The House by the Thames (21 page)

There was another new customer too, right on Bankside and by and by in many other places as well. Till the beginning of the nineteenth century the streets of the capital were lit by parish oil-lamps, which produced only pools of light in the general dimness and required regular trimming and cleaning by underpaid ‘greasy fellows'. In 1807, however, Pall Mall was given coal-fuelled gas-lamps. These were regarded as such a success that plans were made in 1812 to light Westminster Bridge with gas too – in spite of scoffing from one MP, who refused to believe that you could have a light anywhere without a wick in it. Other people, however, had understood that an essential advantage of gas-lighting was that it could be piped from a distance, and thus centrally organised both physically and commercially. The charter to supply Westminster Bridge was given to the newly formed Gas Light & Coke Company, which built itself a works on Bankside not two hundred yards upstream from where the Sells, the Hornes and several other coal-merchants had their offices.

It was probably because the plentiful coal supplies to make the gas were so near at hand that Bankside was chosen for this innovative venture. Indeed, you could argue that the decision of the first Edward Sells to enter the coal-business there in 1755, even before the Hornes's arrival, had vertiginously long-term effects on the whole character of the area. For, near the end of the nineteenth century, the same logic of proximity meant that one of the first of the new works to generate electricity was built alongside the gas works, which it eventually took over. Then, in the mid-twentieth century, since electricity was already being manufactured on Bankside, when a larger Power Station was needed it was put on the existing site right opposite St Paul's – a place which would never otherwise have been chosen. And this is why, at the end of the twentieth century, a huge and distinctive brick building was there to make an iconic focus for the regeneration of a Bankside from which industrial identity had by then fled.

Thus do patches of London's ground, which are nothing in themselves but gravel and clay and river mud, and the ground-down dust of brick and stone and bones, wood and wormwood and things thrown away, acquire through ancient incidental reasons a kind of generic programming that persists through time.

The first Bankside gas-holders in their round cast-iron casings were relatively small, rising no higher than a genteel three-storey brick house which certainly pre-dated them, as pictured in a water-colour of the period. The business flourished, and was re-christened the Phoenix Gas Company: members of the Barclay and Perkins families were on the board of directors. In 1829, though still retaining its local name, it became part of the South Metropolitan Gas Light and Coke Company. By that time over three hundred miles of London streets were lit by gas. North of the river, the Imperial Gas Light and Coke Company held sway, and gas-holders were developing the elephantine dimensions still familiar to us from the now-disused edifices behind St Pancras Station. Shops took up gas-lighting with enthusiasm: their windows were said to light up the whole street, scaring away thieves and pickpockets but encouraging citizens into late hours and therefore, according to some, into unrespectable behaviour.

After about 1840 gas began to make its way into private homes, for lighting: first it penetrated the ground floor and only later the bedrooms. Gas cooking-stoves and gas fires, though invented early, were not to become common for another fifty years. Gas-light was received at first with reservations – what a pity one could no longer wear worn silks and taffetas at evening parties, as had been the custom in the forgiving glow of candles! – but by and by came universal acceptance of the convenience of gas by the middle classes, who were in a position to run up bills and pay them at set intervals. Candle-ends remained the choice of the poor. In the more squalid lanes off Bankside, there were still some houses lit only by candle-light in the early twentieth century.

And, of course, it tended to be the poor who suffered from the inconveniences of gas works from which they themselves did not benefit, either directly or financially. In the mid-1860s, by which time gas works were smoking away all over London, an impassioned article
³
on their nuisance appeared in
The Times:

‘Wherever a gas factory … is situated within the metropolis, there is established a centre whence radiates a whole neighbourhood of squalor, poverty and disease. No improvement can ever reach that infected neighbourhood – no new streets, no improved dwellings, not even a garden is possible within a circle of at least a quarter of a mile in diameter, and not so much as a geranium can flourish in a window sill.'

That may have been an exaggerated view: there has never been any evidence linking gas works to infection, let alone to total blight. But it was certainly true that the faint but persistent smell discouraged middle-class occupation. A terrible explosion, in 1865, at a gas works up the river in Battersea reinforced the message. In any case, no doubt for a whole range of reasons, by then the Sells dynasty had finally quit their Bankside home.

In the days before the clack of steamship paddles and the sound of their hooters became a constant background to river life, and Bankside was still a good address, how was number 49 faring?

According to the rates books, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century the Sells family were variously living and conducting business at the other Bankside houses they owned. 49 was let for some years to the fellow coal-merchant Thomas Fuce. But by 1824 Vincent Sells is listed in
Pigot's Directory
as living there, and he is still there in 1830. His rates were then £2.10s. per half-year, a little more than those of the Reverend William Mann, the principal chaplain of St Saviour's, who was a near neighbour at 44, and more than was paid by two other St Saviour's clerics, the Reverends Harrison and Benson, who occupied numbers 45 and 46. (Number 49 still had its yard and long garden behind, stretching seventy feet down the length of Cardinal Cap Alley; these other houses did not.) In the Alley, the Sells had rather less select neighbours, for by that time a number of tiny houses had been built at the Skin Market end of the Alley. The Sells owned six of these.

Vincent Sells was the brother of Edward Perronet Sells, younger than him by six years. Edward Perronet and his growing family were then living in 56, Edward Sells the father in 55. Vincent himself appears never to have married. He must have been approaching thirty when he moved into 49, and this, I think, is when the house got the face-lift that is still evident today. It was the early 1820s, and in the boom in property that had followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars it was worth spending money on a Bankside home. There are also indications, in Vincent Sells's Will of twenty years later, that he valued the gentlemanly appurtenances of life.

So, if the original windows that were flush with the façade had not already been replaced by then, they were now, though the design still included interior box-shutters. On the outside, decorative surrounds were added, and the whole of the early Georgian brickwork was covered in a layer of stucco. Inside, especially on the first floor, some new, rather delicate mouldings were added round the doors, and the fine front room was given an elegant new Regency fireplace. Physical signs of other decoration of the period have vanished, but my guess is that much of the wooden panelling was painted over at this time, and other walls were papered with ribbon stripes or ‘Grecian' motifs. It is possible also that this was when a narrow, gridded opening, with a window below it, was made in the paving in front of the house. This would have allowed a modest amount of light and air into the cavernous front cellar, and would have given the genteel appearance of a house possessing servants' quarters, though whether it was really feasible to use the front cellar for kitchen purposes before the introduction of domestic gas-light I do not know. Possibly, at the same time, a semi-submerged window onto the yard and the garden beyond it was made in the back cellar.

(The back wall of the house, including the windows on the ground and first floor, and the levels of paving beyond, was modified in the 1930s and again later in the century, so one can only speculate on the original contours.)

It would also almost certainly have been in the 1820s that the first water closet was installed in number 49. One may imagine old Edward Sells, in his nearby house, scoffing that the yard privy that had been good enough for him, his father and all the generations before was surely good enough for his sons, but the fact was that all over London an early version of the flush toilet was now being introduced in middle-class homes. In the year of Waterloo, the connection of cess-pools and house drains to the old sewer ditches, which ran down to other watercourses and finally into the river, was finally allowed. It was the very thing the Commissioners for Sewers had been trying to prevent since Tudor times, yet somehow no one seems to have foreseen what the result would be. Perhaps the awakening of public health consciousness, which produced reports about ‘airless courts', and pauper children in ‘confin'd rooms', and strange ‘miasmas' seen hanging above graveyards, was too firmly attached to the airborne theory of infection to speculate sufficiently on the danger carried in polluted water.

Drinking water continued to be extracted from the Thames and piped straight to customers. By the late 1820s doubts were being voiced about the wisdom of this. Cartoons about the evils lurking in the river appeared in
Punch
; the banker and Radical MP Sir Francis Burdett raised the matter in the House of Commons. A Royal Commission appointed the following year concluded that water ought to be got ‘from other sources' – yet at least one engineer who gave evidence was of the opinion that ‘the Thames was as pure as spring water'. There seems to have been a persistent idea in the medical profession that just as the air blowing along the tidal river was supposedly full of ‘ozone' and might prevent disease, so the water itself somehow purified whatever went into it. This essentially magic notion persisted in the face of accumulating evidence to the contrary. In 1800 the Thames had still been the fishing river it was in medieval days. There were then said to be four hundred working fishermen between Putney Bridge in the west and Greenwich in the east. Plaice and salmon could be caught off Billingsgate, right in the Pool of London. Twenty-five years later, catches had very much declined, but the fishermen themselves blamed such specific ills as ‘the refuse of hospitals, slaughterhouses, colour, lead and soap works and manufacturies'. While all these did undoubtedly add to the river's dirtiness, they cannot have had anything like the overall impact of the newly waterborne household sewage. In 1831 came the first epidemic identified as cholera.

Yet more and more water closets were installed in the years that followed. Of course, to the owners and users of these conveniences, the first generation ever to enjoy the comfort of a relatively odourless indoor lavatory, the system seemed wonderfully hygienic. After hundreds of years of periodic visits from men with shovels and stinking night-soil carts, the waste just disappeared: then, as now, out of sight was out of mind. It was not till 1840 that Thomas Cubitt, from the family responsible for building much of late Georgian and early Victorian London, expressed the problem forthrightly, and not till another epidemic eight years later that the wisdom of his words was really accepted:

‘Fifty years ago nearly all London had every house cleansed into a large cesspool … Now, sewers having been very much improved, scarcely any person thinks of making a cesspool, but it is carried off at once into the river. The Thames is now made a great cess-pool instead of each person having one of his own.'

On Bankside, of course, the houses were ideally placed for using the Thames as their cess-pool. In the previous century, as the evidence of the first Edward Sells's lease suggests, some occupiers had always benefited from ‘necessary houses' built out over the river. Number 49 was in any case very near the Moss Alley sluice (anciently called the Boar's Head sluice), one of the outlets of the thirteenth-century ditch-system: the house where Edward Perronet was living was almost directly above it. No very extensive building works would have been required for either of the brothers to find a corner indoors and plumb in a cone-shaped ‘Hopper' bowl. This was provided with a trap at the bottom and a tap which, when it was opened, produced a trickling spiral of water that (in theory) cleaned the bowl. At the same time, each house probably acquired a drained sink and a wash basin.

Such amenities tended not to make their way to the upper floors till later in the century, when pressurised water arrived. However, this also seems to have been the period when the closets on the upper floors of number 49 were extended over the top of Cardinal Cap Alley, backed up against the section of number 50 that was already built over the front six foot of the Alley. This would suggest that Vincent Sells organised himself the luxury of a first-floor lavatory, into whose cistern water could have been pumped up by hand.

Some idea of what a prosperous Bankside coal-merchant's house was like at this time, in its basic fixtures and fittings, may be got from the Deeds of three nearby houses, numbers 44, 45 and 46, since by a happy chance these documents have in part survived. These houses occupied the plot of land which had, at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belonged to Henslowe, and in the early eighteenth century to Sir William Oldner. Around the mid-century, the holding was split up and what was to be number 46 was sold to Edmund Shallett, he of Nonconformist renown, while Henry Thrale the brewer seems to have owned 44 and 45. In 1764 all three houses came together again in a purchase by the Horne family, and were owned by them for over ninety years. The ground floor of 46 was half taken up by a cart-entry, which led into a yard shared with 45 and to big sheds at the back. By the 1830s number 44 was let to the Reverend William Mann, his wife and his six children, but it is clear from the details of a subsequent lease from the 1840s that this house, which was a more handsome width than the other two, had previously been equipped by one of the Hornes for comfortable modern living. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the same standards would have applied in Vincent Sells's revamped home, at number 49.