The House by the Thames (8 page)

Taylor retained his leading role in the Company, however, and a few years later, in the bitterly cold winter of 1620–21, regained favour among his peers by publishing a passionate poem about their sufferings. The Thames froze over above London Bridge, and for weeks the watermen were out of work, most of them with no other resources to keep them going. Taylor reckoned that all-in-all about twenty thousand people – wives, children, apprentices and servants, as well as the men themselves – were affected by this misfortune. Since a mini ice-age set in as the seventeenth-century progressed, with long spells of winter frost becoming more common than in the preceding centuries, this lament was to be repeated and repeated again by other voices. During the following century, too, the Thames froze solid some twenty times. The last of these ferocious winters did not occur till 1813–14, after which the climate became a little milder again. But by that time the watermen had a number of other threats to their ancient livelihood.

The theatre trade on Bankside collapsed with the beginning of the Civil Wars in 1642, and by then Taylor had other, more pressing problems. In the general social unrest the power and prestige of the Watermen's Company had also collapsed; Taylor was threatened by enemies he had carelessly made and was once nearly lynched; his royal salary was at an end and, as a known royalist, his goods were confiscated. His wife died, and he had to flee from London, taking refuge with a brother who was an innkeeper near Abingdon. Aubrey saw him then and judged him to be ‘near fifty', handsomely dressed, with ‘a good quick look'. In fact, he was over sixty, too old to row any more for a living. He came back to London later, and in his last years we find him living in near-poverty but married again, to a wife who kept a small ale-house off Longacre in the recently developed district of Covent Garden, where he held court. ‘His conversation was incomparable for three or four morning's drafts: but afterwards you were entertained with
crambe bis cocta
[stale old stories]' – Aubrey again. Taylor made one last great journey on foot round England, but died a few months later, in the summer of 1653, before he could see the Stuarts return to the throne. His dust is buried somewhere behind St Martin-in-the-Fields, where the graveyard of the old church lay, and where present-day travellers and aspirants to fame gather with backpacks and their own travellers' tales.

With the Cromwellian closing of the theatres, Bankside's glory days were over. But then London in general passed through a bad time during the Commonwealth, with many of the great houses abandoned and shut up. Valuable collections, such as those in Whitehall Palace or at Arundel House on the Strand, were pillaged or left to deteriorate. The Bishop's palace on Bankside was divided into tenements and the buildings were much damaged. Churches suffered further assaults on their fittings and decorations, as they had done at intervals since the Reformation almost a hundred years before. The altar rails of St Saviour's, which had stood there ‘anciently, time out of mind', were thrown down to conform to low Church ritual; the medieval Lady Chapel at the eastern end became a bakehouse, and then a pig-stye. At least that church continued to function: at the height of the Civil Wars St Paul's cathedral was used by Cromwell's trained bands as a stable for their horses.

Since the parishes provided the structure of day-to-day authority and such social services as existed, dislocation in the Church led to general breakdown. Many of the public water conduits that had been installed over the last few generations became blocked or holed; streets flooded and paving disintegrated. Crime and street disorder also increased. John Evelyn, returning from a circumspect exile in France in 1652, found the inn landlords on the journey from Dover lacking in their old respect and that, as he passed through Southwark on the way into town, small boys pelted the coach with mud and stones – ‘You would imagine yourself among a legion of devils', he wrote, ‘and in the suburbs of hell.'

But in fact, away from the main road of Borough High Street, and crowded Bermondsey to the east of it, Southwark was still quite a rural, peaceable place: the houses on that side petered out very soon into meadows to the south and Lambeth marsh to the west. There was the odd glasshouse and soap-boiling works established near London Bridge, with more to come later in the century; and a brewery started near the site of the defunct Globe which, a hundred years later, was to become the great works owned by Dr Johnson's friend Henry Thrale. But then the north shore of the river too had its share of new wharves, workshops and smelly manufacturies, even as far west as Whitehall, to the disgust of John Evelyn who took the view that these signs of crude economic activity were unworthy in ‘the Imperial seat of our incomparable Monarch'. The British Empire in its full resplendence still lay a long way in the future, but it was true that fragile ships setting out from the Thames reached as far as America to the west and India, or even China, to the east. They brought back from these ends of the earth decorative goods which found their way into London houses and new plants which began to be cultivated in London's gardens.

There was one particularly splendid and innovative garden near the river west of Lambeth palace (that of the Tradescant family, gardeners to the royal family), but Bankside itself was not short of gardens. They appear with great clarity on the bird's-eye map made by Wenceslaus Hollar's friend and colleague William Faithorne in 1658, two years before the Restoration. The fish ponds, still visible near the end of the preceding century, have all gone by this date, and of the entertainment industry only one bear garden is shown. (Twenty-five years later that, too, was suppressed.) But each of the run of houses now squashed together along Bankside in a continuous line, in the way of ribbon-development on the edge of town in every era, has its own garden behind. Drawn as decorative parterres, they must have been for a mixture of flowers and vegetables, and beyond each lies its own orchard. There is, as yet, no sign of the commercial wharves that would appear on Bankside in the next century. The garden plots all end in a narrow stream (the ditch first dug in the thirteenth century) over which each household has its own plank bridge. The houses at the west end of Bankside, which stand between the roadway and the river, have no gardens, but from the roadway numerous little bridges cross a wider section of stream to further individual orchards. The two streams curve round to join one another by Barge House stairs. Evidently Bankside was still a very well-watered place, indeed the water levels in all the channels still rose and fell with the river tides.

The only problem with Faithorne's image of this garden suburb is that, in the tradition of London map making, it stops short at the southern edge of the Bankside properties, the rest of the space on the sheet being taken by the large, rectangular key to the churches of London and its surrounding districts. In reality, we know that Maid Lane, complete with quite a few houses, was already there on the southern side of the orchards. The two side paths, Gravel Lane and Bandy Leg Walk, led off from it as well, though as yet these would only have been footpaths to St George's Fields. The future layout of Southwark was tentatively taking shape.

When play-going started again after the Restoration, the plays were of a new sort, and so were the covered, proscenium-arch theatres in which they were performed. Fashion – and sin – had moved back to the north side of the river and to the capital's expanding western quarters: to Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to the Haymarket and Piccadilly and St James's Park, the districts conveniently adjacent to Charles II's dissolute court. But it had been twenty years since the watermen had had the theatre-going crowds to ferry to and from Bankside, and probably the general growth of London at that time was enough to ensure their livelihood. The south bank seems to have settled again into its historic separateness, so near to the centre of London yet distant from it. When Ogilby and Morgan produced the first survey map of London, showing properties in wonderful detail, the south bank was excluded from it. Alas, we will never be able to see the exact layout of the Cardinal's Hat and its outbuildings.

The years after the Restoration are those covered by Samuel Pepys's diary, as well as by Evelyn's far more extensive one: each makes references to crossing the water. Pepys visited the Falcon Inn, and also the Bear, a very old inn beside London Bridge whose landlady, ‘a most beautiful woman', drowned herself in the river. Evelyn, seeking inspiration for his own garden down river at Deptford, visited the Lambeth garden that had belonged to the Tradescants, and occasionally went to Lambeth Palace – once walking there over the frozen river. Both he and Pepys stayed dutifully in London throughout the terrible plague year of 1665, the Great Plague that has eclipsed in memory all the century's earlier ones. In September Pepys recorded, looking across the river, that it was ‘strange to see, in broad daylight, two or three burials upon the bankside, one at the very heels of another; doubtless all of the plague; and yet 40 or 50 people going along with every one of them'. Pepys found this ‘strange' because in London proper, where this time round the Plague had become serious sooner than it had in Southwark, public gatherings for funerals had been discouraged for months. In any case many London burials were now taking place summarily, and by night, in mass pits.

The processions Pepys saw so clearly on Bankside must have been making their way eastwards from the Cardinal's Hat area along towards Bankend and hence to St Saviour's and its churchyard. There was then no other church to the west of Bankside till you came to Lambeth, and no other burial ground for the inhabitants of the parish but the old Cross Bones ground where the remains of the ‘single women' supposedly lay – and that was not annexed by St Saviour's as a general overflow burial ground till the 1670s. The popular Southwark idea that there was a plague pit near Bankside seems to have no basis in fact. Deadman's Place, which was later subsumed into the big brewery, is often cited, but this was a Nonconformist burial ground dating from some years after the Plague. The name ‘Deadman' is much older than that, and is probably just a corruption of someone's name.

The river itself was seen as a refuge from the Plague, though many of those hoping to escape the pestilence carried it with them. According to Daniel Defoe, writing a generation later of events in his early childhood:

‘As the richer sort got in to ships, so the lower ranks got into hoys, smacks, lighters and fishing-boats; and many, especially watermen, lay in their boats; but … the infection got in among them and made a fearful havoc; many of the watermen died alone in their wherries as they rid at their roads, as well as above bridge as below, and were not found sometimes till they were not in a condition for anybody to touch or come near them.'

The following summer the river once again figured as a place of escape, but this time the surviving watermen were in luck. As the Great Fire spread in the City on the 2nd and 3rd September, crowds of people bearing their most prized belongings in coaches, carts or in their arms besieged the waterside. Many were prepared to pay almost any price to load their goods to get them away from the flames. Pepys himself paid eight pounds, which was more than his usual month's total housekeeping and servants' wages bill, to have two lighters bear his best furniture and other valuables away to Woolwich. (‘Lighters' were the large sail boats that were usually employed to unload, or ‘lighten', goods from seagoing ships anchored in mid-river. The lighter-masters were, by the next century, admitted to membership of the Watermen's Company. Eventually, as the ferry-trade began to decline, they would come to dominate the Company.)

The Watermen's first Hall in Upper Thames Street disappeared into the flames with many other City Company Halls, and by the third day the north waterfront itself was well alight, along with Cheapside and St Paul's. Many premises near the river were stuffed with highly combustible goods, such as pitch, hemp and flax, while the wharf sides themselves were stacked with timber and coal – power supplies for the growing industrial and commercial capital. The Fire had already burnt the houses on the City end of London Bridge, and with them the ‘water engine' used to raise water from the river for London's general needs, but then the flames were stopped. This time Southwark was lucky, though the district had known destructive fires before and was to lose five hundred houses round the High Street ten years later.

On the day the Great Fire of 1666 took hold, the dry east wind driving the flames westwards made many City-dwellers such as Pepys believe for a while that the City itself would be largely spared. Pepys's first move was to take a ferry to Whitehall to alert the King to what was happening. Then back to the City to locate the increasingly desperate Lord Mayor and hand him the King's authority for pulling down houses to stop the blaze. Later in the day he, his wife and some friends with whom they had dined took to the river again to observe the situation. The air was hot all round them, and full of smoke and sparks, and the true and growing extent of the disaster became apparent – ‘a most horrid, malicious bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire'. The heat, and the unending, crackling roar of destruction drove them to take shelter in ‘a little ale-house on Bankside'. There they stayed till dark came, and then hurried home, beginning to realise that, so large was the area of devastation, their own home might be at risk. The Bankside ale-house was, he says, opposite ‘the three cranes', which was a well-known loading dock situated between St Paul's and London Bridge, so it must have been from another inn rather than from the Cardinal's Hat that Pepys made the observations which still epitomise the Fire for us after nearly three and a half centuries.

The Fire, coming as it did only a few years after the Restoration, seems to constitute one of those frontiers in time which precipitate changes that were coming anyway, but which then arrive all the faster. By the end of the century, London had been transformed more than at any era in its previous history. With upwards of half a million people,
¹
it was more than ten times the size of any other British city. It outstripped Paris in population, becoming the largest city in Europe, and for the first time three-quarters of its population lived outside the old City walls. It was becoming a metropolis – a new word then – and by and by the repercussions of this were felt on Bankside also.