Lost Rivers of London: What Lies Beneath

The prolific Diamond Geezer blog is running a series on The Lost Rivers of London.
And I thought Stamford Brook was mainly a bus garage....

The Londonist has also run interesting posts on London's lost rivers from above., and explains what the Tyburn Angling Society is up to.

These guys hope their torch batteries don't run out...

Frank Jacobs' Strangemaps has ...... a map.

Wikipedia has a general article.

photo: Fleet River Tour by Tom Bolton, on Strange Attractor's London leg of Obscura Day, 20 March 2010 (photo credit: Mark Pilkington)

London Lives 1690-1800

London Lives 1690-1800 is a new searchable directory of over 240,000 contemporary primary sources relating to the lives of 3 million 18th century Londoners at the lower end of the social spectrum.

The project manager is Sharon Howard, who writes Early Modern Notes and is one of the coordinators of the long-running history blog carnival Carnivalesque.

The site is based around workhouse records, criminal registers, coroners' reports and court orders, and the London these documents describe is one where the death penalty was standard for run-of-the-mill thieving.

In many cases individuals with reasonable education and prospects fell in with wrong'uns and ended up on the wrong side of the law, and the consequences were often fatal or involved transportation "down under".

The Keyword search facility is itself evocative - who could resist exploring CopesMadhouse and HardLabouronHulks ?

Documents relating to the same individual are assembled into biographies or lives, with historical background written by the project team. This is one of the most powerful features of the site, and will expand as more biographies are added.

I decided to have a look at the fate of Margaret Larney, an Irish mother of five who was sentenced to death for "degrading the coin of the realm". This involved filing down gold coins, selling the filings, then passing off the "light" coin.

For women the death penalty even in this century was burning at the stake, but in this case there is no surviving record of how Larney perished.

This is an excellent resource that gets under the skin of 18thC London.

The Guardian/Observer has a glowing review too.

The picture is Hogarth's portrait of Sarah Malcolm, hanged for her part in the murder of three women in 1733 (also featured in the Observer review above)

Medieval and Renaissance Galleries now open at V&A

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London opened the redesigned Medieval and Renaissance Galleries this week.

Rachel Campbell-Johnston at The Times Online has posted an article and video introducing the exhibition, and the excellent Londonist has photos showing the bright and airy galleries. The Guardian site has another video.

The £31m refurb' is "triumphant" according to Jonathan Jones of The Guardian in his review:

"Renaissance art is not just a thing of beauty, but of self-expression. It is strange, it is disconcerting, it is all the things we, today, want art to be. You can see that in Donatello and throughout these wonderful new galleries"

Both Jones and Richard Dorment in his article at The Telegraph agree that the V&A holds the best collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture outside Italy. Dorment is also mightily impressed by the new galleries:

"The whole project, designed by architects MUMA in collaboration with the V&A’s curators is a triumph."

And....it's free.

PS. I hope they still have room for the Great Bed of Ware.

Henry-Upon-Thames

This weekend in London is a grand event which should draw a substantial crowd of nobility and groundlings alike.

A reenactment of Henry VIII's royal progess up the River Thames from The Tower to Hampton Court is taking place, complete with attending flotilla, music, and entertainment by the King's Fools.

This is part of the celebrations for the 500th annniversary of Henry's accession. He will be accompanied by Queen Katherine Parr and sundry members of Court.

The King is being conveyed in a Shallop, in its day the "Limousine of the Lower Thames", although lacking in privacy glass and minibar.

"King Henry’s loyal subjects are invited to line the banks of the river". Better turn up then.

image courtesy easier.com

Brrr.....

Temperatures are due to drop well below zero Centigrade in London tonight. Not cold enough to freeze the Thames, as in this painting of 1677, but still parky for these parts. We are used to being kept warm by the jets taking off overhead.

1677 was during the period of the so-called Little Ice Age, which brought very cold temperatures to Early Modern Europe. The Thames regularly froze over , and "frost fairs" were held on the ice.

During the Great Freeze of 1683-4 , the diarist John Evelyn wrote that 'Streetes of Boothes were set upon the Thames... all sorts of Trades and shops furnished, & full of Commodities..." (source: Museum of London).

More seriously, many communities in northern and eastern Europe were abandoned to the advancing ice. Something to think about whilst doing your Pieter Breughel the Elder jigsaw in front of a cosy fire....

Hampton Court on Ice

The seasonal ice rink is in place at Hampton Court Palace. A very happy and peaceful Christmas to all readers!

photo: Wikipedia

Remains of the 'Wooden O' found

Archaeologists in London have found what looks like part of Shakespeare's original playhouse, known simply as The Theatre", in Shoreditch. The playhouse opened in 1576 and The Bard acted here with the Chamberlain's Men.

The theatre is mentioned in the prologue to Henry V:

"Can this cock-pit hold the vast fields of France? Or may we cram within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?"

The timbers were later moved to the South Bank and used to build The Globe in 1599.

A new theatre is to be built on the site at Shoreditch.

More on the history of The Theatre here.

Henry VIII's Dockyards

Portcities is a useful site if you are interested in the role of ports in British history. It is a partnership of port heritage websites, providing a web gateway to their collections, and will grow as more museums, libraries and archives join up.

It currently has material on London, Bristol, Hartlepool, Liverpool and Southampton.

In the London section is an interesting section on Henry VIII's royal dockyards at Deptford and Woolwich . These docks and shipyards played an important role in the early development of the Royal Navy, and Elizabeth I further developed the facilities at Woolwich.

Later on, the reputation of the shipyards encouraged a visit in 1698 by Peter the Great of Russia. Apparently his drunken parties messed up the home of diarist John Evelyn, whose house he was staying at.

Both yards went into decline after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, as new facilities were built closer to Europe (e.g. at Chatham), more suited to building larger ships. Both Deptford and Woolwich closed in 1869, having played a key role in the Royal Navy's formative years.

Sunday Stumbles

Some interesting web pages I have come across recently....

Firstly an interactive Map of Early Modern London from the University of Victoria in Canada. This is based on the famous Agas map held by the Guildhall in London, with hyperlinked descriptions of the sites as you move around the map. There are two versions, one "experimental" (fancier interface but harder to use) .

More clever graphics in the Virtual Tour of Hackney's lost Rectory House on the UK National Archives site. This requires some VR software to be downloaded. Clue - if you get lost in the village, follow the white signposts to the Rectory. There is also a video sequence in which reenactors tell the story of the tenants of the Rectory in The Dysasters and Misfortunes of John and Jane Daniell.

Finally, an interesting new series on BBC Radio 4. In The Poetry of History, Jonathan Bate 'presents a series examining historical events through the poetry they inspired'. The first episode went out today, and is about the Battle of Maldon in 991, when a corner of Essex suffered a violent Viking raid. The battle is remembered in a classic Old English poem. You can listen again to the broadcast on the web for the next seven days I think. The program alternates between extracts from the poem (in modern English) and comments by historians on the events - this works really well.

London Olympics logo, 1512 style

With all the comment around the London Olympics 2012 logo, here's an idea for a simple Tudor-style logo for the 1512 Games - shown here on an attractive linen placemat.

Typeface acknowledgment:
Boert Tudor from www.sulucas.com

Eighty Years in London

Saw this in today's Evening Standard. Simon Rigglesworth and like-minded photographers are trying to update the 1200 pictures in a book entitled Wonderful London, published in 1926.
You can see them here on the flickr picture-sharing site, including various tudor buildings such as the brick gatehouse in St James.

England throws out German salesmen, 1597

This is a follow-on to the last post. It turns out that the English merchants thrown out of "Germany" (which did not actually exist at that time) were victims of ongoing power struggles between the Hanseatic League and English and Dutch trading interests. In the same year, 1597, Elizabeth I closed the Steelyard, the trading post of the League in London. The League gradually declined and was effectively defunct by the end of the 17thC.