London's Street of Stories & Myths (4K)

how are you all how you all doing i'm just um on the hunt of a very special location at the very beginning of the walk i don't normally jump straight into it like this it's all i mean a little bit of a preamble isn't there but we're bang on the scent of something rather special i'm coming through the grounds of the london school of economics the famous lse and i'm coming along some clements lane which is a very old part of the street plan i'm looking for the site of a holy well as you do just here at aldrich just off of holmen actually looks like st clement clements lane seems to come to a dead end i believe since clements lane continues or once continued down there and i think it runs into the back of the royal courts of justice so no passing through there on a whimsy stroll i think we have to take this part here which uh is now i think the continuation of sin clements lane but it's been rerouted from its original medieval route so the plan for today is to pick up the trail of the city of london churches but we're going to start just right outside the western edge of the city in fact we're going to start where was once the western gate of the city of london and taking a number of really interesting locations as we progress along fleet street one of the most famous streets in the whole of britain and there's so much to talk about along the way obviously we won't do the entire history of fleet street we will keep our focus but we'll pick up a few of those really really important locations and uh yeah this is a very special walk today may not be a very long walk but wow there's not many miles you can walk in this country that are packed with so much history and so many stories maybe the royal mile in edinburgh perhaps is a good but it's anyway it's i'm not gonna rank it it's a great walk though okay first church it's just down here so here is the magnificent st clement danes church today it's known as the royal air force church it was adopted by the royal air force after the war when it was rebuilt in the 1950s but it's said that there's been a church on this site since the 9th century of course it has a very evocative name saint clement danes there are various stories about where the name saint clement danes comes from it's associated with the danes i.e the vikings the two most popular stories are number one that this was an area here aldwich that the danes colonized in the ninth century and they built a church simple as that the hole in that theory is said to be the fact that old witch is an old english name so you would thought if the danes colonized it they would have given it a danish name a viking name so that's seen to be slightly less plausible the more favored story is is that after alfred the great defeated the danish army in the 9th century that they were forced to convert to christianity this much we know and that he ordered them to build a church on this site which they dedicated to the patron saint of mariners being a seafaring folk st clement is the patron state of mariners there are two most popular theories there are others that all relate to the danes either being someday being killed and then building up a church to remember them by there's one where a bunch of unarmed danes were slaughtered near this spot um when they were come to palais or maybe even come to worship and they were killed on this spot and so a church was built and named after them there's lots of theories either way they're all very evocative and they all place this spot here in the in the so-called dark ages in the ancient history of london positioned between the city of london and the royal palaces of westminster and it really sets the tone for our walk today i did mention a holy well didn't i and also i've seen the doors open over there so i've got to go through it [Music] they've done an incredible job of the restoration of this church because the church has been rebuilt a number of times it was first rebuilt by um william the conqueror in the 11th century and then it was rebuilt again in the middle ages um and then it was rebuilt again by sir christopher wren i think 1682 so there was a red church that was here until the second world war and it was completely gutted during the blitz and it was rebuilt again in 1958 but if you were to just walk inside that church you would be i think you might think you were in the original ren church we started this video looking for a holy well i think there's an indicator here and a little bit about the story so this uh iron here this iron plaque marks the point where there was a well sunk 191 feet deep beneath this point to access the water i don't think that's the holy well there actually this was uh erected by the the um church wardens in 1807. the holy well that was here from the middle ages i believe is now underneath the uh the royal the royal uh law courts over there all courts of justice and it said that the holy world was a stopping off point for the canterbury pilgrims on their way to canterbury you know the pilgrims of chaucer's canterbury tales and here's a statue to someone who's uh very closely associated with the territory or about to walk through samuel johnson dr johnson considered to be the greatest man of letters in the english language of course the author of the first english dictionary who just decided to write it himself and asked people what they thought certain words meant and wrote it down i prefer the depiction of dr johnson in black adder if you haven't seen it there's bound to be a clip on youtube look it up it's hilarious but very significant figure incredibly significant figure [Music] and here we have the royal courts of justice this is home to the high court and the court of appeal it's a really quite magnificent late victorian building i think it was built in the 1880s so despite its medieval appearance it's only about 140 years old but it's a magnificent building inside i've been in there on two occasions [Music] this stone pillar here in the middle of the street marks the point of the old temple bar the western entrance to the city of london according to legend the monarch had to ask permission to pass beyond this point this was the only place that the monarch could enter the city of london and the lord mayor would have to come out and present them with a ceremonial sword from which they could then proceed into the city of london the original temple bar was removed and taken to an estate in hertfordshire i think it's been returned now just behind some paul's cathedral in paternoster square and a lot of buses along here it's interesting that one of the reasons they are said to have removed the old temple bar the old gate basically built for like horses and carts at most and mostly foot traffic or people on horses or pushing carts along of course by the time you got the more you got busier and the carriages got bigger it created massive congestion and there are images of all the congestion caused by the very narrow gate so i think it may have been an example of an early road widening scheme rather than any kind of symbolic removal of the uh of the old gate i could be wrong about that like i could be wrong about a lot of things so we're now in fleet street which is heavily associated with the newspaper industry with the british press in fact it's still used as a kind of collective term to talk about the the press we talk about the fleet street press don't we although i don't think there are any newspapers left in fleet street actually there might be one i think the catholic church's newspaper is still here i think it's called the tabard or something isn't it i'm sure somebody will know in the comments below and the idea of printing associated with this street goes back to 1500 when william caxton opened the first printing press in britain in uh in fleet street oh one of the first known william caxton's the person we attribute with printing and that was just up here in shoe lane actually just slightly off each street and the first newspapers opened here in the late 17th century i think in the 1680s they were the first newspapers that were based in fleet street and that tradition carried on right until 1986 and a certain uh rupert murdoch decided to break the print unions by moving his newspapers east to whopping led to a massive industrial dispute that went on for ages but it succeeded in breaking that link between fleet street and the press now pretty much every building in fleet street has a story has a very epic story a significant story and it would be impossible to cover it all so we're going to pick out a few choice things a two few choice features that relate to the theme of our walk being a walk amongst the city churches we've got some dungeons in the west coming up we've got the temple church coming up we should try and find the spot of the sweeney todd's barber shop where he committed his dastardly murders this is the magnificent dunstans in the west to distinguish it from dunstan's in the east and for some reason i'm not sure why this church seems to be the hub of the origin myths of london so just there above or behind releasing dunstan's famous clock you'll see two strange looking statues that that hit the bell that beat the bell chime out the bells from dunstan's in the west and they are now said to represent gog and magog but originally gog magog was just one person was a giant gog magog and gog magog is a curious character intrinsically linked to the origin myths of britain and the origin myth of london there are various accounts of this story but i'll give you a kind of potted condensed combined story gog magog was descended from albina albina possibly along with her sisters was exiled from somewhere in the classical world could be uh troy could be greece could be somewhere even further afield and she was sent to britain for doing something wrong upsetting her father for some reason and she basically gave birth oh look there they are i see them hitting the bell goggle magog heard me saying their name um so albina gave birth to a race of giants i hope you're following me so far and britain then at that point was completely populated by a race of giants did they build stonehenge according to this timeline they arrived afterwards but that's not complicated so you've got a race of giants and then you get brutus the trojan now bruce's the trojan is the offspring of anaes from the trojan wars a great hero and he accidentally killed his parents in most versions of the story and so he's exiled either from troy or from italy where enes went to live after the trojan wars hope you're following this so brutus then wanders around looking for somewhere to settle he's got a band of trojan warriors with him he goes to france where he gets involved in a mighty battle he slaughters a warrior there and founds the city of tours but he has to keep moving new places new lands to conquer new people to slaughter so he arrives in a place that is um settled by alba the isle of albion albers isle was known as albion so brutus arrives on this island completely populated by giants which he sets about slaughtering until there is just one giant left gog magog the mightiest of all the giants of albion they get involved in an almighty battle between brutus's best warrior uh how do you pronounce his name corinnaeus i think it is corinneis i'll put the name on the screen and he gets involved in a mighty battle with gog magog finally throwing gog mcgoff off a cliff i think this happens in cornwall and then coronaeus settles that land known as cornwall which i think was originally called cornwallis wasn't it that's what i got from the last kingdom then brutus can then claim britain has his own and becomes the first king of britain and makes london his capital he settles london and forms the capital of britain in london a great origin myth that we should teach in every school there are however a couple of other statues in the porch of some dancers in the west sadly we can't get in there at the moment it's been restored but they tell a different story so in the porch of that church it's all right mate carry on in the porch of that church over there are some dunces in the west just beneath gog and magog should be gog gog magod and coronaeus are three statues and they're 14th century statues that once sat atop the lud gate on ludgate hill and they're of king ludd and his two sons and king ludd is also attributed with establishing london giving it its name ludden london kind of works doesn't it so you can either have brutus establishing uh london or you can have king ludd establishing london maybe there's a story that includes them both those stories do both come from jeffrey of mum for monmouth's book so i don't know how he reconciles that that was quite a breathless retelling of a very long story with multiple different versions um i hope you forgive me if it wasn't necessarily the most coherent retelling of that story but that's true behind those statues up there in that church [Music] here we are stood outside for the bankers number 37 fleet street established in 1672 making it one of the older banks if not the oldest banks in london still in operation great old school kind of tailors here and this is where you can get your wig and gown when you get called to the bar just uh how much is it 700 pounds they've got it on special offer 660. one of the best things about walking along fleet street are all these little kind of courts and places just off the street here we have hair place just down there usually the offices of uh legal chambers is still the center of the the legal profession in london and next to her place is the famous el vino wine bar and this is where all the all the journalists used to drink famously gk chesterton used to drink in here never actually been in elvina not a massive wine drinker so we are really just focusing on on the south side of fleet street here and you really could do a video on either side and we're not even covering everything on this side of the street so i'll have to find a way to incorporate the north side of fleet street in a future video my god look at this playdoh court you see they're everywhere these little distractions urging you to wander off the street which we should do once we've been to the temple and of course i haven't mentioned the obvious thing that clearly fleet street takes its name from the river fleet which runs along the bottom of the street we'll get to that shortly and you can feel already that we're passing down into a river valley we are now going down the hill so as i stand at the top of boovery street i feel like i should give credit to this wonderful book london compendium by ed glinner i've been carrying this book around for nearly 20 years when did it come out i don't know but i've had it in my bag since about 2002 and he says something about boo boo street which i will look up we also have these fleet street heritage plaques here that tell us actually the first printing press was set up in 1480 not by william caxton by winkin de word it's a good name isn't it i think he worked with caxton though in 1480 in shoelane offline street there you go and other printers followed so i managed to walk past the entrance from fleet street into the temple because i want to go to the temple church and i know the church is closed today but that gate's normally open but it was closed so i'm a little bit concerned we might not be able to get in so we're gonna have to go down here down play-doh street and hopefully i think there is a side entrance into the into the inner temple or certainly i think we'll be the middle temple in the temple can never tell the difference so here we've got temple court which apparently is a is a luxury hotel now wonder what they did with all the old retired barristers and judges who used to live here but um that could give us an entrance into the temple let's give it a go looks like we are in luck this will take us to the inner temple which is one of the most fascinating and mysterious places in the whole of london isn't this magnificent it's a real slice of old london in fact it's such a real slice of old london it's often used for filming along with lincoln's in to represent georgian and victorian london and these buildings here are mostly barristers chambers legal chambers people do live here retired judges live in the temple as the name would suggest this land here was once owned by the knights templar the knights templar of legend and law who uh used to protect the pilgrims going to the holy land in jerusalem and they became incredibly wealthy and influential very quickly and they bought a big chunk of land here significantly outside of the city of london they didn't want any interference from the city of london maybe the city of london wouldn't accept them something like that anyway so it became almost like a rival power base which they set up here and they became too powerful too influential and the various monarchs and the nobles and the lords of europe got together and got the pope to ban the knights templar and there was famously a big crackdown on them wasn't there i think is that one explanation for friday the 13th did it happen on friday the 13th have i got that confused with something else anyway by the early 14th century the knights templar were forced to give over all their land to their rivals the order of saint john so the orders and john took over this land here and they were the ones that set up the legal establishment here but the great legacy of the templars is to be found through here the temple church [Music] and here it is temple church built sometime between 1160 and 1185 when it was consecrated by the patriarch of jerusalem it was built by the knights templar to be a model of the church of the holy sepulchre in jerusalem so it was known as a piece of jerusalem in london for people that couldn't make a pilgrimage to the holy land this is the closest they could get they could come to this church and it would be a little piece of jerusalem here in london it's where the knights templar were initiated into the order this is where the initiation rights took place it's also where the punishments took place as well there was a cell here where they would be locked if they fell foul of the knights templar sometimes being starved to death inside the church which unfortunately we can't go into today i don't think there are some templar burials and there's some effigies where you have the effigy of the night on top of the tomb they're really quite startling well worth a look if you can get down here of course temple church is made famous by dan brown by playing a significant role in his novel the da vinci code and what i thought was really interesting is once i came through here about 15 16 years ago and they were doing a talk in here about the da vinci code and the role of the temple church and the templars in that story so they were completely embracing that mythology perpetuated and i imagine that's slightly embellished by dan brown for his story of course dan brown took a lot of that stuff from um or had sourced let's just say a non-fiction book called the holy blood and the holy grail which i think sort of popularized a lot of the myths around the knights templar rather than being a group of sort of um kind of warrior monks who got incredibly rich and just basically went into property and banking and but they laid on all this other kind of mythology and uh what's interesting is there was a legal case between the authors of the holy blood and the holy grail and dan brown which played out just over the road in the royal courts of justice so it all came back to this spot here [Music] this is pump court [Music] these are the cloisters [Music] so this is middle temple hall a magnificent medieval building i think it dates from at least the 1500s it's said that this is where shakespeare's 12th night was first performed possibly by shakespeare's own company it really is a magnificent building this really is such a magical beautiful peaceful little slice of london here hoisted away between fleet street and the thames and amongst all the legal chambers you've got wonderful little remnants and vestiges such as this building here this is a a buttery that was built sometime before 1515. his fig tree court adjoined it and it was destroyed in the great fire of london then it was rebuilt and it was destroyed again during the blitz in 1940 this little remnant of the buttery remains so we're going to pass through that gate there into tudor street and back into the contemporary world from this little time capsule here i really love walking through the temple it's got such a magical feel to it particularly for someone like me whose sense of history is partly informed by things like the hobbit and black adder and such like that place makes it all kind of kind of quite feel quite real um there's one more place i really want to show you last we still got a semblance of light it's uh it's getting it's getting dark now it's getting gloomy which is the perfect time to go to this final site um which is sort of a holy well a sight of pagan worship i mean do i need to say more what i will say though is this area we're walking through here between the temple the thames and the river fleet was known as alsacia alsacia alsacia as in alsace the disputed territory between france and germany because this at one point was a lawless land where there was no real legal authority sat between the uh the influence of the westminster and the royalty and the influence of the city of london and this became a place where you could seek refuge from uh prosecution a bit like the liberties of holborn i'm not sure this was technically a liberty but it was certainly an area of outlaws that uh fell into that kind of use after it was abandoned by the rural palace bridewell was abandoned by edward vi turning into um a workhouse we'll we'll deal with that when we get there and so this became a really lawless area amongst the outlaws to hide here though was daniel defoe who walking down fleet street saw a notice calling for his arrest with quite an accurate description of himself so he crossed the street came to alsacia where he knew he couldn't be reached and prosecuted and after that apparently that became the name for areas that were a bit dodgy and a bit rough and a bit lawless became like it became known as alsacia i'm probably saying that wrong i know someone will correct me in the comments and uh you might see parallels the fact that it's this area of alsacia where really the printing presses the fleet street printing presses later became based so maybe there's a maybe there's a resonance there so we're going to go up white fryers street here which i guess must have been the name of a friary because on the other side of farringdon road on the other side of the river fleet you have black friars black friars the black flower pub and the black friars monastery i feel like we can't ignore hanging sword alley i don't hold out great hope for where it may lead it's bringing us to the backs of some office buildings here i think this one on the right is called fleet bank house there you go there's a name that tells you the story of an area but just above the top of this building here we can see the magnificent spire of some bride's church which is the next church on our tour of city of london churches and some brides avenue will take us to the magnificent some brides church [Music] surprises a really magical little church isn't it they claim that there's been worship on this site for 2 000 years there's roman remains that were found here that may have been associated with worship or may have been a burial strike they're not sure but they also believed that it was a site of pagan worship as well and then a very early christian community was established here the first church was built in the anglo-saxon period there's a little remnant of the wall down there which you can see in the crypt beautiful little museum in the crypt there and then there was later the danes built a church here and there were continuous churches built on this site i think it says there were eight churches built on this site and christopher wren added that magnificent spy that became a great spire ian sinclair writes about how i think it was in the 80s that you could just climb that spot it was a side door that was always open you could just go up there and get these magnificent magnificent views of the entire city it's a really magical place it's known as the journalist church because it was where well okay because it's on fleet street but it was also where caxton moved his press here i think in in the 1500s it's a really magical beautiful little spot now i did read some time ago i think it's in my book old baths wells and springs of london or springs baths and worlds of old london the septimus sunderland book that there was a a holy well on this site there's a location somewhere behind the church so we'll go around the back there see if we can find any remnant of it it may have been dedicated to some brigid or some uh some bridget some brigade who was the celtic goddess of healing i think of healing and childbirth that was originally worshipped here according to ed glenn at that little nugget about some bridget here's another little nugget that may or may not be true apparently the traditional shape of a wedding cake now the multi-tiered wedding cake comes from the steeple here ren steeple because there was a baker in the lane laneway here who used that as a design for a wedding cake that caught on true or not true will we ever know right we're just going to go down this little alleyway here to see if we can find the site of an old very important palace that stood beside the banks of the river fleet the old bell pub any of you used to drink in there any good memories of the old bell looks like a fine boozer to me there's another fine looking part what's called the crown and sugar loaf i have drunk in most of the pubs along here so here we're just beneath the back of the church you can see brides and brides is up there so it's somewhere around here that you would place the holy well i don't think there's any sign of it anymore i have looked actually in the past but um when you're walking between holy wells i think you could take this as the as the site that's two isn't it in one walk it's not about going now basically i want to find a site that i can call the location of the old royal palace built by henry iii it must be here because i can see you can see farringdon road down the end there which would have been the river fleet so somewhere here was that original palace it's henry iii built a palace here right between the banks of the thames and the river fleet which is just another side of this building that way i've only just worked out it was called bride well palace it must have been from the well right the holy world that was here bride well surely that is bridget's world brigades well brigade as well am i clutching at straws there i think we should go down bride court don't you i think this could be a good place to capture the spirit of the old medieval palace so henry iii used to hold his court here at bridewell palace and then he was became abandoned became uh sort of a slightly um in ruins and it was renovated by henry viii for the visit of charles v in 1522 it was here at bridewell palace that henry viii negotiated his divorce from catherine of aragon he then passed it on to his son edward vi who gave it to the city of london to establish a kind of workhouse house of correction for the idol the strumpet and the vagabond it was then that area became known as a kind of lawless area alsatia but it's incredible to think of a really important palace here on this site i'm slightly using this arcade to give it a sense of structure a sense of building but it's very evocative and it's you get these stories everywhere around london you would never know there's no markings or anything to indicate that such a historic event as the divorce of henry the of henry viii and catherine of aragon was negotiated right here one room stood here or i'm sure people take a cheeky wee after a few too many pints in the old bell and here the albion pub the resonance of alba and the giants of albion live on to this very day there's no leading behind our mythology we still have an awful lot of the city churches still to visit today it was more about quality rather than quantity a street of stories so many amazing stories and myths i love walking around here and i love telling you these stories i hope you enjoyed that magnificent walk well it's magnificent for me obviously you'll be the judge of whether it was magnificent for you i recommend going down into the comments section there will be some great comments people with memories of fleet street of working there people with all the historical stuff that i've missed out we'll have to come back and do the other side weren't we of um the other side of fleet street and then got fetter lane shoe lane this kind of links in with my little italy video which i'll link below along with my river fleet video which i'll link below and the other city of london church's videos i'm not sure there'll be another video before new year so i'd love to take this opportunity to wish you a very happy new year and an amazing year ahead i feel really optimistic about the year ahead and they'll certainly be loads more great walks to share with you take care all the best and as ever i look forward to seeing you on the next walk wherever that may be and actually i don't have a clue [Music] you

Channel: John Rogers

Views: 720,835

Keywords: London, This Other London, psychogeography, london walks, london travel, John Rogers, John Rogers walks, 4K video, hiking, London travel guide, London walking tour, London walk, walking trail, London walking tour 4K, Olympus OM-D EM-1 mark 2, Temple Church, Fleet Street, churches, history, London history

Id: Ybped7HmCbM

Length: 36min 10sec (2170 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 27 2021