Gilded Drainpipes

E.S. Turner

• The London Rich: The Creation of a Great City from 1666 to the Present by Peter Thorold
  Viking, 374 pp, £25.00, June 1999, ISBN 0 670 87480 9
• The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture by Mordaunt Crook
  Murray, 354 pp, £25.00, May 1999, ISBN 0 7195 6040 3

My worthiest ancestor, who in 1780 saved London from desolation – as I like to think – by ordering his redcoat militia to fire on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to notice. As a sheriff of London, Sir Barnard Turner was instrumental in abolishing Tyburn as a place of execution. In so doing he ended the tumultuous turnout of ruffians, whores and honest citizens who cheered, or execrated, the deathcart on its way from Newgate along Tyburn Road, now Oxford Street, to the gallows ground now known as Marble Arch. His action sprang from a moral impulse and not, I am convinced, from any desire to raise property values in the area known as Tyburnia. However, I gather from The London Rich that the ending of this long-standing nuisance was much valued by the hard-pressed aristocracy who, fleeing inner-city squalor, were seeking to build a new residential area north of Oxford Street. Only a generation later Macaulay, speaking on the Reform Bill, enthused over ‘that immense city which lies to the north of Great Russell Street and Oxford Street, a city superior in size and in population to the capitals of many mighty kingdoms; and probably superior in opulence, intelligence and general respectability to any city in the world’. This was pitching it a bit strong, though not for Macaulay.

Vol. 21 No. 12 · 10 June 1999 » E.S. Turner » Gilded Drainpipes (print version)
Pages 31-32 | 3230 words