Piccadilly

By Barry Turner

A mile long thoroughfare from the Circus to Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly is a microcosm of 400 years of British history. With an incredible roster of past residents, ranging from bizarre aristocrats and larger than life politicians to celebrated writers and artists, Piccadilly is rich in tales of the weird and wonderful.

The backdrop

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mensch Publishing
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781912914593

Barry Turner

Barry Turner is a bestselling historian whose many books include Suez 1956, When Daddy Came Home (with Tony Rennell), Karl Doenitz and the Last Days of the Third Reich (Icon, 2015) – ‘a page-turning narrative’ (Daily Mail) – and The Berlin Airlift (Icon, 2017) – ‘a fine piece of popular history’ (BBC History). His latest book, Waiting for War, was published by Icon in 2019.

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1

The Early Days

To go back four hundred years we find that all true Londoners lived within the old City, the square mile now home to the financial sector. As the population increased and commerce expanded, those who could afford to do so reached out to the west to escape what William Petty called ‘the fumes, steams and stinks of the whole easterly pile’. While smart houses were built in the Strand alongside the Thames, the father of modern architecture, Inigo Jones, adapted the Italian Renaissance style to create Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden as residential squares on lines of an Italian piazza.

Meanwhile, what was to become Piccadilly was still virgin territory. Cattle and sheep grazed on green meadows disturbed only by occasional horse riders or the coaches following the rough track to Reading, a bone-shaking distance of some forty miles.

The origin of Piccadilly as a name has long been in dispute. In his Buildings of England, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner maintained that the word derived from the Dutch, Pikedillekens, or bits of cloth. The consensus now is that it was Robte Backer or Robert Baker, as he became known, who gave Piccadilly its identity. In 1612 he invested fifty pounds in land ‘near the windmill’ in what was to become Great Windmill Street. On his newly acquired property, Baker built a house soon dubbed, though not to his liking, Pickadilley Hall, a reference to his speciality, the making of piccadils, a stiff collar or the scalloped edge at the arms of a dress.

Before long, the whole area at the top of Haymarket where farmers came to buy fodder, was known as Piccadilly. The locals worked the land to feed London’s burgeoning population, up from 200,000 in 1600 to around 350,000 by mid-century.

Among the landowners who have left their mark was Thomas Pulteney who held the hundred acre St James’s farm in the reign of Elizabeth I, at a yearly rent of £7.16 shillings. The Pulteneys were to give their name to one of the first of the Piccadilly hotels that could claim to be more than a coaching inn and to Great Pulteney Street in Soho.

After the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived Commonwealth, a very different Piccadilly began to take shape. The restored monarchy in the person of Charles II found an easy way of rewarding loyalists by doling out parcels of land close to Westminster, the centre of royal power.

One of the first to benefit was Henry Jermyn, First Earl of St Albans, who speculated on laying out St James’s Square on the side of Pall Mall to provide town houses for the aristocracy and more modest houses for letting to the professional classes.

On the grandest scale was the project undertaken by Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Lord Chancellor, in effect, chief minister to Charles II. To build a palace fit for the King’s favourite, he chose as his site the open countryside bordering Piccadilly. Between 1664 and 1667, three hundred men were engaged on building what the diarist John Evelyn described as ‘the most useful, graceful and magnificent house in England’ with gardens covering eight acres.

Unfortunately for Clarendon, no sooner was he ready to move in than his power ran out. He had enemies on all sides. Those who had thrived under Cromwell were naturally averse but he was also harassed by fellow royalists who were jealous of his position, particularly after the marriage of his daughter to James, Duke of York, the King’s brother and heir apparent.

In 1665, it was Clarendon who suffered the backlash from the bubonic plague which decimated the old city with its cramped streets and open sewers. The following year, the conspiracy mongers held the Lord Chancellor to blame for the Great Fire which made over 70,000 Londoners homeless.

The odds were even further stacked against Clarendon by his conduct of foreign affairs. A sensible decision to dispose of Dunkirk, a British outpost across the Channel, raised the ire of patriots who were further incensed when the Dutch navy devastated the British fleet at anchor on the River Medway. Loud were the excuses of the ‘gentleman captains’ whose nautical ignorance was matched by their reluctance to put themselves at risk.

The King took it out on Clarendon. With the consequences of impeachment hanging over him, he fled the country. His mansion was let out until his death in 1674 when it was sold to the Duke of Albemarle. A free spender and hard drinker, Albemarle was in no position to enjoy his acquisition. Instead he got himself appointed governor of Jamaica where he devoted his energies to a hunt for sunken treasure.

Clarendon House was almost a ruin when, according to Evelyn, it was bought by a syndicate ‘of rich bankers and mechanics’, headed by Sir Thomas Bond. The site was cleared to make way for Bond Street, Dover Street and Albemarle Street, the latter destined to be London’s first one-way thoroughfare, running through the centre of what had been Clarendon House.

By then, work had started on a church for Piccadilly. Land had been set aside by the Earl of St Albans but there was a delay in starting work as the favoured architect, Sir Christopher Wren, was too busy erecting city churches to replace those lost in the Great Fire. After the foundation stone for St James’s was laid on 3 April 1676 it was another eight years before it opened for worship. Wren was easily forgiven. By common consent, he had created a masterpiece, providing ‘a room so capacious as with pews and galleries to hold two thousand persons and all to hear the service and see the preacher’.

Among the first to visit the church, Evelyn gave particular praise to the carvings of Grinling Gibbons, dubbed the ‘Michelangelo of Wood’. ‘There is no altar anywhere in England,’ he wrote, ‘nor has there been any abroad, more handsomely adorned.’ The font, sanctuary and the organ were all embellished by Gibbons. Hostile criticism was reserved for the steeple, though Wren was hardly to blame. His design, judged to be too expensive, was rejected for a cheaper version drawn up by a local carpenter, a false economy as it turned out since it was not long before it had to be replaced.

The steeple came down and the church all but wrecked in 1940 by a German bomb. While the Gibbons carvings survived under protective covering, St James’s remained a roofless shell for seven years.

There has always been a touch of the unorthodox in the history of St James’s. Today its mission is ‘to create a space where people of any faith or none can question and discover the sacred life through openness, struggle, laughter and prayer.’

Burials include auctioneer James Christie who founded nearby Christie’s and caricaturist James Gillray and Dutch artists Willem van de Velde, Elder and Younger. A memorial to the botanical artist Mary Delaney records how the niece of Lord Lansdowne married Patrick Delaney, a poor Irish priest, the illegitimate son of a servant girl. For unusual weddings, the prize must go to the explorer Sir Samuel Baker who, in 1865, married a young woman he had bought at a Turkish slave auction.

Of all the Piccadilly aristocrats who have worshipped at St James’s, the most endearingly eccentric was the Duke of Cambridge, brother of George IV. The Duke was given to speaking his thoughts in a loud bellow and on Sundays could be heard giving a running commentary on the sermon. When the parson concluded with, ‘Let us pray’, the Duke would raise his voice to declare graciously, ‘By all means, my dear fellow, by all means.’ On one occasion, after listening attentively to the reading of the Commandments, he added to the seventh, ‘No, no; it was my brother Ernest who broke that one.’

Burlington House, better known today as the Royal Academy of Arts, was one of the earliest grand houses to be built on the north side of Piccadilly. The mansion was yet to be finished when it was bought by the 1st Earl of Burlington in 1667. It was the 3rd Earl, with his passion for architecture and landscaping, who gave Burlington House its distinctive appearance. This was inspired by the northern Italian Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio, who followed the clean classical lines of Greek and Roman architecture. Such was Burlington’s devotion to Palladio and such was his influence on contemporary taste, that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Palladian style ruled supreme over architectural practice.

Burlington faced his house with stone, replacing the red brick favoured by the first Earl, and erected a magnificent colonnade. Though greatly admired, it was hidden from Piccadilly by what was said to be ‘the most expensive wall in England’ though ‘wonderfully proportioned to the length’.

Described by Horace Walpole as ‘the Apollo of the Arts’, Burlington turned his home into something of an artists’ commune. Of the resident guests, George Frederic Handel wrote three of his operas here while frequent visitors included the poet and satirist Alexander Pope and John Gay of The Beggars’ Opera fame. It is all to Burlington’s credit that he recognised Gay’s talent. The central theme of The Beggars’ Opera, that while rich and poor were equally susceptible to vice, it was the poor who reaped the punishment, did not go down well in polite society.

It was Lord George Cavendish, a later Earl of Burlington, the first by a second creation (the history of the British aristocracy is not easily disentangled) who built the Burlington Arcade, the first enclosed shopping street in London, ‘a covered promenade with shops on either side for the sale of jewellery and fancy objects of fashionable demand’. He was motivated, it was said, by a desire to serve the public and ‘to give employment to industrious females’, presumably as shop assistants. The popular assumption was that the Arcade prevented passers-by from throwing rubbish into his garden. Employed to keep order, livered beadles were recruited from Lord George’s regiment, the 10th Hussars. The rules they were expected to enforce included no whistling, running, playing musical instruments or the opening of umbrellas. The Arcade opened for business in 1819 and has remained fashionable ever since, its appeal enhanced recently by a multi-million pound facelift.

Burlington House was sold to the government in 1854 as a prospective site for a National Gallery. When it was instead decided to start afresh with a National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, Burlington House was leased to the Royal Academy. The ‘most expensive wall in England’ was demolished and a new front was added to accommodate such learned institutions as the Geological Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Not long into the eighteenth century the area around Piccadilly was finding favour with the nouveau riche, whose wealth was founded on business and the professions. As early as 1708 A New View of London described Albemarle Street as ‘a Street of excellent new Building inhabited by Persons of Quality between the Fields and Portugal Street’, while Dover Street was ‘a street of very good Buildings, mostly inhabited by Gentry’.

Linking into Piccadilly, Mayfair was no longer the site of a riotous spring fair. In its glory days, it covered thirteen acres of itinerant traders and promoters of bare-knuckle prize fighting, bull and bear baiting and freak shows. In their place came three magnificent squares starting with Hanover Square, laid out after 1714 with spacious houses inhabited by ‘persons of distinction’. The Hanover Square Rooms were famed for their concerts. J.S. Bach, Haydn, Paganini and Liszt all performed there.

Berkeley Square, carved out of fields beyond the garden of Berkeley (later Devonshire) House, took shape after 1737 at about the same time as Grosvenor Square, where the Duchess of Kendal, George I’s mistress, was among the earliest residents. Their daughter, Petronilla Melusina married the 4th Earl of Chesterfield who built a house on the north side of Curzon Street, facing Hyde Park. His friends teased him for choosing such a way out place to live, telling him that he had no right to call his new home a town house since it was so far from the city centre. Chesterfield himself quipped that with few friends willing to take the trouble to call on him, he would need a dog to keep him company.

Chesterfield was an eccentric with a sense of the ridiculous. In his picture gallery where hung the portraits of his ancestors, he extended the lineage of the Stanhope family name to include Adam de Stanhope and Eve de Stanhope. Unable to take himself or the royal court too seriously and having missed out on a political career, except for a brief period as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Chesterfield retired into private life at the age of fifty-four. He is now best remembered for the letters he wrote to his son, Philip Stanhope, handing out advice which for the most part the recipient rejected. Many of Chesterfield’s pithy sayings still strike a chord. How right he was to observe that ‘advice is seldom welcome and those who need it most always like it least’. Nor was he far from the truth when he claimed that ‘without some dissimulation no business can be carried on at all’. The opinion that runs throughout the letters is nowhere better demonstrated than in Chesterfield’s view of sex.

The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous and the expense damnable.

Few of his contemporaries, male or female, agreed with him except, possibly, about the expense.

Chesterfield House was pulled down in 1937 to meet the demand for luxury flats.

Built early in the reign of George III, Gloucester House at 137 Piccadilly gained distinction as the first exhibition site for the Elgin Marbles. Originally attached to the Parthenon in Athens, the Marbles were shipped to Britain by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, British ambassador in Constantinople when Greece was under Turkish rule. So began an international dispute over ownership that has still to be resolved.

Elgin claimed to have acquired the statuary legitimately, having successfully negotiated with the Sultan for its removal. Moreover, it was claimed, had the Marbles stayed at the Acropolis they might well have ended up as building material, their value unrecognised by the Turkish occupiers. Recent evidence suggests that Turkish sensitivities were not as blunted as Elgin made out.

With possession being nine tenths of the law, particularly when the aristocracy was involved, Elgin was able to sell the Marbles to the British government. While contributing to the cost of his divorce, he complained that the sum raised fell short of the money he had spent on acquiring and shipping the Marbles. Handed over to the British Museum in 1816, they are now displayed in the purpose-built Duveen Gallery with their future frequently under negotiation.

As for Gloucester House, it was subsequently occupied by two royal dukes – the Duke of Gloucester from 1816 to 1834 and the Duke of Cambridge to 1904 when it was pulled down to make way for a block of luxury flats and, as from 1971, the Hard Rock Café.

Despite the infusions of old and new money, Piccadilly in the late eighteenth century retained much of its rakish character. Hyde Park Corner was judged to be ‘a most wretched place’. According to the German-born travel writer Max Schlesinger:

There were a great many taverns whose fame was none of the best; and, on review days, the soldiers from the neighbouring barracks sat in front of the houses on wooden benches, whilst their hair was being powdered, and their pig-tails tied up. During this interesting operation, they laughed and joked with the maid-servants who passed that way. As a natural consequence of these proceedings, the quarter was avoided by the respectable classes.

This was putting it mildly. Highwaymen and footpads preyed on the unwary. After nightfall, few dared to walk alone from Kensington to the more salubrious parts of Piccadilly. At Hyde Park corner, a bell was rung at seven and at nine o’clock as a call to those who sought safety in numbers.

Piccadilly and prostitution have had a long association. As early as 1606, an ordinance to lop the hedges and clear out the ditches was judged to be urgent because, ‘Thieves and harlots shelter there to the destruction of the King’s subjects in winter time and in summer time all the harlots continue to be there.’ Neither thieves nor harlots were deterred.

Throughout the eighteenth century, foreign visitors to London were shocked by the swarm of ‘street girls, well got-up and well-dressed, displaying their attractions’. This was Friedrich Wilhelm von Schutz, whose Letters from London was published in Hamburg in 1792. Von Schutz concluded, ‘no place in the world can be compared with London for wantonness’.

While suspect figures were bandied about by campaigners for a crackdown (estimates of up to 50,000 prostitutes active in London, this of