised the construction of a live cattle market at Copenhagen Fields, Islington, to the north of King’s Cross in an area which at that time (though not for much longer) was still rural. The new market was opened in 1855 by Prince Albert, clearing the way for the former market at Smithfield to be redeveloped.

The New Market: Floating Runways

Construction of the present Smithfield meat market on the site of the old livestock market took two years (1866–68) and was undertaken to the designs of the City architect (later Sir) Horace Jones (1819–87) who was also responsible for Billingsgate Market, Leadenhall Market and Tower Bridge. It cost almost a million pounds, a huge sum for the time, and consisted of two wings known as East Market and West Market separated by the Grand Avenue. These are all Grade II listed buildings today. The market had its own railway station in a tunnel beneath the market that could be reached from King’s Cross and Blackfriars stations. The station no longer operates but the former railway sidings have become a car park and the tunnel is used by Thameslink services whose passengers are quite unaware of their proximity to the famous market. A lavish opening ceremony on 24 November 1868 was performed by the Lord Mayor, accompanied by the band of the Grenadier Guards and followed by a banquet. The market was later extended to accommodate poultry and fish and installed one of the capital’s first cold stores, following the arrival of refrigerated meat from Australia and New Zealand. The first consignment arrived on 2 February 1880. The market now covers 10 acres: about twice the area of the former livestock market. In the Second World War the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Max Perutz used one of Smithfield’s cold stores in an attempt to allow the refuelling of aeroplanes protecting the shipping lanes against U-boats. He experimented with the development of a material suitable for building floating runways to be positioned in the mid-Atlantic but in vain. The RAF decided that they preferred long-distance planes!

Grand Avenue, Smithfield, by Sir Horace Jones. (Oxyman)

The End of Rationing

Unlike the other wholesale markets such as Covent Garden, which have moved from the City centre to more accessible and spacious premises further away, Smithfield has developed and prospered on the site that has been London’s source of meat for 1,000 years. On 4 July 1954, Smithfield was the scene of a celebration that marked the end of the rationing that began in 1940, early in the Second World War. On that day, meat, the last item to be rationed, became freely available for the first time in fourteen years. Smithfield opened at midnight to mark the event and ration books were ceremonially burned. The buildings were substantially refurbished by the City Corporation in 1992 and parts of the site have been, and remain, objects of controversy as proposals to demolish and redevelop some buildings are regularly put forward and usually refused after lengthy enquiries. Watch this space.

‘Antique working practices’

The market is busy from 9 p.m. unloading the vehicles that bring the fresh meat for the following day’s trading. ‘Shunters’ move lorries into bays for unloading where ‘pullers-back’, working within the vehicles, move the meat from the front to the back of the vehicle from which ‘pitchers’ unload it and take it to the stalls. There it is dismembered by ‘cutters’, weighed by ‘scalesmen’ and sometimes moved from stall to stall by ‘humpers’ or on the trolleys of ‘bummarees’. ‘Deliverymen’ take the meat to the customers’ vehicles while ‘offal boys’, young apprentices, look on to learn their trades as their fathers and uncles work. In 1969 a report on the operations of the market described it as, ‘a picture of antique working practices’ and the epitome of the ‘pre-entry closed shop’ whereby all vacancies were filled at 8 a.m. on Tuesdays by the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Any stallholder who employed his own labour would be boycotted by ‘pitchers’ and receive no meat at his stall! When questioned by a researcher about the reasons for these practices a union official replied, with disarming honesty, ‘Self-interest, the same as barristers and solicitors’! Because of its long and unsocial hours the Smithfield area is particularly well supplied with pubs and restaurants which serve excellent food and drink at all times to the market’s workers who are noted connoisseurs of good fare.

Smithfield Market, 2010. (Jorge Royan)

When Can I Visit?

Trading at Smithfield begins at 3 a.m. and ends at noon, Monday to Friday, though many stalls cease to trade at 7 a.m. by which time the retailers, catering contractors, hoteliers and restaurateurs have made their purchases and departed. Anyone, including visitors, can buy produce from the stalls and in the week before Christmas many private individuals travel to Smithfield to purchase their poultry, game and hams as their mediaeval ancestors did. It is also possible to walk around the markets after midday when they are very quiet. For those who wish to learn more about how the market operates City of London blue badge guides conduct walking tours of the market beginning at 7 a.m. and lasting an hour and a half. The guide will tell you of the activities of the assortment of oddly-named and carefully demarcated trades which handle 150,000 tons of meat each year, the jobs often being passed from father to son. Booking for the tours is essential and may be made at [email protected]. The tour takes ninety minutes and costs £8 (£6 concessions). The market is the starting point for a cycle race called the Smithfield Nocturne featuring professional as well as amateur cyclists racing around London at night. The event has its own website which gives details: www.londonnocturne.com.

Places of Interest Nearby

The nearby church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, founded in 1123, survived the Great Fire and contains the ornate tomb of the founder of the hospital and priory, Rahere. It once contained a printing works that employed Benjamin Franklin. The almost equally ancient church of St Bartholomew-the-Less is nearby, and is of an unusual octagonal shape, its parish consisting simply of the hospital. Reference has previously been made to the monument to William Wallace, which was set into the wall of St Bartholomew’s Hospital in 1956. Number 43, Cloth Fair is the former home of the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman whose residence there is marked by a blue plaque. The building now belongs to the Landmark Trust and it is possible to stay there.

The former home of poet Sir John Betjeman at No. 43 Cloth Fair, adjacent to Smithfield, is marked by a blue plaque. (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

2

From Copenhagen to Bermondsey: New Caledonian Market and ‘hot gear’

Smithfield livestock market closed, to the relief of its neighbours, on 11 June 1855 and the new Metropolitan Cattle Market was opened by Prince Albert two days later in Copenhagen Fields, north of King’s Cross Station and close to the station’s goods yards to which live sheep and cattle were brought. A slaughter house was also built on the site. The new market was built by the City Corporation on the former site of Copenhagen House, a property constructed in the early years of the seventeenth century to accommodate the entourage of the Danish king when he was visiting his brother-in-law King James I. The Corporation bought the 74-acre site in 1852 and spent three years clearing it and building pens to hold the livestock that was to be driven there from the goods yard. The pens, which could hold 40,000 animals, were surrounded by iron railings surmounted by figures representing the animals traded there. Many of the railings remain though these figures have been removed. They did not always restrain the animals as planned and there were several cases of bulls escaping, as at Smithfield. On one occasion a bull was cornered, appropriately, in front of a sign advertising Bovril. Several pubs were built to accommodate market traders of which most, including The Butcher’s Arms may still be seen. A clock tower was built as the central feature of the market to a design by the City architect J.B. Bunning. It is still a prominent feature of the area, which is now mostly occupied by dwellings.

Cloth Fair Revived

By the time that the livestock market moved from Smithfield the former Cloth Fair had developed into a market selling much more than cloth. It had, in effect, become a market for general merchandise whose stallholders, denied the large numbers of visitors associated with the former livestock market, sought another home. The costermongers (‘barrow boys’) who had lost their Smithfield audience, along with refugees from the recently (1855) proscribed Bartholomew Fair, approached the City Corporation to ask that on Fridays, when the new Metropolitan Cattle Market did not trade, they could be admitted to the new market ‘according to ancient custom, among the empty cattle pens’. The Corporation, no doubt attracted by the prospect of renting out empty space on an extra day a week, agreed to the request and within a few weeks the Caledonian Market was born, taking its name from the nearby Caledonian Road.

Newly opened Metropolitan Cattle Market, 1855.

Prince Monolulu and ‘dark beads’

Within a few months the Caledonian Market had become an established feature of London’s commercial life. The gates would open at 10 a.m. on Fridays to admit ‘runners’, young men noted for their speed and athleticism, who would be despatched by stallholders to occupy the most favourable pitches and register their claim with the Clerk of the Market who was responsible for collecting rents. Amongst the more exotic attractions were Prince Monolulu, a huge Ethiopian who offered to sell racing tips with the cry ‘I gotta horse, I gotta horse’ and the banana king who, besides bananas, sold ‘peaches like a maiden’s cheek’. Honey Jelly Pills, ‘To purify the blood’, were amongst many quack remedies on sale. However, genuine bargains were also to be had. On 19 January 1932 the Morning Post carried an account of a young woman who had bought a necklace of ‘dark beads’, for the price of 7s 6d, which were soon recognised as black pearls and sold for £20,000. More prosaically, shortly afterwards a first edition of Alice in Wonderland was bought for one old penny and sold for £10. In 1916 a Wounded Allies Great War Fair raised £30,000 for wounded soldiers.

Silver Kings and Stolen Goods

The market became especially well known as an outlet for silver and for stallholders known as Caledonian Silver Kings, much of their merchandise having been acquired through theft. The market enjoyed the status of a marché ouvert (open market), a concept dating from mediaeval times under which stolen goods sold in certain markets between sunrise and sunset became the legal property of the purchaser. It originated at a time when people did not travel far so, if the owner of property that had been stolen failed to search for them in his local market (where they were most likely to be for sale) between sunrise and sunset on market day he lost title to them.

Film Stars, Royalty and Americans

By the 1930s the sale of livestock had declined as Smithfield’s ready-slaughtered meat took over the market but over 2,000 stalls were regularly to be found in the Friday market and it was attracting celebrity visitors, including the film star Greta Garbo and the Prince of Wales soon, briefly, to be King Edward VIII. In 1932 the popular novelist J.B. Priestley wrote an account of the market that emphasised its enduring popularity with American visitors:

You may pay ten shillings more for a silver bowl or an amber necklace in the Caledonian Market than you would pay in a decent shop in the centre of the city but you are being given more than ten shillings worth of romantic legend with the articles. The story of how you picked them up will be worth a whole heap of dollars to you, once back in the home town.

The fascination for Americans remained long after the market had moved. In the 1980s a former habitué of the market, Fred White, encountered two Texans, complete with Stetsons, at Caledonian Road Station looking for the cattle market. The closest underground stations to the former site, with its prominent clock tower and surviving railings, are King’s Cross and Angel.

New Caledonia

During the Second World War the market was closed and the site was used as a lorry park for vehicles belonging to the army and to the Royal Mail. The cattle market never reopened but when the war ended a petition, signed by 13,500 stallholders and customers, requested that the Friday market be restored. The original site had been designated for housing, only the clock tower remaining of the original buildings. In 1950 the market was reopened as the New Caledonian Market at Bermondsey Square in Southwark on the former site of Bermondsey Abbey, the opening ceremony being performed by the actress Valerie Hobson, later the wife of John Profumo, MP and cabinet minister. The marchéouvert status accompanied the market to its new site where ‘hot gear’ continued to be traded. The concept was abolished in 1995 though old habits die hard and customers arriving early may still find valuable objects being discreetly offered from the backs of vans for payment in cash. The market is now mostly devoted to antiques, along with jewellery, paintings, clocks, ceramics and glass. It is also referred to as Bermondsey Market and continues to be popular with foreign visitors, especially Americans, as J.B. Priestley noted of its predecessor.

Caledonian Park Clock Tower, 2005. (Gordon Joly)

WHEN CAN I VISIT?

The market is open every Friday from 4 a.m., with trading from 5 a.m. (though alert visitors may find some sales being made from the backs of vans before that time) and ends at about midday. The closest underground station is Borough.

PLACES OFINTEREST NEARBY

The area close to the market has many associations with Charles Dickens. Lant Street, near Borough Station, was the home both of Dickens and of David Copperfield with Dickens’s characters being commemorated in Little Dorrit Court, Trundle Street, Weller Street and Copperfield Street. The church of St George the Martyr, next to the station, has a Little Dorrit East Window to mark where Little Dorrit married Arthur Clennam. Also nearby, just off Borough High Street, is Angel Place where a wall plaque marks a remaining fragment of the Marshalsea debtors’ prison to which Dickens’s father and several of Dickens’s characters were committed. Chaucer’s Tabard Inn was demolished in 1873 but its former site is commemorated by a blue plaque in Talbot Yard, off Borough High Street close to its junction with Southwark Street. The neighbouring George Inn, owned by the National Trust, is London’s oldest coaching inn. Look out too for Leathermarket Street, which was the home of the Leather, Hide and Wool Exchange, now a building devoted to residences, small workshops and a smart restaurant. It is a reminder of the fact that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bermondsey grew up as the centre of the British trade in tanning leather. Hides were bought from London butchers, water and oak bark for the tanning process were available from the river Ravensbourne and from Kent and there was a ready market for the finished products in the City, just across London Bridge.

The wall of the Marshalsea Prison, where Charles Dickens’s parents were detained as debtors, a source of great sorrow and shame to the novelist. (Wikimedia Commons, Gordon Joly)

3

Leadenhall Market: From Fruit and Veg toHarry Potter

The first reference to the ‘Leaden Hall’ occurs in a document of 1296 though by 1309, according to John Stow, it was the property of Sir Hugh Neville and his wife Alice who had erected a mansion with a lead-covered roof. A few years later it was the site of a poultry market whose traders were later joined by cheese-makers. Its site, however, was much more ancient since it occupied the site of the former Roman Basilica and forum in the very centre of the Roman Londinium. It was the largest such site north of the Alps and the market that the forum accommodated would have occupied an area the size of Trafalgar Square. In 1408, again according to John Stow:

Robert Rikeden of Essex and Margaret his wife confirmed to Richard Whittington and other citizens of London the manor of Leaden Hall. In 1411 Richard Whittington confirmed the same manor to the mayor and commonalty of London, whereby it came to the possession of the City.

Richard Whittington thereby acquired Leadenhall, as he came to the end of the third of his four mayoralties, and passed on its ownership to the City Corporation, where it remains. In 1419 it became the site of the City’s granary, a fine stone building, together with three schools and a chapel for those doing business at what had now evidently become an important centre of trade in grain. There was also a beam, similar to that in the Steelyard (see here) for the weighing of wool, which suggests that the market had become an important centre for trading in a variety of commodities including linen cloth and metal objects such as key rings and nails. In 1488 it was decreed that, within the City, leather could only be sold at Leadenhall. By the 1500s meat, poultry and fish were also being sold there and in 1622 it was granted a monopoly in the sale of cutlery. It had, by this time, become London’s biggest market for general produce.

Entrance to Leadenhall market, 2005. (Wikimedia Commons. Yewenyi)

‘Frenchman and foreigners’

In 1484 the building was severely damaged by fire but it must have been rebuilt very soon afterwards because in 1503 City merchants petitioned the Lord Mayor and Corporation to decree that all ‘Frenchmen and foreigners’ should be obliged to sell their wares only at the Leaden Hall and use its beam for weighing their produce. The word ‘foreigners’ probably meant anyone from outside the City itself. Later in the century, in 1534, as Richard Gresham tried to find premises for a bourse like the one he had seen in Antwerp, where merchants could trade with one another in a variety of commodities, it was suggested that Leaden Hall would be a suitable site. The alleys around Lombard Street were no longer thought to be adequate for the purpose but after some debate, in Stow’s words, ‘John Champneis being Mayor, it was fully concluded that the bourse should remain in Lombard Street, as before, and Leaden Hall no more to be spoken of concerning that matter’. Stow recorded that by his time the market was mostly devoted to wool, by far England’s greatest export, and also for materials used in City pageants as well as being used as an arsenal for the storage of guns to protect the City in the event of attack. It came into its own at Christmas when, again according to Stow, a tree was ‘set up in the pavement nailed full of Holly and Ivy for disport of Christmas to the people’.