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.

Fire Brand (10.09.2010)

The word curfew derives from the Norman French Couvre le Feu – meaning put out your fire, and not as is commonly thought to tell citizens that they must not leave their homes, but since it is bedtime a bell would ring to remind them to extinguish all their fires, something a baker from Pudding Lane in 1666 clearly ignored.

First ordered by William the Conqueror this long lasting tradition is still maintained at Gray’s Inn with a curfew bell rung each evening in South Square, itself the centre of the legal profession since 1370.

Fire, that fear of nay mediaeval city, with its timber framed buildings by the end of the 12th century London’s houses were required to be made of stone on the lower parts and roofs had to be tiled.

Each ward was required to provide poles, hooks, chains and ropes for the demolition of a burning house. Later as homeowners could insure their houses, the insurance companies employed their own firemen to protect those insured properties.

Fire-marks denoting which building was insured with which company were affixed to the front of a building.

These fire-marks can still be found in Goodwins Court, and probably accounts for this little gem remaining intact, which made its first appearance in the rate books in 1690, being described then as a row of tailors.

Approached from St. Martin’s Lane (opposite the Salisbury Buffet public house) through a doorway up a couple of steps this intimate little alley seems positive Dickensian with a row of eight narrow late 18th century shop fronts working gas lamps and an attractive clock face over an archway giving on to Bedfordbury. Take Samuel Johnson’s advice to his companion Boswell when just arriving in London “to survey its innumerable little lane and courts”.

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.

Join the queue (07.09.2010)

Often as I’ve put the cab up on the Paddington rank, I have watched passengers as they have squabbled about their relative positions in the queue, blithely ignoring the fact that behind me are 100 taxis available for hire. Observing this I’ve just put it down to “Johnny Foreigner” who doesn’t understand the quaint English courtesy of standing in a line and waiting one’s turn.

Apparently though according to a recent survey LINK the English are becoming more impatient; 41 per cent of people refuse to queue longer than two minutes in stores, with two-thirds regularly stomping away in a huff at having to endure a wait for anything. Furthermore, half of us refuse even to enter a shop if there is the sign of a queue.

Six years ago in a previous survey we were prepared to wait patiently for a barely credible five minutes before impatience got the better of us.

I remember visiting Paris in the 50’s and finding a ticket number dispensing machine attached to bus stops, used to establish the order passenger should embark, this at a time when queuing in England was seen as enduring a mild hardship for the common good, if soldiers at Dunkirk could stand in line to board their ship, waiting one’s turn to buy a loaf of bread was what set up apart from those “one the other side of the English Channel”.

We now one company is keeping alive this tradition I discovered recently when I visited the London Eye. On arrival I noted with smug self-satisfaction, the queue stretching into infinity for the attraction. Clutching my “fast track” pre-booked confirmation I joined the queue for the ??? kiosk. After 10 minutes of waiting the assistant informed me as she ad other before me that I was in the wrong queue and directed me to the ticket office. A crowd of us joined the back of the 80ft long queue marked “Pre-booked and Group Bookings” each holding their fast-track confirmation receipts.

When reaching the desk I have to admit dear reader my stiff upper lip was sorely tested when told again that I was in the wrong queue. The sound of protestations from my fellow queuers the desk clerk reluctantly issued that precious official tick.

It then was only a matter of joining yet another 40ft long queue to enjoy the “flight”. Total time flying 40 minutes; total time queuing 40 minutes. Next time I’m going on a foggy day.

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 Greatest Day in our History (31.08.2010)

We’ve all had a Tardis Teaser fantasy. What moment in history would you like to be transported if you had a time machine?

One point in London’s timeline worthy of consideration might be the opening of “The Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations” or as Punch nicknamed it the Crystal Palace. Covering 19 acres with room inside to accommodate four St. Paul’s Cathedrals it was at the time the largest building on earth.

Started 160 years ago on 31st August 1850, a year earlier it had not even existed as an idea, until Henry Cole more famous for inventing the Christmas card conceived the idea after visiting the Paris Exhibition.

An open competition attracted 245 designs all were deemed unworkable. A design committee was formed having amongst their number Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and between them they produced a vast low, dark shed of a building, needing 30 million bricks. Now with only 16 months to go desperate times required desperate measures and Joseph Paxton was approached.

Paxton, born into a poor farming family in Bedfordshire, he was at the age of 20 running an experimental arboretum for the Horticultural Society. There one day he made such an impression on the Duke of Devonshire in that his strong, clear voice could be heard by the near deaf Peer of the Realm, he was offered the post of Head Gardener at Chatsworth House.

Paxton really was a boy wonder, he created one of the great gardens of England at Chatsworth with the Emperor Fountain’s raising a jet of water 290 feet into the air, a feat only exceeded once to this day in Europe; built the largest rockery in the country; designed estate villages; became the world’s expert on dahlias; produced the country’s finest melons, figs, peaches and nectarines winning numerous prizes; he ran two gardening magazines; a daily newspaper; he was on the board of three railway companies; built the world’s first municipal park, later copied to form Central Park in New York; the hot house at Chatsworth he built was so vast that when Queen Victoria visited the Great Stove, as it was called, she toured it in a horse drawn carriage.

Learning of the committee’s struggle to design a building for the Great Exhibition he doodled plans while chairing a meeting and had completed drawing ready for review in two weeks. The design broke all the criteria stipulated for the competition, but desperate times required desperate measures and after a few days of hand wringing the committee accepted them in their entirety.

Nothing, really absolutely nothing, says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than entrusting this iconic building to a gardener. No bricks, no mortar, no foundations, prefabricated from standard parts away from the building site it was simply bolted together. The build time was phenomenal in eight months, one million square feet of glass, 18,000 panes a week (one third of all the glass produced that year); 20 miles of guttering, 33,000 iron trusses and tens of thousands of planks of wooden flooring, this being tested by a battalion of soldiers marching across it. The finished building was 1,851 feet long (in celebration of the year the exhibition was held, now copied by the new World Trade Centre whose height matches in feet the year of their independence), 408 feet across and 110 feet high and spacious enough to accommodate a much admired avenue of mature elm trees.

Queen Victoria opened the exhibition on 1st May 1851 describing with some justification that it was “the greatest day in our history”. Open for five and a half months it attracted six million people at a time when Britain had a population of only 20,959,477. Almost 100,000 objects went on display; a knife with 1,851 blades; furniture carved from coal; a 4-sided piano; a bed which automatically tipped its surprised occupant into his morning bath; an enormous lump of guano from Peru. Newfoundland for some inexplicable reason devoted its entire stand to cod-liver oil, and the highlight of the day was a use of the elegant “retiring rooms” the flushing toilets, a novelty at the time.

Unlike its successors the Great Exhibition cleared a profit of £186,000, enough to buy 30 acres of land south of the exhibition site where the Royal Albert Hall, Victoria and Albert Museum, Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Art and Royal College of Music were later built.

After the Exhibition was closed the Crystal Palace was moved to Sydenham were we managed to burn it to the ground in 1936. All that marks its passing is the Colebrookdale Gates originally made to stand at the entrance to the north transept of the Exhibition, now moved to the entrance to Kensington Gardens beside Alexandra Gate and behind which Albert sits enthroned in his memorial, on his lap he holds a book: The Catalogue of the Great Exhibition.

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.

Requires no skill to operate (24.08.2010)

The man who invented the world’s most intrusive device described his instrument as: “The telephone may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried on by word of mouth between persons in different rooms, in different streets or in different Towns . . . The great advantage it possesses over every other form of electrical apparatus is that it requires no skill to operate the instrument”.

Alexander Graham Bell (if ever a person’s name was better suited for his invention, I’ve yet to find), couldn’t have imagined what his invention would lead to in the 21st century or for that matter what idiots would make use of it.

So what has the latest reincarnation of Mr Bell’s invention got to do with CabbieBlog I hear you muttering amongst yourselves? Well, driving in London is becoming ever more stressful with pedestrians engrossed in using their i-phones walking into the road, then looking up with a startled expression when they see my cab bearing down on them.

Women are often accused of lacking spacial awareness, but men, sorry chaps it’s usually the male gender, that seems engrossed in their phones, and whatever they are doing on it, certainly excludes any road sense.

So when Alexander Graham Bell informed the populace that his “apparatus . . . required no skill to operate he should have added the caveat – but retraining might be necessary in the art of crossing a road, for how to talk on one’s phone and cross London’s busy roads needs a skill that many have failed to acquire.

FOOTNOTE: Around the mid 1800’s many were trying to invent the telephone, the most unfortunate was the American Elisha Gray who actually filed something called a patent caveat – a sort of holding claim that allowed one to protect an invention that wasn’t quite yet perfected – on the very day that Alexander Graham Bell filed his own, more formal patent, unfortunately for Gray, Bell beat him by a few hours.

Thanks for checking out CabbieBlog just don’t do it while crossing the road.

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.

Cracking the Coade (17.08.2010)

Standing on Westminster Bridge guarding the gateway to south London stands the 13-ton South Bank Lion, made from London’s famous artificial stone, said to be the most durable and weatherproof of any such material so far invented.

Patented by Richard Holt and manufactured in his Lambeth yard from 1720 for 40 years this stone was successfully modified by unmarried “Mrs” Coade by the addition of finely ground glass and prefired clay, when she took over the factory in 1769.

Over the next 70 years Coade Artificial Manufactory as it became known, produced a range of garden nymphs, sphinxes, statutes, busts and other ornamental features for buildings, Coade stone can be found at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Tower of London and on the tomb of Captain Bligh in the churchyard of St. Mary-at-Lambeth.

As it says on one of its paws the South Bank Lion was completed in May 1837 just three years before the factory closed with a loss of the stone’s precise composition formula.

Our Lion first graced the Lion brewery on the south bank of the Thames near where Hungerford Bridge now stands. Painted red and standing high over the entrance archway he even survived the Blitz. The brewery was demolished in 1949 and our Lion disappeared to emerge to grace the Festival of Britain in 1952. Two years later at the King’s suggestion the lion was placed at the entrance to Waterloo Station.

He has only stood in his current position since 1966. When it was moved several items of interest were found in a recess in the lion’s back, they included two coins from the time of William IV and a trade card of the Coade family, so when the Lion was moved to its present site a 1966 coin and a copy of The Times for 17th March 1966 were added to the original items.

The lab boys have rather broken the myth of a lost formula for Coade Stone having recreated it perfectly in a laboratory in the British Museum.

If you want to have a go this is how you go about it:

Its manufacture requires special skills: extremely careful control and skill in kiln firing, over a period of days. This skill is even more remarkable when the potential variability of kiln temperatures at that time is considered. Mrs Coade’s factory was the only really successful manufacturer.

The formula used was:
10% of grog (see below)
5-10% of crushed flint
5-10% fine quartz (to reduce shrinkage)
10% crushed soda lime glass.
60-70% Ball clay from Dorset and Devon.

The ‘grog’ was made up of finely crushed fired items, such as pitchers (ware that has been fired but rejected due to the presence of faults). This was also referred to as “fortified clay” which was then inserted (after kneading) into a kiln which would fire the material at a temperature of 1,100 degrees Celsius for over four days.

As a further blow to his mythical status our Lion’s manhood was reworked after being considered too large once he came down from his high archway over the brewery gate.