through the Tower, with a man by her side, whom she does not attempt to quit except to run to the Canteen, where she is occasionally indulged with a draught of ale, of which she is particularly fond.
The menagerie was much improved by Mr Cops, and during his tenure it became clear that it was no longer acceptable to house animals in such conditions as the Tower afforded. The menagerie housed 280 creatures by 1832. It was closed in 1835, when the animals formed the basis of the collection for London Zoo in Regent’s Park.
2. The Margins
The City represents the heart of Old London, and it remained the hub of the growing metropolis. At the beginning of the Georgian era it was newly built and cleaner than it had ever been, full of ideas and urgency. And money. If the people were not sophisticated, displaying only commercial taste, they were solid and prosperous.
We now leave the tightly packed mercantile streets, smelling of fish, whale oil, animals and coffee, and head for the lawless urban sprawl outside the walls; the haunt of restless apprentices, homosexuals and forgers, writers, refugees and rebels. A place where anything might happen.
As early as the reign of Elizabeth I, London had ‘ got a great way from the streame [of the Thames]’. Living outside the City rapidly became an attractive option for many, particularly merchants who wanted grand gardens rather than enclosed courtyards, artisans whose trades required space and freely running water, and those who could not afford to live in the Square Mile. However, from the moment the urban sprawl began to creep round the eastern walls of the Tower it became a place for poor immigrants and the marginalized.
The jagged arc of the City boundary begins in the east, beyond the Tower. Up against the Tower of London was the church of St Katharine and its associated hospital. In 1598, the historian John Stow described it as ‘ pestered with small tenements’ and wrote that there was a large number of ‘strangers ’ living there. St Katharine-by-the-Tower and St Botolph-without-Aldgate hold a significant amount of records for baptisms and burials of black members of the local community during the eighteenth century. Their entries are annotated with ‘Black’ or ‘Blackamoor’. In May 1827, St Katharine’s was pulled down so that the area might be redeveloped as part of the new London docks. More than a thousand small tenements were cleared to make way for the docks, displacing over 11,000 inhabitants with compensation only for freeholders.The first of the docks was to sit immediately in the space the church had occupied for seven centuries.
Just north of St Katharine’s was ‘Rag Fair’, the nickname for Rosemary Lane ‘ where old clothes and frippery are sold’. A later account reveals:
There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me look on his with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man,
For
, says he,
I have actually cloathed him for fourteen pence
.
On 14 February 1756,
The Public Advertiser
recorded that Mary Jenkins, a second-hand clothes dealer in Rag Fair, had sold a pair of breeches to a woman ‘for sevenpence and a pint of beer’. In the pub, the purchaser found eleven Queen Anne gold guineas and a banknote dated 1729 sewn into the waistband. The woman was apparently illiterate, and she sold the banknote to another customer for a gallon of ‘twopenny purl’ (a powerful mixture of hot beer, sugar, ginger and gin) before being told that the note’s value was £30. Elsewhere:
Jews used to go about the streets with bags full of wigs, crying out, ‘A dip for a penny.’ … It would happen that the man fished up a wig too big or too small, or a black-haired man got a red wig, or the reverse; or a most outrageous fit, in which no decent citizen or artisan could
The menagerie was much improved by Mr Cops, and during his tenure it became clear that it was no longer acceptable to house animals in such conditions as the Tower afforded. The menagerie housed 280 creatures by 1832. It was closed in 1835, when the animals formed the basis of the collection for London Zoo in Regent’s Park.
2. The Margins
The City represents the heart of Old London, and it remained the hub of the growing metropolis. At the beginning of the Georgian era it was newly built and cleaner than it had ever been, full of ideas and urgency. And money. If the people were not sophisticated, displaying only commercial taste, they were solid and prosperous.
We now leave the tightly packed mercantile streets, smelling of fish, whale oil, animals and coffee, and head for the lawless urban sprawl outside the walls; the haunt of restless apprentices, homosexuals and forgers, writers, refugees and rebels. A place where anything might happen.
As early as the reign of Elizabeth I, London had ‘ got a great way from the streame [of the Thames]’. Living outside the City rapidly became an attractive option for many, particularly merchants who wanted grand gardens rather than enclosed courtyards, artisans whose trades required space and freely running water, and those who could not afford to live in the Square Mile. However, from the moment the urban sprawl began to creep round the eastern walls of the Tower it became a place for poor immigrants and the marginalized.
The jagged arc of the City boundary begins in the east, beyond the Tower. Up against the Tower of London was the church of St Katharine and its associated hospital. In 1598, the historian John Stow described it as ‘ pestered with small tenements’ and wrote that there was a large number of ‘strangers ’ living there. St Katharine-by-the-Tower and St Botolph-without-Aldgate hold a significant amount of records for baptisms and burials of black members of the local community during the eighteenth century. Their entries are annotated with ‘Black’ or ‘Blackamoor’. In May 1827, St Katharine’s was pulled down so that the area might be redeveloped as part of the new London docks. More than a thousand small tenements were cleared to make way for the docks, displacing over 11,000 inhabitants with compensation only for freeholders.The first of the docks was to sit immediately in the space the church had occupied for seven centuries.
Just north of St Katharine’s was ‘Rag Fair’, the nickname for Rosemary Lane ‘ where old clothes and frippery are sold’. A later account reveals:
There is no expressing the poverty of the goods, nor yet their cheapness. A distinguished merchant, engaged with a purchaser, observing me look on his with great attention, called out to me, as his customer was going off with his bargain, to observe that man,
For
, says he,
I have actually cloathed him for fourteen pence
.
On 14 February 1756,
The Public Advertiser
recorded that Mary Jenkins, a second-hand clothes dealer in Rag Fair, had sold a pair of breeches to a woman ‘for sevenpence and a pint of beer’. In the pub, the purchaser found eleven Queen Anne gold guineas and a banknote dated 1729 sewn into the waistband. The woman was apparently illiterate, and she sold the banknote to another customer for a gallon of ‘twopenny purl’ (a powerful mixture of hot beer, sugar, ginger and gin) before being told that the note’s value was £30. Elsewhere:
Jews used to go about the streets with bags full of wigs, crying out, ‘A dip for a penny.’ … It would happen that the man fished up a wig too big or too small, or a black-haired man got a red wig, or the reverse; or a most outrageous fit, in which no decent citizen or artisan could
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