Palace, Park and Square: St James's and the Birth of the West End - Simon Thurley CBE

well good evening and I'm very pleased to be giving my next two lectures in my Gresham series about specific London buildings and the impact that they had on the development of London as a whole and today I'm going to start with talking about in specific since James's Palace and it might be just worth saying a couple of words of why I've been thinking about some James's Palace I've been asked by the by the Royal Collection to write a history of the building and unlike many of the other royal palaces which I've been quite familiar since James's never had a great sort of nineteenth-century antiquarian history of it and as a consequence I've been starting from scratch and I've been thinking a lot about Weiss and James is important why it's significant so that's my my starting point this evening and I want to start by showing you this map which illustrates the piece of land that I want to talk about and tonight this is a piece of land that covers the whole of Westminster Pimlico Hyde Park Mayfair st. James's and Covent Garden and you'll see from this map that the whole area was divided from very early on into two separate manners there was the manor of Westminster which was to the east at the river Tyburn this is the Tyburn here this is a tributary of the Tyburn the Taipan comes down here into the Thames so the the manor of Westminster and on the other side was the manor of I and the manner of I lay between the Tyburn and the river Westbourne there so these two separate manors and originally the amount of land in these manners that was owned by the crown was actually extremely small it really comprised the area round Westminster Palace and a small area up for the royal mews where the royal and horses were work was stabled and this map here just really makes that point here is the end clave the royal end clave at westminster palace the muse is here this Square and we're here just above Charing Cross and that was really the extent of royal ownership well the destruction of Westminster Palace down here by a huge pyre in 1512 really robbed the English monarchy of its headquarters and it left it without a residential base in Westminster but of course the fall of Cardinal Wolsey in 1529 and the appropriation of his Westminster mansion here York place gave Henry the eighth's the opportunity to reestablish a royal presence in Westminster and of course not content with acquiring Woolsey's York place the king purchased a huge amount of private land adjoining the new Palace of Whitehall as it became to extend its buildings and it's gardens and this really was a lot of land in this area here that belonged to private individuals who had their properties assessed and then in the language of today compulsorily purchased to the north of what became Whitehall palace there was more land bought a square of land known as Scotland which became Scotland Yard here and to the north of that a hospital the hospital of st. Mary runcible here and as a result and it's shown very nicely here on the the map that's generally known as a gas you can see the property that was acquired by Henry the 8th to fashion his new palace I mean it's a very very large area really running from so 10 Downing streets here Richmond House Terrace here the whole of this area really were more or less up to and Charing Cross itself now this involved the recent complex series of land transactions that were actually masterminded by Thomas Cromwell because of course Thomas Cromwell started off first of all as Woolsey's land agent and then moved on to be Henry the eighth's land agent of course later on he becomes his chief minister and everything else and it was the work of Cromwell that really gives the English monarchy this large new royal palace in Westminster and in an act of parliament in 1536 Henry the eighth's formally extends the legal boundaries of the old abandoned a Palace of Westminster to cover Whitehall and they're therefore in legal sense the whole of this area here becomes in English law the Royal Palace of Westminster the principal Palace of the realm now at this point the part of London which we now know as st. James's was still open countryside so we've been talking about the area down here this cross here is Weston James's Palace is and this is the area today I think we would probably call em st. James's south of of Piccadilly and really because it was in the middle of nowhere in the Middle Ages it was chosen as the location of one of Westminster's two leper hospitals so there was a leper Hospital up here some Giles is and a leper Hospital here at Sand James's the hospital its chapel and the lodgings for its master attached to it were always I think to a greater or lesser extent in the orbit of Westminster Palace several Royal Clark's rented it and lived in the residential parts and in the 15th century there its bishops and royal ministers lived there by the reign of Henry the eighth there was actually a comfortable mansion at Sand James's and the hospital Church wasn't full of lepers don't imagine any lepers there in time of Henry the eight that weren't any it actually was a fashionable place to go and worship for the wit richer and residents of Westminster it also had a good endowment it owned a hundred and sixty acres of land in its immediate environs down here which is Nelson James's Park and so when the Henry the eighth brought the hospital and the land and annexed them to Whitehall he essentially acquired for himself a nother house now if you look at royal houses back into the Middle Ages most of the larger houses had subsidiary houses to which the king could withdraw with a small number of companions and have her sort of private time so a big house like Woodstock in Oxfordshire had a satellite house called Langley about a half an hour's ride away where the king could retreat to and Greenwich had a subsidiary house out at once Ted and Richmond palace had a subsidiary house at hand worth as they're looking at st. James's in its relationship to Whitehall was this perhaps intended to be a satellite house to Whitehall or given the circumstances of its creation it's designed essentially by Henry the 8th and Anne Boleyn together was this designed to be a New London residence for the Queen's consort of England to replace their historic residence at Bernard Castle or was it intended to become the nursery house for the air that Anne was to bear the king so it would be like the relationship between Greenwich and Eltham Elton was a place where the Royal children were kept Greenwich was the place where the sovereign and his consort lived well as we shall see st. James's did in fact become the official nursery house for the royal family and the home of successive print Princess of Wales and I really have no doubt that this was the original intention and a few a few months ago I was sound like a massive name drop I was talking to the Queen and I pointed out to her that it was rather remarkable that actually some james's is still the home of the Prince of Wales because of course Prince Charles lives in Clarence house which is actually just a part of some James's Palace well this palace was to be a handsome thing it was basically two courtyards one here and one behind it here of the residential rooms for the royal family and an outer court here leading to a gatehouse and this is the gatehouse that still survives at the end of James's Street and it wasn't a very big house whose a fraction of the size of Whitehall or more Hampton Court but of course it was designed to be the house of the heir to the throne who had a very small household and as a sort of child's house if you like it needed much less accommodation than the big houses so Henry the eighth's grand conception for Westminster embraced the sovereigns own house on the river side and a linked but entirely separate residence on the other side of a park for his son and heir but Henry the eighth's Westminster was not just about buildings because in a separate process but one that further consolidated royal power over Westminster was the transfer of the manorial rights of the abbot of Westminster from the abbot to the crown and the crown created a meander the eighth created an appointee who would be in charge of the manor of Westminster and that person was given the title the High Steward of Westminster and so in order to retain control of all the land in Westminster round the Royal Palaces this High Steward post was always held by the most senior people at court and quite often the most senior ministers of the crown so the first holder of the High Steward post was santa need any who was Henry the eighth's keeper of Westminster Palace he was the man basically who was in charge of all the royal buildings and in Westminster but under Elizabeth the stewardship was held by William Cecil Lord / Burleigh who of course was her chief minister and under James the first it was held by Robert Earl of Salisbury and then and then after that George Villiers Duke of Buckingham in other words the two most important men in James the First's caught the men who controlled England through their prime ministership but also most importantly also controlled Westminster and Lord Burleigh introduced into Westminster's government a board of elected local officials in 1585 in the form of a court of Burgesses and to these people report passed the responsibilities for controlling housing sanitation highways and other sort of matters of local government which these high-ranking officers of the crown could leave behind and in that wonderful charming way that institutions set up in the 16th century lasted forever and ever that Court of burgesses really remained the government of Westminster until 1901 which is quite extraordinary now in 1584 there was an act of parliament concerning Westminster doesn't matter what the act was but its preamble very neatly and succinctly sums up the character of Westminster as it was established by the Tudors and I'll just quote from the preamble the preamble calls Westminster the seat of royalty the receipt of the nobles and the state of the Honorable Council the sanctuary of all justices the place of the show of all the nobles and ambassadors coming from foreign parts it was the place where it all happened and this was a place quite unlike the old medieval Palace of Westminster the old palace was extremely urban it was tucked in it was squeezed in between Westminster Abbey and the river and surrounded by the urban Ville of Westminster but the new palace was to have its own hunting parks now known as sand James's Park Green Park Hyde Park and in fact Regents Park and beyond that it was set in a vast land holding of some 3,000 acres now these land transactions the land transactions necessary to create this massive 3,000 acre land holding were managed by Thomas Cromwell and he essentially created a vast new de mean for the new Westminster Palace north of the Thames so this is the plan you've seen before first of all after acquiring the land from actually was Eton College who actually were that owned the the leper Hospital at Sand James's he acquires all this land up here this land belongs to a variety of ecclesiastical bodies 60 acres came from Abingdon abbey 42 acres came from the hospital of Burton Lazar the Mercer's company owned about 86 acres Westminster Abbey over 180 acres Eton College I've already mentioned and to this were added various parcels of land from st. martin-in-the-fields and st. Margaret's Westminster and as I've already mentioned from run civil hospital and various other private individuals and so essentially the crown acquires in the manor of Westminster this northern part all the land south of Oxford Street and and which is here east of Bond Street and west of st. Martins Lane and added to this was another parcel of land acquired from Westminster which was the convent garden here now Covent Garden so all this land is acquired by Henry the Eighth now other than perhaps safeguarding the springs and conduit heads that provided water to the Royal Palaces which was situated here and the pipes ran down here to give water at the Royal Palaces Henry the Eighth didn't have any real interest in keeping these lands in hand and so soon after their acquisition they were all granted out on leases of varying lengths and this very large tenant it land holding here became known as the Bailiwick of since James now the Bailiwick was not the full extent of Henry the eighth's acquisitions because as well as obtaining much but actually not quite all of the manor of Westminster between 1531 and 1536 he also acquired most of the manor of I to its west and this was a very large area covering some 1090 acres 482 acres here north of Piccadilly and 608 acres here south of Piccadilly down to the River Thames now we know that the way that Thomas Cromwell acquired all these lands was by sending out and surveyors to make detailed surveys of the land he was acquiring so that the lawyers could be very specific about what was transferred into Crown hands but unfortunately all of those maps are now long lost and so if we want to reconstruct the detail of what it was that Henry the Eighth actually acquired we have to rely on later topographical information and in this respect the early history of Westminster is remarkably well served so let's start with the map we've already looked at extremely well-known you'll all be familiar with it this is the copper plate map normally known as a gas which of course shows this is the far edge of the map which shows the end of Westminster Abbey the old Westminster Palace Whitehall and we just get a tiny tiny clip of the lands that Henry the eighth acquired this area here that became James's Park and the area going off from Charing Cross but if we really want to get a view of what was acquired our starting point has to be the map that was drawn by the surveyor Richard knew Court and he conducted a survey of London and its suburbs in the 1640s possibly in connection with Parliament's defense of the city against royalist forces and of course the area we're now going to look at is we're going to look at this square down here and what this map does it gives us an incredibly good impression of Westminster at the end of the Stuart period but to be honest with you the details are really very problematic his depiction of the royal residents of st. James's and I'll show you a detail of it in a moment is completely made up it's a complete and utter fantasy we also know that he made up a whole lot of houses and Gardens here this end West End us at James's Park which never existed and Whitehall and Westminster themselves depicted here can only really quite charitably be described as being diagrammatic but he does show us some very important points so first of all he shows us extremely clearly since James's Park so James's Park was walled by Henry the eighth by a wall that was 1.7 miles long built rapidly in 1532 to three and access to this park was originally through only two places the first was through an agate from white old palace itself so that the king could lead the palace and go and see his park and the other way was through the gatehouse that still survives from the bottom of since James's Street instant James's Palace because and this is an extremely important point since James's Palace was inside since James's Park it wasn't outside it it was inside since James's Park and therefore that gatehouse the bottle versus James's was actually not only the entrance to the palace it was the entrance to the park itself and this is an extremely important point because it tells us that since James's Palace is part of this secure this sort of ring of Steel this secure area that Henry the eighth creates in order to provide a secure place for his son and heir of course he doesn't have a son of their wood with an Berlin but eventually and that J Edward the sixth takes up residence in James's Palace and the park wall appears in this equestrian portrait of Henry Prince of Wales when Henry was living in st. James's Palace and what we can see here and there were these wonderful Prince of Wales's feathers in little stone or terracotta plaques on the wall you can see it is a massive wall this is a really serious piece of security it was extremely difficult to get innocent James's Park unless he went in through one of the gates now Fay thorns map needs to be cross-referenced with another map of a very similar period it's a very remarkable thing it's a sketch map that's in the Bodley and library in Oxford now we don't know who drew this sheet showing Westminster but the sheet is glued onto a map of the city again dating from the early 1640s and the original map was printed and it's got a lovely title it was called the Countryman's or strangers ready help in him finding our streets lanes and places in London so the ready help has glued onto the end of it this bit here that shows st. James's and both these maps make a very important point and that is the extraordinary isolation of James's Palace isolated on the other side of the park but isolated in the bailiwick of sand James's which is actually almost completely unbuilt up it was crossed it was traversed by a road a road that dates from the Middle Ages which linked Charing Cross here with the hospital and then went on to the bridge that went over the river Tyburn the Knights bridge as in Knightsbridge and and went off went off West Henry the eighth built another road this roads and James is when units walk down it you were walking down a road that Henry the eighth laid out and he laid it out specifically to link the gatehouse it's and James's with the main east-west road which of course is now and Piccadilly and if we look at a detailed view of faith thorn we can see some of the details now this is the fantasy of some James's Palace I mean you know it didn't look really anything like that at all he's just put that in very diagrammatically but what we do see is the the t-junction of the roads and on the corner here again very diagrammatically shown this is a tennis court this is a tennis court built for prince henry of wales and used by and prince charles and beyond it this little house is the house of Charles the first father Cree and what isn't shown here is a walled garden which was a physic garden in which were grown the medicinal herbs which were prescribed to the various royal children who lived of course and close by now as for the rest of the land and all this land here of which there is a lot as you see when it was acquired it was mostly common fields although some of it had been enclosed Henry the eighth fully enclosed this bit here which is called James sorry it is this bit here which is called since James's field and he converted the arable land into med meadowland but he didn't really have much use for it himself and so it's all leased out now as a consequent of these leases in 1585 there's a dispute over the land boundaries between two of the tenants and the legal proceedings resulted in this plan and this plan essentially shows us the Bailiwick of some james down here isn't James's Palace this isn't James's field this is the Royal Mews Charing Cross here you've got st. Martin's Church here this is some Giles is up here and what you're looking at it are the fields divisions and the boundaries in in in the bailiwick so you've got an st. Martins Lane and here you've got Oxford Street up here and you've got quite a clear view of what this land was actually like now this whole bailiwick was granted in 1617 except the Royal Mews and James's Park it was granted to Prince Charles and he held the the lands in the bailiwick on a 99-year lease held by trustees for his benefit and to release value from this land Prince Charles's trustees were permitted to grant leases on it up to 31 years of duration and the bailiwick remained Charles's when he was King but in 1629 and this is an extremely important point which I'll come back to later in order to top up Henrietta Maria's dowry adjoint you Charles the first instructed his trustees to pass this baileywick from him to the Queen's trustees for her benefit and so all of this land ends up being the property of Henrietta Maria now this extraordinary level of detail that we have for the Bailiwick of since james's is replicated in another map related to another legal dispute oh sorry and this is a Surrey drawing a redrawing of it I should have shown you this before because it's a little bit clearer - you can see st. Martin's Church as the muse and James's field and we had these these big fields and James's field Sint Maartens field sent Giles his field and then we have the the land that's rented out by henrietta maria there's the second map i wanted to show you is this one this is a map essentially of the manor of i socint James's Park is here James's Palace is here Westminster Whitehall palace is here this is the River Thames this is Hyde Park and this is Knights bridge across here this is the Davis estate which would later become the Grosvenor Estate and it was drawn by lawyers in around 1665 but it's a copy of an earlier survey of the estate of 1614 and basically what it shows is the whole of the west side of Henry the eighth's Westminster lands as acquired from the abbot of Westminster and here is a redrawing of that so you can see it and clearly just to give you your view again this is James's Park and here and it shows very nicely what Henry the Eighth got for his money in the 1530s this is all essentially agricultural land but in the middle of it down here is a little manor called manner of a manner of eye this is the manor house and this was the private retreat of the abbot of Westminster Westminster Abbey's here where he could go less than a mile across here and he could retreat from the the Abbey in in privacy and this manner called land neat was acquired by Henry the 8th it was very comfortable house he used it quite a lot he the king and his courtiers would retreat from Whitehall but under Queen Elizabeth the first it was leased out and eventually it was sold by James the first in 1623 so down here you have a manor house and the original village of I was somewhere up here to the West End of st. James's Park where Buckingham Palace is so this is the site of Buckingham Palace and on this site in 1609 210 James the first as part of one of his sort of slightly Harebrained Schemes tried to set up a business for a domestic silk industry and what he does is he encloses four acres of land that is this square here to create a mulberry garden and he plants mulberry trees in it and this garden which is very approximately on the site of the south wing of Buckingham Palace today was quite a big investment for him it cost nearly a thousand pounds to wall it in and and plant the trees and it cost him four hundred and thirty-five pounds a year to run it I mean every year he was spending a hundred and twenty pounds on silkworms so we have the that we have this mulberry a garden here and then to the northern part here we have the manor of Hyde bought by under the eighth and 1536 and this was part of the hunting estate that the king established and he built a road linking linking that the the hunting park with woods and James's so he could conveniently take carts and and wagons there there was also a banqueting house which you can see on this map I'll show in a second and another version of it and this banqueting house was used by the tutors and the Stewart's after hunting expeditions in Hyde Park now what I've done is I've taken these all these historic maps and put them together for you this evening in is the first outing of this map ever I drew it specially for you it puts it all together so what you are looking at here is this extraordinary landholding assembled by Henry the eighth's the Thames here the the manor of I the mulberry garden James's Palace James's feels this other land in the bailiwick and the Royal Mews Scotland Yard Whitehall palace and Sint James's Park and I'll come back to this map number of occasions but this is a snapshot of the massive land holding that is created by Henry the 8th and of course at the center of all this isn't James's Park right at the centre and today I think it is still possible to get a sense of the topography of st. James's Park because of course what we're looking at here is the Thames Valley a series of gravel terraces that come down from the sort of heights of Hampstead down to the river itself and Piccadilly which is up here sits on one of those flat gravel terraces and as you come down from Piccadilly come down since James is you come down the slope steep slope to the next Terrace and on this Terrace is built since James's Palace and then there's another steep Terrace that you can see here in Kipps and perspective view you can still see it walking through some James's Park another Terrace that leads you down to the the the park itself and so that sense of James's Park being at the bottom of the series of hills is reinforced by all the water courses and this shows Charles the seconds canalization of the water courses but the park as a consequence was used by the Stewart's for wild fouling the very keen shooting dark and wild birds they also used it for shooting driven deer but it was also a sort of menagerie and every time as a sort of diplomatic gift the royal family were given some outlandish beasts it was put into some James's Park and so at one stage so James's Park and had two elephants four camels and various other things wandering around sort of at Will's so you've got a bit of a surprise sometimes and it had a very rural atmosphere very deliberately these Holly walls kept everybody out you can see this is of course a later view but even in the reign of William and Mary you can see how dense that the the build up had come but this is still at this rural Haven it was a favorite place for royal picnics of the strolls it was an intensely private estate Charles the first enforced regulations that restricted access to the park only through two gates one up here from Whitehall and the other here through st. James's indeed I think part of the purpose for purchasing all this land around Westminster was to preserve the environs of this royal and enclaves and a series of royal proclamations first issued in 1580 but repeated and reinforced many many times attempted to restrict the growth of London and the build-up of housing around Westminster although famously James the first had regarded the growth of London as an I quote a general nuisance to the whole kingdom and on the face of it royal proper Isle policy was to throttle the growth of London Charles the first in particular was happy to grant licenses to individual cronies of his to build in its environs and the most obvious example of this of course was the license given to the urn of Bedford to develop his residential estate in Covent Garden this was only allowed on the condition that the architecture was acceptable to the king and to the Royal surveyor of works and Inigo Jones so although the king really wanted to control development around Westminster he wasn't really particularly successful because there was a huge amount of unregulated building which attracted not only the sort of artisan and tradesman but attracted the poor and beggarly at the start of James the First's reign Westminster was a town of about six and a half thousand people and the surrounding parishes particularly since Martens contained perhaps another six thousand by the time the civil war broke out the population of the core of Westminster had increased by two hundred and fifty percent and the parish of st. martin-in-the-fields had grown by five hundred percent and had a population of about 17,000 people and so when you look at faith thorns map you can see this parish here absolutely full of people all pushing their way at the bailiwick of sand James's and of course old Westminster as well you know bursting at the gunnels with people wealthy courtiers obviously wanted to live in old Westminster near the palace and the Abbey but in Charles the first reign in particular they started to buy houses in the parish parish of Sint Maartens and it's been calculated not by me that between 1625 and 1640 one more than 750 people with claims to gentility of some sort settled in the parish in fact in 1640 there were twenty English peers 57 knights and fifty-one Squire all of whom were paying rates in this parish here this is not what Charles the first wanted his concern was to get these people the aristocracy in the gentry out of London to their country estates to do the job of governing the kingdom as was their duty but there were exceptions because during the 1630s Charles the first gave special permission to his close friends to build houses in the orbit of the Royal Palaces and we can see the most important ones of these on faith thorns map so the first one is this house here this is not part of the Royal Palace of San James's this is a private residence that is built right opposite the gate on royal bland it was built by a man called Sir Thomas Howard who was one of the horse-riding cronies of Henry Prince of Wales and who became in 1614 a master of the horse to Prince Charles he was one of the people who went for the Duke of Buckingham and Prince Charles to Spain on his sort of madcap trip in 1622 and some time in the 1620s he was given permission to build a large house here opposite actually the the riding house and stables of st. James's another house was licensed by Charles the first just here at the West End of st. James's Park this is goring house goring george goring Lord goring was a courtier and soldier much more importantly he was also vice Chamberlain to Henrietta Maria and he was Henrietta Maria's master of the horse and he spent a vast amount of money building a very magnificent house here and setting out these gardens around it again on former royal land a third huge mansion was built in the northern part of the bailiwick just here by Robert Sidney the 3rd Earl of Leicester this was Leicester house which of course eventually becomes Leicester Square etc he's a leading Caroline diplomat and he bought four acres of st. Martin's fields he was actually prohibited from building there by all these royal decrees and so in August 15 31 he actually acquires a physical license is the only license that I found these houses but the license entitles him and I quote to build a house with necessary outhouses buildings and gardens on the condition that the Front's and all the utter walls and windows of the premises be wholly made of brick and stone or one of them and the forefronts to be made in that uniform sort and order as may best beautify the place say what all this shows is that by the outbreak of the Civil War although they'd been a lot of building in old Westminster and the parish of Sint Maartens with the exception of a very small number of aristocratic mansions that had been licensed by the king some James's and the lands about it was still really more or less completely undeveloped so we have a few hours to pratik houses one two three it is another one there Nord new quarters here you have got land here that is pretty clear and so when we look at this wonderful drawing I we think by halle in the royal library we're standing sort of at the sort of West Fortnum and Mason's is roughly and we're looking down towards Westminster here's obviously Westminster Abbey here's Westminster Hall here's the bell tower in Westminster Whitehall palace is sort of over here this is some James's Park and here is that incredibly high wall I talked about and you can see here very very clearly the way that some James's Palace is inside the park to get into the park you have to go in through the gatehouse here to get into the park but all this land here apart from the old shed and things here and this conduit house that is channeling water down to Westminster and Whitehall it's completely undeveloped and there is the road running which is now Pal mal running from Charing Cross to knights British you can see it's completely unbuilt up but of course the Civil War made a big impact on all of this in 1642 and 1643 Parliament ordered the fortification of London the City of London was still walled it was ditched fortified with gates but of course Westminster was completely vulnerable and at first there were some sort of stand-alone defences little earthwork forts changes bars and chains across the roads but in 1643 when Parliament felt there was a real prospect the Charles the First's forces could make an assault on London it was resolved to construct a comprehensive defensive line around the city and its suburbs and here we have this brilliant a map to sketch by stutely in corpus christi college and you can see the way this great ring of Defense's was thrown round London this is of course as the city wall here but this and here is Westminster here is Kensington there and this is the son James's area here and this is actually not a very accurate map but it's quite a nice one because what it does is it shows the way that through this former Royal land in the manner of I the defences run up here run up and down to the West End of st. James's Park past past Knightsbridge here through the bailiwick of sand James's up through some choices and round through the north of London and the the defences were studded with these forts and there were at least three of these forts in the Bailiwick of Jameses and you can get some of this in in the street names a Mount Street in Mayfair is where one of these and one of these fortresses were so you can get a little bit of a good but actually nothing survives now and I put it on my special map this is the dotted line here this is where the line of Defense's went so you can see there's a very deliberate attempt here to protect some james's and the palace where of course the King's children were locked up at this point and and Westminster from a possible loyalist attack after the execution of Charles the first with London under military occupation all the large buildings around here were commandeered by the army so since James's becomes a barracks goring house becomes a barracks up here Leicester house right at the end of the the interregnum becomes a barracks the whole area just becomes a huge sort of military area land that was royal crown land that was kept in hand was sold off and so in facts and James's fields here was sold for nearly two thousand pounds to a man called Hugh Woodward and he had a plan to start building houses on it but in the 17th century as today there were many NIMBYs and the NIMBYs but petitioned Oliver Cromwell and Oliver Cromwell issued an edict stopping mr. Woodward from building his houses and it is for this reason that in 1660 when charles ii returned to the throne this area here was still unbuilt it was unbuilt i really for a couple of reasons the first reason is is because son James's field here which was open land had been since the 13th century the site of st. James's fair a particularly rowdy and drunken four-day booze event that took place on the eve of James's day and it was shut down obviously by Oliver Cromwell in 1651 but it was resumed in 1660 and to develop any of this area you had to really move the fair but the other but the reason why this area was undeveloped is because it was really part of this Royal Recreation Zone you didn't only have the tennis court here you had the pal mal and the pal mal was this long narrow alleyway made up of ground-up cockleshells rammed into the loam where were the sort of croquet mallet you wacked huge balls through hoops over a course about half a mile long and so it was only really with the ability of Charles a second to relocate the fair and to relocate the pal mal with its 140 lime trees that you could start thinking about the redevelopment of st. James's field and it was in this way that the possibility came for some james's to be built over at the restoration all Henrietta Maria's lands were restored to her so once again in 1660 Henrietta Maria owns the bailiwick of st. James's and she grants a major part of the bailiwick to Henri German Earl of sant albans now Henri German had entered Henrietta Maria's household in 1627 and he'd risen to be her favorite so much so that there was sort of gossip about their relationship but he thought with the king during the civil war and then went into exile with henrietta maria as her Lord Chamberlain and through the whole of the interregnum he was her absolute right-hand man and even rumours that after the King's death that they got married I mean it's not true but they were very very close and during this time of exile st. Albans had raised 647 416 pounds for the royalists cause partially to give money to the various failed attempts at restoration but also to maintain her household we're talking about something between 20 and 25 million pounds in modern-day money and in the process he hadn't concurred personally vast and debts and so at the restoration henrietta maria and charles ii owed since German Henri German and a huge debt and he was granted a huge number of properties he was given a big chunk of Virginia in America but he also got leases of the former royal houses of by fleet of Auckland and crucially he was given the Bailiwick of Sint James's in Westminster and it was as the owner of this land that German effectively founded the West End that we know today and as he did so he effectively brought into reality the dream that Charles the first had had the dream of creating an aristocratic quarter that complemented the royal estate of Westminster st. Albans explicitly stated that his new houses were for and I quote the conveniency of the nobility and the gentry who were to attend upon his Majesty's person and in Parliament the centerpiece was of course James's square based on the architecture laid out by James's but bought by Inigo Jones's and Jones at Covent Garden and of course all sand albans and Inigo Jones had known each other very well and he also commissioned Christopher Wren who he also knew very well and who he had shown around and Paris to build since James's church and so this is a map or chart drawn by Jonas more around 1660 - which was it originally intended to show the docks that map goes right over here but this bit here shows James's immediately at the restoration and you can see here this is the pal mal you can see here the the land which sent Albans begins to develop in the open fields and the inhabitants that he attracts were indeed the great and the good of the restoration you won't be able to read any of the names on this plan but these are the plots in st. James's Square and this is an aristocratic quarter it remains an aristocratic quarter four centuries after its founded before 1675 already in residence was Lord Bella says the Earl of Arlington by count Halifax Thomas German his son and the French ambassador Monsieur cotton and as the square was developed so also and here's the square were developed houses along at the other side of pal mal and these houses were also very much occupied by the aristocracy but they of course were built up against this extremely high Park wall that we've met before and what's interesting about these houses is that as you see all of them have these quite big gardens that go to the back of the walls and almost every single one of these houses built what we know is a mount in other words a very large pile of earth on which they could stand and look over the wall and see what is going on in that their royal gardens so the creme de la creme of rest restoration society including famously the King's mistress Nell Gwyn who lives here had these houses which were deliberately trying to get themselves as close as possible to the royal family and of course at the same time what happens is that we've seen this one before that James Duke of York the heir to the throne takes up residence in James's Palace this was no sort of dingy backwater this was the center of another glittering court and the residents of the new West End now lived in it's bright light and reflected its bright light back at it now ladies and gentlemen it's often said not least by me that in the development of London the crown played a very slim role but I think in the birth of the West End we can see that really from the time of Henry the eighth monarchs were absolutely determined that they controlled the land around Westminster this was for security and the civil war makes very clear point about that it was for hygiene it was for law and order but I think most importantly of all it was for dignity monarchs from Henry the 8th to Charles the second wanted to dignify their royal palace by an aristocratic quarter that surrounded it and I think it is perhaps a supreme irony that in the end it was the civil war that gave the opportunity for this to happen thus bringing a royal dream finally to life thank you very much [Applause] you [Applause]

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 17,601

Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, simon thurley, built environment, architecture, palace, park, St James's, west end, london, Hyde Park, La Hyde, mayfair, The Field of Eye, Belgravia, Pimlico, Vill of Eye, The Field of Westminster, The Field of St James, Tothill Fields, St James's Park

Id: IpPYjE7Sv4Q

Length: 55min 7sec (3307 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018