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.

Maidens without midriffs (05.09.11)

Travelling along one of London’s busiest roads it’s easy to miss St. Pancras Church, which when built in 1819 cost £76,679 and at the time was the most expensive house of worship built since the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral some 100 years previously.

Standing on the corner of Euston Road and Upper Woburn Place covered in grime thanks to the traffic hurtling past, with vagrants sleeping under its spacious Ionic portico it’s hard to imagine what it must have looked like in its prime when its architects William and Henry Inwood returning from Athens with measured drawings under their arm based their building on the Erechtheion of the Greek Acropolis.

On the side facing the Euston Road are three caryatids, copies of a purloined original on display in the British Museum nearby thanks to Lord Elgin – was there anything he didn’t take that wasn’t screwed down in Athens?

Now I don’t want to appear unchivalrous, but tell me don’t the beautiful handmaidens supporting the projecting alcoves, look, how can I describe it? Dumpy.

The statues were made of Coade artificial stone, a formula which had been lost but has since resurfaced on Wikipedia, taking the sculptor three years to make. They were brought to the church looking dainty until they were ready to be put up into place, Mr Charles Rossi, their creator, found that the measurements were a little out. He presumably had been working to metric while the builders of the church chose imperial and try as he may he couldn’t get the Greek goddesses to fit the recess. With a large crowd bemused at his misfortune Rossi needed to act rather quickly to regain his self-respect. He performed a miracle operation with 12 inches being extracted from their midriff, their draped Grecian gowns helping to conceal their stunted torsos.

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.

Chubby cherub blamed (02.09.11)

As any fireman will tell you there is a myriad of causes attributable to the origin of a fire and in the aftermath of The Great Fire of London dozens of theories were put forward. We blamed the French – as always – in the guise of a deranged silversmith, Robert Hubert, who confessed and was promptly executed, it was discovered afterwards that he had arrived in the country two days after the conflagration. William Lilly, a famous astrologer, was next in the frame having predicted a major fire in the previous year; he only just managed to save his neck by persuading a special committee of the House of Commons of his innocence. Next, the Catholics were accused, they were always a popular whipping boy since the Reformation, and no doubt the Jews were also held to blame.

Now we have strayed into the blaming culture for one simple reason, this week, based on around 20 years of historic data, a study published in The Lancet claims that by 2030 as many as 48 per cent of British men could be obese. Why you might ask has this anything to do with a fire nearly 350 years ago? Well bear with me on that one.

As you might imagine the City Fathers thought long and hard about the fire’s cause and the destruction of their city and decided to erect in Cock Lane, which it was claimed was at the western limit of the fire’s destruction, this little statute. The Boy on Pye Corner was deliberately made fat (although by modern standards he appears just a little chubby) to add emphasis to its inscription:

The Boy on Pye Corner was erected to commemorate the staying of the Great Fire which beginning at Pudding Lane was ascribed to the sin of gluttony when not attributed to the Papists as on the Monument.

So there you have it, junk food was to blame.

Curiously the original building on this site, which was demolished in 1910, upon which the Boy was placed, was a pub called The Fortunes of War and was favoured by the resurrection men who sold corpses to the anatomists at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital opposite. The corpses fresh from road, river, grave and hangman’s noose or just murdered were exhibited in an upstairs room by the landlord, labelled with the finder’s name and presumably with a suitable price attached.

The name of the alley – Cock Lane – was first recorded in 1200, and probably signified a lane where fighting cocks were reared and sold. In the late Middle Ages Cock Lane was the only place north of the Thames where brothels were legally sanctioned, handy is if your cabbie refuses to go south of the River.