A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century

By Jerry White

This “magisterial history of London” explores the rapidly changing culture and commerce of the eighteenth century in “a book that hums with vitality” (Times Literary Supplement, UK).

London in the eighteenth century was a new city, risen from the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666. The century that followed was an era of vigorous expansion and rapid change as waves of people were drawn to its wealth, power, and many diversions. Borrowing a phrase from Daniel Defoe, Jerry White calls London “this great and monstrous thing,” the grandeur of its new buildings and the glitter of its high life shadowed by poverty and squalor.

A Great and Monstrous Thing offers a street-level view of eighteenth century London’s public gardens and prisons, its banks, and brothels, its workshops and warehouses. White introduces us to shopkeepers and prostitutes, men and women of fashion and genius, street-robbers and thief-takers, as they play out the astonishing drama of city life. What emerges is a picture of a society fractured by geography, politics, religion, history—and especially by class.

Despite the deep and destructive gulf between rich and poor, Jerry White shows us Londoners going about their business as bankers or beggars, reveling in an enlarging world of public pleasures, indulging in crimes both great and small—amidst the tightening sinews of power and regulation, and the hesitant beginnings of London democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9780674076402

Jerry White

Jerry White is an activist entrepreneur known for leading high-impact campaigns, three of which led to international treaties: the Mine Ban Treaty; the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; and the Cluster Munitions Ban. White shares in the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. As co-founder of Landmine Survivors Network, he worked with Diana, Princess of Wales, to help thousands of war victims find peer support and job training. White served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State to launch the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, introducing advanced decision analytics to predict the outcomes of complex negotiations. He studied religion at Brown and theology at Cambridge University, with honorary degrees from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, University of Massachusetts Boston, and Glasgow Caledonia University. White is a Professor of Practice at the University of Virginia.

Book preview

A GREAT AND MONSTROUS THING

A GREAT AND MONSTROUS THING

London in the Eighteenth Century

JERRY WHITE

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

2013

Copyright © Jerry White, 2012

All rights reserved

Jacket art: (top) A Midnight Modern Conversation by William Hogarth (1697–1764)/ oil on canvas/ Yale Center for British Art/ Paul Mellon Collection; (bottom) Nocturne by Walter Greaves (1846–1930)/ Private Collection/Photo © The Maas Gallery, London/The Bridgeman Art Library

Jacket design: Jill Breitbarth

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

The Bodley Head

Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

London SW1V 2SA

First Harvard University Press edition, 2013

Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, Jerry, 1949–

[London in the eighteenth century]

A great and monstrous thing : London in the eighteenth century/

Jerry White. — 1st Harvard University Press ed.

p. cm.

Originally published as: London in the eighteenth century.

London : Bodley Head, 2012.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-674-07317-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. London (England)—History—18th century. 2. London (England)—

Social conditions—18th century. 3. London (England)—Social life

and customs—18th century. I. Title.

DA682.W48 2013

942.107—dc23    2012037633

For John Hodgkins and Paul Wilsdon-Tagg,

eighteenth-century men both

‘. . . it will, I believe, be allowed to be agreeable and sufficient to touch at those Things principally, which no other Authors have yet mentioned, concerning this great and monstrous Thing, called London.’

Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 2 vols., 1724–26, Vol. I, p. 325

A Description of London

Houses, Churches, mix’d together;

Streets, unpleasant in all Weather;

Prisons, Palaces, contiguous;

Gates; a Bridge; the THAMES irriguous.

Gaudy Things enough to tempt ye;

Showy Outsides; Insides empty;

Bubbles, Trades, mechanic Arts;

Coaches, Wheelbarrows, and Carts.

Warrants, Bailiffs, Bills unpaid;

Lords of Laundresses afraid;

Rogues that nightly rob and shoot Men;

Hangmen, Aldermen, and Footmen.

Lawyers, Poets, Priests, Physicians;

Noble, Simple, all Conditions:

Worth beneath a threadbare Cover;

Villainy – bedaub’d all over.

Women, black, red, fair, and gray;

Prudes, and such as never pray;

Handsome, ugly, noisy, still;

Some that will not, some that will.

Many a Beau without a Shilling;

Many a Widow not unwilling;

Many a Bargain, if you strike it:

This is LONDON! How d’ye like it?

John Bancks, 1738

CONTENTS

Illustrations

List of Maps

Preface

Introduction: London 1700–1708

PART ONE: City

I. James Gibbs’s London, 1708–54

The Architect Most in Vogue: James Gibbs

‘A Kind of Monster’: Growing London, 1720–54

Obstructions and Inconveniences: Changing London, 1700–54

II. Robert Adam’s London, 1754–99

‘A Kind of Revolution’: Robert Adam

‘We Have Done Great Things’: Improving London, 1754–99

The Mad Spirit of Building: London Growing, 1754–99

‘An Epitome of a Great Nation’: London, 1799

PART TWO: People

III. Samuel Johnson’s London – Britons

‘London is Their North-Star’: Provincial Londoners

‘Men Very Fit for Business’: North Britons

‘Within the Sound of Bow Bell’: Cockneys and Citizens

‘A Very Neat First Floor’: Living and Dying

‘Take or Give the Wall’: Getting on Together

Insert 1

IV. Ignatius Sancho’s London – Citizens of the World

‘Our Unfortunate Colour’: Black Londoners

‘Foreign Varlets’: Europeans and Some Others

‘Offscourings of Humanity’: Jewish Londoners

‘Get Up, You Irish Papist Bitch’: Irish Londoners

PART THREE: Work

V. William Beckford’s London – Commerce

‘That Which Makes London to be London’: Trade

‘Most Infamous Sett of Gamblers’: Money Matters

‘They Swim into the Shops by Shoals’: Retail

‘Clean Your Honour’s Shoes’: Streets

VI. Francis Place’s London – Industry and Labour

‘Minute Movement and Miraculous Weight’: Made in London

Fellowship Porters, Lumpers and Snuffle-Hunters: Moving Things Around

High Life Below Stairs: Domestic Service

‘At the Eve of a Civil War’: Masters and Men

VII. Eliza Haywood’s London – Print, Pictures and the Professions

‘Purse-Proud Title-Page Mongers’: The Business of Words

‘Overburdened with Practitioners’: Print and the Professions

‘Painting from Beggars’: The Business of Pictures

PART FOUR: Culture

VIII. Teresa Cornelys’s London – Public Pleasures

‘High Lords, Deep Statesmen, Dutchesses and Whores’: Carlisle House

‘Down on Your Knees’: The Stage

‘Sights and Monsters’: The Lions of London

No Equal in Europe: Pleasure Gardens

‘Too Busy with Madam Geneva’: Drinking and Socialising

‘This Extravagant Itch of Gaming’

Insert 2

IX. Martha Stracey’s London – Prostitution

‘How Do You Do Brother Waterman?’: Prostitutes

‘The Whoring Rage Came Upon Me’: Men and Prostitution

‘Damn Your Twenty Pound Note’: Fashion and Vice

X. Mary Young’s London – Crime and Violence

The Republic of Thieves: Plebeian Crime

Virtue Overborn by Temptation: Genteel Crime

‘Save Me Woody’: Violence

PART FIVE: Power

XI. The Fieldings’ London – Police, Prison and Punishment

Mr Fielding’s Men: Thief-Takers

‘Pluck Off Your Hat Before the Constable’: The Parish Police

‘Hell in Epitome’: Prison

‘Low Lived, Blackguard Merry-Making’: Public Punishments

XII. Jonas Hanway’s London – Religion and Charity

Fear of God and Proper Subjection: Charity

Nurseries of Religion, Virtue and Industry: Governing the Poor

‘To Resest ye World ye Flesh and ye Devell’: Religion

‘No Hanoverian, No Presbyterian’: Religion and Politics, 1700–59

Insert 3

XIII. John Wilkes’s London – Politics and Government

‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ 1760–68

‘Life-Blood of the State’: City versus Court, 1768–79

Not a Prison Standing: The Gordon Riots, 1780

‘I Would Have No King’: Revolution and Democracy, 1780–99

Afterword

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

James Gibbs, c.1747, after William Hogarth

Robert Adam, c.1765, after a portrait in the RIBA

Samuel Johnson, c.1780, after Sir Joshua Reynolds

Ignatius Sancho, c.1770, after Thomas Gainsborough

William Beckford, engraving of the Guildhall monument, 1772

Francis Place, 1836, after a sketch by Daniel Maclise

Eliza Haywood, c.1728, engraved by George Vertue after James Parmentier

Teresa Cornelys, c.1765, artist unknown

The Young Wanton, c.1770, published by Carrington Bowles

Brothel Thieves, 1735, William Hogarth, The Rake’s Progress, Pl. III

Henry Fielding, c.1749, after William Hogarth, and Sir John Fielding, c.1762, after Nathaniel Hone

Jonas Hanway, c.1780, after James Bretherton

John Wilkes Esq., 1763, William Hogarth

LIST OF MAPS

London in 1723

London in 1790

Strand, Fleet Street, 1761

Westminster, 1761

City and the Upper Port, 1761

St Clement Danes to Charing Cross, c.1799

Fleet Street to St Paul’s Churchyard, c.1740

Soho, 1761

Covent Garden and Drury Lane, c.1795

Chick Lane, c.1740

Covent Garden, c.1740

Bloomsbury, 1761

Westminster to St George’s Fields, 1790

PREFACE

On Tuesday 13 June 1732, after some days of eager anticipation, the pillory had finally been carted from Newgate and assembled by carpenters at Seven Dials. It was to receive John Waller, convicted of perjury, attempting to swear away men’s lives for crimes they had never committed so he might profit from the rewards. He was the pretended ‘victim’ or key witness in no fewer than six prosecutions for highway robbery at the Old Bailey between 1722 and 1732 in which two persons were condemned to death. Not all his victims were virtuous, because one was the notorious James Dalton, leader for a number of years of one of the most active gangs of street robbers in London, who was duly hanged on Waller’s evidence in 1730. Waller was sentenced to stand at Seven Dials and then, some days later, outside Hicks’s Hall, the magistrates’ court at Clerkenwell. He would never keep that second appointment.

No one was more loathsome to the London crowd than an informer. John Waller must have known what fury he would face when he was brought out of Redgate’s alehouse in King Street (now Neal Street) for the short walk to the pillory. When he appeared on the platform he was met by a storm of missiles so fierce that the officers were unable to fasten the block. As they struggled to get his head in the pillory several men rushed the platform, among them Edward Dalton, brother of the man hanged by Waller’s testimony. Waller was caught by one arm in the pillory but his head was yanked free from the block. He was ‘stripped as naked as he was born, except his Feet, for they pulled his Stockings over his Shoes and so left them; then they beat him with Collyflower-stalks’, pulled his hand from the pillory and punched, kicked and stamped on him as he lay on the platform. A chimneysweep forced soot into his mouth and it was rammed down his throat with a cauliflower or artichoke stalk. Someone slashed him ‘quite down the Back’ with a knife. The excitement was such that the pillory was pulled over, spilling Waller and his assailants onto the stones. ‘Waller then lay naked on the Ground. Dalton got upon him, and stamping on his Privy Parts, he gave a dismal Groan, and I believe it was his last; for after that I never heard him groan nor speak, nor saw him stir.’

Waller’s body was taken in a hackney coach to the St Giles Roundhouse where a surgeon pronounced him dead, and then back to Newgate. All the way, an exultant cheering crowd followed the coach. Among them were Edward Dalton and Richard Griffith, a meat porter who ‘took particular Pleasure in mobbing and pelting Persons appointed to stand upon the Pillory’ and who had been prominent in beating Waller to death. At the door of Newgate the prison authorities refused for some time to take the body in until ordered to do so by the Sheriffs. During the delay, Waller’s mother, who had been anxiously awaiting her son’s return, entered the coach. ‘There was a Man in the Coach, and they put me in, and I laid my Son’s Head in my Lap . . . My Son had neither Eyes, nor Ears, nor Nose to be seen; they had squeezed his Head flat. Griffith pull’d open the Coach-door, and struck me, pull’d my Son’s Head out of my Lap, and his Brains fell into my Hand.’¹

The terrible antagonisms leading to the death of John Waller remind us that London in the eighteenth century was a divided city. Its divisions overlapped one another at many levels. Old separations between London, Westminster and Southwark were still marked physically on the ground, adding to the difficulties of getting round the metropolis. It was a city divided by politics and history, fractures especially deep between the City of London and the court and parliament at Westminster. It was a place of religious discord between churchmen and dissenters and between Protestants and Catholics. The public spheres of men and women were separate in part, their private relations frequently marked by violence and exploitation. Neighbourhoods might be riven by ethnic tensions and family affronts. And everything was complicated by class, for the divide between rich and poor in London was never greater or more destructive in the modern era than in these years. At times these divisions were such that London could seem at war with itself: for a week in June 1780 it really was. There are many narratives that can be constructed from this dramatic, turbulent and disordered century in London’s history, but one powerful theme will be how and to what extent the Londoners and their city healed these open wounds.

The fashions of history-writing have swung in recent years towards a celebration of the English eighteenth century as an age of artistic and scientific genius, of reason, civility, elegance and manners. It has often been summarised as the Age of Politeness. And when we think of England in this century it is really London we have in mind, for London led the nation in genius, elegance and manners to an overwhelming degree. There is a great deal of truth in this characterisation, but a proper balance needs to be struck. For this was a city (and an Age) of starving poverty as well as shining polish, a city of civility and a city of truculence, a city of decorum and a city of lewdness, a city of joy and a city of despair, a city of sentiment and a city of cruelty. We might truthfully summarise it as a city of extremes. In Daniel Defoe’s epigram of the early 1720s, London really was ‘this great and monstrous Thing’.

In transcribing original texts I have followed the originals, with all their eccentricities of spelling, punctuation, italics and capitalisation and without disrupting the flow with innumerable ‘sics’. The reader will have to trust me that Joshua Reynolds really did write of the ‘Prince of Whales’, that a newspaper advert really did refer to a baby’s ‘Shoos’, and so on.

Dates given before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1752 are given in the old style, except that I have made the year begin on 1 January rather than 25 March, as was frequently the case at the time. It is a most disconcerting thing to find a newspaper for 31 December 1705 followed by the issue of 1 January 1705; I have avoided the device of 1 January 1705/06 and given the year as 1706.

Pressures of length have required economy in the endnotes. I have used short titles throughout, with full titles given in the bibliography at the end of the book. And I have confined the notes generally to sources for direct quotations, surprising facts, and some limited suggestions for further reading.

Translating money into modern values is fraught with difficulty. For much of the eighteenth century a regular income – hardly ever attainable, I should add – of 75p a week (say £40 a year) would provide security and reasonable comfort for a family of man, woman and two children; a pound a week would be considered good money for anyone working with their hands, even a junior clerk; and a gentleman could manage to keep up a decent appearance on £200 a year. If we have in mind a multiplier of 250 to translate old values into new we won’t go too far wrong.

12d (pence) = IS (shilling) = 5p

Half a crown = 2s 6d = 12.5p

Crown = 5s = 25p

240d = 20s = £1

1/2 guinea = 10s 6d = 52.5p

1 guinea = 21s = £1.05p

1 moidore = 27s = £1.35p

INTRODUCTION: LONDON 1700–1708

London is generally believed, not only to be one of the most Ancient, but the most Spacious, Populous, Rich, Beautiful, Renowned and Noble Citys that we know of at this day in the World: ’Tis the Seat of the British Empire, the Exchange of Great Britain and Ireland; the Compendium of the Kingdom, the Vitals of the Common-wealth, and the Principal Town of Traffic that I can find accounted for by any of our Geographers . . .¹

By 1700, after half a century of relentless expansion, London had overtaken Paris to become the largest – if disputably the finest – city in Europe. It stretched in a great arc of continuous building along the north bank of the Thames, some five miles as the crow flies from Tothill Street, Westminster, to Limehouse in the east. It was linked to the south bank and the burgeoning Borough of Southwark – the next largest town in the kingdom if it could ever have been imagined separate from the metropolis – by the 500-year-old London Bridge. The connection seemed more solid somehow when travellers mistook it for just another street until a gap in the houses on either side revealed the swirling river below. North to south, across that single bridge, London was more shallow than broad, just two and a half miles from the ‘stones’ end’ in Shoreditch to the furthest point of Blackman Street, Southwark. This was a walkable city, just three hours across (allowing for obstructions) and less than two hours north to south, and on foot was how most Londoners experienced it. Even so, its size and complexity and dense obscurities already made it unknowable: ‘So large is the Extent of London, Westminster and Southwark, with their Suburbs and Liberties, that no Coachman nor Porter knows every Place in them . . .’²

That age-old three-part division of ‘London’, dating back to Saxon times at least, was still real enough at the beginning of the eighteenth century, despite the unbroken continuity of the built-up area. The City of London, the heart of trade, manufacturing and the manipulation of money, had centuries before burst beyond its Roman walls, but confined itself to ancient boundaries east of Temple Bar and west of the Tower. The City of Westminster had two sectors: one around the Abbey, Westminster Hall (the law courts) and the Houses of Parliament, and the other – more aristocratic – around St James’s Palace, the royal court. This area around St James’s, with its northern suburbs, was just becoming known as ‘the west end of the town’. By 1700 the two cities were conjoined by houses and streets almost a mile deep from the river to their outer suburbs and liberties. These outliers in effect formed a township distinct from the cities out of which they had grown, made of once separate villages now fused in a solid ring from St Martin-in-the-Fields in the west to Whitechapel in the east. This ring of suburbs, though highly diverse, was predominantly a workers’ district. South of the river, Southwark also had a strong manufacturing complexion, leavened with trade and something of the City’s money-getting ways. In the east, on both sides of the river, was an entirely different London, a seafarer’s town or towns, places of both poverty and considerable wealth. Seagoing London was most dense along the river’s north bank at Wapping, but it had a significant strand along the south bank from Bermondsey, through Rotherhithe, to the quite separate towns of Deptford and Greenwich – neither, in 1700, London at all.

Despite frequent allusions to the cities of London and Westminster and the Borough of Southwark as three distinct places, and despite there being in reality five main divisions, the whole had come to be known and understood as ‘London’ by 1700. Distinctions, though, remained more than skin deep. Joseph Addison famously summed them up in June 1712:

When I consider this great city in its several quarters and divisions, I look upon it as an aggregate of various nations distinguished from each other by their respective customs, manners, and interests. The courts of two countries do not so much differ from one another, as the court and city, in their peculiar ways of life and conversation. In short, the inhabitants of St James’s, notwithstanding they live under the same laws, and speak the same language, are a distinct people from those of Cheapside, who are likewise removed from those of the Temple on one side, and those of Smithfield on the other, by several climates and degrees in their ways of thinking and conversing together.³

How many lived in this ‘aggregate of various nations’? If only we could answer with confidence. All numbers in eighteenth-century London are to be treated with scepticism, most mistrusted, many dismissed out of hand. Contemporary estimates of London’s population around 1700 helpfully ranged from around half a million to 2 million. Historians since have been hardly the wiser. The two most eminent London historians of the first half of the twentieth century adopted astonishingly precise figures of 674,500 for 1700 and 676,750 for 1750. A kind of consensus around 575,000 for 1700 and 750,000 for 1750 has emerged in the last fifty years, but the true figures are unknowable and these will only ever stand as best guesses. If we keep in our minds over half a million for 1700 and under three-quarters of a million for 1750 we won’t go too far wrong. Even so, the staggering size for contemporaries of London’s population at the beginning of the century is brought home by the estimate for Britain’s second city in 1700. That was Bristol, at around 30,000. It is believed that one in ten persons in England and Wales lived in London; and that perhaps one in six had lived in it at some time in their lives.⁴

Just why London’s ‘nations’ proved so populous is an easier question to answer than how many Londoners there were. Its sheer size exercised a gravitational pull on the nation, through wonderment and curiosity and tales retold; and through counties from Cornwall to Cumberland producing and delivering goods for the London market and providing labour-power for every function from serving maid to courtier. London was the kingdom’s centre of world trade and shipping, of the emerging banking, brokerage and insurance industries, of finished commodity manufacture not only for the metropolis but for the nation, for European competitors, for the empire and for the world. It was the home of the royal court, with its countless civil-list pensioners; of Parliament, which transacted an immense part of not just public, but local and even private business for the nation; and of uniquely metropolitan institutions like the higher law courts, a monopoly of printing and publishing, and the ‘royal’ theatres. For all these reasons London was immensely wealthy. And that in itself was a further irresistible allure to rich and poor alike, ever supplementing the ‘aggregate of various nations’.

A striking feature of this monster city in 1700 was its newness. In September 1666 some three-fifths of the City of London had been destroyed in the Great Fire. The losses were immense – 13,200 houses were burned to the ground and so were most of the great public buildings, including St Paul’s Cathedral and eighty-seven parish churches. Rebuilding the housing took well into the 1670s. The public buildings took longer – St Paul’s was not considered finished till 1711. And rebuilding was at a much reduced density – some parish churches and livery company halls were never replaced and only around 9,000 houses filled the place of those lost.

Although some lamented a failure to reconstruct the City on rational geometric lines, a different and doubtless improved City nonetheless replaced the old. The new houses were of brick rather than plaster-faced timber as before. They had neat flat fronts, were generally two rooms deep, three or four main floors high, and two or three windows (or ‘bays’) wide. Attics were set back into the roofline and there were no storeys jutting forward over the pavement, nearly brushing gables with the houses across the way. Old property boundaries had generally been followed. But where opportunity offered, main roads were widened and courts and alleys were opened out, and gradients were flattened when the Thames waterfront was raised three feet. So in 1700, three-fifths of what had been an ancient City, full of Tudor buildings and older, was now a great modern town, just thirty years old or less.⁵

Almost equally important, the Fire had given an added push to suburban development in and around Westminster, as the wealthiest citizens took the chance to seek a convenient home downwind of, but close to, the crowded City. St James’s Square’s first houses were rated from 1667 and the neighbourhood south of Piccadilly grew apace from then. Great old mansions along the riverside south of the Strand were pulled down and replaced with elegant rows of terraced houses in York Buildings and neighbouring streets from the 1670s. The area around the Haymarket and Leicester Fields (later Square) was also built on from the 1670s, Soho in the 1670s and 80s, Golden Square and around in the 1680s, Seven Dials in the 1690s. In north London, smart suburbs took root around Red Lion Square and at Bloomsbury Square from the 1680s. There was expansion at the same time in some middling and poor parishes at the edge of Westminster and the City, in St Martinin-the-Fields and St Giles and in Clerkenwell. Further east were new streets in Spitalfields, driven by demand from French Protestant migrants especially from 1685, and in Wapping. Finally, south of the river, the Great Fire of Southwark of 1676 destroyed 600 houses, which were rebuilt in the new brick or in traditional timber and plaster. All this, then, was pretty much spanking new or just coming of age in 1700. Indeed, the up-to-date feel of much of London was a matter of astonishment, its new growth ‘really a kind of Prodigy’, according to Daniel Defoe.⁶

There was much of charm and beauty in this new London. Contemporary Britons believed it ‘the fairest’ city ‘in all Europe, perhaps in the whole World’. Part of that claim resided in the majesty of old buildings like the Tower and, most of all, Westminster Abbey: rising over the trees of the park, ‘with another city arising beyond all’, it offered ‘a view of such a nature as few places in the world can parallel’. But much was contributed by what was new. The warm pinks and reds of the brick used to build the new City and suburbs were not supplanted by a cooler grey until towards the end of Queen Anne’s reign (1714). In paintings of the time and for half a century after, the muted fireside glow of London brick cast the city in a rosy hue. It seems to have proved more resilient to discolouration from London smoke than white Portland stone, used for every grand public building and quickly blackened on the south and west façades by the prevailing winds.⁷

It was not just the welcoming colours of new London that gratified contemporaries, but the regularity of the street frontages in the City and of the streets themselves in many of the newer suburbs. Grandeur too could be found in the new public buildings of the City, in the rebuilt churches wrought or influenced by Sir Christopher Wren, fifty or so gleaming steeples and towers in Portland stone, some soaring 100 feet and more over the buildings around them. Grandest of all was the new cathedral of St Paul’s, Wren’s masterpiece, massively dominating the City skyline from its elevated position atop Ludgate Hill. Its inspiration – no accident this, given the frequent comparisons between the celestial city and London – was St Peter’s at Rome. The cupola of St Paul’s stretched some 300 feet into the sky. It would remain London’s tallest building for more than 200 years to come, helping strangers find their bearings by a glimpse of the dome over the housetops. Even so, its magnificence was curtailed by London’s inherent claustrophobia and the close clustering of buildings around it: ‘we can’t see it till we are upon it,’ wrote one critic, who called for the demolition of the nearby City gate and the opening of a line of view from St Paul’s to the river to show its full glory.⁸

This cramped confinement was at its worst in the remnants of old London that had escaped the Fire. These were extensive. Two-fifths of the City represented probably 5,000 houses and other buildings, not all old because of London’s ceaseless rebuilding and refashioning but many dating back to the 1400s and many more to the century of Elizabeth and Shakespeare. Not even all these were necessarily bad and not all the old streets were uniformly poor and shabby. But much of this pre-Fire housing in the City was worn and decrepit from generations of multiple occupancy and landlord neglect. The wards of Farringdon Without (or outside the walls) and Cripplegate Without contained much of the worst housing in the old City, with over 300 courts and alleys between them. The former included part of Chick Lane and Fleet Lane near the Fleet Ditch, and Long Lane, Smithfield, all bywords for filth and dangerous disorder. Small enclaves of the worn-out City were dotted here and there, like the Liberty of St Martin’s-le-Grand, and the former ‘Alsatia’ or ancient thieves’ and debtors’ sanctuary of Whitefriars between Fleet Street and the Thames.

Beyond the City, swathes of the inner suburbs from Charing Cross to Whitechapel pre-dated the Fire. The courts and alleys between St Martin’s Lane and Bedfordbury were so interlocking and obscure, so much a law unto themselves, that they were known as the Bermudas or the Carribbee Islands from the early seventeenth century. The narrow streets of St Giles were notoriously poor, filthy and dangerous. Turnmill Street, Clerkenwell, was the archetypal London slum long before the word was invented, its name thrown casually into conversation as symbolising the very lowest of London low life. Names like Rotten Row, Foul Lane, Ragged Row, Dark Entry, Dirty Lane, Pissing Alley (‘a very proper name for it’) litter the London maps of the time around Long Acre and Drury Lane, Shoreditch and Whitechapel.⁹ Perhaps Southwark was as bad as anywhere, the courts and alleys off Bankside ‘very meanly built and Inhabited’, the Mint (another Alsatia, west of the high street) ‘sorry built with old Timber Houses, and as ill Inhabited’, and Kent Street, the main road to Dover, very dirty, narrow and mean, with courts of ‘old sorry Timber Houses’. But most embarrassing of all was old Westminster. Here, around the Abbey, the law courts and the Houses of Parliament, were densely clustered wooden sheds and hovels, even leaning against the Abbey walls. Some were ‘ready to fall’. King Street, the main road from the court and City to Parliament, was a narrow filthy congested way, an affront and obstruction to the Queen and her burgesses. This whole wretched area around the Abbey was known as ‘the desert of Westminster’. Its outlook wasn’t improved by the extensive blackened remains of the Tudor Whitehall Palace, burned to the ground in January 1698 and still largely undeveloped in the early years of the century.¹⁰

Throughout this old London, some obscure places had no name at all, outliving any claim to inheritance or title. They were run as fiefdoms by the occupiers until so knocked about they were abandoned altogether, the odd ‘backward Place, which now, thro’ Time, or other Casualties, is come to Desolation, and has at this Day nothing but Ruins, to shew it was once the Possession of poor Inhabitants’. Houses there and elsewhere frequently collapsed. Indeed, much of old London seemed tottering on the verge. Small wonder that after the Great Storm of November 1703, ‘Houses looked like falling scaffolding, like skeletons of buildings, like what in truth they were, heaps of ruins.’¹¹

It was this old London that was primarily responsible for the great inconveniences of metropolitan life. Here the streets were generally surfaced with large pebbles and with a central kennel or gutter, at very best uneven and rough. Main streets had footways on either side paved in flat stone, Purbeck stone the preferred material, and were not raised much – if at all – above the roadway. To stop carriages taking advantage of the smooth stones they were protected by stumpy wooden posts at the pavement’s edge. But in narrow streets there was no footway and no protection at all for the pedestrian. In any event, the upkeep of pavement and carriageway was the responsibility of the separate occupiers – not even the owners – of houses on each side up to the central kennel or midpoint. It was a duty much neglected. Where undertaken, it was performed as cheaply as possible. No obligation existed to use the same materials, or even repair to the same level, as one’s neighbour. The pits and troughs that wheeled traffic had to negotiate were bone-shaking and axle-shattering; the holes and hazards endured by foot passengers were not just prejudicial to bones but to life itself. Stagecoach passengers encountering ‘London stones’ from the country ‘were jumbled about like so many Pease in a Childs-Rattle, running, at every Kennel-Jolt, a great Hazard of a Dislocation . . . Our Elbows and Shoulders . . . Black and Blew’. The 800 hackney coaches licensed for hire were better sprung apparently than the stages, but even they were teeth-rattlers.¹²

There were other hazards too. The drainage of London in 1700 was established on a simple system. Common ‘shores’ or sewers, often Thames tributaries like the Fleet River or ‘Ditch’, were intended for surface water drainage only. On this optimistic assumption, the Fleet had been canalised in the 1670s below Holborn Bridge to the Thames and lined with warehouses on either side. Using sewers for foul drainage, for human waste, say, or blood from the slaughterhouses, was unlawful. Human waste was stored in cesspools, pits dug often directly beneath the ‘bog-houses’ or ‘houses of office’. They had to be emptied in the hours of darkness to mitigate the nuisance, their contents or ‘night soil’ brought up by bucket and shovel and carted to the farmers’ country dunghills, or to great pits in Tothill Fields, Westminster, and elsewhere.

In fact these systems were separate in name only. Night-men took the risk of a fine and tipped their carts in the common sewers to save a tedious journey to the fields. Those with properties alongside the sewers built their bog-houses over them with impunity, or nearly so. Londoners urinated openly in the streets and defecated more privately on the stones of courts and alleys. Chamber pots were emptied into the kennels, which in any event collected the scourings of the streets, the horse and cattle dung, the dog shit and animal carcasses, and shot them into the sewers:

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.¹³

That was Jonathan Swift, whose nose was too tender for many London lodgings, driven from one to another by the stench of the ‘sink’ or drains, even in polite parts of the town like Bury Street, St James’s. Amidst the less polite, things could get very messy indeed. A narrow lane near Billingsgate ‘stunk of Stale Sprats, Piss, and Sirreverence [human excrement]’. In ‘the Hog-keepers yards at White-Chappel’ the swine were ‘fed with Carrion, and the Offall of Dead Beasts are kept, whose Smell is so unsufferably Nauceous that People are not able to go that way’. Worst of all, perhaps, were the places in Southwark and Bermondsey close to the ‘Tide-Ditches’ that ‘receive all the Sinks, Necessary-houses, and Drains, from Dye-houses, Wash-houses, Fell Mongers, Slaughter-houses, and all kinds of Offensive Trades . . . notorious Fountains of Stench enough to Corrupt the very Air, and to make People sick and faint as they pass by’. Nor was the atmosphere improved by the habit of storing the scavengers’ scourings or street slop in giant mounds or laystalls along the north bank of the Thames and on the edge of the town. Those on the river at Dowgate and Whitefriars and Dung Wharf in the City were thirty or forty feet high, and as wide and long as a city block. The ‘mounds’ of ashes, street mud and rubbish or ‘dunghills’ at Whitechapel, Clerkenwell and elsewhere were as big as modern slag heaps, with roadways to the top for carts to tip their loads and to remove the contents for brick makers and market gardeners in the countryside. For Bernard Mandeville, ‘the stinking Streets of London’ were all a sign of a vigorous trading existence, and so ‘a necessary Evil’. Others were less philosophical. Small wonder that the royal family removed from St James’s Palace to Hampton Court in hot weather to avoid the stench of London, or that flies were the scourge of every summer in town. In 1708 a plague of flies was so dense that Londoners’ feet left impressions ‘as visible as in snow’ on the dead insects in the streets.¹⁴

According to Ned Ward, that sparkling though scabrous chronicler of metropolitan low life at the turn of the eighteenth century, who always called a turd a turd, an eclipse of the sun was ‘Invisible to us at London, by Reason of a Stinking Fog that arose from wreaking Dung-hills, Distillers Fats, and Pipeing Hot Close-Stool-Pans’; and, of course, because of London smoke. Coal smoke, foreign visitors thought, was the ‘Bane of London’ that ‘poisons the air one breaths in it’. The London air was said to be notoriously ‘thick’ and in winter ‘Fog and Dirt are the two cheapest things then to be had’. Other irritations included the great swinging signs that, in the general absence of street names on walls and house numbers, alerted the passer-by to shops and inns. By the early eighteenth century a map or directory had become an essential tool for finding a way through London, though choosing which of fourteen King Streets, say, was the one you needed could still tax the ill-prepared. Hence the complex directions given out by shops, as in this case for the supplier of Dr Tilney’s Green Drops for ‘Ailments and Infirmities of the Seminals and Genitals’: ‘the furthermost House but one, on the right Hand, in Fountain Court, near Exeter-Change, Strand’.¹⁵

Getting around this sprawling, opaque and densely interwoven city wasn’t easy. Pedestrians had to have their wits about them and sometimes considerable fortitude. ‘Taking the wall’, keeping as far from the filthy street mud as possible, could lead to arguments, even fights, if one person refused to give way to another. Walkers had to compete too with the trotting chairmen, instantly identifiable by football-sized calves bulging through their stockings. There were 200 sedan chairs licensed for hire – 300 from 1713, to accommodate the growth of the town – and many wealthy residents had private chairs. Supposed to keep to the roadway, many – perhaps all – bullied their way inside the posts: a chairman’s ‘By your leave!’ was less request than ultimatum.¹⁶

All these dangers were worse by night. By the standards of the second half of the century, the lighting of London streets around 1700 was looked back on, literally, as some dark age. But to contemporaries the convex lamps of the City, introduced in 1695, and the ‘globular’ lamps of the West End, an innovation of 1709, made London the best lit of all cities. They only shone on ‘dark’ nights without moonlight, and even then were extinguished long before dawn, but to foreign visitors these lamps were as ‘the little Suns of the Night’.¹⁷

Other amenities ranked high among the conveniences of London, especially the four parks that largely defined the boundaries of the city on the western side. They stretched, somewhat larger then than now, from Westminster to Kensington, a village throughout the eighteenth century and connected to London more in the mind than on the ground. Originally they had been deer parks for the use of Henry VIII and his court. In 1700 there was still open country between the town and Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens; building had just about come up to Green Park; and in the south, St James’s Park had houses on three sides. High brick walls enclosed the separate spaces to make them less continuous than later became the case.

Smartest was St James’s, behind the royal palace in Pall Mall. When Londoners talked of ‘the Park’ in the eighteenth century, this is generally what they meant. It was ‘famed wellnigh throughout the world’, a German visitor recorded in 1710. All Londoners of the middling classes and above knew it and all visitors had to experience it. Mrs Percivall, a provincial English lady, breathlessly relayed her impressions to a friend in the country (whose name and whereabouts have not come down to us) around 1713:

[St James’s Park] has many Deer in it, ’tis very large and two Canalls and a pond called Rosamonds Pond, here are many Swans, here are abundance of Lime Trees which makes many fine Walks, some close some open in the Spring this place is very Sweet . . . in this Park all the Fine Ladys and Great Beaus walk at Noon in the Winter and ten a Clock at night in the Summer, there stands a Centinel at every Gate to keep beggars and Masked Ladys from walking here. The finest walk and what is most frequented is the Mall ’tis Gravelled and Rolled.

[Of Hyde Park] ’tis very large many Acres: in some places ’tis quite open and other places are bushes of Trees some in order and others wild this stands very high, and the Coaches come here in the Summer, you shall see some Evenings two hundred Coaches; here is a place called the Ring where they generally go to view one anothers fine Equipage and Cloaths, no Hackneys nor foot men are allowed to come in the Ring, they are always dressed when they come here to the best advantage, the Coaches pass so close that many Assignations are made . . .¹⁸

Another of London’s great assets was the Thames. London’s very existence as a great trading city depended on it and the river at work was as much one of the sights of London as the parks at play. Indeed, it was an industry in itself, supporting a host of fishermen who caught roach, barbel, flounder, salmon, even an occasional sturgeon. It was also a great highway and gave work to some 1,400 lighters or one-oar barges, and some 3,000 wherries. Watermen in one- or two-men boats could be hired at eighty-nine ‘plying places’ either side of London Bridge, mostly to the west of it and on the north bank. On a sunny calm day it was the quickest and most comfortable way between the City and Westminster, or to cross from the Middlesex to the Surrey side. It was not without its dangers, though. Shooting the narrow arches of London Bridge, where the water could suddenly fall a dozen feet or more, was a hazard many avoided by being landed on one side and taking boat again at the other: ‘when we had watched our boat passing through the bridge, from the shore we could see neither boat nor boatman, so that one could well imagine that both were being sucked down by the water.’ Danger from wind and crowding of vessels led to capsizes and deaths every year – eight people in two separate incidents drowned near Vauxhall in April 1718 alone, for instance.¹⁹

Around 1700 the Thames was not yet the great public sewer that it would become, but it was polluted enough from the common shores emptying into it: Ned Ward wondered how ‘the Lady Thames’ could ‘have so sweet a Breath, considering how many stinking Pills she swallows in a Day’. The evening swarms of rats on the riverbank near the Savoy remained a perpetual nightmare for one Londoner at least. Yet there seemed to be few qualms in taking the bulk of London’s domestic water straight from the river, without filtration or even settlement first. Much of it was supplied from the old waterworks at London Bridge, dating from 1582. The sediment of Thames water was said to settle faster in the glass than the New River’s, supplying the northern suburbs from a source in Hertfordshire, and from the Thames came apparently the drinking water of choice. Whatever the source, all houses of the middling classes and above had access to a piped supply from one of the several London water companies. The poor were served by common pumps in the courts and alleys and by-streets. The supply to everyone was intermittent, householders storing their water in lead cisterns, usually in the basement. And it was made worse by frequent breakages in the six-inch wooden mains beneath the streets and at the join with the leaden pipes supplying each house. Even so, no city in the world, it was thought, was better supplied with water than London.²⁰

There is one further amenity worth dwelling on at this point. No Londoner, even one entombed in the dankest, darkest City alley, was more than a mile or two from something like open countryside. Further afield and the hills of Middlesex and Surrey and the pastures and forests of Essex presented beautiful unspoiled views and smoke-free, stench-free air. But even by 1700 Londoners had begun to take a myriad liberties with this rural innocence. At every point on the London compass the wealthy citizen, his wife or his widow had staked their claim, fattening up the villages here, imposing with a country mansion there. Just a few instances will have to stand for an uncountable many: in the west, Gumley House, Isleworth, for a prominent London mirror- and cabinet-maker (c. 1700), and Gordon House, Isleworth (c. 1718), for Moses Hart, a wealthy London Jewish merchant; in the east, Leyton Great House (1712) for Sir Nathaniel Tench, one of the first directors of the Bank of England, and Wanstead House (begun 1715) for Sir Richard Child, a banker of prodigious wealth. These and many more were

magnificently furnish’d with rich Tapestry, India Silks, Damask, gold and silver Plate, China Ware and Porcelane, rich Cabinets, &c. and adorn’d with fine carved Work and Paintings as many Palaces: And when it is considered that most of these are only the Summer Retreats of Gentlemen, and that many belong to the Tradesmen of the City of London, who perhaps seldom spend but a Day or two in the Week there, surely nothing in the World can imitate it.²¹

Surely nothing could. And it was into this filthy, magnificent, immense and bewildering world of London that James Gibbs stepped, some time in the autumn of 1708.

PART ONE

CITY

James Gibbs

I

JAMES GIBBS’S LONDON, 1708–54

The Architect Most in Vogue: James Gibbs

James Gibbs had more influence than any other architect on the new London that began to emerge in the first half of the eighteenth century. In many ways that is a modest claim, for in those years no single architect stamped his mark on the city as Wren had done on the fifty years before or Robert Adam would do on the fifty years to come. The work of other architects showed greater individuality and genius, and the London churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor in particular have been given the palm by posterity. But Gibbs loved London in a way that Hawksmoor never did. And Gibbs proved a more versatile designer. His influence ranged widely over the city’s ecclesiastical, domestic and institutional buildings in a way that no contemporary architect chose to match.

James Gibbs was a Scot and a Roman Catholic, born near Aberdeen in December 1682, the son of a prosperous merchant. By the time he was sixteen his parents were dead. He settled for a time in the Netherlands, probably with relatives. At first destined for the priesthood, he entered a seminary at Rome. It proved uncongenial. But Rome breathed vigorous life into an early genius for drawing and painting, and by 1705 Gibbs had begun to study architecture under a variety of Roman masters. He applied himself with flair and dedication to a subject that clearly delighted him.¹

It appears to have been the last illness of his sole surviving brother that drew Gibbs back to Protestant Britain in November 1708 rather than any promise of commissions or clear plan of forging an architectural career there. By the time Gibbs reached London his brother had died. Instead of proceeding north to Aberdeen, he chose to discover what the city had to offer him. He was not yet twenty-six, and as far as we know he had never set foot in London before. Gibbs would make London his home for the rest of his life.

Perhaps surprisingly, his outsider’s background did him no harm. The Act of Union of 1707 had brought many fellow Scots to London, and a number were in positions of power. His Catholicism made him the natural choice of architect for wealthy co-religionists. His strong Jacobite sympathies with the cause of the Stuarts, exiled in France, sounded a chord with many. These religious and political affiliations were closely concealed, but all who needed to know were in on the secret. More publicly, Gibbs was a Tory and he arrived in London on the eve of a brief Tory ascendancy under a high-church queen of Stuart stock. His skills as an architect, schooled in Italian classicism while retaining a taste for the baroque, won him the admiration of the ageing Sir Christopher Wren. And an easy charm, always ready to see the best in people, combined with striking good looks – a full mouth, wide-set eyes, and not yet marred by the corpulence that would overtake him in later years – can have done him no harm in polite society.

These were all propitious alignments and they quickly proved fertile. Aristocratic Scottish clients in London commissioned projects from Gibbs in both the metropolis and North Britain. They included the joint Secretaries of State for Scotland, the Earls of Loudoun and Mar, Gibbs refashioning a house and office for them in Whitehall in 1710. It was around this time that, for reasons of expediency, Gibbs chose openly to worship in the established church. He never lost his love for his old religion, but to practise it openly would have undoubtedly denied him many of the commissions that would go on to make his fortune. There were many people at this time active in or around London political life who were not quite what they seemed and James Gibbs was one of them.²

Whatever his dissimulations in religion and politics, Gibbs needed to make no compromise in his distinctively individual voice as an architect. He came to London at a time when architectural fashion was about to shift from the high baroque of Wren to a new and less decorative classicism inspired by the sixteenth-century Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Palladianism would become the dominant, though far from pervasive, building style for prestigious projects in London until the 1750s. Despite its Italian origins, its clean unfussy ordered lines seemed most completely to express Protestant ideals. Palladianism contrasted strongly with the elaborate decorativeness of baroque, which bore more than a hint of idolatrous Catholicism. The new style could properly become a Whig architecture for a Hanoverian Britain, returning to the plain-speaking veracity of Inigo Jones and the early seventeenth century and rejecting the exuberant and morally dubious baroque of Wren and his pupils Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. Palladianism was beginning to emerge as a force in ‘taste’ at around the time Gibbs came to London. In a decade it would be something like an orthodoxy. But not before Gibbs had made his first indelible mark on the face of eighteenth-century London.³

In February 1711 the parishioners of Greenwich petitioned the House of Commons for financial help to rebuild their parish church. Its roof had collapsed some four months before. There quickly followed a rash of similar pleas from other places, either for rebuilding a worn-out structure or for replacing a small church with one big enough for the swelling suburban populations of places like Rotherhithe, Putney, Southwark and Shoreditch. In March the House received details of the estimated populations of the London suburbs and the church accommodation available for worship. There was a woeful shortfall, just forty-six churches and chapels for over half a million thought to be living in the most populous parishes. A Commons committee reported in April that the existing accommodation provided for no more than one in three of those who needed spiritual succour from the Church of England. This was an affront to both a pious Queen and a Tory administration that saw the established church as an essential bulwark of the social fabric. The House resolved to legislate to build fifty new churches ‘in and about the Suburbs of the Cities of London and Westminster . . .’⁴

The Fifty New Churches Act of 1711 promised far more than it ever achieved. Just twelve new churches were built under the act and not all those were in the suburbs. Even so, all twelve remain among the most treasured London buildings of the eighteenth century. There were three in the East End: Christ Church, Spitalfields (1714–29), St George in the East in Ratcliff Highway (also 1714–29) and St Anne’s, Limehouse (1714–30), all by Nicholas Hawksmoor and all properly suburban. Three were south of the river: St Alfege’s, Greenwich (1712–18, Hawksmoor), St Paul’s, Deptford (1713–30, Thomas Archer) and St John Horsleydown, Bermondsey (1727–33, John James). Two were in the City: a new church on the northern edge, St Luke’s, Old Street (1727–33, Hawksmoor and James), and the rebuilt St Mary Woolnoth (1716–24, Hawksmoor). One was in north London: St George’s, Bloomsbury (1716–31 Hawksmoor). And three were in Westminster: St John’s, Smith Square (1713–28, Archer), St George’s, Hanover Square (1720–25, James) and St Mary le Strand (1714–23). This last was by James Gibbs.

London in 1723

Nicholas Hawksmoor was one of the two original surveyors to the commissioners tasked with building the fifty new churches. As the list of attributions shows, he was by far the more active. William Dickinson, his fellow surveyor, resigned in August 1713 to pursue other interests. Immediately, the friends of James Gibbs, Wren prominent among them, recommended him as successor. It all came at an important time, for Gibbs was struggling financially. The strongest competition came from John James, who had the support of Sir John Vanbrugh and the Whigs. In November 1713, with the help of his numerous powerful Scottish patrons, now influential in a Tory administration, Gibbs was chosen by secret ballot to succeed Dickinson.⁵

Gibbs’s first commission, a most prestigious one, was to build a church on ground anciently occupied by the maypole in the Strand, just east of Somerset House. There were considerable problems in doing so. The site was tightly constricted but occupied a viewpoint of metropolitan significance in London’s most important thoroughfare, linking as it did the two cities of London and Westminster. Gibbs overcame these challenges with great individual flair. St Mary le Strand remains one of London’s architectural pearls, among the best loved and most readily recognised of all the London churches. Its three-tier steeple is a particular triumph but was apparently an afterthought, insisted upon by the commissioners when the building was already twenty feet above the ground. St Mary’s petite, demure appearance, in virginal Portland stone, was quickly seized upon as exquisitely feminine. The Earl of Mar congratulated Gibbs on his ‘fair daughter in the Strand’, ‘the most complete little damsel in town’.⁶

Gibbs’s first commission as surveyor for the fifty new churches would prove his last. Politics once more intervened, this time to his detriment. The lingering last illness of Queen Anne, and her death on 1 August 1714, provoked a constitutional crisis, followed by a rebellion and an invasion. As at numerous prior crises, politics became not just a matter of personal conviction but involved the possibility of arrest, imprisonment and financial ruin. Quite literally, at this point in the century politics could become a matter of life and death. Gibbs, a dissembling Catholic and Jacobite whose real sympathies were well known, found himself on the losing side. With the Whigs in the ascendance, the House of Hanover on the throne and a Stuart ‘Pretender’ gathering an army in Scotland, Gibbs was sacked in January 1716. He had before then apparently seriously considered joining the rebellion but was dissuaded from doing so by the Earl of Mar, its fomenter in Scotland, and perhaps by Lord Burlington.⁷

Burlington, just twenty-two yet an architect and patron of some renown and owner of a sizeable estate behind his mansion on the north side of Piccadilly (now home to the Royal Academy), was perhaps the most influential advocate for Palladianism as the fitting architecture of Hanoverian Whiggery. In fact, in the closet, he seems to have been a closely secretive supporter of the Jacobite cause. But in the troubled days of 1714–16 he maintained an entirely convincing pose as a loyal subject of George I. In any event, his commitment to Palladianism was unalloyed. He, his protégé William Kent, one of the most brilliant architects and interior designers of the day, and Colen Campbell, a Scot like Gibbs, who became an influential theorist for the Palladian movement, helped popularise a definitive shift in taste from the early years of George I.

Not, though, that architectural practice in London followed their lead with anything like uniform acceptance of the new fashion. Eclecticism was the only consistent characteristic of London building design from the age of Wren onwards. Architects not only pursued a range of styles in their projects; they might happily combine one or more styles in any building coming under their hand. For this reason alone, Gibbs’s less than wholehearted espousal of the new fashion deterred few commissions. His talents as an architect were manifest and many. Even some Whigs liked what he designed. Most of all, though, it was Tory clients, the embittered remnants of Queen Anne’s last government and their wealthy friends, who ensured Gibbs’s setback of 1716 was merely temporary.

Despite dismissal by the commissioners for the fifty new churches, it says much for Gibbs’s technical skills and his diplomacy that he was allowed to retain the contract for St Mary le Strand and see the church through to completion. And although the act of 1711 missed its target so widely, the pious urge behind it resonated in a score or more of London parishes where churches were both decrepit and too small for the needs, real or imagined, of a larger congregation. Well into the 1730s, church building or rebuilding continued to be the largest single generator of public architecture in London.

The general satisfaction with which Gibbs’s St Mary le Strand was received made him a significant contender for these other projects. In 1719 he was commissioned to add a steeple to Wren’s St Clement Danes, just east of St Mary le Strand. And when the parishioners of St Martin-in-the-Fields successfully petitioned Parliament in January 1720 for powers to raise money and replace their outworn church it was to Gibbs they then turned. After a stiff competition, in November he was ‘elected by a large majority’ of the select vestry who managed parish business. It was a most prestigious project and Gibbs a most surprising choice of architect. For St Martin-in-the-Fields was the parish church of the King and his family, and Gibbs was known by many to be a closet Catholic and Jacobite, as well as a Tory. On the other hand, his talents and achievements as an architect were plain for all to see, and George I had no compunction in laying the foundation stone, ‘with full religious and masonic rites’, on 19 March 1721. The project did not always run smoothly. Trouble arose from a stream that flowed beneath St Martin’s Lane and the portico’s foundations had to be built on ‘several hundred tombstones’ taken from the churchyard and reburied in mortar. But overall the building moved apace for the times and the church was consecrated in 1726. It cost the enormous sum of nearly £34,000, some £14,000 more than St Mary le Strand.⁸

James Gibbs’s St Martin-in-the-Fields remains the most famous and distinctive parish church in London. It undoubtedly benefited, ninety years or so after his death, from the opening out of St Martin’s Lane and the construction of Trafalgar Square. Until then it was so closely pressed by the surrounding shopfronts that no one could step back and view the church from any satisfying viewpoint. Even so, and despite the sniping of architectural purists, it was recognised at the time as perhaps the finest building of the post-Wren era. St Martin-in-the-Fields was James Gibbs’s masterpiece. It is a beautiful building that continues to delight and impress nearly 300 years on. The unlikely combination of a Roman portico, a Gothic steeple and Italian embellishments, all worked through with geometric concepts derived from Wren, was entirely unorthodox yet highly influential. St Martin’s ‘became the type of the Anglican parish church and was imitated wherever in the world English was spoken and Anglican worship upheld’.⁹

By the 1720s Gibbs was the architect ‘most in vogue’.¹⁰ He had made his name with his ecclesiastical architecture