The House by the Thames (15 page)

Large-scale trading indeed – though not as large as it was to become on that site in the following century. A steam-engine was installed by Thrale in 1770 to raise the water for his works that had previously been raised by a horse-powered treadmill. This was replaced again twenty years later by a more elaborate steam-piston engine, made by the great James Watt and his partner Boulton, but by then Mr Thrale and his mad ambition were dead and gone. Very corpulent, he collapsed with apoplexy in 1780. Mrs Thrale set to work in the counting house herself to sort the business out, helped by Thrale's executors: these included a cousin, an illegitimate son, John Cator of Bankside who was now an MP – and Dr Johnson. A contemporary description has the great man himself, ‘bustling about, with an ink horn and pen in his buttonhole, like an exciseman'. Evidently the romance of the new commercialism had captivated even him, for when asked by a prospective buyer for his estimate of the real value of the brewery, he famously answered: ‘ “Sir, we are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” ' Mrs Thrale commented in her journal:

‘Johnson … desires above all other good the accumulation of new ideas [and] is but too happy with his present employment … difficult to win him from the dirty delight of seeing his name in a new character flaming away at the bottom of bonds and leases.'

I daresay that much of the same delight was felt by others, who, in that propitious era, were beginning to build big fortunes by trading in basic commodities – others such as the brewery Charringtons, their cousins the coal-merchant Charringtons, the Horne family and indeed the Sells.

Mrs Thrale, who wanted only to dispose of the business profitably, was delighted when she received through the offices of John Perkins, the brewery manager who had seen off the Gordon Rioters, an offer from ‘a knot of rich Quakers'. They paid £135,000. The first Thrale had got it early in the century for £30,000, so even though Mrs Thrale suspected that Perkins was in cahoots with the Quakers (the Barclay family) to ensure his own future, she was satisfied with the deal. She was now free to retreat into ‘peace and a stable fortune, restoration to my original rank in life' – in which she married an Italian music master and lived to eighty far from Bankside. The brewery, briefly renamed the Anchor Brewery, became Barclay Perkins by the 1790s, though local people long went on calling it ‘Thrale's'. For the whole of the next century it was one of the sights of London and was visited by generations of respectful foreigners, often ladies, who have left fervent descriptions of its vats, boilers, grain chutes, huge output, sweating muscular employees and scores of equally muscular dray-horses.

Although, with the rise of the Victorian temperance movement, the amount of beer drunk by the working classes would come to be seen as an evil in its own right, in the late eighteenth century this counted as a good old English habit, much preferable to gin-drinking. It could even be seen as central to England's increasing influence throughout the world and to the founding of her empire. A Southwark worthy – Concannen – wrote in 1795:

‘
Thrale's intire
is well-known as a delicious beverage, from the frozen regions of Russia to the burning sands of Bengal and Sumatra … It refreshes the brave soldiers who are fighting the battles of their country in Germany [what were to become the Napoleonic Wars had begun for Britain in 1793], and animates with new ardour and activity the colonists of
Sierra Leone
and Botany Bay.'

As the brewery expanded further, it came to dominate a whole stretch of Bankside, swallowing in the process burial ground, almshouses, remains of Tudor houses and the sites of the old theatres. (Mrs Thrale thought she had seen the last of the Globe demolished to allow more light into their house. In fact, these ‘ruins of Palmyra', as the family christened them, seem more likely, from their position, to have been those of the last Bear Garden, which may have gone on with furtive bear- and dog-fighting activities almost to the time when Mrs Thrale arrived on the scene in 1762.)

The brewery was still flourishing in the first half of the twentieth century, but shrank into a bottling plant in the 1960s. It shut at last c.1980. Today, flats and offices cover the site. But the Anchor pub, discreetly rebuilt but not much changed in appearance since the seventeenth century, still sits on the river at Bankend and once again attracts crowds of drinkers on fine summer evenings.

On such evenings two hundred and fifty years ago where did the Bankside bourgeoisie go? Apart from taking evening walks on the bridges to ward off typhoid fever, what did they do for entertainment, the Sells, the Cators, the Shalletts, the Astells, John Perkins and all the others who were turning the Surrey shore to good account? Today, we are so accustomed to the post-William Morris concept of places being degraded by ‘the spreading of the hideous town' that it takes a conscious adjustment to realise that dingy urbanisation was not uniformly spread – and that that was not, in any case, quite how the eighteenth century saw the matter. In the middle decades of the century at any rate, the influence of new commerce was perceived as bringing with it a desirable civilisation and gentrification to the rural backlands of Southwark.

St George's Fields, a large and puddly common heath immediately south-west of the Borough, had long been a popular place for early morning duck-shooting, duels, assignations and also for large assemblies of people. The rowdy late-summer Fair there that Hogarth had painted was suppressed in 1756. Mineral springs, that enthusiastic preoccupation of the period, were ‘discovered' among the pools. The old Dog and Duck tavern
⁵
turned itself into a Spa, complete with breakfast room, bowling green, a tea-garden and a Long Room with music and dancing. Even Mrs Thrale was not above recommending the waters for health. The fact that so many people were prepared to believe in the special properties of waters from the spas, which were now dotted plentifully round the fringes of the great city, is probably an indication of just how polluted many other London water supplies were, including that produced by the Thrales's own engine from the river.

A few years later another place of resort, Finch's Grotto, opened near by in the grounds of a former country house. Apparently aiming at a slightly more exclusive clientele than the Dog and Duck, it boasted
more
supposed medical springs, garden walks, evening concerts and other delights including ‘A Lodge of Free-Masons and a Club composed of the most respectable persons in the vicinity'. Excerpts from Mr Finch's handbills for his Grotto over the years tell their own tale of how the St George's Fields area was developing. In the 1760s the ‘coach road' was said to be by Blackman's Street (an old name for the Borough High Street), while ‘Such Gentlemen and Ladies as chuse to come by water, will please to observe that Mason stairs' [very near 49 Bankside, with a way through to the Gravel Lane] ‘are nearest to the Gardens.' But by the '70s, when Blackfriars Bridge and ‘Great Surrey Street' leading from it (today's Blackfriars Bridge Road) were established, cutting across the old lanes, the publicity could make reference to the coach routes being ‘from Westminster and Blackfriars Bridges'. This meant that these bridges, though widely separated on the shore-line by the curve of the river, now had new south-bank turnpike roads linking them and also picking up the old main road from Southwark. The central point where these roads met was on St George's Fields: an obelisk marked the spot at the time, and now does once again today (St George's Circus). Thus a whole new district, suitably drained, would become ripe for the building of new streets of houses.

This fairly soon began to happen for, forty years after the last building boom had petered out at the end of the 1720s, another one was under way. Finch's Grotto did not even last a generation, dying with its owner in 1777. Perhaps the nearby opening of a white lead manufactory, among other works, did not encourage any new proprietor. The site has ended up today just on the western side of Southwark Bridge Road, at the bend in the road immediately south of the junction with the much older Great Guildford Street – the one-time Bandy Leg Walk. It was bought by the St Saviour's Vestry to build a new workhouse, ‘spacious and convenient', to accommodate four hundred people, at a much-disputed cost of £5,000.

Other, more prestigious new constructions in the ‘classical' style soon arrived in Great Surrey Street. An octagonal chapel was built there for the popular Nonconformist preacher Rowland Hill. In 1788 a rather similar building appeared, the Rotunda, built to house natural history specimens, then very fashionable objects as the world opened ever wider. Some of these specimens had allegedly been brought back from Australia by Captain Cook. Eighteen years later the deteriorating remnants were auctioned off and the Rotunda, renamed the Surrey Institute, was used for lectures on the sciences. Later again, less improvingly, it became a place for concerts and general entertainments.
⁶

But the real drama of change going on under the eyes of those who lived on Bankside in the late eighteenth century was connected with the central business of living, and the grandest building in Great Surrey Street was a temple to steam. It was the type of industrial architecture that was now creating a new world in the north of England, but it was a novelty in London and much admired by some as a sign of Progress. This was the Albion Flour Mills, designed by Samuel Wyatt and equipped by Rennie with the latest in steam-powered rotary machinery. It could grind far more wheat, night and day, than the wind- and water-powered mills that were still in general use: millers all round London and the south-east were alarmed, seeing the future and not liking it. However, the mill was in business only four or five years before a fire destroyed it in 1791. It was widely rumoured that arson was involved, though Wyatt and Rennie themselves thought that badly lubricated machinery was to blame. At any rate, local millers rejoiced, and are said to have been seen dancing on Blackfriars Bridge in the light of the flames.

It does not seem to say much for Progress that the Mills' blackened, roofless walls stood for eighteen years before they were pulled down. Albion Terrace was erected on the front of the site, using some of the façade, with Rennie's workshops at the back. During part of the time the Mills stood ruinous, William Blake was living not far away in what was still – just – known as Lambeth Marsh. There, in ‘lovely Lambeth' that ‘mourned Jerusalem', his visionary view of the world around him began to cohere. He passed by the shell of the Mills every time he walked into the City, and one may believe that it was this sight, rather than any general acquaintance with England's new manufacturing towns, that was the inspiration for his ‘dark satanic mills'.
⁷

By the end of the century, the growing perception that Progress came at a price was being voiced by a number of Southwark inhabitants, notably by Concannen and Morgan, the authors of
The History and Antiquities of the Parish of St Saviour's, Southwark
. Their comments on Potts Vinegar Manufactory show this ambivalence. Vinegar, which uses the waste matter from brewing, had long been made in the Borough, but in 1790 two families already in the trade combined to open a much bigger works near the south-west end of the Anchor Brewery: ‘The alterations made by these gentlemen can hardly come under the denomination of an improvement only, a total change having taken place by entire new erections and apparatus for the purposes of manufacture, which is now deemed to be the most extensive and convenient of the kind in England.'

They also noted that near St Saviour's Church, where the Bishop's palace had once had a riverside view, were now a range of buildings right on the waterfront: Fell's Flower Wharf, Keen and Smither's Coal Wharf, Lingard and Sadler's Mustard Manufactory, Calvert's Corn Wharf, and several more including a dyeworks. The Mustard works in fact had built a gantry over narrow Clink Street to the remains of the old palace, which had been built into the walls of their warehouse. Some twenty years later a fire destroyed the warehouse, exposing the surviving late-medieval and Tudor stonework to the gaze of local people, who were just beginning to develop a greater interest in relics of the past. Without this providential fire, all vestiges of the palace would probably have been swept away in further rebuilding. As to Bankside itself, Concannen gives up on detail, but his message is clear:

‘This spot presents us with so great a variation from the ancient situation which history relates it to have been in, that we are almost at a loss how to introduce the subject …' He then launches into the praise for the brewery and for ‘Thrale's intire' quoted earlier.

He is, however, at his most eloquent on the subject of street paving, that issue of the time which provided for endless arguments in Vestry meetings about cost, need and rate-payers' money. Some efforts had been made by Parliament to get Southwark properly paved and lighted in the 1760s, but the Paving Act that specifically related to the Clink Liberty (the parish of St Saviour's) did not come in till 1786. It is not clear how well implemented it was:

‘Before the passing of this act of Parliament the Clink liberty merited all that opprobrium with which even those who were acquainted with it beheld it. It was supplied with something like light, watched by subscription; the variety and ill state of the pavement and the inconvenience it was to passengers is almost inconceivable; it is now improving, and though the progress is far from rapid, it is yet considerable and the benefit resulting to Society is evident …' While some of the new lamps (which would have been oil-lamps) were ‘numerous, and tolerably brilliant', others were ‘dismal and dirty' . There are obscure but meaning-laden references to ‘duty' and ‘the business of everyone attended to by no one' and the passage ends with the pious hope that ‘future writers [will] record improvements'.