Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
with the slightly creepy attendants, the building itself is worth admiring, and there's a
whole exhibition on
L. Ron Hubbard
, the American pulp-fiction writer and hypnotist
who founded the Scientology cult.
College of Arms
Queen Victoria St • Mon-Fri 10am-4pm • Free •
T
020 7248 2762,
W
college-of-arms.gov.uk •
!
Blackfriars or Mansion House
Originally built round a courtyard in the 1670s, the red-brick mansion of the
College
of Arms
was
opened up to the south with the building of Queen Victoria Street in the
1870s. The college is the headquarters of heraldry in England, and even today is in
charge of granting coats of arms to those who can prove they've been “a benefit to the
community”. The Earl Marshal's Court - featuring a gallery, copious wooden panelling
and a modest throne - is the only room open to the public, unless you apply to trace
your family or study heraldry in the college library.
Old Bailey
Old Bailey • Mon-Fri 10am-1pm & 2-5pm • Free •
T
020 7248 3277,
W
cityoflondon.gov.uk •
!
St Paul's
The Central Criminal Court is better known as the
Old Bailey
, after the street on which
it stands, which used to run along the medieval city walls. The court's pompous,
domed, Edwardian building - “Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the
Wrongdoer” the entrance proclaims - is topped by a gilded statue of Justice, depicted
without blindfold, holding her sword and scales. The country's most serious criminal
cases are heard here, and have included, in the past, the trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the
Kray Twins, the Angry Brigade (see p.292), plus all Britain's multiple murderers. You
can watch the proceedings from the visitors' gallery (no under-14s), but you're not
allowed to take anything into the court (and that includes mobiles) and there's no
cloakroom. Sadly, visitors do not get to see the Grand Hall, with its swirling marble
floor and walls, succession of domes and grandiloquent frescoes.
The site of the Old Bailey was originally occupied by
Newgate Prison
, which began
life as a small lock-up above the medieval gateway of Newgate. Burnt down in the
11
PUBLIC EXECUTIONS AND BODY SNATCHERS
After 1783, when hangings at Tyburn were stopped,
public executions
at Newgate began to
draw crowds of one hundred thousand and more. The last public beheading took place here in
1820 when five Cato Street Conspirators (see p.86) were hanged and decapitated with a surgeon's
knife. It was in hanging, however, that Newgate excelled, its most e
cient gallows dispatching
twenty criminals simultaneously. Unease over the “robbery and violence, loud laughing, oaths,
fighting, obscene conduct and still more filthy language” that accompanied public hangings
drove the executions inside the prison walls in 1868. The night before an execution, a handbell
was tolled outside the condemned's cell, while the jailer recited the Newgate verse that ended:
“All you that in the condemned hole do lie/Prepare you, for tomorrow you shall die… And when
St Sepulchre's bell in the morning tolls/The Lord above have mercy on your souls.” Until Newgate
got its own bell, the “Great Bell of Old Bailey” was in the church of
St Sepulchre
(Mon-Fri
11am-3pm;
W
st-sepulchre.org.uk), and tolled the condemned to the scaffold at eight in the
morning. The handbell and verse are displayed inside the church, opposite the Old Bailey.
The bodies of the executed were handed over to the surgeons of St Bartholomew's for
dissection, but body snatchers also preyed on non-criminals buried in St Sepulchre churchyard.
Such was the demand for corpses that relatives were forced to pay a nightwatchman to guard the
graveyard in a specially built watch-house - still visible to the north of the church - to prevent the
“Resurrection Men” from retrieving their quarry. Successfully stolen stiffs were taken to the nearby
Fortune of War
tavern, which stood on Pie Corner, by Cock Lane, to be sold to the surgeons. Today,
Pie Corner is marked by a gilded overfed cherub known as
Fat Boy
, who commemorates the
“staying of the Great Fire” of 1666, which, when it wasn't blamed on the Catholics, was ascribed to
the sin of gluttony, since it had begun in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner.
