London - City of Change and Moorgate

A thankfully rather cooler day saw me undertake the Clerkenwall walk for Andrew Duncan's excellent Walking London. Its an immensely interesting and historic area with huge chunks of medieval London hidden in plain view. The first of these is St. John's Gate built in 1504 as the Southern entrance to the Priory of St. John - OK so it was heavily restored in the 19th century but hey beggars can't be choosers. The knights of St. John were crusaders - Knights Hospitallers charged with tending with those taken ill on the long journey to Jerusalem, after the expulsion of Christians from the Holy Land they left for Rhodes and later Malta. It was here in 1877 that the St. John's Ambulance Brigade was initiated. After a wander through Smithfield the next stop was the Church of St. Bartholomew the Great - founded in 1123 what remains is roughly half of the original building - demolished as part of the dissolution of the monasteries in 1543. The church was originally part of a priory associated with St. Bartholomew's Hospital -both institutions were initiated by Rahere a mysterious figure sometimes credited as Henry I's jester. The churchs Tudor frontage was erected as part of Richard Rich's restoration of the area, he benefited from the Dissolution by buying up land that used to belong to the church. The church itself is a star of stage and screen well screen having featured in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994),Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Shakespeare in Love, The End of the Affair, Amazing Grace, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, The Other Boleyn Girl, Sherlock Holmes, Snow White and the Huntsma, and worryingly Avengers: Age of Ultron. The third complex is just the other side of Cloth Fair (no guesses as what used to occur there). Charterhouse was a Carthusian priory for twenty five or so monks founded in 1371 and then dissolved in 1537. This was a traumatic event involving the hanging, drawing and quartering of the Prior and ten monks being transported to Newgate gaol where they either starved or were executed. The impressive remains are typical of "the type of large rambling 16th century mansion that once existed all round London" as Pevsner says. The buildings became an almshouse and school in 1611 endowed by Thomas Sutton, the Master of Ordnance in Northern Parts. His idea was to fund a home for eighty male pensioners ("gentlemen by descent and in poverty, soldiers that have borne arms by sea or land, merchants decayed by piracy or shipwreck, or servants in household to the King or Queens Majesty"), and to educate forty boys. The institution gained a reputation for medical knowledge the institution was one of the original seven english public schools defined by law in 1868. The school was transplanted to Godlaming in Surrey in 1872 the buildings being used first by the Merchant Taylors School and then Barts Medical School. While these remnants remain much of what surrpunded them originally has vanished - a reminder of the transitory nature of urban existance. This also means that plaques such as that to Susanna Annesley sited on Tabernacle Street that I was after is no longer there - in fact its now construction site annoyingly.

Sir Charles Vyner Brooke

As if to emphasise the cosmopolitan nature of Bayswater I've been looking through Lived in London too find rather depressingly that I missed about half the plaques (or at least half of English Heritage's listed plaques in the area). They are an interesting cross-section: an Italian ballet dancer a South African writer, an Austrian singer, a Russian political thinker, and American writer and an Italian scientist not to mention King George Tupou V of Tonga. There is also on Albion Street a plaque to Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, the third and last white Rajah of Sarawak who assumed the title on the death of his father in 1917. He was a Cambridge man. He shared power both with his brother and nephew and devolved many of his powers to his advisor and an administrative body. The country developed public service and legal systems based on the British model. He took a surprisingly modern approach to cultural matters, banning Christian missionaries and encouraging indigenous traditions. Brooke fled when the Japanese invaded, first to Australia and then to London where he spent the rest of his life ceding his power to the British Crown in 1946. This was a contentious issue the transfer being opposed both by his nephew who acted as Rajah Muda (Crown Prince) and by the majority of the Council Negri or Parliament. Sarawak became part of Malaysia shortly after his death. Albion Street is, needless to say a way from rubber plantations and tropical heat and you can't help but think of those who experienced the shrinking of Empire. How do you comprehend these seismic social changes? You're no longer the master of all you survey with an automatic right to dictate to all and sundry on pretty much any aspect of their lives.