Porridge Island
Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
June 2026
Famous in literature and popular speech, this street or alley leading from St. Martin's churchyard to Round Court was a home for the purchase of cheap food, specialising in ready dressed meat such as roast pork and soup. It lay in a corner of the city near the junction of Charing Cross and the Strand, adjoining the narrow streets of the rookery known as the “Bermudas” behind the church of St. Martin’s in the Fields. Walter Thornbury provides a concise history:
At the bottom of St. Martin's Lane was a nest or rookery of narrow lanes and streets, which rejoiced in slang names, such as "Porridge Island," "The Bermudas," and the "Straits of the Strand." The names in course of time became classical, being constantly imported into the comedies of the time by Ben Jonson and other authors. From the allusions to them which occur, it is clear that they were occupied by a low lot of inhabitants, who indulged in gin, ale, and fighting. Porridge Island, especially, was filled with second-rate cook-shops…. The greater part of this rookery was swept away about the year 1830, but a considerable portion of the low courts remain about Bedfordbury.
According to The Life and Extraordinary History of the Chevalier John Taylor (1761), a scurrilous biography of the famous oculist that was wrongly attributed to his son, the job of “Cook-Shops in Porrage-Island, Vinegar-Yard, and Long-Ditch, Westminster” was ‘to dress up Beef and Cabbage for Carmen, and for Porters.” More narrowly, Porridge Island was described in the Victorian era as “A paved alley or footway, near the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, destroyed in 1829, when the great rookery (of which Bedfordbury is still a sample) was removed from about the Strand and St. Martin's-lane… It was filled with cooks' shops, and was cant name. The real name is, I believe, unknown.”
The term came into general usage in the third quarter of the century, when it begins to crop up in periodicals and in plays by Samuel Foote and others. “Was it for this that I dined for a groat in Porridge Island?” wrote a contributor to the Town and Country Magazine in 1777. At the same juncture, the still impoverished artist James Barry was said to have “had tea boiled in a quart pot, and a penny roll for breakfast, dined in porridge Island, & had milk for supper.” Barry’s studio was in Suffolk Street, off the Haymarket, so it was no distance at all to the Island: but there is a hint of the old raffish Bohemian existence associated with St. Martin’s Lane.
A characteristic exchange took place, probably in the 1770s, between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale, reported in her Anecdotes. She had complained that she disliked goose, because “one smells it so while it is roasting, said I: ‘But you, Madam (replies the Doctor), have been at all times a fortunate woman, having always had your hunger forestalled by indulgence, that you never experienced the delight of smelling your dinner beforehand.’ Which pleasure, answered I pertly, is to be enjoyed in perfection by such as have the happiness to pass through Porridge-Island of a morning.” Johnson quickly rebuked her: “Come, come (says he gravely), let's have no sneering at what is serious to so many: hundreds of your fellow creatures, dear Lady, turn another way, that they may not be tempted by the luxuries of Porridge-Island to wish for gratifications they are not able to obtain.” When she wrote up her account later, Hester Piozzi added a footnote: “Porridge-Island is a mean street in London, filled with cook-shops for the convenience of the poorer inhabitants; the real name of it I know not, but suspect that it is generally known by, to have been originally a term of derision.” While Johnson might have found the tone of this condescending, it was an accurate statement of the prevailing usage.
Turning to the Bermudas, this area was mentioned by Jonson in Bartholomew Fair (performed 1614), besides references he makes to it elsewhere as “the Streights.” Laura Wright was unable to find seventeenth-century sources that define the exact location of the area, but she notes that in John Rocque’s map, the area is defined by a number of small streets. “In it, from north to south, lay Castle Court, Glastonbury Court, Goodwins Court, King’s Arms Stable, Hop Garden (both stable and garden were narrow passages by 1747), Chymisters Alley, Mays Buildings, Turner’s Court, Charles Court, Dawsons Alley, Cheltons (Sheltons) Court and Bedford Court, with Bedfordbury running through the area north to south as a narrow roadway.” Most of these disappeared in the grand clearance that accompanied the construction of Trafalgar Square to the south-west. Wright goes on to point out that “Bermuda had become the first island destination to which the City of London transported vagrants, petty criminals and destitute children over the age of eight.” On this basis, she suggests that “penal colony” served as “the main semantic thrust behind the rookery name.” In addition, Wright investigates a further name connected with the district, Caribbee Islands (with variants).
Whatever the physical situation at ground level, dramatists and journalists continued to make use of the expression “Porridge Island” well into the nineteenth century, in sources such as the Christmas pantomime at Drury Lane in 1819. We can add to the examples cited by Wright one of the most graphic (if topographically loose) allusions, made by Thomas Babington Macaulay in his famous essay on Johnson (1831). He imagines the lives of Richard Savage and other hack authors, “sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge Island.” As late as 1879, Austin Dobson—a belated Augustan—composed a familiar epistle in octosyllabic couplets, recalling the age when “Savage and his Brother-Sinners / In Porridge Island div’d for Dinners.” The Bermudas had passed from the London landscape for ever, but they still haunted the literary imagination.
For the linguistic history of the district, see Laura Wright, “On Cribby Islands,” Journal of the English Place Names Society, 44 (2012): 48–65.