Honey Lane

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market

Walking along Cheapside and having to divert slightly because of building work going on, I noticed an interesting keystone above a little alleyway. As the builders’ hoarding was blocking the entrance, I could not go through to see what lay behind, but the name of the alley and the design of the stone said it all. This was Honey Lane, once leading to Honey Lane Market – or so I thought.

But when I did some research on the old market, I noticed that the Ordnance Survey map of 1893 had the alley further to the west. The blue arrow is roughly where I saw the alley, the red arrow is where the OS-map situates Honey Lane. Although there appears to be a walkway, possible covered, on the OS-map marked by the blue arrow, it would be unlikely that both lanes were called Honey Lane. More research was obviously necessary. Let’s first look at the old market. The OS-map mentions Honey Lane Market, but just as part of a street. If you compare it with Horwood’s 1799 map, you will see that the market used to cover a far larger area. What the OS-map calls Honey Lane Market is just the southern side of the market in Horwood’s map and the whole area between Russia Row and Honey Lane Market appears to have been built upon sometime in the century that lies between the two maps, obliterating the original market.

Ordnance Survey map 1893-1895

Horwood’s 1799 map

And that is exactly what happened. Honey Lane Market had been established after the 1666 Fire on the site of some private houses and the churches of All Hallows Honey Lane and the adjoining St. Mary Magdalen Milk Street. Although the name suggests that the market was primarily for selling honey, much in demand as sugar was still an expensive commodity and also used in large quantities by the apothecaries, it had a far more varied range of produce on offer. There was a market house in the centre with warehouse space in the cellar and on the first floor, and there were over a hundred butchers’ stalls in the square, besides those for the sale of fruit, vegetables and herbs. The area would also accommodate sellers who brought their wares in baskets.⁽¹⁾

In 1834, an Act of Parliament established the City of London School which set its sights on the Honey Lane Market area. The neo-Gothic building was designed by the City architect James Bunstone Bunning (1802-1863). The first stone for the school was laid on 21 October 1835 by Henry Lord Brougham and Vaux and it opened its doors in 1837. The grand doorway and porch were on the western side of the building in Milk Street.

Engraving by J. Woods of the City of London School. Original steel engraving drawn by Hablot Browne after a sketch by Robert Garland, published in The History of London Illustrated by Views in London and Westminster (1838) (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

According to the British Almanac for the Diffusion of Knowledge of 1836, the school was to be “divided into seven or eight classes, and there [would] be a spacious lecture room, twenty-seven feet high, capable of containing from 400 to 500 pupils”. There would also be “a large writing room, a library, &c.” Hmmm, wonder what the &c. was. Spacious as this may all sound, the number of students soon outgrew the space available and a further Act of Parliament in 1879 allowed the school to seek larger premises which they found on the Victoria Embankment. The school moved hence in 1883.⁽²⁾.

The Honey Lane site was redeveloped after the Second World War and nothing now remains of the market or the school building. A birds-eye view of the area will show one large building reaching from Cheapside to Russia Row. According to Keene and Harding, Honey Lane was moved during the reconstruction and “now lies some 140 ft. (42.67 m.) to the E. of the original lane”.³ Alright, that explains the discrepancy between my observation and the Ordnance Survey map. Mystery solved. In the Google Earth View below, Honey Lane lies between the large building fronting Cheapside and the construction site (red arrow).

(1) Susan R. Henderson, The Public Markets of London before and after the Great Fire of 1666 (1977), p. 74-75.
(2) More on the history of the school can be found here.
(3) D.J. Keene and V. Harding, Historical Gazetteer of London before the Great Fire: Cheapside; parishes of All Hallows Honey Lane, St Martin Pomary, St Mary le Bow, St Mary Colechurch and St Pancras Soper Lane (1987), p. 3.

Clare Market: from flesh and fish to art

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art, market

According to Peter Cunningham in his Hand-Book of London (1850, p. 122), it was William Holles, created baron Houghton of Houghton, Nottingham, in 1616 and Earl of Clare in 1624, who had lived in the St. Clement’s Danes parish since 1617 and who created Clare Market on his London estate. Cunningham was, however, mistaken as the first Earl of Clare was called John Holles (1564-1637). Sir William Holles (1471?–1542) was his grandfather and long dead by the time the market came into existence. Strype in his Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster of 1720 says that Clare Market is “very considerable and well served with provisions, both flesh and fish; for besides the butchers in the Shambles, it is much resorted unto by the country butchers and higglers, the market days, are Wednesdays and Saturdays.”⁽¹⁾

Clare Market by T.H. Shepherd (1815)

Illustrated London News, September 1891. Source: View from the Mirror

By the nineteenth century, the reputation of the market had gone down considerably.

It is a market without a market-house; a collection of lanes, where every shop is tenanted by a butcher or greengrocer, and where the roadways are choked with costermongers’ carts. To see Clare Market at its best, it is needful to go there on Saturday evening: then the narrow lanes are crowded, then the butchers’ shops are ablaze with gas-lights flaring in the air, and the shouting of the salesman and costermonger is at its loudest. Nowhere in London is a poorer population to be found than that which is contained in the quadrangle formed by the Strand, Catherine-street, Long-acre, and Lincoln’s-inn and the new law courts. The greater portion of those who are pushing through the crowd to make their purchases for to-morrow’s dinner are women, and of them many have children in their arm. Ill-dressed, worn, untidy, and wretched, many of them look, but they joke with their acquaintances, and are keen hands at bargaining. Follow one, and look at the meat stall before which she steps. The shop is filled with strange pieces of coarse, dark-coloured, and unwholesome-looking meat. There is scarce a piece there whose form you recognise as familiar; no legs of mutton, no sirloins of beef, no chops or steaks, or ribs or shoulders. It is meat, and you take it on faith that it is meat of the ox or sheep; but beyond that you can say nothing. The slice of bacon on the next stall is more tempting, and many prefer a rasher of this for their Sunday’s dinner to the coarse meat which neither their skill in cooking nor their appliances enable them to render tender and eatable, or satisfactory to the good man who is at present drinking himself to a point of stupidity at the public-house at the corner, and spending an amount which would make all the difference in cost between the odds and ends of coarse meat and a wholesome joint. It is a relief to turn from the butchers’ shops to the costermongers’ barrows. Here herrings or mackerel, as the season may be— bought, perhaps, -a few hours before at Billingsgate —are selling at marvellously low prices, while the vegetables, equally cheap, look fresh and excellent in quality.⁽²⁾

Last of the bulk shops by H. Barton Baker from his The Stories of the Streets of London (1899)

The area with its narrow Elizabethan streets and toppling houses, overflowing with produce and people, declined gradually into what was called, the Clare Market Slum. Barton Baker called it “a murky district”, “that once notorious haunt of vice and misery”.⁽³⁾ But not long after he wrote his book, a lot of the streets were razed away in one sweeping development scheme when Aldwych and Kingsway were created. For excellent posts on the reconstruction of 1901-1905, see Peter Berthoud’s blog with lots of old photos and a map of the development, here and here.

The street name Clare Market still exists, although no longer a market, but a thoroughfare through the London School of Economics buildings. The school, although basically teaching politics and economics, is known for its promotion of the arts. If you walk through the area, do not forget to look up and around you to enjoy the various artworks on display. I will show you two, but there are more!

Baby Tembo

The small elephant, baby Tembo, on the steps of the Student Service Centre is a bronze sculpture by Derrick Stephan Hudson, and one of the more than ten statues donated by the Canadian businessman Louis Odette, who studied at LSE in 1944.⁽⁴⁾ Tembo’s mother and siblings can be found in Windsor, Ontario. If you run the sculpture slide show on the Windsor site, you may also recognise Yolanda Vandergaast’s Penguin that in London can be found across from Tembo at the entrance of Waterstone’s – where else? But there is more art than these two animals to be found around LSE.

On the corner of Clare Market and Portugal Street, above the big W logo of Waterstone’s bookshop is a mural by Harry Warren Wilson. According to the information panel “the motif represents ‘London’s river’ and illustrates subjects taught at the School”. Wilson exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1924 to 1952 and, besides making murals, also painted and worked with glass.

All in all, Clare Market is perhaps a little bit off the regular trail, but certainly worth a visit. 
 
 
 

(1) Book 4, chapter 7, p. 119. Higglers were apparently middlemen who traded in poultry and dairy products. They bought the produce from farmers by barter, hence haggle/higgle. See here.
(2) Charles Dickens (Jr.), Dictionary of London, 1879. Online here.
(3) H. Barton Baker, The Stories of the Streets of London (1899), pp. 154-155.
(4) For an overview see here.