London has many biblical links – from both Old and New Testaments – reflected in the names of geographic areas, places of worship and many local institutions. Within six degrees of separation this posting will travel from the prophetess Deborah to the River Jordan drawing its themes solely from the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible). The New Testament provides very little challenge if we add up repetitions of the names Jesus and Mary and the Saints.
There’s also a kind of theme within a theme in this posting. Running all the way through, you will find water. Here, for instance, is Babylon. The Israelites, during their 50 years of exile in the 6th century BC, sang of their longing for Zion ‘by the rivers of Babylon’.
From the 12th century London itself had been referred to, in part or whole, as ‘Babylon’. In medieval London it was used to describe a small – and I am imagining quite unsavoury – area near the London wall.
By the 18th and 19th centuries all London was referred to as both Babylon and Babel – a centre of empire and a city of diverse tongues. Immigrants, foreign merchants, overseas sailors and refugees would certainly have confounded through their many languages.
By the turn of the 20th century it was merely the East End, ‘the city of dreadful night’, that was most often referred to as a ‘modern Babylon’. However, we begin this posting properly with two wise women.
Deborah
The Israelite Judge Deborah (12th century BC) was represented as the new Queen Elizabeth during her coronation pageant on 14th January 1559. Deborah herself was from the tribe of Ephraim, a real Judge (in the biblical context) and an advocate of Israelite independence within Canaan.
Queen Elizabeth I. Image courtesy of NPG
Tradition says Deborah judged wisely for 40 years and as both a Judge, and a saviour of Israel (England’s enemy Spain was represented by Canaan) the coronation pageant embodied the virtues of Deborah within the young Elizabeth. At the time this may have been more in hope and anticipation than concrete evidence but Queen Elizabeth went on to reign for 44 years, rather successfully. The London link is clear, but the water? In 1533 Princess Elizabeth was born to Queen Anne Boleyn within Greenwich Palace, built on the banks of the River Thames.
Jacob’s Island
If you took a boat from Greenwich Palace, and steered it towards central London, just before Tower Bridge on the Surrey side of the River Thames you come to Bermondsey. It’s here, on a stretch of river known as the Upper Pool that the River Neckinger once flowed freely into the Thames.At the mouth of the (now culverted) Neckinger stood St Saviours Dock, used in pre-Dissolution times by the monks of Bermondsey Abbey. By the early nineteenth century the area to it’s immediate east was known as Jacob’s Island.
Jacob's Island, circa 1840. Shown here is Folly Ditch near Mill Street.
Jacob’s Island was a nastier than usual slum, most infamous both for carrying cholera and being a refuge for criminals. The biblical Jacob was father to the twelve Tribes of Israel. Who Jacob was in this London context, no record seems to show. But why was it especially an ‘island’?
At high tide the waters flowed into a ditch – Folly’s Ditch – isolating this tiny Venice of vice from the rest of London, and its forces of law and order. In ‘Oliver Twist’ Charles Dickens placed Bill Sykes’s home and death scene in this squalid bog.
During the latter half of the 19th century the slum was cleared (and drained) and wharves, mills and warehousing rose above the newer residences. Nowadays, these former hives of industry have been converted into homes for the wealthy. But older, local residential streets still remain, one of which goes by the name of Jacob Street.
Noah’s Ark
From the Neckinger, on the south bank of the Thames, to the City and the Walbrook on the north bank would have been no distance at all up until the late 1500′s. By this time the Walbrook had become no more than an unnavigable, polluted ditch and this small river, which originally flowed through Roman Londinium, had more or less ceased to exist.
The Walbrook’s source lay no higher than Shoreditch, before flowing through a hole in London Wall at Moorfields (the wall brook). It found the Thames between today’s Southwark and London Bridge.
Mansion House today - Minus Noahs Ark
Present day street Walbrook lies a few yards east of the Walbrook’s original course, next to Mansion House, official residence of the Lord Mayor of London. Built by George Dance the Elder between 1739-52 on the site of the old open air Stocks Market, Mansion House was a grand palladian, erm, mansion house in the popular style.
On its roof Dance built, what can only be described as, protuberances; extensions if you like, which were nicknamed ‘The Mayor’s Nest’ and ‘Noah’s Ark’. Dance added them to raise the height of the various public rooms within.
George Dance’s son, George Dance the Younger, removed Noah’s Ark in 1794, when he in turn roofed over the courtyard, creating integral high ceilinged rooms. The ‘Mayor’s Nest’ also eventually went, in 1842.
Temple
Old Temple Church
Half a mile to the west of Walbrook lies Temple. Along Temple’s southern perimeter runs Victoria Embankment.
Until this mid-19th century construct, Temple ran down to the bank of the Thames from its northern boundary at Fleet Street.
The name Temple derives from the lands’ original owners, a French crusade era holy order of knights called ‘Poor Fellow Soldiers of Christ and of The Temple of Solomon’ or more commonly ‘Knights of the Temple of Solomon of Jerusalem’; conveniently shortened to Knights Templar.
Within this compound they built the New Temple Church in 1162 (still standing) and the Great House in 1185. Answerable only to the Pope they developed great wealth and power by protecting pilgrims en route to The Holy Land and less piously, through banking and property.
The Knights Templar were dissolved in 1312, having been accused of blasphemy, heresy and sodomy. Temple was given by King Edward II to the Knights Hospitaller (Order of St John of Jerusalem) who in turn leased the land to lawyers.
Henry VIII
Henry VIII seized the land for himself during the Dissolution. James I however returned the land to lawyers creating the Middle Temple and Inner Temple. Today, lawyers or law students living in Temple are still known as Templars.
Jerusalem Tavern
Running slightly to the east of Temple lay the mouth of the River Fleet (some of it even having been reclaimed for land by the Knights Templar). Rising in Hampstead Heath the river flowed through Kentish Town, Camden Town, Clerkenwell and Farringdon until it met the north bank of the Thames near today’s Blackfriars Bridge.
Although the river’s source can still (just) be traced, it is now almost fully culverted and out of sight up to its modern day outlet, which also functions as a storm drain.
The Jerusalem Tavern today
One street to the east of where Farringdon Road crosses Clerkenwell Road is Turnmill Street, the name itself a testament to the pre-industrial working methods practiced along this lower stretch of the river. One street further to the east lies Britton Street, and it is in Britton Street that we find the Jerusalem Tavern. There had been Jerusalem Taverns in Clerkenwell for centuries, due to the presence and influence of the nearby Priory of St John (of Jerusalem). Britton Street now houses the last remaining Jerusalem Tavern, occupying a building that dates from the streets foundation in the 1720′s. The tavern had previously been a merchants house and a clockmakers.
John Britton
Until 1936 the street was formerly known as Red Lion Street. To distinguish it from other streets of the same name it was re-named after John Britton (1771-1857), the noted antiquarian and geographical writer who had originally been apprenticed to his wine merchant uncle in the street. Britton later recorded his memories of the ‘damp, murky cellars’, presumably the consequences of bad drainage and the seeping waters of the Fleet.
River Jordan
St. Pancras station
Our sixth and final ‘degree’ leads us to where the Fleet now flows under Kings Cross, and meets the eastern end of the Euston Road. As the Euston Road heads west past St Pancras Station it forms the southern boundary of Somers Town.
Named after the Somers family who had owned the land from the late 1600′s Somers Town is bordered in the north by Crowndale Road and in the west by Euston Station. The construction of London’s northern relief road, the New Road (now the Euston Road) in 1757, created a defined border separating Somers Town from Bloomsbury.
From the late 1700′s Somers Town developed as an urban expansion of the metropolis, attracting the labouring classes, sizable numbers of French escapees from revolutionary France and later Spanish emigres.
The communities of Somers Town acknowledging the wide, roaring demarcation separating them from the more established areas to the south called Euston Road ‘the River Jordan’.
As Somers Town’s inhabitants would have known, the River Jordan of the Hebrew Bible was a boundary crossed by Jacob from Canaan to Haran, a border between Israelite tribes and a crossing for the Israelite armies of Gideon and King David.
The Bible also regarded the River Jordan as something sacred and holy. For those stuck in the traffic jams of today’s Euston Road, perhaps it’s only profane and blasphemous thoughts that occupy the minds of the trapped motorist.
I hope you have enjoyed traveling around biblical London with me. Please leave any comments or feedback you have regarding this, or any of the other ’6 Degrees of London Separation’ posts.
