JUDY PULLEY
Greater London today stretches out over 600 or so square miles, but the one square mile of the City of London is where its story begins. From Holborn, south to the river, and from the west end of Fleet Street to the Tower of London, the boundaries of the Square Mile are often marked by statues of silver dragons. They are part of the City’s coat of arms, the crest containing the red cross of St George and the short sword of St Paul. Every street sign in the City bears this symbol, leaving you in no doubt as to where you are.
ANY EXPLORATION OF London should start here at its early heart – where the Roman invaders established the City called Londinium almost 2,000 years ago in about AD 50.
Stand in Guildhall Yard off Gresham Street and beneath your feet is the elliptical arena of the amphitheatre, today marked by a curved slate line. Imagine the roar of the crowd as 6,000 gathered to watch animal and human combat. On the lower floor of the nearby Guildhall art gallery, part of the southeast wall can be seen and the remains of a small room where gladiators lit a candle and offered a prayer before entering the arena. Emerge from Tower Hill underground station and you are confronted by a vast expanse of Roman city wall. Very few sections now survive but this imposing barrier enclosed the City from AD 200, keeping citizens safe from potential outside threats. City streets today still bear the name of its gates – Aldgate, Newgate, Ludgate. Near to Bank station, beneath a street called Walbrook, runs the freshwater stream of that name around which grew up the original small Roman settlement of timber houses often likened to a Wild West frontier post, but which eventually became the fifth largest city in the western Roman empire with a population of 30,000.
Traces of this City – nine metres below the streets today (with all subsequent layers of history sandwiched between) – are continually being unearthed by the archaeologists who move in when a City office building is demolished for redevelopment.
We know the site of the main public baths at the junction of Queen Victoria Street and Huggin Hill – apparently the Romans tried to encourage the unwashed locals they found here to take up this custom. The basilica, where justice was administered, and the vast forum or marketplace both lie beneath the splendidly ornate Leadenhall Market built in 1881. Built around the forum and the wharves of the river port, by AD 60 the City, as the historian Tacitus tells us, was ‘filled with traders and was a great centre of commerce’.
WHERE TO READ THIS
A perfect place would be on one of the stone benches in Guildhall Yard off Gresham Street: under your feet, the slate circle marking out the Roman amphitheatre, to one side the ancient fifteenth-century Guildhall and to the other, Sir Christopher Wren’s church of St Lawrence Jewry, completed after the Great Fire and so named because nearby was an area of Jewish settlement before the community was expelled from England in 1290.
Trade is still the nature of the City of London today, but in its role as a leading financial centre, trade is now in invisible commodities. Banking, international insurance, foreign exchange markets and derivatives have replaced Roman imports of olive oil, wine, fish sauce, jewellery and pottery, and exports of tin, hides and hunting dogs. Reference in the media to ‘The Square Mile’ or ‘The City’ means just one thing – the world of shares and investments, interest rates and hedge funds.
Gradually throughout the latter part of the third century, the Romans began to withdraw. The rule of Rome officially ended in 410 with the Emperor Honorius relinquishing all responsibility for the defence of Britannia. The once grand City became a ghost town and fell into disrepair. The next group of invaders, Saxons from northwest Europe who were not city dwellers, set up small village settlements to the west, which by the 600s had grown into a town known as Lundenwic in the area of today’s Covent Garden.
It wasn’t until the ninth century that the old walled City, much of which had by this time been levelled, started to be resettled. Much of the present street pattern and layout can be traced to this period in the reign of King Alfred. Around this time the City began to establish the foundations of a unique form of government – the first independent local authority. Formed long before a government at Westminster, it is often referred to as the ‘Grandmother of Parliaments’ and many of its ancient traditions, surviving into the twenty-first century, have their origins over 900 years ago.
Aldermen (or ‘eldermen’) administered the City from the eleventh century. Eventually the aldermen began to summon ‘wise and discreet’ citizens for consultation and from 1376, they became known as the Court of Common Council, which with its twenty-five aldermen still exists today as the ‘town council’ of the City of London.
In 1067, one year after the Norman Conquest, William I granted the City self-government by charter. This hugely important document still survives today in the archives of Guildhall library – a tiny piece of parchment (15cm by 4cm), with just four lines written on it. William is not known as the Conqueror here in the City because no conquest as such actually took place. The City agreed to accept him and, in return, he agreed to them keeping their ancient rights and privileges, again confirmed in Magna Carta in 1215.
The oldest ceremonial office is that of sheriff – the shire-reeve or port-reeve – originally the King’s representative within the City. However, in 1199 King John granted the City the right to elect its own sheriffs, a significant move and transfer of power. Two are still appointed each year, attending the Lord Mayor of the City of London on official duties and being present at sessions of the Central Criminal Court at Old Bailey.
The office of Mayor – later to be known as Lord Mayor – was created in 1189, Henry FitzAilwyn being the first to take office. He held the job for twenty-five years, unlike present-day Lord Mayors for whom one year of hectic ceremonial activity is quite enough. The Lord Mayor’s official residence, Mansion House, is a grand eighteenth-century town palace completed in 1752, which stands opposite the Bank of England. In the pediment over the columned entrance, a carving entitled ‘The Dignity and Opulence of the Great City’ echoes the confidence of the age in which it was built, where a female figure representing the City tramples Envy underfoot.
A fair and goodly house
Every fourth Thursday at 1 p.m., the Court of Common Council, presided over by the Lord Mayor in his velvet robes and chain of office, meet in Guildhall off Gresham Street. Within this ancient stone building the City has been governed, sheriffs and Lord Mayors elected, and kings and princes entertained since 1428, when builder John Croxton replaced the earlier thirteenth-century hall, changing ‘an old and little cottage’ into ‘a fair and goodly house’.
The interior is decorated with the coats of arms and banners of the City of London’s livery companies of which there are over a hundred. These have their origins in medieval guilds, which existed throughout Europe where groups of traders living and working in the same areas began to make provision for regulating competition, controlling standards and training apprentices. Members paid to belong, the name ‘guild’ deriving from the Saxon word ‘guilden’ – to pay. Guild members were also required to swear an oath of allegiance on the Bible to the livery company. Masters of the companies wore distinctive clothing and badges or ‘livery’, and hence in the City they became known as livery companies.
The oldest in origin is the Worshipful Company of Weavers, founded in 1155. Others include the Fishmongers, Grocers, Skinners (who controlled the fur trade), Salters, Wax Chandlers (makers of beeswax candles), Apothecaries and Goldsmiths. Many have their homes in sumptuous halls in the City – the Fishmongers on the north side of London Bridge, the Apothecaries in Blackfriars Lane off Queen Victoria Street – though sadly their buildings are not open to the public. Their powers over their trades declined during the eighteenth century and today their role is largely charitable, raising millions for good causes and supporting education through grants and scholarships. New companies are still being created and in recent years, World Traders, Tax Advisers and Hackney Carriage Drivers (the famous London taxi drivers) have all joined the ranks of more ancient trades. Livery companies are also involved in the election of the Lord Mayor every year.
Looking up at the steeply pitched roof of Guildhall, it is hard to believe that it dates only from 1953. Several roofs have topped the high stone walls, two being destroyed in disasters which devastated this particular area of London – the Great Fire of 1666 and the bombing during the Blitz in the Second World War.
Medieval London with its narrow streets of wooden and thatched-roof houses had always been vulnerable to flames. William Fitzstephen, one of the first London historians, comments in the early twelfth century that the only things wrong with the City were ‘the immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires’. For decades Londoners had a fear of what might happen in that year of 1666 – the year of the three 6s, the sign of the ‘Beast’ – and many prophesied disaster. On the night of 2 September 1666, a fire began in the baker’s shop of Thomas Farynor in Pudding Lane, named after the slang term for animal intestines, one of the City’s meat markets being situated in Eastcheap just to the north.
The blaze spread rapidly; the Lord Mayor was alerted but dismissed the problem, saying it was so minor that ‘a woman could piss it out’. Four days later 13,000 houses, 87 churches and 44 livery company halls lay in ruins. The diarist John Evelyn describes the fire at its height: ‘the stones … flew like grenades, the lead melting down the streets in a stream and the pavements of them glowing in a fiery redness and neither horse nor man was able to tread on them’.
At least 100,000 citizens were now homeless, living rough in the fields around London, and although amazingly only eight people are recorded as having lost their lives, the number must, in reality, have been higher.
Within ten days, several plans for reconstruction were submitted to King Charles II, the most ambitious being that of Christopher Wren, a mathematician, scientist, architect and Professor of Astronomy at All Souls College Oxford. His desire was to sweep away all traces of the overcrowded medieval City and rebuild wide straight elegant streets and open piazzas. Seen as ultimately too impractical to implement, the authorities rejected most of Wren’s project and rebuilt on the old street lines.
Wren did, however, reshape the City skyline. He was given the post of Surveyor General and the task of overseeing the design of fifty-one new churches and of St Paul’s Cathedral.
There have been five cathedrals dedicated to St Paul on the site since 604, several of which were destroyed by fires. The church always referred to as Old St Paul’s was actually begun in 1087 and finally completed in 1310. Built on a vast scale in the Gothic style, it was in fact taller and longer than the present-day cathedral with an extraordinary spire, the highest in England, estimated to be at least 143 metres high, but the spire was struck by lightning in 1561 and had to be removed. Old St Paul’s, already thought by many to be in danger of collapse, was damaged beyond repair in 1666.
Wren’s cathedral was completed in 1710, taking thirty-five years to construct – too long, in the eyes of many at the time. Its innovative design incorporated a dome, then something unfamiliar to Londoners. Visitors today can climb the 530 steps to the Golden Gallery encircling the highest point of the dome on the outside, for exceptional views across the City.
Up close – the City
The Lord Mayor’s official residence, Mansion House, is a grand eighteenth-century town palace completed in 1752, which stands opposite the Bank of England. In the pediment over the columned entrance, a carving entitled ‘The Dignity and Opulence of the Great City’ echoes the confidence of the age in which it was built. In it, a female figure representing the City tramples Envy underfoot. Its basement once housed cells. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the suffragette movement in the early twentieth century, was once held there.
Commerce and coffee
Throughout the seventeenth century, as a new City emerged from the ashes of the fire, the financial institutions, which still have their home within the Square Mile, came into being.
Coffee was at the heart of it all and in an age where there is now a coffee shop on every corner, it is hard to imagine a time before 1652 when no one in London had tasted it.
In St Michael’s Alley off Cornhill, Daniel Edwards, who had discovered the potent beverage during his travels in the eastern Mediterranean, set up his servant Pasqua Rosee in business.
The venture was an immediate success. London merchants, told that coffee ‘closes the orifices of the stomach, helpeth digestion and quickeneth the spirits, making the heart lightsome’, flocked to try it out. Coffee houses grew in number: in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were probably almost as many as there are today. City merchants found them convenient places in which to meet and negotiate, and eventually different houses became specialised in particular areas of trade. Opened in the 1680s, Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in Great Tower Street focused on marine insurance, leading to the founding of Lloyd’s of London, the world’s foremost insurance market. Jonathan’s in Change Alley off Lombard Street was where the Stock Exchange had its origins. In Lloyd’s today, about twenty staff attired in blue tailcoats who act as concierges in the building are still called ‘waiters’ in reference to the days of serving coffee.
The Bank of England, established in 1694 to raise money to wage war against France, issued handwritten bank notes as receipts for money deposited there – a system introduced by goldsmiths a century earlier. Today its impressive home in Threadneedle Street is a building of two halves: the lower solid screen wall with only six windows, designed by John Soane in the late 1700s; and above it, Herbert Baker’s 1930s extension where a row of male statues hold keys and chains to represent security and strength.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the Victorian Square Mile was the powerhouse of the Empire, controlling trade and managing the enormous wealth of the largest city in the largest empire the world had ever known. Complexes of warehouses around the Tower of London, Fenchurch Street and Houndsditch were the storehouses for the goods arriving into the docks further to the east – spices and tea, ivory and feathers, fragrant oils and exotic woods – while the great shipping companies’ headquarters were situated in and around Leadenhall Street. Goods as well as invisible commodities continued to be traded well into the twentieth century: fur auction houses of the Hudson Bay Company near Mansion House station, the Coal Exchange in Lower Thames Street opposite Billingsgate Fish Market, the Corn Exchange in Mark Lane near the Tower – all now disappeared. The City was a sombre and serious place of business. Men in a uniform of bowler hats and pinstriped suits carrying rolled umbrellas and briefcases travelled in from the suburbs to work – by 9 p.m. the City was a deserted ghost town.
By the end of the 1930s, with Britain preparing for war, the City authorities realised the businesses of the City would be a prime target together with the docks. In the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, two-thirds of the City of London was destroyed as firefighters fought in vain to extinguish the results of the hail of incendiary bombs. Many of the interiors of Wren’s churches were destroyed, though often their solid walls, picturesque towers and steeples survived. Sir Winston Churchill sent a message to the City authorities: ‘At all costs, St Paul’s must be saved’. A volunteer force – St Paul’s Watch – patrolled the roof, often in complete darkness, searching for incendiary bombs that had lodged in corners and crevices. It is thanks to their bravery that the dome of Wren’s great cathedral still dominates the skyline of the City, although today’s soaring modern buildings threaten to obscure it.
Views of St Paul’s from some strategic points around London are still protected by a policy introduced in the 1930s called St Paul’s Heights, however, competition from areas such as Canary Wharf where many financial companies have relocated, now means City offices are getting ever higher and more imaginative, changing the whole scale and character of the Square Mile. The trend began twenty years ago when Richard Rogers designed Lloyd’s extraordinary stainless-steel refinery-like offices in Leadenhall Street. Nearby is the more recent Swiss Re building in St Mary Axe – the rounded bullet-shaped ‘Gherkin’ – which has now become as much a London icon as Tower Bridge. Within the next few years, even higher towers are set to rise, mostly located on the City’s eastern side and some which have already acquired nicknames – the Leadenhall Building (the ‘Cheesegrater’) opposite Lloyd’s, the Pinnacle (the ‘Helter Skelter’) in Bishopsgate and 20 Fenchurch Street (the ‘Walkie Talkie’).
The Square Mile of the City of London has throughout history constantly changed and reinvented itself and it is the contrasts and juxtapositions of styles and time existing at every street corner that make this small City within a city so unique.