Lost London by Richard Guard Read Free Book Online

day to sell cress by the hand. With the amount to be sold dependent on the size of the trader’s fist, the call of ‘Don’t pinch your hand, governor’ was regularly
to be heard from the buyers of Farringdon.
    The market relocated in 1883 to Smithfield, though for many years booksellers continued to congregate on Farringdon Road.
Fauconberg House

    Soho
    S TANDING ON THE NORTHEAST CORNER OF Soho Square, (also home to the equally famous Monmouth House) this was the home of Thomas Belasyse, First Earl of
Fauconberg (1627–1700).
    Originally from a Royalist family, he married one of Oliver Cromwell’s daughters but swapped sides again at the Restoration in 1660, only to betray James II and invite William III to take the English throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an act for which he received his earldom.
    The famously cross-eyed Speaker of the House of Commons, Arthur Onslow, made Fauconberg House his residence from 1753 to 1761. The building was improved by Robert Adam and went on to serve as
Wright’s Hotel and Coffee House for almost fifty years until 1857, at which point it was taken over by an instrument-maker. In 1858 Crosse & Blackwell opened a pickle-bottling plant on
the premises, which the company later turned into offices and a five-storey factory producing soups, chutneys and marmalades to sell across the British Empire. With the building demolished in the
1920s to make way for the Astoria Cinema, only the dreary and rarely noticed Falconberg Mews remains as a reminder. The whole area was swept away to make room for the capital’s massive
Crossrail development in 2010.
Field of the Forty Footsteps

    Russell Square
    I N 1685, THE YEAR OF THE M ONMOUTH R EBELLION , it is said that two brothers, both
courting the same woman, fought a duel for her affections in the fields behind Montague House (now the British Museum).
    Both died from their resulting wounds and from that day forward, so the legend goes, no grass would grow in the footsteps where they trod, or on the tussock where the girl at
the centre of the dispute sat to watch the contest.
    A letter addressed to the poet Robert Southey (1774–1843) from his friend John Walsh encouraged Southey to visit the Fields:
    I think it would be worth your while to take a view of those wonderful marks of the Lord’s hatred to duelling called ‘The Brothers’ Steps.’ They are in a field about a
third of a mile northward from Montague house ... The prints of their feet are about the depth of three inches, and nothing will vegetate them so much as to disfigure them ... Mr. George Hall, who
was the Librarian of Lincoln’s Inn, first showed me these steps twenty-eight years ago ... he remembered them about thirty years, and the man who first showed them to him about thirty more,
which goes back to the year 1692 ... My mother well remembered their being ploughed up and corn sown to displace them, about fifty years ago, but all was labour in vain, for the prints returned in
a while to their pristine form.
    The exact location of the site is debated, with some arguing for the car park behind Senate House on the west of Russell Square while others suggest an area in front of
Birkbeck College, slightly to the north. Fanciful visitors might still glimpse footprints in the grass newly laid there, though students taking short-cuts across the lawn might be a more logical
cause.
Fleet Marriages

    B ETWEEN 1617 AND 1753 A LEGAL LOOPHOLE meant that on-the-spot marriages could be carried out in an
    area surrounding the Fleet Debtors’ Prison known as the ‘Liberties of the Fleet’.
    Many of the pubs nearby bore the sign of a happy couple holding hands, alongside a caption: ‘Marriages performed within’. Often the ceremonies were conducted by
clergymen incarcerated in the Fleet for debt. It was widely believed by the ruling classes that many of these marriages were forced and nothing but a sham. The image of a drunken son of the
aristocracy reeling down