Lost London by Richard Guard Read Free Book Online Page B

blood, though time and again the city authorities tried to restore the Fleet to its former
glory. Under Queen Elizabeth I and then Lord Protector Cromwell, it was scoured and cleaned. In the aftermath of the 1666 Great Fire it was able to be used for the
transportation of coal barges but by the early 1700s it was again in trouble. Jonathan Swift wrote of it:
    Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
    Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,
    Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.
    The Fleet’s death knell sounded when it was turned into a sewer from Fleet Bridge (at the junction of Ludgate Hill and Fleet Street) all the way to Holbourne Bridge. Stretches of the sewer
remained uncovered until 1768, despite the death of a drunken Kentish barber in 1763 who was found stuck fast and frozen solid in its filthy waters. The northern part of the river was gradually
covered over as the surrounding land was given over to housing projects over the course of several years.
    By 1850 the Fleet was one of London’s main sewers, moving 1,500,000 cubic feet of sewage per day. Its Thamesside entrance was a popular ingress into the sewer system for toshers, who made
their living by sifting the dirt for anything remotely useful or valuable. ‘A more dismal pursuit can scarcely be conceived’ wrote John Archer in 1851 in Vestiges of Old London. In 1855 the Fleet was incorporated into the city’s main sewage system and diverted to Barking Creek. Its name lives on in Fleet Street, Fleet Lane and in the notorious Fleet Prison.
Frost Fairs

    W HEN THE WEATHER WAS SEVERE ENOUGH that the River Thames froze over, the people of London would take advantage and build stalls and booths along the
    ice for an impromptu fair.
    There are numerous records of these events that describe how pretty much anything normally available to buy on the streets was for sale on the ice, too. One contemporary sketch
of an ice fair depicts signs for shops and stalls including ‘the Duke of York’s Coffee-house’, ‘the Tory booth’, ‘the Halfway House’, ‘the Bear
Gardenshire Booth’, ‘the Roast Beef Booth’, ‘the Music Booth’, ‘the Printing Booth’, ‘the Lottery Booth’ and ‘the Horn Tavern
Booth’.
    Other attractions included football matches, skating, sledging and ice-based fairground games, such as a whirling-chair or a car drawn by several men using a long rope fastened to a stake fixed
in the ice. Bear- and bull-baiting were also commonplace, as was the sight of a whole ox roasting, a ritual carried out with some ceremony. In 1715, one Mr Hodgeson claimed the right to dispatch an
ox for the purpose – his father having performed the same task in 1684 – and arrived ‘dressed in a rich laced cambric apron, a silver steel, and a hat and feathers, to perform the
office’.
    It is believed that there were ice fairs on the Thames in the following years: 1150, 1281, 1408, 1435, 1506, 1514, 1537, 1565, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635, 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1677, 1684, 1695,
1709, 1716, 1740, 1776, 1788,1795 and 1814. The ice appealed to members of all classes, too. Elizabeth I was reported to have gone walking on the
impromptu rink one year, while Charles II even went fox hunting on it during the great frost of 1685–6.
    Printers, meanwhile, would set up stalls selling mementos of the occasion. One such included the following lines of descriptive verse:
    There you may also this hard frosty winter
    See on the rocky ice a Working-Printer,
    Who hopes by his own art to reap some gain
    Which he perchance does think he may obtain.
    Here also is a lottery, music too,
    Yea, a cheating, drunken, lewd, and debauch’d crew;
    Hot codlins, pancakes, ducks, and goose, and sack,
    Rabbit, capon, hen, turkey, and a wooden jack.

    The frosts that ushered in the fairs were not without their hardships, however. The price of food and fuel would inevitably go up while as many as 3,000 people who normally