BY DUNCAN J D SMITH
Pie ‘n’ mash
These days Britain’s national dish is no longer roast beef and nor is it fish and chips. It is Chicken Tikka Masala, a dry and spicy Indian dish with added sauce to satisfy the nation’s craving for gravy. It’s a good illustration of the way in which Britain has absorbed and adapted external influences since the days of empire and is available at Veeraswamy, Britain’s first Indian restaurant established in 1926 at 99 Regent Street, W1.
That’s not to say that roasts and fried fish have disappeared from London’s culinary map. Far from it. Simpson’s Tavern at 38 Ball Court, EC3, London’s first chophouse, has been serving pies and roasts since 1757, whilst Rules at 35 Maiden Lane, WC2, has specialised in game since opening in 1798.
Meanwhile, since 1889 Sweetings at 39 Queen Victoria Street, EC4, has been bracketing its fresh fish lunches with the likes of potted shrimps and Spotted Dick pudding. Modest by comparison is the Regency Café at 17–19 Regency Street, SW1, which has provided the best full English breakfasts since 1946, and the family-run Golden Hind at 73 Marylebone Lane, NW1, which has been serving excellent fish and chips since 1914.
Two delicacies unique to London are pie’n’mash and eels. Steeped in Cockney culture, these honest, no-frills dishes have been enjoyed since the mid-1800s and are still available in more than 80 eel and pie shops around the capital. One of the best – and certainly the oldest – is M. Manze at 87 Tower Bridge Road, SE1. It is considered important enough to warrant its very own Blue Plaque, which is displayed inside the shop rather than being fixed to the wall outside because of the building’s Grade II listed status.
Established in 1892 and taken over in 1902 by the Italian Manze family, the premises and the recipes remain exactly as they were a century ago. Behind the old-fashioned façade and green awning there is a single dining room lined neatly with green and white tiles. To one side a row of booths contain dark wooden benches and marble-top tables, where customers can enjoy their food sitting down.
Those with less time queue at the take-away counter and enjoy this most original of fast foods outside. Either way the product is the same: a traditional beef pie with mashed potatoes served with a topping of parsley sauce, known as liquor. A splash of vinegar with a side helping of jellied or stewed eels completes the experience. For devotees of the dish there is the Pie & Mash Club, which meets regularly at different restaurants and grades them accordingly (www.pie-n-mash.com).
Those in need of a stroll after eating should head north from Manze’s to 11 Bermondsey Square, SE1, where the shadowy 11th century remains of Bermondsey Abbey can be seen beneath a glass floor in the Del’Aziz restaurant. Even more surprising, around the corner at the junction of Mandela Way and Page’s Walk, is a decommissioned Soviet T-34 tank! It was placed there in 1995 by local property developer Russell Gray after his plans to develop the site were refused by Southwark Council.
Getting there: Jubilee, Northern lines to London Bridge, then bus or walk down Bermondsey Street. M. Manze is open Monday 11am–2pm, Tuesday–Thursday 10.30am–2pm, Friday 10am–2.30pm, Saturday 10am–2.45pm; manze.co.uk
The Mystery of Baker Street
Surely one of London’s most famous addresses is 221B Baker Street, NW1. It was in lodgings here between 1881 and 1904 that writer Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) installed his fictional super sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, along with dependable sidekick, Dr. John Watson. But as with all good detective stories not all is quite as it seems.
Baker Street certainly existed when Conan Doyle wrote his books but the house numbers only reached as far as 85 (beyond lay York Place and then Upper Baker Street). The area was a well-to-do residential district, and Holmes’ apartment – had it existed – would probably have been part of a Georgian terrace. It is described in A Study in Scarlet (1897) as comprising “a couple of comfortable bed-rooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows”.
Only after Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 was the name Baker Street extended from its original terminus at the junction with Crawford Street, northwards to Park Road. The existing houses in this new section were renumbered, with the block of odd numbers from 215 to 229 being assigned to an Art Deco building constructed in 1932 for the Abbey National Building Society. With 221 now a real address, fan mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes began arriving, so much in fact that for many years a full-time secretary was employed to deal with it!
Fast forward 60 years and the plot thickens. In 1990 a wall plaque identifying 221B Baker Street was installed outside the newly-opened Sherlock Holmes Museum – at Number 239! Immediately a dispute arose over who should rightfully receive letters addressed to the detective. Certainly the museum had a good case, since it occupied a Georgian building that had actually served as a boarding house between 1860 and 1934. The Abbey National, on the other hand, occupied the correct address – although 221 was only part of a much larger building. The issue was only resolved in 2002, when the Abbey National vacated its premises and the Royal Mail recognised the museum’s right to the post.
The regular queues outside the museum today are testimony to the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes despite fears expressed by Conan Doyle’s daughter that its existence might reinforce the notion that the detective was real. She was probably right since even the blue wall plaque outside mimics those erected elsewhere in London in honour of people who really existed. Either way, an undoubted highlight of any visit is the atmospheric reconstruction of the famously cluttered sitting room-cum-study overlooking Baker Street, replete with Holmes’ trademark pipe, Stradivarius and magnifying glass. It is not difficult to imagine him standing at the window musing on his next case against the atmospheric backdrop of Victorian suburban London.
Those who can’t get enough of Holmes should also visit the Sherlock Holmes Pub at 10–11 Northumberland Street, WC2. It contains another replica of the Baker Street apartment created this time by the Abbey National and Marylebone Borough Library for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It was acquired by Whitbread’s Brewery in 1957.
The first life-size statue of Sherlock Holmes was erected in 1988 near the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, where Conan Doyle’s attempt to kill off his hero resulted in a public outcry so fervent that he was forced to revive the character. A decade later the Abbey National commissioned another statue outside London’s Baker Street Tube station. A wax effigy of actor Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes is displayed currently at nearby Madame Tussauds.
Getting there: Bakerloo, Circle, Hammersmith & City, Jubilee, Metropolitan lines to Baker Street. The Sherlock Holmes Museum is open daily 9.30am–6pm; sherlock-holmes.co.uk
Kirkaldy Testing Museum
Victorian South London was once an area packed with different industries. Although long since abandoned they have left some fascinating remains. A unique example is the Kirkaldy Testing Works at 99 Southwark Street, once a global centre for measuring the tensile strength of construction materials.
The works were founded by the Scottish engineer David Kirkaldy (1820–1897), who as a young man was apprenticed at an iron foundry in Glasgow. He quickly moved from workshop to drawing office, where between 1858 and 1861 he undertook a ground-breaking series of tensile load tests. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, steel was replacing wrought iron, and tests were necessary to better understand the new material’s strengths and limitations.
In 1863 and by now an expert in his field Kirkaldy left Glasgow and relocated to London to establish his own testing works. He designed and patented a large hydraulic tensile test machine, or tensometer, which was manufactured in Leeds and sent down to Southwark in 1865. The machine was moved to its present custom-built location in 1874, where visitors can still see it operating today.
Over 14 metres in length and weighing in at 116 tons, the tensometer is designed to work horizontally, with the desired load applied by a hydraulic cylinder and ram. With a load capacity of around 450 tons it can test samples up to six metres in length in either tension or compression, and up to eight metres in bending. Crushing, shearing and torsion tests are also possible. Powered originally by high pressure water from the London Hydraulic Power Company the tensometer is now worked by an electric pump. In deference to the machine’s antiquity a load not exceeding 20 tons is used when breaking specimens for visitors.
Until its closure in the 1960s the Kirkaldy Testing Works tested materials sent from all over the world. Locally they tested parts used in the construction of several Thames’ bridges, as well as the Empire Stadium at Wembley (1923) and the Skylon at the Festival of Britain (1951). Metals suspected of having failed were also tested, including the remains of a de Havilland Comet aircraft that crashed off Elba in 1954. Most famously the works tested samples for the official inquiry into the Tay Bridge disaster. The bridge had collapsed during a storm in 1879 claiming the lives of all 75 passengers in a train crossing over it at the time. Using his tensometer, Kirkaldy demonstrated categorically that the cast iron lugs used to connect the framework of the bridge to the columns supporting it had failed. Little wonder the phrase “Facts not opinions” is inscribed over the works’ entrance!
Members of the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society first visited the abandoned works in 1974, as a result of which the building and its contents were listed for preservation (the first time in Britain such a joint listing had occurred). The ground floor and basement of the works were subsequently converted into a self-financing museum and the upper floors turned over to offices. Since its opening the museum has become a resting place for numerous other testing machines making it a one-of-a-kind collection.
Getting there: Jubilee line to Southwark. The Kirkaldy Testing Museum is open on the first Sunday of each month 10am–4pm, www.testingmuseum.org.uk
London Necropolis Railway
A curious Victorian building stands at 121 Westminster Bridge Road not far from Waterloo Station. Rising four storeys with an ornate stone and terracotta façade, it features an unusually grand entrance. Nothing today suggests why it was built and only a trawl through the history books provides the answer: the building was once the entrance to the London Necropolis Railway.
The origins of the railway date back to the early decades of the nineteenth century, when London’s population more than doubled, and with it the demand for burial space. The City’s existing medieval parish churchyards became so congested that bodies were buried one on top of another. That of St. Botolph’s-without-Aldersgate eventually rose several metres above the surrounding streets!
The health hazards were obvious and were highlighted by several outbreaks of cholera. As a result a Royal Commission was established to investigate the problem. It revealed that each year some 20,000 adults and 30,000 children were being buried in barely a square kilometre of existing burial grounds. Gravediggers were forced to dismember old bodies in order to cram new ones into what little space remained.
In the wake of these grisly findings several Burials Acts were passed. Under their terms the old churchyards were abandoned in favour of seven new garden-style cemeteries created in a ring around what were then the outskirts of London. Endorsed by Parliament they were laid out by private companies between 1832 and 1841. Subsequently dubbed the ‘Magnificent Seven’ they are Abney Park, Brompton, Highgate, Kensal Green, Nunhead, Tower Hamlets and West Norwood.
The Acts also saw the establishment of the London Necropolis Company (LNC). Its board of directors looked even further ahead to a time when all burials could be made in a single out-of-town cemetery. Accordingly in 1854 they opened Brookwood Cemetery in the Surrey countryside, where land was cheap and plentiful. With little chance of it ever being affected by urban growth, the LNC predicted that Brookwood could accommodate 50,000 funerals a year – and would continue doing so forever.
The dead and the living were ferried out to Brookwood on private funeral trains using the existing London & South Western Railway (LSWR) out of Waterloo. The LNC only needed to install sidings at either end to reach the company’s own stations. Mourners’ anxieties would be eased by the journey being through what at the time was predominantly open country.
For its London station the LNC initially selected a site off York Road abutting the arches of an LSWR viaduct. Coffins could easily be brought here by road or river and then hoisted by steam lift to an elevated platform, where they were loaded onto waiting funeral trains bound for Brookwood. But when Waterloo Station was enlarged in the 1890s this station was demolished and replaced by the one on Westminster Bridge Road. Here First Class mourners were welcomed through the grand front entrance still visible today, and then reached the platform by lift. Third Class mourners were relegated to a rear entrance on Newnham Terrace and had to use stairs. Frosted glass screens and distinct waiting areas ensured the classes remained segregated even at platform level.
In this form the new station serviced funeral traffic until it was badly damaged during an air raid in 1941. By this time, however, usage of Brookwood had already fallen far short of the LNC’s original projections. The outward journey had ultimately proved too time-consuming, especially once further cemeteries were opened in the London suburbs. The London Necropolis Railway never ran again and today the old station building has been converted into offices. The only real reminder of its former function is a stretch of abandoned elevated railway track visible to the rear.
But this was not the end for Brookwood, indeed it still serves as a cemetery and can be reached easily by car. Visitors can also take the train but only as far as Brookwood mainline station, since the LNR’s siding has now been taken up (the separate platforms for Anglicans and Dissenters still exist though). Bolstered by remains relocated from cleared London churchyards and the subsequent burial of Commonwealth and other military personnel, as well as many Muslims from London’s Turkish community, Brookwood today lays claim to being the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom.
Getting there:
Bakerloo line to Lambeth North; Bakerloo, Jubilee, Northern, Waterloo & City lines to Waterloo. Unfortunately the building is not open to the public.
This article is adapted from the book Only in London: A Guide to Unique Locations, Hidden Corners and Unusual Objects by Duncan J. D. Smith (The Urban Explorer). For more information visit www.onlyinguides.com.