Turnmill Street

Turnmill street (by some, tho' falsely, called Turnball and Trumball str.) a considerable spacious str. betn Clerkenwel green Nly, and Cow cross Sly. L. 330 yds, and from P.C. near NW 900 yds. This str. has its name from a River or Brook formerly here, whereon stood several Mills, says Stow.

[Turnmill Street.] On the left hand of [St. Johns] Street lieth a Lane called Cow Cross, of a Cross sometime standing there; which Lane turneth down to another Lane called Turnmill Street, which stretcheth up to the West side of Clerkenwell, and was called Turnmil Street, for such cause as is afore declared.

Turnmill street, the ancient name of the street now corruptly called Turnbull street. See Turnbull street.

Turnbull street, Cowcross, this street was anciently denominated Turnmill Street, from the mills erected in it, turned by a stream of water from Hampstead and Highgate; which being at present seemingly dried up, some writers have represented it as lost; but that stream is brought to the suburbs of London in two large wooden pipes, each of a seven inch bore. Maitland.

Turnmill-St., Clerkenwell, is the continuation of Cow-cross-street, and is so called from the mills that were anciently erected in it, that were turned by a stream of water from Hampstead and Highgate.

Turnbull Street (properly Turnmill Street), between Clerkenwell Green and Cow Cross, and long a noted haunt for harlots and disorderly people. Middleton in his Black Book (1604) calls it Tunbold Street. The west side of Turnmill Street has been cleared away for the Metropolitan Railway.

Under Fleet Bridge runneth a water, sometimes called the river of the Wells, since Turnmill or Tremill brook, for that divers mills were erected upon it, as appeareth by a fair register book of the priory at Clerkenwell, and donation of the lands thereunto belonging, as also by divers other records.—Stow, pp. 6, 11.

Falstaff. This same starved justice [Shallow] hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street; and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk's tribute.—Shakespeare, Second Part of Henry IV., Act iii. Sc. 2.

One of the characters in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair is "Dan Jordan Knockem, a horse-courser and a ranger of Turnbull;" and there are many uncleanly references to it in Beaumont and Fletcher, Taylor the Water Poet, London Carbonadoed, etc.

Ursula. You are one of those horse-leeches that gave out I was dead in Turnbull Street, of a surfeit of bottle-ale and tripes.
Knockem. No, 'twas better meat, Urse: cows' udders, cows' udders!—Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair.

Cowcross Street and Turnmill Street. At the start of the twenty-first century, these two streets and their hinterland are among the most visibly thriving parts of Clerkenwell. They house a range of businesses and places of refreshment, as well as a rising residential population, permanent and transient. Cowcross Street in particular is a cherished thoroughfare which owes its charm to its gently curving course and close-knit scale, and its liveliness to the proximity of Farringdon Station (Ill. 228). Its medley of buildings ranges from much–altered Georgian houses with shops through converted Victorian warehouses to contemporary offices and flats.

The present-day fabric of Cowcross and Turnmill Streets still bears the imprint of three near-simultaneous developments that took place close by in the 1860s and profoundly altered the area's character: the construction of Farringdon Road, the building of the Metropolitan Railway, whose Farringdon passenger and freight stations were located at the hinge of the two streets, and the reconstruction of Smithfield Market. These transformations did not quite inaugurate the present four- or five-storey scale of these streets. But they confirmed it and hastened it on, as plentiful Victorian warehouses for manufacturing and wholesaling sprang up, linked to railway and market.

Until Farringdon Road was completed, Cowcross Street and Turnmill Street formed a single important route north from the City, leading to what are now Farringdon Lane and King's Cross Road (Ill. 229). It had become a narrow and congested thoroughfare, passing through a densely built-up district, commercial and industrial in character since the Middle Ages and harbouring many old tenements in courts and alleys, occupied by some of the poorest of the poor. The sites along the west side of this route were completely obliterated by the new road and railway, while the street lost more of its ancient character when the roadway was widened and the paving levels improved in 1865.¹ Apart from Farringdon Station, and the handful of buildings adjoining, the west side of Turnmill Street since then has been lined by nothing more than a brick wall alongside the railway cutting (Ill. 230).

Until about the end of the eighteenth century, Cowcross Street was usually called Cow Cross, the name probably referring originally only to the east—west branch of the street. Subsequently it was known as Cow Cross Street, a form gradually superseded by Cowcross Street during the nineteenth century. Historically, it included what is now the southern half of Turnmill Street, extending as far as the boundary between the parishes of Clerkenwell and St Sepulchre Without (Ill. 229). The present demarcation dates from 1925, when Nos 66–31 Cowcross Street became Nos 83–102 Turnmill Street. At the same time the greater part of Charles Street, running in front of Farringdon Station, was redesignated part of Cowcross Street (the short portion west of Farringdon Road becoming part of Greville Street). As for Turnmill Street, this originally went further north than now, including what was to become Silver Street, on the west side of the Middlesex Sessions House.

This chapter covers chiefly the historic line of the route between St John Street and Clerkenwell Road. Presentday Cowcross Street west of Turnmill Street, Farringdon Station, and the entire west side of Turnmill Street are discussed with Farringdon Road and the railway in Chapter XIII. The present building on the corner site of Turnmill Street and Clerkenwell Road is described with the rest of Clerkenwell Road in Chapter XIV.

The area before the Victorian improvements

The line of Cowcross and Turnmill Streets marks the south and west boundary of the precincts of the Hospitaller priory of St John of Jerusalem. Whether the mid-twelfth century priory dictated the position of the streets, or the streets were already in existence and set the limits of the priory is uncertain, although the latter explanation is likelier. The horse and cattle market at Smithfield certainly pre-dated the priory, being in existence by 1123. As well as Smithfield market there was a separate cow market, with its market cross after which Cowcross Street is named. This stood at the junction of St John and Cowcross Streets, where a small open area still exists (Ill. 254).² Like St John Street, Cowcross and Turnmill Streets were used for droving in connection with these markets, and may even have been more important anciently than St John Street for this purpose, and as a route to High Barnet and the north generally.³

In the thirteenth century the priory owned meadows on the west side of Turnmill Street, running down to the Fleet. By the 1280s there were houses with gardens on the east side of this street, on long, narrow plots backing on to the 'hospital croft' (later Butt Close). Lessees here included tile-makers and millers. Mills certainly existed along the river by the mid-twelfth century, and gave the street its name. They were variously used for corn-milling, but also fulling, lead-milling and pigment-grinding.⁴ Cowcross Street was also being developed from about this time, probably with premises where butchery or related activities took place, such as the working of horn.⁵ The ready supplies of fresh water from the Fleet, the Faggeswell Brook south of Cow Cross, and Fagge's Well itself, probably situated near the cow market, made this an attractive area for tanning after the exclusion of tanners and leatherworkers from the City in 1365. Parchment–making, another related trade, was being carried on in Turnmill Street by the early fifteenth century.⁶

Being a main route to and from London, Turnmill and Cowcross Streets acquired numerous inns. The Cock, on the east side of Turnmill Street, is recorded as extant in the mid-fourteenth century, the Rose somewhat later. By the early fifteenth century there were shops in the vicinity of Peter's Lane, and a variety of craftsmen there, including tilers, a smith and a skinner. The tenements erected here occupied narrow plots, with shops on the street frontage and workshops behind.⁷ Similar dense development subsequently spread westwards along Cowcross Street, replacing cottages, stables and gardens.

After the dissolution of the priory the two streets seem to have degenerated. By the end of the sixteenth century this was a poor area, synonymous with crime and prostitution. The parish of St Sepulchre Without was part of a wider district known as the 'Rules of Fleet', where Fleet Prison debtors could get lodgings, and this may have been a factor in determining the low character of the area.⁸ There was perhaps something of the louche flavour of Bankside. The playwright George Wilkins, who is believed to have written the first nine scenes of Shakespeare's Pericles, set up as an innkeeper in Turnmill Street in 1610, his inn probably also a brothel.⁹ There are passing allusions to Turnmill Street, often under the name of Turnbull or Turnball Street, as a place of vice and low life in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Bartholomew Fair and other plays up to Restoration times.¹⁰ Among other slight literary associations, Dr Thomas Worthington, former president of the English College of Douai and one of the translators of the Douai Bible, lived in Turnmill Street in 1624,¹¹ while the young Andrew Marvell lodged briefly on 'the North Syde of Cowcrosse' in 1642.¹²

This was also an area of violent crime and theft. The street robber James Dalton, whose sensational life story was published on his being hanged in 1730, was probably born in Cow Cross, returning here from transportation to America and becoming part of a 'ferocious' local street gang.¹³ The many taverns were an obvious source of trouble. In 1789 the Vestry complained that there were too many, petitioning the magistrates not to renew the licences of four (including one of particularly bad reputation, the Roebuck, opposite Turk's Head Yard), nor to grant any new ones.¹⁴

In 1796 a riot starting in the Sun (on the north side of the present Cowcross Street) spread to the watch-house, where the beadle was killed and a number of watchmen injured.¹⁵ Around the same time William Lancaster, landlord of the nearby Compasses (forerunner of the modernday Three Compasses at No. 66 Cowcross Street opposite), was revealed as a Hounslow Heath highwayman.¹⁶ A little later the Castle tavern, ancestor of the present pub of the same name in Cowcross Street, was allegedly granted a pawnbroker's licence by George IV in recognition of a loan to settle gambling debts incurred in cock-fighting at Hockley-in-the-Hole (a painting displayed in the pub depicts the imagined scene).¹⁷ Before its replacement in 1865–7 the Castle was described as the haunt of 'the knackers and bone-pickers of the metropolis'.¹⁸

The knacker's trade was an important one locally, particularly in nearby Sharp's Alley (see below). Horse theft was rife, and it was not unknown for a stolen horse to be swiftly sold and disposed of at one of the many local slaughterhouses. About 1800 Thomas White, a slaughterhouse owner, petitioned against the granting of any more licences for slaughterhouses, as the area could not sustain so many: or, if it could, it would only be because of a corresponding increase in horse theft.¹⁹

As to the older fabric of the area, timber-framed or largely timber-built houses, medieval, Tudor or Stuart in date, survived long into the nineteenth century. Cromwell in the 1820s described Turnmill Street as containing 'many ancient dwellings disguised, for the most part, by modern repairs'. He seems to have been referring not to the many generally very small houses in the off-street courts and alleys, but to higher-class ones.²⁰ In the 1850s Pinks noted wooden-fronted buildings in Faulkner's Alley, and the remains of an elaborately carved gateway at the corner of Red Lion Alley.²¹

Apart from one slight sketch of 1828 by the painter E. T. Parris,²² little of this seems to have been recorded, though a group of timber buildings in Cowcross Street by the entrance to White Horse Alley attracted some attention in the early 1870s, shortly before demolition. White Horse Alley itself was also drawn, and a photograph by William Strudwick showing narrow houses and shops in Peter's Lane, some of timber and some of brick, conveys in detail the character of the better side lanes (Ills 231–233).

Brick-built houses doubtless started to replace timber ones in the normal way from the later seventeenth century. The east side of Turnmill Street, as disclosed by a photograph showing the progress of the Metropolitan Railway and Farringdon Road in the early 1860s, was lined by mainly Georgian-style fronts, though some may have hidden much older houses (Ill. 508). Today few traces of the Georgian fabric remain, the only substantial run of survivors being at Nos 4–8 Cowcross Street, some dating from the 1780s. Almost alone among larger buildings before 1800 was a workhouse of 1727 for the parish of St Sepulchre Without, one of the many built following Sir Edward Knatchbull's Poor Relief Act of 1722–3. It stood just south of the site of Farringdon Station, between Sharp's Alley and Black Boy Alley, 'a very dirty part of the Parish', and close to the workhouse and burial ground of the parish of St Sepulchre within the City bounds (Ill. 229). The site was on a small estate bequeathed in 1658 for the benefit of the poor by Edward Cottle, citizen and loriner, who had perhaps been in business hereabouts. Closed in 1845, the building was demolished as part of the Metropolitan Railway clearance.

Industry and Commerce

For centuries Cowcross Street and Turnmill Street were home to a wide range of processes, manufactures and trades. There were some long continuities. Booth's gin was produced in or near Turnmill Street for two hundred years until the 1970s (page 197).

The original Cow Cross cattle market and the Smithfield horse and livestock market were the most enduring influence on the character of Cowcross Street. The slaughtering of animals, especially horses, and the processing and storage of their carcases, were the trades longest associated with the area, and the latter has only recently dwindled. Horse-slaughtering was important here in the late eighteenth century and perhaps had been much earlier. The same establishments evidently killed or received 'unserviceable' cattle too, such as diseased animals that would not do for good-class butchery.²³ In Victorian times the name of John Atcheler of Sharp's Alley, 'horse slaughterer to Her Majesty and the Royal Family' was well-known.²⁴

Sharp's Alley, a long maze of courts that ran southwards from the point where Turnmill and Cowcross Street now meet, was a particularly fetid environment. This nexus housed a cluster of noxious, to some extent codependent trades. Here besides Atcheler the knacker laboured in his day two carcase-butchers, a bladder-dealer, and several catgut workers making strings for violins and other musical instruments. A map of 1824 shows a horseslaughterer's yard and buildings here occupied by one Ford.²⁵ This was no doubt connected with the works of Thomas Ford, listed here in the Post Office Directory in 1841 and described as a cart-grease manufacturer.

By the time Sharp's Alley was cleared for the railway, several of its firms already boasted large, purpose-built premises. Among these, for instance, were Braden's steammills for manufacturing cattle-feed, on the site of the present Farringdon Station (Ill. 508). The increase in scale can probably be dated to around 1800. Warehouses were being built on Turnmill Street in the very early 1800s, while two are shown in or near Sharp's Alley on the parish map of 1823, one identified as for hops (Ill. 229).²⁶ In keeping with the area's reputation for crime, in the late 1820s an illicit glassworks with three furnaces was discovered by excisemen, hidden in 'a back and very secluded shed' in Round Court, a dead-end off Sharp's Alley.²⁷

Quite how unsavoury the Sharp's Alley enclave was is suggested by a prosecution brought in 1848, when a policeman stopped a carter delivering the foul-smelling carcases of diseased cows and a horse at the carcasebutcher Lansdowne's yard. Giving evidence, his neighbour Atcheler claimed the carcases were really meant for him, and described Lansdowne as a respectable man who 'did not make the common sausages, but only those that were fit for the west-end of town … the real German sausages, which were of the very best meat, mixed with a bit of "tommy"'. Asked if he meant 'Tommy Cat', Atcheler replied amid laughter, 'Oh! no; a little of bull beef, which makes them good and stiff.' At Atcheler's yards, here and later in Belle Isle, north of King's Cross, horse-flesh was boiled up in vast coppers to make catsmeat, for feeding cats and dogs.²⁸

Soap-making was another of the noxious trades found in the area, its presence no doubt explained by the proximity of Smithfield Market and the Fleet river. Among the smarter crafts found plentifully in southern Clerkenwell at this period, cabinet-making seems not to have been represented here, though it had been earlier to some extent at least. In the late eighteenth century there were at least some makers of clocks and watches in Cowcross Street, including the clockmaker James Harbud and a watchmaker from Whitehaven, John Davidson, insolvent in 1772.²⁹ John Willshire, a tool dealer, perhaps supplying local craftsmen, was active in Cowcross Street about 1800.³⁰ Peter and Paul Gally, looking-glass and pictureframe makers, were based in Turnmill Street for a time about 1809.³¹ In 1790 James Scofield at No. 76 Cow Cross was producing the 'patent coach trumpet', a kind of speaking tube for passengers to communicate with their coachman, an invention which Scofield boasted was used by the Prince of Wales.³²

Many ordinary businesses were also carried on here. A tallow chandler and a tobacco-pipe maker, both of Turnmill Street, were among the first officers in 1724 of the new parish of St John's, Clerkenwell,³³ and occupations of Cow Cross residents in the 1750s and 60s included those of soap-maker, chandler, corn chandler, cabinetmaker, broker, blacksmith, bricklayer and pewterer.³⁴ Lowlier occupations included the spinning of yarn for mops, recorded in 1801 when the Turnmill Street workshop where it was being carried on burned down.³⁵

On the eve of the clearances for Farringdon Road and the Metropolitan Railway, the west side of Turnmill Street, together with the Sharp's Alley warren, supported a number of butchers, bakers and other shops, and industrial or craft activities including candle manufacture, coach-building and the making of hames or shafts for horse-drawn vehicles.³⁶ Among several foodstuff dealers was a poulterer and egg-merchant, who in 1844 lost a thousand pigeons in one fire and 500 quails (kept in a cellar) in another a few months later.³⁷ In Cowcross Street near the way-in to Sharp's Alley was a charcoal-burner.

For Cowcross Street, in the early 1840s, fairly few businesses were listed in the street directories. On the north side, between St John Street and Booth's distillery, these included two plumbers, a glass bender, a maker of paint and varnish, and a firm making scales. East of Sharp's Alley, on the south side, were wire workers, a bellowsmaker, a tobacco-pipe maker, a carpenter-builder, a cooper and dealers in tallow and rags: a roster little changed from a century and more before. Ten years on, the number of businesses had apparently more than doubled, particularly on the north side and further north towards Booth's distillery. Much of the increase seems to have been in ordinary shops (and may reflect the growing comprehensiveness of the directories), but there were now also a brass-cock founder, an Italian figure-manufacturer, and a maker of projecting letters. By 1860 there was a strong representation in Cowcross Street of metal-based trades, including several tool dealers, a whitesmith, a blacksmith, a coppersmith, a printer's smith, a stove-range maker, and a firm of engineers. John Chubb, the lock and safe maker, had set up his safe factory here, at No. 27.³⁸

Slums

Cowcross Street and more so Turnmill Street harboured some of the worst slums of mid-Victorian London. Much publicity was given to them in the 1860s and 70s, particularly to a patch dubbed Jack Ketch's Warren or Little Hell. This was an area around Broad Yard and Lamb Court, at the north end of Turnmill Street (Ill. 234). Little Hell disappeared in the clearances for Clerkenwell Road, but even in the late 1890s slum conditions persisted in courts off the north side of Cowcross Street.

It is uncertain to what extent these slums were a new phenomenon in the mid-nineteenth century. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century Turnmill Street in particular had been part of a wider district of ill-repute, known for its high levels of crime and low-life attractions such as bearbaiting and cock-fighting and the associated activities of drinking, gambling and prostitution. Much squalor no doubt existed, and there is some evidence of flimsy housebuilding from the 1630s, when shanties were built on the foundations of pigsties in Turnmill Street.³⁹ But the great influx of population into the area during the nineteenth century must have placed unprecedented pressures on the local housing and infrastructure.

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Slum clearance in Cowcross and Turnmill Streets was not followed by the building of housing on or near the cleared sites, which were redeveloped with warehouses and factories. Commercial and industrial development was in the end the reason for the disappearance of most of the slums, rather than action by the sanitary authorities. By 1911, although there were still a few alleys and yards off Turnmill and Cowcross Streets, they were 'no longer the haunt of vice, but, without exception, decent yards attached to business premises'.⁵² Most of the old courts and alleys have disappeared entirely, the most evocative survivals of the old pattern of development being Faulkner's Alley, between Benjamin Street and Cowcross Street, and Peter's Lane.

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Individual sites and buildings: Turnmill Street (east side)

Booth's Distillery (demolished). Cowcross Street and Turnmill Street were associated with the manufacture of gin by the Booth family and its successors for two hundred years. The story began in the early 1770s, with the establishment of what became the Cow Cross Distillery by John Mootham and Philip Booth. In 1772 Mootham, a gentleman resident in Highgate but with a distillery in Borough High Street, took a 42-year lease of a former brewery on the east side of the road, on part of the site now occupied by Nos 76–86 Turnmill Street and 24 Britton Street. (It was then referred to as in Turnmill Street, but later became No. 55 Cow Cross Street.)⁷³ Whether Mootham had just re-fitted the brewery for distilling or the conversion had been done some time previously, is not clear. Nor is it clear whether he was already in partnership with Philip Booth, whose name first appears in the ratebooks as having taken over the previously empty premises. Philip Booth & Co., as their firm was called, soon expanded the works, acquiring property to the south, in Plowman's Rents, including a former slaughterhouse, and to the rear in Red Lion (now Britton) Street.⁷⁴ By 1787 they also had a distillery at Stanstead Abbotts in Hertfordshire.⁷⁵

Cow Cross Distillery passed into the hands of Philip Booth's sons William, Felix and John. It was extensively rebuilt (Ill. 247) and another distillery was built in Brentford, near the sons' homes in Ealing and Gunnersbury.⁷⁶ In 1830 William died and John retired, leaving Felix in sole control. Felix, who in 1835 was made a baronet for his work in sponsoring Arctic exploration by his friend John Ross, continued to expand the business through acquisitions, as well as branching out into other activities. Booths eventually became the biggest distilling concern in the country.⁷⁷ The business continued in family ownership until 1897, following the death of Felix's nephew Sir Charles Booth, 3rd Bart, when it was floated (together with the business of another distiller's in Albany Street, Regent's Park) as Booth's Distillery Ltd.⁷⁸

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Cowcross Street North side and Peter's Lane

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Nos 2 and 3 (Ill. 251). The exact date is uncertain, but this is probably a Victorian rebuilding on the same scale as the pair of houses with shops built here in 1784–5, when Thomas Dalby, butcher, of Fore Street, City, was the owner.⁹⁸

No. 4 was most likely built about 1780, shortly after Thomas Dalby acquired the sites of Nos 2–4 in 1776. Though the building has been harshly treated, the carcase is basically original.⁹⁹

No. 5. Gauged-brick heads to the flank windows and some other features accord with a date of 1823–4, after the sale of the property to J. Taylor. The building is united at the rear with a one-room deep house of similar date, formerly entered from Peter's Lane. Robert Larst, a carpenter of St John, Westminster, acquired buildings on both sites in 1776, for use by David Davies, the long-serving master of Dame Alice Owen's School, but nothing of that age appears to remain.¹⁰⁰ A baker, John Fisher, was resident in 1841.¹⁰¹ The pedimented doorway leading to the upper floors, with rubbed brick decoration, appears to date from about 1880.

Nos 6–8 (The Rookery). One of a small chain of boutique hotels in period buildings, the Rookery opened in 1998. It was converted and extended by Gus Alexander Architects from three Georgian shop-houses (Ill. 354), and three smaller Victorian houses on the west side of Peter's Lane (formerly Nos 12–14). No. 6 was built in 1780–2 for Thomas Hurford, a baker, who had earlier occupied a building at No. 5. It replaced two smaller houses, and had a chaise-house, stable and woodhouse at the back with access from Fleur-de-Lis Court. The plot was roughly triangular, and laid out with three rooms per floor.¹⁰² Nos 7 and 8 were built in 1798–9, when the owner was John Rodbard (or Robbard), miller, of Chigwell, Essex. They had central-staircase plans. Two large bread ovens survive in No. 7, also formerly a bakery.¹⁰³

For conversion to a hotel the houses were gutted apart from the roof structures and eclectically fitted out, using much salvaged material, including mahogany panelling said to have come from a bombed West End theatre. Each of the 33 rooms is named after a former occupant or an inhabitant of the immediate area. Facia boards on the Cowcross Street fronts bear the names in fake-old lettering of tradesman tenants found in nineteenth-century ratebooks. (The name Greedus on one is taken from Philip Gredus, pork butcher, at No. 9 in the 1841 census.) At the back is a lively brick tower with a slated spire, built in 1996–7 (Ill. 252), embellished with bulls' and cows' heads modelled and cast by Mark Merer and Lucy Glendenning.¹⁰⁴

…

Nos 17 and 18. Two small houses with shops. No. 17 was very likely built in 1781–2 for Edward Gunner, who had then recently acquired the property.¹⁰⁸ The architraves are a Victorian embellishment. No. 18, partly over White Horse Alley, was much reconstructed in 1886–7, by J. H. Bethell, architect-surveyor, probably replacing a beer shop, formerly the Green Man, which may have survived as a timber house till that date.¹⁰⁹

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South side

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Greenhill's Rents

Greenhill's Rents was laid out in 1733–5 by John Greenhill of St George Hanover Square, gentleman, later described as a merchant; thirty-nine 'good & substantial Brick Messuages' had been built there by 1745. The site was formerly occupied by an inn called the Castle, which may have been the forerunner of the present-day Hope public house, while the line of the street partly follows the line of an old passage called Three Tun Alley.¹²⁹ Formerly Yshaped, Greenhill's Rents lost its southern arm with the formation of Charterhouse Street.

On the north side are No. 1, a house of the later nineteenth century, now rendered, and the Smokery (see under Nos 78–85 Cowcross Street, above). At the end, next to the railway cutting, is No. 11, a well-preserved four-storey warehouse, with a hoist crane still present over loft doors. It is built of stock brick with voussoirs mixing brick and stone. The Metropolitan Railway leased the property in 1876, which may indicate the date of the building.¹³⁰

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^1. MBW Mins, 28 April 1865, p. 511; 4 Aug 1865, p. 957
^2. Barney Sloane and Gordon Malcolm, Excavations at the Priory of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Clerkenwell, London, 2004, pp.25–6
^3. Chris Ellmers, 'Clerkenwell: a study in urban growth, with special reference to the period 1590–1841', unpublished draft Ph.D. thesis, 1979, p.18
^4. Pinks, pp.338–40: Sonia Roberts, The Story of Islington, 1975, p. 124
^5. Sloane and Malcolm, p.88
^6. Ellmers, p.27
^7. Sloane and Malcolm, p. 138
^8. Ibid., p.275
^9. ODNB
^10. Pinks, p.339
^11. Ibid., p.340
^12. Pauline Burden, 'Marvell after Cambridge', in British Library Journal, 4, 1978, pp.45–6
^13. ODNB
^14. ILHC, Clerkenwell Vestry Mins, 25 Aug 1789, p.225
^15. LMA, MJ/SP/1797/07/023
^16. The Times, 10 Sept 1796, p.3c: LMA, MJ/SP/1795/ 10/041
^17. Gillian Darley, John Soane, An Accidental Romantic, 1999, pp.73–4: Alec Forshaw and Theo Bergström, Smithfield Past and Present, 1990 edn, pp. 158–60
^18. B, 28 Oct 1865, p.772: City Press, 23 Nov 1867
^19. LMA, MR/L/SP/043
^20. Cromwell, p. 174
^21. Pinks, pp.304–5
^22. GL Print Room, cat. no. p5371416
^23. LMA, MJ/SP/1791/01/049
^24. The Times, 7 Jan 1848, p.7b
^25. LMA, Acc/1876/MP1/175C
^26. LMA, MR/B/C/1802/415: LMA, Acc/1876/MP1/175C
^27. The Times, 5 Oct 1829, p.2e
^28. The Times, 7 Jan 1848, p.7b
^29. Chris Pickford, Bedfordshire Clock and Watchmakers 1352–1880, 1991, p.291: John B. Penfold, The Clockmakers of Cumberland, 1977, p.153
^30. Camden Local Studies & Archive Centre, trade card in Heal Collection, 118.18
^31. Geoffrey Beard and Christopher Gilbert (eds), Dictionary of English Furniture Makers 1660–1840, 1986, p.328
^32. The Times, 17 July 1790, p. 1b
^33. M.H. Port (ed.), The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches, 1986, p.108
^34. LMA, MJ/SP/1769/10/090; MJ/SP/1769/A/020: www.oldbaileyonline.org
^35. The Times, 7 Jan 1801, p.3d
^36. POD
^37. The Times, 11 June 1844, p.5e
^38. ODNB
^39. TNA, SP16/345/92
^40. Clerkenwell News, 24 April 1861
^41. B, 26 July 1862, p. 531
^42. Clerkenwell News, 24 April 1861
^43. B, 21 Dec 1850, p. 609
^44. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1861–2, vol. I, p. 174
^45. James Greenwood, 'London Courts and Alleys', in In Strange Company; being the experiences of a Roving Correspondent, 2nd edn, 1874
^46. B, 21 Dec 1850, p. 609
^47. B, 12 March 1853, pp. 161–2
^48. Ibid.
^49. B, 2 Jan 1864, p. 9
^50. B, 7 May 1870, p. 370
^51. MBW Mins, 1873–7
^52. Walter Besant, London: North of the Thames, 1911, p. 470
^53. B, 25 Aug 1855, p. 398
^54. POD: Illustrated Times, 29 Aug 1863
^55. POD
^56. The Times, 6 Sept 1873, p. 1b
^57. BL, Evanion Collection of Ephemera, Evan. 9071
^58. POD
^59. R. Spink, DBC: The Story of the Danish Bacon Company 1902–1977, 1977
^60. DSR: POD: B, 1 Jan 1881, p. 32
^61. The Times, 2 Dec 1931, p. 5e
^62. DSR: MDR: RB: POD
^63. ILHC, Report of Medical Officer of Health, Finsbury, 1936, pp. 119–120 (in cuttings L1.7)
^64. B, 6 May 1865, p. 324; 19 May 1866, p. 359
^65. The Times, 11 Aug 1876, p. 5d; 12 Aug 1876, p. 9f: DSR
^66. IBC
^67. B, 26 June 1880, p. 807
^68. Robert Opie, Sweet Memories, 1988, p. 60
^69. POD: GLC/AR/BR/7/070205
^70. B, 19 July 1879, p. 817
^71. David Taylor, 'Connectivity and Movement', in Peter Neal (ed.), Urban Villages and the Making of Communities, 2003, pp. 102, 106: Town and Country Planning, March 2004, p. 175
^72. IBC: www.epr.co.uk
^73. MDR 1773/4/354
^74. MDR 1777/2/302: GL, MS 9110/23; MS 8674/114; MS 11936/216: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/EE/017936
^75. GL, MS 11936/341
^76. TNA, J90/1244: H. D. G. Holt, Sir Felix Booth, 1963
^77. ODNB
^78. Lord Kinross, The Kindred Spirit: A History of Gin and of the House of Booth, 1959, p. 82
^79. LMA, Tanqueray Gordon Collection, Booth's Distillery Ltd, Directors' Minute Book 1897–1904
^80. Ibid.: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/070205
^81. LMA, Tanqueray Gordon Collection, Booth's Distillery Ltd, Directors' Minute Book 1897–1904
^82. B, 17 Aug 1901, p. 157: Kinross, p. 82
^83. LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/070205: Academy Architecture, 1901, p. 48
^84. Architectural Review, May 1904, pp. 206–14: LMA, Tanqueray Gordon Collection, Booth's Distillery Ltd, Directors' Minute Book 1897–1904
^85. Architectural Review, May 1904, p. 213
^86. Kinross, p. 78
^87. LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/017936
^88. IBC
^89. Ibid.
^90. Ibid.
^91. Ibid.
^92. B, 24 Jan 1874, p. 80: DSR
^93. IBC
^94. Ibid.
^95. Ibid.
^96. Ibid.
^97. Ibid.
^98. LMA, MR/PLT/2371–2: MDR 1776/4/192
^99. LMA, MR/PLT/2367: MDR 1776/4/192
^100. LMA, MR/PLT/2367–2413: MDR 1776/4/247
^101. Census
^102. LMA, MR/PLT/2367–9: MDR 1782/3/330: IBC
^103. LMA, MR/PLT/2386–7: MDR 1786/6/434: IBC: Census
^104. Information from Hazlitts Ltd: www.gusalexanderarchitects.com
^105. DSR: MBW Mins, 22 Nov 1878, p.693
^106. IBC: The Times, 17 April 2007, p. 76: information kindly supplied by Paul Cooke
^107. B, 27 April 1867 p. 300: TNA, IR58/43018/248
^108. LMA, MR/PLT/2367–9
^109. B, 25 Dec 1886, p. 934
^110. IBC: www.epr.co.uk, 2 Feb 2007
^111. B, 13 Sept 1879, p. 1037: BN, 12 Sept 1879, p. 330: DSR
^112. B, 28 May 1864 p. 403: Census of 1871
^113. The Times, 5 May 1860, p. 4a; 1 July 1897, p. 3a
^114. IBC
^115. B, 28 Oct 1865, p. 772 (tender): City Press, 23 Nov 1867: ILHC, cuttings
^116. GL, MS 11551
^117. The Times, 30 Dec 1870, p. 9e
^118. DSR
^119. IBC
^120. Ibid.
^121. Ibid.
^122. David Braithwaite, Building in the Blood: The Story of Dove Brothers of Islington 1781–1981, 1981: DSR
^123. DSR
^124. Ibid.
^125. IBC
^126. ILHC, cuttings L 1.7: IBC: City Recorder, 26 Sept 1991
^127. DSR
^128. RB
^129. MDR 1733/1/470–2; 1735/1/206; 1745/1/108, 114: Ogilby & Morgan's map (1676)
^130. TNA, IR 58/43019/3780
^131. IBC