No 41. Beside the Devil's Acre
For the last eleven years of my government service, I worked for the Department for Transport (DfT) in Great Minister House (GMH), overlooking Horseferry Road, a dreary thoroughfare. At my previous department I'd once enjoyed a view of the river, so this was a comedown. But in London, nowhere is truly dull.
Rise and Fall of the Horse Ferry
There are many blue plaques in the City of Westminster showing where the famous once lived or worked, but in Horseferry Road, there are none. If your idea of history is the doings and sayings of monarchs and politicians or the output of renowned artists and literary figures, then there is little for you on the fiddler's elbow between Strutton Ground and Millbank. During the coronation of George IV in 1821, Horseferry Road was the place allocated the attending peers to park their carriages, but that’s about it. It’s proximity to Parliament and the Abbey makes its own history pale.
Horseferry Road is there because the Archbishop of Canterbury needed a crossing between his Lambeth Palace home and the Royal Palaces in Westminster. Anyone could hire a waterman to row them across the river, but they were unable to carry horses, wagons and coaches, so a little south of where Lambeth Bridge stands today, the horse ferry was established. This large raft became a convenient alternative to London Bridge. The earliest documentary evidence of it is from the early 16th Century but anecdotally, it may have existed before London Bridge was first erected in stone in 1176. Horseferry Road was the most practical route between palace and ferry. Westminster Bridge opened in 1750, dealing the ferry a mortal blow, but it struggled on until the first Lambeth Bridge opened in 1862.
Hansom Cabs and Omnibuses
In 1760 buildings and market gardens lined the north side of Horseferry Road, but the land now occupied by GMH was part of Tothill Fields at the edge of Westminster. The Tot Hill was a mound bearing a beacon, apparently located where the iron urinal stands in Regency Place.
Until the mid-1930s, the land occupied by GMH and the northernmost block of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ chequerboard flats on Page Street was a maze of business premises. From the 1840s until 1902 it was dominated by Broadwood & Sons piano factory, which had a large saw mill at its heart. A report of its burning down in 1856, lamented that ’only’ 200 pianos had been saved, giving some indication of its scale. An 1896 plan shows the rebuilt factory, alongside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office on the corner with Marsham Street, devoted to the destruction of old forms. An Army & Navy Stores warehouse lay to the west, next to the recently constructed Coroner’s Court.
It's perhaps fitting that GMH should have become the home of the DfT, given the area has such a rich transport heritage. The complex of buildings and yards, included the stables necessary to accommodate the horses on which Victorian cities relied. From those yards, Hansom cabs rattled over the cobbles and out into the teeming streets to ply their trade. Horse buses had stables here along with some of the coach-builders who created their vehicles.
Censuses show that many local inhabitants pursued occupations associated with transport, including cab and omnibus proprietors and drivers, carpenters, and carmen, who were the lorry-drivers of their day. By the 20th century the buildings facing Page Street hosted fledgling companies associated with motor buses and motor cars and the London General Omnibus Company was based nearby.
In 1870 the first recorded bicycle crime took place where Strutton Ground joins Horseferry Road. Alfred Jupp was charged with ‘riding a velocipede furiously to the common danger’. He was accused, along with other ‘roughs,’ of ‘recklessly riding about and obstructing the crossing, persons having to wait some time to avoid being knocked down by bicycles’.
The largest business in the area from 1812 until after the Second World War was the Gas Light & Coke Company, the office frontage of which was on Horseferry Road. Westminster gasworks occupied most of the block where the Home Office building stands, spreading over Monck Street. It was a centre of innovation in gas purification and the source of the first municipal gas lighting in London. Westminster Bridge was lit up first and Buckingham Palace benefited shortly afterwards. The atmospheric glow of a couple of thousand gas standards may still be appreciated in Green Park, Constitution Hill and around Parliament.
Public House Dramas
The White Horse & Bower pub originally stood slightly away from the road, the ‘bower’ by now being a shaded tea garden. Before the Coroner’s Court was built, inquests into suspicious deaths were often held in the pub. Both the White Horse (1830) and the Barley Mow (1835) were Georgian, but rebuilt on a larger scale in the early 20th Century. Many other pubs once stood on Horseferry Road. Where it meets Great Peter Street and Strutton Ground stood The Rifleman. Where the London Scottish Regiment is based, was The Ship. The Old King’s Head stood on the corner with Marsham Street at the end of a terrace of shops that ran along the eastern perimeter of the gas works. On a corner just east of St John’s Gardens stood the Duke of Clarence and facing Lambeth Bridge, for those needing a stiff drink before braving the ferry, there was a pub on each corner, the Brown Bear to the north and the White Hart to the south.
Pubs usually have their dramas. In 1892, Henry Whittenbury, the landlord of the Duke of Clarence, crept into the resident potman George Matthews’ room and attempted to cut his throat with a razor. After a fierce and bloody struggle, Whittenbury ran off and told a horrified policeman that he had cut off a man’s head. It was an exaggeration. Matthews was still alive, having bandaged his own wounds, and though understandably shaken, he was disinclined to press charges. Whittenbury was diagnosed as suffering from delirium tremens, a symptom of which is confusion brought on by withdrawal from alcohol – the 'DTs’. Sadly, Matthews died in hospital a few days later, but rather than being hanged for murder, Whittenbury was acquitted. Doctors confirmed that the injuries he'd inflicted on his potman had been too superficial to have caused his death. Matthews had also been suffering from delirium tremens, and that is what was thought to have killed him.
One Monday evening in 1898, outside the Barley Mow a group from the Salvation Army began to sing and preach to those entering and leaving it. After half an hour of this, Henry Gill, the landlord, went out and asked them to shut up and go away, but their captain, Harry Spicer, refused. Gill sent for a constable who was reticent about arresting someone from the Salvation Army, but eventually the matter found its way to court. Spicer’s counsel asked whether Gill would have been bothered had it been a barrel organist or a German 'oompah' band, both common street entertainments at the time. Gill insisted that he would, for it wasn’t about religion or morality, but about his business being disturbed. The magistrate and defence counsel had the following exchange:
M: ‘Will they undertake not to go there again?’
DC: ‘I’m afraid I cannot give any undertaking of that sort. As a matter of principle the Salvationists think they were entitled to stay’
M: ‘Then as a matter of principle they will have to pay 40 shillings and 2 shillings costs or go to prison for one month.’
Harry Spicer refused to allow his friends pay the fine, preferring to spend a month in prison.
The Devil’s Acre
With business premises along one side, Horseferry Road was a thriving community and a lot of people lived there - too many. The section of the road occupied today by the Peabody Trust buildings, was covered in squalid tenements, often with single rooms occupied by large families. These insanitary hovels were part of the slum area around Old Pye Street and Perkins Rents, dubbed ‘The Devil’s Acre,’ described by Charles Dickens in Household Words as "the most deplorable manifestation of human wretchedness and depravity."
They were ripe for redevelopment, because having such squalor so close to Parliament and Westminster Abbey was reputationally embarrassing. A century of newspaper stories testify that Horseferry Road was rife with drunkenness and petty crime. Much of the alcohol that fuelled this misbehaviour was manufactured there. At the Lambeth Bridge end, Thornes Westminster Brewery and the Millbank Distillery, employed many locals.
At the other end of Horseferry Road a row of Georgian shops survives. It once featured stalls, sharing much of the atmosphere of Strutton Ground. On the site occupied by Channel 4, the Westminster Wesleyan College trained teachers, but during the Great War it was taken over by the Australian Government as a London base for ANZAC soldiers on leave. A short film made by an Australian soldier in 1917 captures the flavour of the street, including stalls, ANZAC soldiers, and a throng of youngsters fascinated by the camera, their co-operation secured by the distribution of toffees. The film ends outside the Catholic Church facing Regency Place, which was destroyed during the Second World War.
The ruins of that church feature prominently in the unusual and touching 1958 film Innocent Sinners, which centred on a young girl’s desire to escape from her miserable reality by creating a garden in the rubble. The famous urinal in Regency Place can be seen in the background in a few scenes and the Royal Oak is also recognisable.
Phyllis Pearsall, who mapped the streets for the first A to Z of London, mentions the urinal in the introduction to her book, From Bedsitter to Household Name. She worked from one of the Astral House flats in Regency Place and recounted borrowing a hand barrow from the nearby Royal Oak, to deliver her first order for 1250 copies to WH Smith in 1936.
The Great Flood
The area's squalor, and its proximity to the highest offices of state and church, prompted many suggestions for ‘improvements’, most of which involved sweeping away the homes of the poor without alternative arrangements or recompense. They were considered part of the problem rather than as the people who kept everything going. There were many objections for this reason, but also because many Londoners did not wish to see the area changed forever. The extension of the Embankment swept away a great number of picturesque, but squalid wharves, including Horseferry Wharf, replacing them with Victoria Tower Gardens. Few trusted the authorities not to permit the space to be built upon as soon as a lucrative enough offer came along.
In January 1928 the Thames itself was to change the neighbourhood forever. The area had always been susceptible to flooding. In 1822 the river had overwhelmed the wharves and rushed down into the streets, flooding the market gardens along the north side of Horseferry Road. In 1928, the river burst its banks again, flooding many parts of London. Horseferry Road and the surrounding streets were suddenly under several feet of water again, and because the area was densely populated, with many inhabiting basements, people died. Fourteen Londoners drowned in the flood, half of them in this neighbourhood. Trapped in the basement of No 1 Horseferry Road, seventeen-year-old Harry Sears drowned, five more died in Grosvenor Road (now Millbank), and another in Vincent Street.
Ever Changing
By 1937, the labyrinth of buildings and yards that had once dominated Horseferry Road had been demolished and GMH's predecessor, Great Westminster House, was under construction. For years it was the headquarters of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, shared in its early days with the Salvage Department of the Ministry of Supply. The interior, including an Art Deco foyer appears in the 1983 film We Think the World of You starring Alan Bates and Gary Oldman. The exterior can be seen in the 1939 film Q Planes. Starring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Valerie Hobson.
Nearby, the Westminster Hospital grew around St John’s Gardens having relocated from Broad Sanctuary in 1939. Former Prime Minister Clement Attlee died there in 1963. It closed in 1994. The gasworks site became the site of a large government building named Marsham Towers in 1971, but it was demolished in the 1990s to make way for the current Home Office building.
Today, civil servants still dominate the area, but as London becomes a 'heritage' theme park, the creep of hotels and luxury apartments is likely to change the nature of Horseferry Road once again.
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