For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

The Shock of the Old (29.09.13)

Nothing quite prepares you for the experience: you’ve enjoyed a pre-theatre drink looking across the Thames at Wren’s masterpiece, itself a view not seen outside any other London venue.

Entering a bland modern foyer and milling around, it has the same buzz of anticipation all theatre audiences experience before curtain up.

The usher examines your ticket as you approach the auditorium, if that is the right word, and you enter one of London’s most amazing spaces.

A perfect circle about 100ft in diameter gives an immediate sense of intimacy. You might be sharing this space with 1,500 other theatre-goers, but you feel almost part of the performance.

Three tiers of wooden benches tower above you giving height to this amazing structure, and on the roof, thatch, not seen on any other building in the capital since The Great Fire.

For those theatregoers used to the Edwardian proscenium arch with the stage below and the audience kept at a safe distance, watching a production at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is a truly memorable experience.

For The Globe has a thrust stage that projects into a circular yard where for £10 ‘groundlings’ can stand and watch the performance, but a word of warning here, the roof only covers the stage and the seating areas. So if it rains, and well you are in London, as a groundling you get wet.

If you splash out for the dearer seats invest in a cushion, they can be hired before the performance to protect one’s posterior from the unforgiving oak benches.

Performances are designed to replicate Elizabethan theatre, staged often during daylight hours, with no microphones, speakers or amplification, with music played on period instruments.

The entire building has been constructed from English oak using traditional joints making it an authentic 16th-century timber-framed building.

There are some nods to modernity, the thatched roof is protected with fire retardant and sprinklers (it’s how the last Globe burnt down), and the pit where you stand as a groundling is concrete unlike in the 16th century where compressed earth strewn with rotting reeds was beneath your feet. The capacity of the modern Globe has been reduced by 50 per cent with a nod to health and safety.

Last year the World Shakespeare Festival as part of the Cultural Olympiad celebrated London 2012, all of Shakespeare’s 38 plays were performed in 38 different languages, at the Globe Theatre, next year we celebrate the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and in 2016 the 400th of his death. Let’s just hope we don’t burn down the Globe again.

This article has been written to recognise the author’s contribution to travel and tourism by Avis Car Hire on the A-List Awards 2013.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

A New River for London (29.09.13)

There cannot be many commoners who have given their name to so many parts of London as Sir Hugh Myddleton (or had their name misspelt as much), and today marks the 400th anniversary of the opening of his venture to bring water into London from Hertfordshire. Londoners only had access to water from wells or from the filthy Thames, via a large waterwheel at London Bridge. A challenge issued by King James that finally brought a solution to the problem.

Having made his fortune in London as the Royal Jeweller to King James I, Sir Hugh Myddleton proposed to construct a water conduit from Amwell in Hertfordshire into the capital. His scheme was to run the water’s flow along the 100ft contour line but he met with vociferous opposition to the scheme as it ran its sinuous path across farmers’ fields on its route to London.

Some evidence of his venture can still be seen, in Enfield Town a little park has the New River running through it before going underground. Popping up again at Bush Hill Park as it wends its way through Palmers Green disappearing underground again when it reaches Myddleton Road at Bowes Park. It next appears alongside the two reservoirs constructed for this venture by the Amhurst Park and Seven Sisters Road junction before going underground at – yes, you’ve guessed it – Myddleton Avenue, with a final above-ground appearance in Cannonbury at New River Walk.

The original venture comprising over 38 miles terminated at New River Head was opened on 29th September 1613 when water was let into the Round Pond at New River Head at the site of the Thames Water Board’s headquarters (now converted into flats) at the corner of Rosebery Avenue and Hardwick Street.

Water was then taken from the reservoir into the city in pipes made from hollowed elm logs and then into individual houses through lead pipes. By 1670, up to two-thirds of houses in many parts of London had running water thanks to the New River.

The cost of the scheme proved beyond the means of Myddleton’s private fortune and he approached the King for help. As he was the Crown jeweller the King agreed to pay half the cost of the whole undertaking for half the profit as a sleeping partner. It proved a good investment by 1700 a single share paid about £200 a year and by 1766 it was worth £8,000 a year.

The New River Company remained London’s most important water supplier for 300 years and the venture is commemorated in many ways around the Islington area of north London.

Sir Hugh Myddleton’s house at Myddleton Corner was at 140-3 Upper Street, built in 1595 the building was rebuilt in 1891 and a terracotta plaque on the first floor attests to this. Myddleton Hall is to be found in Almeida Street and is now used as the Almeida Theatre.

Islington’s finest square is Myddelton Square just south of the Angel, off the square is River Street which runs into Amwell Street commemorating the source of the water supply in Hertfordshire. Almost opposite the old Water Board’s headquarters stands Hugh Myddelton Junior and Infant School in Myddelton Street and Myddleton’s statute is to be found on Islington Green facing towards the end of his venture.

There is a fountain playing at the corner of Rosebery Avenue and Arlington Way where Sadler’s Wells still stands which marks the New River’s final destination.

Other London streets that bear Myddleton’s name include Myddelton Close EN1; Myddelton Gardens N21; Myddelton Park N20; Myddelton Passage EC1; Myddelton Road N8; Myddleton Mews N22.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Out-Eiffeling the Eiffel Tower (24.09.13)

Riling the French has been a national sport since before Waterloo, but no one has taken it to the lengths that Sir Edward Watkin did 150 years ago in Wembley.

In 1869 he proposed constructing a tunnel under the English Channel and had actually started digging when it was pointed out that he lacked the necessary planning permission both in Kent and in France.

Undeterred he planned to beat the Frenchies by building an Eiffel Tower – only taller.

He established the Metropolitan Tower Construction Company and attracted many anti-Franco loyal subscribers.

He contacted M. Eiffel to design the tower but with the stipulation of making it 150 ft higher than the original, although unsurprisingly the French engineer declined the generous offer.

Sir Edward then announced a competition, with a prize of 500 guineas which attracted dozens of designs for his tower. The submissions came from as far afield as Sweden, Turkey and Australia, and included the Leaning Tower of Pisa – only erect. One bedecked with hanging gardens and with a nod to modernity it was intended to house a community of vegetarians.

The winner designed a copy of Paris’s original and in 1891 work began on 280 acres of the hallow turf that Wembley Stadium now stands.

More than 100,000 people came to see the work in progress, but it quickly became obvious that funds were not available to complete this monument to patriotism.

The tower became known as ‘The Shareholder’s Dismay’ and stopped at 150ft prompting locals to demand recompense for spoiling their views with his ugly stump.

It wasn’t until 1907 that fewer than a dozen people turned up to watch as demolition experts blew up the whole sad assembly.

Rising from the wreckage of Watkin’s folly 16 years later was the Empire Stadium the centrepiece of the British Empire Exhibition. With its twin towers it soon became the shrine to English football until it was demolished in 2003.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Sentinels of our streets (17.09.13)

Boris described it as “a national treasure of global importance”, and yet one of London’s least-known museums boasts an average of just 10 visitors a day; it is the British Postal Museum & Archive.

We now live in a world of emailing, twittering, texting and Facebooking each other. I’m as bad as the next techie-junkie for why should I be writing this post!), but for over a century-and-a-half we managed to get by with the Royal Mail – Thank you very much.

Currently situated behind Mount Pleasant Sorting Office the archive in its title doesn’t do it justice. A collection of old phone boxes; every sort of pillar box ever built; two million stamps, many never issued and worth thousands; and all houses in two-and-a-half miles of archives.

The museum has its own 6-mile private underground stretching from Paddington to Whitechapel which was in use by the Post Office until 2003. There is also the British Postal Museum Store at Debden, Essex for larger objects.

When producers of the BBC series Lark Rise to Candleford want to recreate an authentic Victorian post office counter, they borrowed an original from here.

During the Blitz, the pillar box was often the only thing left standing on East London’s streets so deep are their foundations, but that should keep these sentinels of our streets immune from thieves with a JCB digger.

In 1874 the Post Office switched from green pillar boxes to the familiar red to make them more visible in urban fog – people kept bumping into them.

As with the telephone box letter writing and posting is becoming rarer, and we need a museum to celebrate this lost art. With £20 million from the National Lottery and a further £5 million from the sale of some of their collection the British Postal Museum & Archive plans to open a proper museum attracting 80,000 visitors a year, and it has plans to reopen a section of the old London Post Office Railway for tourist journeys.

With the imminent sale of Royal Mail, we might one day need a museum to show future generations this uniquely British institution.

For those new to CabbieBlog or readers who are slightly forgetful, on Saturdays I’m republishing posts, many going back over a decade. Some will still be very relevant while others have become dated over time. Just think of this post as your weekend paper supplement.

Driving my Droschky (10.09.13)

In 2006 Stuart Pessok, Managing Editor of the trade’s biggest-selling newspaper Taxi ran a series entitled ‘We Speak Your Language’ in which he invited readers to submit examples of cab slang in an attempt to keep the language alive.

He put together a ten-page glossary of the cabbie’s lexis. It was divided into locations and buildings, ranks and shelters, drivers, cabs, passengers, the Public Carriage Office (The Knowledge and subsequent technicalities), money, the police and miscellaneous. Thus he produced the bible of the cabbie’s universe.

The Bell and Horns cab shelter will resound to tales of trapping a job as you set down a punter at the Shakespeare during the kipper season and take a bowler-hat to the Inside-Out Building only to find that he is a bilker.

Driving a cab is a lonely profession, for much of your working life is spent with only strangers for company. So when cabbies meet colleagues it is hardly surprising that much banter takes place.

As London’s cabbies have been working the streets for nearly 400 years it should come as no surprise that the trade is rich in parochial slang. We learned acolytes of The Knowledge have our own language, although, since it stems from a closed, occupational group it should properly be referred to as jargon. In this case, it is taxi-speak, which seems to have existed since the mid-19th century. It is, one might suggest, the ultimate take on ‘London in Slang’.

A butter-boy whose a Gantville Cowboy can easily find him (or her) self fouling the rank, which is not that he has enjoyed a curry the previous night. The Grapes of Wrath are a common occupational hazard another is finding one caught short. Should this happen when you are near the Aztec Temple the Iron Lung is but a short drive away. This is a urinal in Regency Place opposite Portuguese Tony’s Café where you can have a splosh with other mushers.

Jargon proper comes from within: the drivers and the vehicles. An owner-driver has been a musher since the 1880s; the cab roof being equivalent to a mush, an umbrella. The Gantville cowboys: predominantly Jewish cabbies who live around Gants Hill, Newbury Park, Ilford and Claybury; Copperarse or Leatharse: one who works long hours hence the condition of their trousers; Butterboy: a novice, likely to be that butter that won’t melt in an innocent mouth, this cabbie jargon, like many words is used by other professions, in this case the police.

To suck the mop is to be left on a rank when everyone else has got jobs (literally trips, figuratively passengers). Ranking on a long ’un is driving around in search of fares and hanging it up waiting outside hotels, lights off, ready to jump on the Billy Bunters (punters; an old squirt is an ageing gent, a mystery a young woman). A shtumer, originally a bad cheque, is a booked job that on arrival has evaporated.

Driving your sherbet you might be given a shtoomer by your radio circuit or at Harabs when on point you could forget to hit the zeiger (the meter maker’s name) when a punter gets in which would mean that you would do a stalker as you duck and dive through the Dirty Dozen in Soho.

Many nicknames for the destinations and ranks seem to have fallen into disuse: The lines of cabs that once marked The Ditch (Fleet Street) are no longer needed. The punning and disinformation terms have fallen out of favour. Bishopsgate: the Athenaeum wherein crowd the senior clergy; The Deaf and Dumb: the wartime ministry of information, The Flowerpot: Covent Garden market. Harley Street was The Resistance: as in fighting c. 1945 against the nascent NHS.

The Dirty Dozen refers to twelve streets that take you from Regent Street to Charing Cross Road without using Oxford Street: Crossrail has seen that one off. It’s a long time since anywhere in Soho qualified, as once did Archer Street, as Poverty Corner, the poverty presumably being that of the musicians who sought work there, rather than the drug dealers who traded amongst them. Admirals the name of Dolphin Square which has mansion blocks bearing the names of maritime heroes. Dead Zoo unsurprisingly refers to the Natural History Museum. Anyone who has been involved in lengthly litigation would like the name given to the home of many top solicitors’ offices Bedford Row – Shark’s Parade.

New ones have been invented The Wet Doughnut for the Diana memorial and the unlamented bendy-buses were dubbed sixty-foot accordions. The cab itself, better known as a sherbert (dab) has been given the moniker after a popular modern author Sandy McNab, while many of the old hands still refer to it by it Russian-Jewish name a droshky.

London cabbies once called the minicab men touts or scabs if they were illegal and little people if not. Now their cars are big and shiny, determine themselves as ‘private hire vehicles’ and pose as cut-price challenge the traditional cabbies. Do Addison Lee’s drivers have their own jargon? Is any among them likely to collect it? It is unlikely as has happened with the London Taxi profession.

Sarf London boy Graham Gates who passed The Knowledge in 1992 has continued compiling the original list started by Stuart Pessok and has written a book on this fascinating subject London Taxi Driver Slang published by Abson Books. Be Lucky!