A gate at the Royal Exchange

Tags

civil engineering, coat of arms, Mercers' Company

Anyone even slightly familiar with London knows the impressive Royal Exchange building, but have you ever looked further than the massive porticoed front? Oh, you have been inside, have you? Great, but that was not what I meant. Have you, for instance, gone round the whole building on a Sunday morning when it was still shut? No, I did not think you had, but you should, because if you had done so, you would have seen this very elaborate fence closing off the northern entrance.

The present Royal Exhange building is the third on the spot. The first was built at the instigation of Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566-68, but that building was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. The same fate fell to the second building on the 10th of January, 1838, and the third was subsequently built in the early 1840s. Many plans were submitted for the new building, but the Committee could not decide on a winning design. Several architects were then asked to submit a design, but not many were willing to commit themselves, and after a lot of to-ing and fro-ing the classical design of Sir William Tite was chosen who characterised his design as a building “of grandeur, simpilicity and usefulness”. The fact that a classical design was chosen is no wonder as the remit was that the design was to be “of the Grecian, Roman or Italian style of architecture, having each front of stone of a hard and durable quality”.⁽¹⁾

Tenders for the actual building work were received in October 1841 and the firm of Messrs. Webb was chosen to lay the foundation. A second contract for the actual building itself was granted to Thomas Jackson, “of course”, as the Sydney Herald would have it, because he submitted the cheapest estimate.⁽²⁾ On 17 January, 1842, the foundation stone was laid by Prince Albert. The official opening took place on 28 October, 1844, by Queen Victoria herself.⁽³⁾

In the centre of the grillwork at the entrance in Threadneedle Street, a maiden can be seen, the symbol and coat of arms of the Mercers’ Company. Thomas Gresham, a mercer, had bequeathed the first Royal Exchange jointly to the Mercers and the City of London Corporation. You can see the coat of arms of the City on the gates at the southern entrance. The Mercers’ Maiden graces many buildings in London signifying their ownership. According to the Mercers’ website, she first appeared in 1425 on a seal and over the centuries her apparel has changed with the fashions of the day until 1911 when she was officially turned into the coat of arms of the Company.

On the bottom of the gate the name of the ironworks that supplied the gates can be found: H. & M.D. Grissell. Henry and his brother Martin De La Garde Grissell had a partnership between 1841 and 1858 as the Regent’s Canal Ironworks at Eagle Warf Road. Henry was the driving force behind the firm and had worked with John Joseph Bramah before he started his own business. After 1858, Henry continued the business on his own. The firm made ironworks for bridges, lighthouses, dockyards and other waterworks, both in England and abroad. Robert Stephenson and Grissell had the highest regard for each other and they often worked together on Stephenson’s engineering projects, such as on the bridges over the Nile. Other gates and fences that were supplied by the Regent’s Canal Ironworks can be found at Buckingham Palace and the British Museum. After Henry’s death, an obituary appeared in the Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers (vol. 73, 1883) in which Henry was given the sobriquet of “Iron Henry” and was said to be almost obsessed by the details of his work. This attention to detail speaks strongly from the gates at the Royal Exchange. Let’s hope that this Royal Exchange does not fall victim to a fire as its predecessors have done and that we can admire Grissell’s gates for a long time to come.

One question remains, however. What do the initials G.T. mean on the gates? The only two explanation I can come up with is Guilliam (Latin variant of William) Tite, the architect, or a combination of the first letters of Tite and Grissell. Any thoughts, anyone? Update: the initials are indeed of Sir Thomas Gresham, so the guess by London Remembers (see comment) turns out to be correct. Thanks go to Michael Moore, Building Manager at the Royal Exchange, for confirmation.

More on Henry Grissell and his activities on the school committee of Holy Trinity, Hoxton, at London Remembers.

(1) Wilson’s Description of the New Royal Exchange (1844), pp. 73-78.
(2) The Penny Mechanic and Chemist: A Magazine of the Arts and Sciences, 11 September 1841, p. 325; and The Sydney Herald, 8 February, 1842.
(3) Wilson, p. 80-81 and 116.

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Guy of Warwick

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coat of arms, knight

A small bas-relief of Guy, Earl of Warwick, can be seen on the corner of Warwick Lane and Newgate Street on a very modern office building. It is said that Warwick Lane is named after Warwick Inn, owned by the Earls of Warwick. In 1458, the 16th Earl of Warwick, Richard Nevell ‘The Kingmaker’, came to the great convention that took place during the Wars of the Roses and John Stowe says that he came,

with 600. men, all in redde iackets, imbrodered with ragged staues before and behind, and was lodged in VVarwicke lane: in whose house there was oftentimes sixe oxen eaten at a breakefast, and euery tauern was full of his meat; for he that had any acquaintance in that house, might haue there so much of sodden [boiled] and roste meate, as hee coulde pricke and carry upon a long dagger.⁽¹⁾

An uncommon feature of the little statue is the reference to Pennant’s book Some Account of London, 5th ed, p. 492. if we go to that source, we read the following:

On the front of a house in the upper end of the lane is placed a small neat statue of Guy earl of Warwick, renowned in the days of King Athelstan for killing the Danish giant Colbrand, and performing numbers of other exploits, the delight of my childish days. This statue is in miniature the same with that in the chapel of St. Mary Magdalen, in Guy’s-Cliff near Warwick. The arms on the shield are chequè or and azur, a chevron erminè, which were his arms, afterward gold, by the Beauchamps earls of Warwick.

How much of all that is historical fact or just embellished legend is hard to judge. What is fact, is that Æthelstan died in 939 AD and the earldom of Warwick was not created until 1088, so there is at least a substantial time-gap to be explained. In any case, this Guy’s exploits became a great source for legends and romantic stories, from fourteenth-century French romantic poems to seventeenth and eighteenth-century plays, ballads and chapbooks.⁽²⁾ Another possibility is a confusion with Guy de Beauchamp, 10th Earl of Warwick (c. 1272-1315) whose coat of arms, as Pennant noted, was adopted by the Beauchamps in c. 1200, and closely resembles the one on the relief. However, a footnote by the editor of the 5th edition claims that the arms were born by Thomas de Newburgh, earl of Warwick in 1222. Let’s say that the true story has disappeared in the mists of time and we will just have a closer look at the later history of the relief itself.

Drawing of the older relief ©British Museum

The middle section of the present bas-relief could be seen higher up on the front of a house built after the Great Fire. See copyrighted picture from Collage here. Although the information that goes with this drawing suggest the date is c. 1820, I assume it must be before 1817, because of the restoration date on the present bas-relief.

The statue, as Pennant already noticed, is a copy of the much larger one in the chapel of St Mary Magdalen, in Guy’s Cliff. The house and chapel now belong to the Freemasons and are not open to the public, but they have posted a Photo Gallery Archive on the web that contains a picture of the original statue of Guy, but alas, the poor man is in an advanced stage of decay. See copyrighted picture here.

Illustration of the original statue from C. Knight, Old England: Pictoral Museum (1845), vol. 1.

The top and bottom sections of the present-day relief were added later, most likely at the time of a restoration in 1817. Or perhaps even later when it was moved to its present location? The 1817 restorer was John Deykes, architect and surveyor, who is probably best known for his work in Malvern, where he designed the Library and Assembly Rooms. He entered the Royal Academy’s Exhibition of 1815 with ‘The Fountain of the Innocents, Paris’ in the Architectural Drawings section as number 771 and also had in hand in the restoration work at St. Bride’s. At one time he lived at Mr. G. Smith’s, Doctors’ Commons and at 2 Thavies Inn, Bartlett’s Buildings, Holborn.⁽³⁾ Bartlett’s Buildings was a place where a number of solicitors and attorneys lived and had their offices, close to the Inns of Court. In the Middle Ages, Thavie’s Inn had been one of the Inns of Chancery, but was, in the nineteenth century, no longer used as such.

Thavies Inn by T.H. Shepherd, 1858 ©British Museum

How and why the relief ended up on the front of a modern office block is unclear. The why is not difficult to work out as it is still on a building that is situated at the corner of Warwick Lane and Newgate Street where the old inn is supposed to have been, but the how is not known. When I asked the good people at the reception desk in the building, they could not tell me anything about it, so this is where the story ends for the moment. If anyone has a clue, please add a comment.

(1) John Stow, A Survay of London. Conteyning the originall, antiquity, increase, moderne estate, and description of that city, written in the yeare 1598 (1603), p. 66.
(2) See also: Guy of Warwick: Icon and Ancestor, ed. Alison Wiggins and Rosalind Field (2007) online here. And the webpage of Siân Sechard.
(3) Boyle’s Court Guide for January 1821 and A. Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts; a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904 (1905), vol. 2, p. 319.

Whitefriars crypt

Tags

coat of arms, monastery, Whitefriars

He came out of White-fryers: he’s some Alsatian Bully⁽¹⁾

On 8 November 1895, the Birmingham Daily Post reported on a news item that had appeared in The Daily Telegraph about “an interesting discovery in Whitefriars Street, upon the site of the Carmelite Monastery, from which the street takes it name, founded about 1241.” When one Hurrell decided to sell his freehold property in Britton’s Court, he put the sale in the hands of Messrs Lumley of St. James’s House, St. James’s Street and when one of their clerks noticed a Gothic vault in the cellar of the house, the cellar was cleared to get a better view. According to the paper, “it was obviously a crypt beneath some portion of the ancient church or monastery”. The room was about 14ft square and 5ft high in the centre. When they dug down into the accumulated rubbish, a brick floor was found that had been laid on another layer of rubbish which covered a tiled floor – “possibly the original one” – on a bed of mortar. An opening in the western wall of the chamber lead to a small passageway. At the time of writing, the passage had not yet been cleared of rubbish, but it was suggested that it might lead to more subterranean parts of the old monastery. One week later, on Saturday 16 November, the story was also taken up by The Era who could report that a coffin of Pierbech marble had been found in the passage, besides some old coins, fragments of bone and some clay pipes. They also included a drawing of the crypt.

coat of arms Carmelite order

The Carmelite monastery referred to in the newspaper reports on the discovery of the crypt had been founded on the site by the Carmelites, known as White Friars because of the colour of their habit, or to be precise, the colour of the mantel they wore over their brown habits when travelling and on formal occasions. They had built a small church on the south side of Fleet Street which was replaced by a much larger one a century later. Their land was extended several time until it roughly covered the area between Whitefriars Street (then called Water Lane) and Temple Lane and between Fleet Street and the Thames. The information panel on the site gives the foundation date of the monastery as 1253, about a decade after the order was established in London. The crypt itself is thought to date from the late 14th century. For more on the early history of the order see here.

map Aggas 1563

map Roque 1747

Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia, 1688

After the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII, the area fell into the hands of private individuals and the church and other monastic buildings were converted – the Great Hall was used as a playhouse. The area was filled with cheap housing and became known as Alsatia (after Alsace, the disputed area between France and Germany). A slight oversight left the exemption from City jurisdiction that had been granted to the monks, the ‘sanctuary’, in place, which, compounded by a measure of self-government granted by James I to the inhabitants, the ‘liberty’, made the area a safe haven for those fleeing from the long arm of the law until the matter was regularised in 1697 by The Escape from Prison Act. Thomas Shadwell set one of his comedies in the area, The Squire of Alsatia (1688), in which one of the sons of country gentleman Belfond misbehaves with unfortunate friends in Alsatia. When father gets to London to put matters right heavy-handedly, he is taken prisoner by the locals and has to be rescued by his other son. Sir Walter Scott situates one of his Waverley Novels, The Fortunes of Nigel, in the lawless enclave. In fact, Scott acknowledges his debt to Shadwell’s work in his introduction as the source of his knowledge of “the footing on which the bullies and thieves of the Sanctuary stood with their neighbours”.

But to come back to the crypt. After the initial rediscovery in 1895, nothing much was done until the 1920s when the area was used by the News of World. Sidney Toy, in his The Crypt at Whitefriars⁽²⁾ relates that during the 1927 excavations some tile-paving from the east cloister was found in situ and, in a plan of the monastery site, he shows exactly where the crypt was located, just north of the prior’s lodgings. “The walling and the panels of the vaulting are of chalk, the dressing of the doorway of Kentish rag and the vaulting ribs of clunch”.⁽³⁾ The missing quarters were rebuilt using lime stone from Monks Parks quarries, near Bath. During the restoration, a second door was found, which turned out to be the connecting door to the prior’s lodging. After the newspapers left the area in the 1980s, another bout of redevelopment took place and the crypt was moved on a concrete slab to its present location.

For directions on how to get to the crypt, see the post on Magpie Alley.

(1) Sir William Belfond to his brother Sir Edward Belfond on a companion of his son in Thomas Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia (1688), p. 10.
(2) S. Toy, The Crypt at Whitefriars, 1932. Copy in Guildhall Library (PAM 17555). See also A.W. Clapham, “The topography of the Carmelite Priory of London” in Journal British Archaeological Association, N.S. xvi (March 1910), pp. 15-32.
(3) Clunch is traditional building material used mainly in eastern England and Normandy. It encompasses a wide variety of materials such as irregular lumps of rock either picked up from the fields, or quarried and hewn from the ground in more regular-shaped building blocks. It is predominantly chalk/clay based and is bedded in mortar to form walls (Source: Wikipedia).

Serjeants Inn

Tags

coat of arms, Fleet Street, insurance, law

Although the iron gates at 50 Fleet Street clearly show the words ‘Serjants Inn’, the dove and serpent above the wording have nothing to do with the former lawyer’s inn, other than consecutively using the same address. Serjeants Inn, Fleet Street, was originally one of the addresses from which members of the Serjeants-at-law conducted their business, the other was in Chancery Lane. In the 1730s, the Fleet Street lease was not renewed and the serjeants all moved to Chancery Lane. In 1737, the lease was taken over by the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office (the Amicable Society for short) who erected a new building on the site in 1792/3, designed by Robert Adam (1728-1792).

Engraving by Samuel Rawle, 1801 ©British Museum

In The European Magazine, and London Review of 1801, the above engraving of the new building in Fleet Street is given as well as an account of the history and regulations of the insurance corporation:

“Queen Anne, by letters patent, dated 25th July 1706, incorporated William [Talbot], then Bishop of Oxford, Sir Thomas Aleyn, and others named, and the future subscribers, by the name of the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office”.⁽¹⁾

In fact, the society was the brainchild of John Hartley, a bookseller in Fleet Street. The printing press was put to good use in advertising the new assurance society, for instance, in the anonymous Letter from a Member of the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance; giving his Friend an Account of That Society, as it now stands Incorporated by Her Majesty’s Letters Patent of 1706. The author says that the original “design has undergone many material alterations, since the first proposals were publish’d by Mr. Hartley”, but if his friend wanted to know every particular, he must wait for the by-laws that were in the process of getting accepted.⁽²⁾

1792 receipt for payment of contribution (Source: scripophily.com)

In the original plan a maximum of 2,000 members were to pay £7 6s for a policy and £6 4s annually. Members could hold up to three shares on one life. The funds thus collected were divided among those eligible for a payout “at an equal rate per share, with only such reserve as is necessary for defraying the charges of management”. The European Magazine assures the public that “on inspecting the accounts of the dividends for many years past, the average share appears to have amounted to about 200l”. If anyone wanted to have information, they could go the Society’s office which was open every day from 9 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon “where books containing the Charters, Regulations, and Names of the Members, may be had on application”. So much for privacy. But things did not always go as smoothly as suggested in the European Magazine account. In the early years, a clerk embezzled some £1,700; in 1713, the treasurer walked away with £6,500; and in 1830, the manager of the society absconded with the funds.⁽³⁾

The reason for the dove and serpent in the coat of arms of the Amicable Society have been forgotten, but they were already carved above the door of their Hatton Garden office in 1716. The motto is Prudens simplicitas (careful simplicity) which would be a great motto for modern-day bankers to adopt.

Coat of arms (Source: Aviva.com)

The original maximum of 2,000 members, was gradually increased; in 1790 to 4,000, in 1807 to 8,000 and in 1836 to 32,000. The set price per share was also abandoned in the new charter of 1807, premiums now depended on age and circumstances, something other insurance companies had already introduced earlier. In 1866, the Society merged into the Norwich Union Life Insurance Society, now part of Aviva and they moved their London offices to 50 Fleet Street. In 1912, the road was widened and during the rebuilding, the gates were lost. They were rediscovered in a scrapyard in 1937 and taken to the Norwich Union head office in Norwich, which proved to have been a blessing, as in WWII the Fleet Street buildings were destroyed. The gates were reinstalled in London in 1959 and moved to their present location in 1970. The gates now lead to a fancy hotel, but the link with the Serjeant Inn is not entirely lost. A group of solicitors have set up a barrister’s chambers, 3 Serjeants’ Inn, at 50 Fleet Street.⁽⁴⁾ They are in no way related to the original Serjeants-at-law, but it is still a nice thought that the legal origins of the place and the connection with the Amicable Society are not completely forgotten.

(1) Volume 40, July 1801, pp. 7-8.
(2) British Library, shelfmark 8225.e.46.
(3) www.aviva.com
(4) 3serjeantsinn.com. Information on the fate of the gates from their website.

A bit of Yorkshire in London

Tags

bank, coat of arms, Yorkshire

Between Milford Lane and Essex Street at 200 Strand stands a building with an interesting coat of arms with a ram’s head as the crest. It transpires that the building belonged to the Huddersfield Building Society that was established in 1864 in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, as the Huddersfield Equitable Permanent Benefit Building Society, not to be confused with the short-lived Huddersfield District Permanent Benefit Building Society (1863-1888). In the annual meeting of November 1918, it was – fortunately – decided to shorten the name of the society to the Huddersfield Building Society.
That same meeting saw the introduction of several ‘Rules’ of which number 5 was that “the Seal of the Society shall bear the name of the Society and the device of the coat of arms of the County Borough of Huddersfield”.⁽¹⁾ The motto under the Huddersfield coat of arms is ‘Juvat Impigros Deus’ (God defends the diligent) and the sheep – or more precisely, their wool – refer to the source of market town Huddersfield’s wealth. At the board meeting of 2 January 1922, the directors were shown the coat of arms, “mounted and in oxydized silver at a cost of £3.3.0d., to be hung in the Board Room”.⁽²⁾
From 1924 onwards, the Society employed London agents and from 1929 they had their own London offices, not yet on the Strand, but in Holborn Viaduct.⁽³⁾ A plaque inside the Strand building tells of the destruction by enemy bombs in WWII and the subsequent rebuilding and re-opening in 1959.
In 1975, the Huddersfield Society merged with the Bradford Building Society and in 1982 with the West Yorkshire Building Society to form the Yorkshire Building Society. The building on the Strand used to be called Huddersfield House, but is now called Yorkshire House.

(1) Trevor H. Hall, The Early Years of the Huddersfield Building Society (1864-1928), Huddersfield, 1974, p. 117.
(2) Idem, p. 123.
(3) Idem, p. 128.

Coat of Arms on the front of the building

Sheep’s Head on the front of the building

For comparison: the official Coat of Arms of Huddersfield Borough.

Source photo: Wikipedia