The Oldest House in London (eBook)

2

The Eagle & Child

The Oldest House in London is Built

Richard Rich’s carefully tended relationship with the Tudor dynasty was successfully maintained by his grandson, Robert. However, Elizabeth I’s death heralded a new era. In 1603, James I (who had reigned as King of Scotland since 1567) acceded to the English throne. Keen to curry favour with the new monarch, Robert Rich lost no time in introducing him to his 13-year-old son, Henry, who made an instant and lasting impression on the middle-aged monarch. By all accounts, young Henry’s ‘features and pleasant aspect equalled the most beautiful of women’ and were combined with a personality described by the chronicler Clarendon as ‘a lovely and winning presence, to which he added the charm of genteel conversation’. James I soon became infatuated, showering him with gifts, usually of the monetary variety – the historian James Granger claimed that the king ‘wantonly lavished £3,000 upon him at one time’.

The precise nature of Henry Rich’s relationship with James I is unproven, but there is evidence that he may have cynically exploited the ageing monarch’s infatuation. In 1847 the American journalist Eliakim Littell declared, ‘From the dawn of his youth, true to his ancestral characteristics, Henry Rich was a selfish politician’, adding that his handsome countenance concealed a dark heart. ‘In private life he was violent and haughty; nay more, he was a man of utmost selfishness, unmitigated by any of those loftier qualities which sometimes, coupled with a fiery, overbearing disposition … will not permit us quite to hate.’ Walter Scott’s Secret History of the Court of James I went further, stating, ‘Rich, losing that opportunity his curious face and complexion afforded him, by turning aside and spitting after the king had slabered his mouth.’

Whatever the truth of his association with the king, Henry Rich prospered at the royal court and in 1612 his social status was elevated further when he announced his engagement to Isabel, the daughter and heir of Sir Walter Cope – an immensely wealthy landowner who presided over his vast estates from an enormous mansion known as Cope Castle, the grounds of which stretched across the modern west London enclave of Kensington.

Delighted to be forging links with the influential Cope family, Henry’s father Robert rewarded him with the valuable deeds to the St Bartholomew estate. Determined to squeeze as much profit as possible from his wedding gift, Henry resolved to develop its last available plot of land – Launders Green.

Although it promised to be a lucrative speculation, Henry Rich’s plan for Launders Green received a lukewarm reception from both the locals and the City’s Court of Aldermen, who had long since felt that the precinct of St Bartholomew’s was becoming dangerously overcrowded. Aware that his new development had its detractors, Rich offered some reassurance by promising to issue strict, thirty-one-year leases forbidding multiple tenancy. This had the required effect and the project was given the green light by the authorities.

Once the fear of overcrowding had been allayed, Henry Rich set about designing a neat square of eleven tall townhouses on Launders Green. As was common practice at the time, each property served as a live/work unit. Subterranean storage cellars led up to an open-fronted room at street level that could be used by the inhabitants as either a workshop or a retail premises. Keen to maximise his return on these shops, Henry Rich stipulated that they had to be vacated each year at fair time so he could let them (for hefty rents) to traders. In order to minimise the inevitable disruption this would cause for the inhabitants, he incorporated staircases in Launders Green’s inner courtyard that gave direct access to the living quarters without going through the shops. The first storey of these airy chambers comprised, in modern estate-agent parlance, ‘reception rooms’ in which the inhabitants relaxed, ate and entertained guests. On the floor above, similarly proportioned rooms provided sleeping quarters while further bedrooms and servants’ accommodation were found in the steeply pitched garrets.

Building work on Launders Green began in 1613. Unusually for the time, wattle and daub walls were eschewed in favour of bricks, which were almost certainly crafted locally. Ever since Dutch brickmakers had opened a field near reconstruction work at London Bridge in 1404, the practice of creating brickfields close to development sites had become common and rather neatly resulted in buildings being created from the earth on which they stood.

By the time Launders Green was developed, brickmakers were capable of producing bricks in different shades, which could be used to create attractive geometric patterns on frontages. However, although this style was popular in Europe, the brickwork on English houses was often left plain and embellished with intricate plasterwork designs instead. The Worshipful Company of Plaisterers (plasterers) was granted its first charter by Henry VII in 1501 and, over the following century, elaborate plaster mouldings became a popular form of house decoration, both inside and out. Examples still survive today across Britain – Canonbury House (once part of St Bartholomew’s Priory’s extensive portfolio) has ornate sixteenth-century plasterwork, as does the Charterhouse in nearby Charterhouse Square.

Over at Launders Green, it seems unlikely that Henry Rich would have gone to the expense of decorating his rental properties with expensive plaster designs. However, tantalising illustrations published in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1800 reveal that some of Cloth Fair’s oldest buildings did indeed possess them. The jettied upper floors of a butcher’s shop are shown sporting four gargoyles, and a townhouse – possibly one of the Launders Green houses – is embellished with three huge plaster casts of flowers and animals, measuring around 6ft in height.

While their walls and foundations were built of brick, the floors of the Launders Green houses were almost certainly made from broad and sturdy oak boards. This durable wood was also used to panel interiors of the period and many examples survive today, their light honey brown surfaces blackened by centuries of smoke. Elsewhere in the houses, elm was probably used for doors and window shutters while fences around the construction site would have been made from wicker hurdles of woven hazel, alder and willow.

Transport logistics meant that wood used in house building often came from local estates, so Henry Rich’s land at Kensington may well have yielded the timber for his properties at Launders Green. However, if no local supply was available, a large yard at St Benet Woodwharf in the City stocked Estrich (or Eastland) boards from the Baltic. The standard 8ft 6in length of these timbers dictated ceiling heights on timber-frame buildings and subsequently became the standard height for rooms in domestic houses of the period, even those built of brick or stone.

Protecting the Launders Green houses from the elements were steeply pitched, tiled roofs and wooden pentices, which acted as awnings over the shop front and were a useful place to hang banners advertising the goods inside. However, as traders competed to make their banner the most visible pentices grew to dangerous proportions and jutted so far into the street that unobservant horse riders were regularly knocked off their mounts. Thus, by the time Launders Green was developed, the City authorities had decreed that all pentices had to be raised at least 9ft from street level.

The principal features inside the Launders Green properties were undoubtedly the fireplaces. In the early 1600s fires were used for heat, light and culinary activities and, even on a hot summer’s day, at least one hearth would be lit in any given home. The paramount importance of fires led to the curious tradition of placing a shoe inside the chimney stack, either on a ledge or in a purpose-built cavity behind the hearth. The sheer number of shoes discovered in seventeenth-century chimneys make it extremely likely that some were hidden inside the Launders Green houses, but today we can only guess at why they were put there. It may be that builders left them as a sort of personal signature or they may have been installed by the occupants as a fertility talisman – the ancient nursery rhyme, ‘There was an old woman who lived in a shoe’ tells the story of a home overrun with children, shoes and boots were tied to the back of honeymoon vehicles, and Lancashire women who wanted to conceive often wore the shoes of someone who had recently given birth. However, whether these traditions have any connection to the mysterious shoes in chimneys is a moot point.

Obscure superstitions notwithstanding, the Launders Green houses were completed in the winter of 1614 and Nos 41–42 Cloth Fair – today the only surviving section of the square – became part of London’s cityscape. Now that the last piece of available land at St Bartholomew the Great had been developed, Henry Rich was eager to discover how much his estate was worth. With this in mind, he employed surveyor Gilbert Thacker to visit the site and compile a list of every building, its value and the name of the leaseholder. Amazingly, Thacker’s survey survives and today it provides a fascinating and unique snapshot of Cloth Fair at the beginning of the 1600s. It also reveals that, from the outset, today’s 41–42 was let as one house...