Abstract
In London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (1925), Errol Sherson describes Wych Street, located on the eastern periphery of the West End and within 200 metres of Drury Lane Theatre, as ‘one of the narrowest, dingiest and most disreputable thoroughfares the West End has ever known.’ By this time Wych Street had long disappeared, although its memory lingered. In a short story entitled ‘Where was Wych Street’ (Strand Magazine, 1921), Stacy Aumonier attempted to recall the street’s existence and its significance. In the course of the story the street is identified in relation to two theatres – the Gaiety and the Globe – only the latter of which was connected to the street. Surprisingly, no reference is made to the Olympic Theatre with which Wych Street had been identified since the early nineteenth century or to the Opera Comique immediately adjacent to the Globe, highlighting the problematic role of memory in mapping historical space. This article examines the historical, theatrical and geographical mapping of Wych Street, bringing out contrasts, contradictions and paradoxes, and considering its role as part of the theatrical and extra-theatrical milieu of London.
This discussion of the theatrical life and death of Wych Street is indebted to Lynda Nead’s distinctions, in Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, between mapping and movement. In particular, in discussing movement, she draws attention not only to the chaotic energy of the streets themselves, but also to the imposition of order via the demolition of streets (which had once been destinations) in order to create thoroughfares for movement between other spaces, other destinations. 1 In essence this article tells a story, for, despite the positive and negative issues raised by the use of maps in constructing histories, the concept of mapping (diachronically and synchronically) still encourages us to tell a story, but allows that story to be told in new and different ways. Yet there is inevitably an element of chance in what characterises a neighbourhood, even though mapping gives a sense of permanence, for however short a time, to the temporary, to the evanescent, to what eventually will vanish or be replaced. De Certeau has articulated the contrast between the city rendered legible by mapping and the city as experienced at street level. As paraphrased by Lynda Nead, ‘Space, at street level, is beyond the discipline of the urban system. It describes an illogical geography produced through symbolic mechanisms such as the dream and memory.’ 2
Memory figures strongly in Stacy Aumonier’s short story ‘Where was Wych Street?’ published in the Strand Magazine in 1921, 3 which is based upon an apparently trivial series of disagreements about the precise location of a street which had disappeared off the London map in 1903. In the course of the story, which begins in the public bar of the Wagtail, located in the dockland area of Wapping and ends at a dinner party in Belgravia and lunch in the clubland of St. James’s, Wych Street’s location becomes the catalyst for a series of momentous events. At the Wagtail it precipitates a fight between a trio of thugs and those drinking at the bar. The argument escalates, people are stabbed and the thugs, in their efforts to avoid the police, barricade themselves in a nearby house. The result is a siege, and a fire that brings about the deaths of the thugs, police officers and some bystanders. Debate about the exact location of Wych Street surfaces again at the ensuing judicial enquiry, when the chief justice and the barristers supporting the enquiry disagree once more. This disagreement is then played out at a dinner party when a young barrister argues with the guest of honour in the presence of the host. The result is the destruction of the young barrister’s prospects. At the conclusion of the story, a disinterested raisonneur, who has attended the enquiry and was a guest at the dinner party, is lunching with the Lord Chief Justice and finds himself at odds with his host on the same subject, but rather than quarrelling about the geographical exactness, decides simply to describe the vanished Wych Street as a melancholy one.
The argument of course is a trivial one. However, the momentous events that ensue suggest that, regardless of its precise location, Wych Street resonated across a broad social spectrum with differing levels of meaning. The original reference to Wych Street by a woman drinking with her husband at the Wagtail had been to the fact that her aunt had worked as an assistant in a corset shop there. The judge at the enquiry pointed out that he had travelled down Wych Street for many years. The guest of honour at the dinner party justified his knowledge of the street, on the grounds that he had bought books there as a student. Both the lawyers at the hearing and the drinkers in Wapping, however, agreed that the street had some relevance to theatres: specifically, they refer to the Globe and Gaiety theatres which had been built in the late 1860s. The drinkers at the Wagtail identified Wych Street as a narrow lane at the back of the old Globe theatre that used to pass by the church. Chief Justice Pengammon remembered at the enquiry that is was ‘a narrow street running across the site of the Gaiety theatre’ while Parlby, the arriviste KC, thought Wych Street ran ‘east of Wellington Street at the site of the old Globe theatre, adjacent to St. Martin’s in the Strand’.
So where was this ‘melancholy little street’ whose existence was capable of causing such widespread disagreement? A mid-eighteenth-century map of London clearly shows a street running parallel with Holywell Street and the Strand. It ends in Butcher’s Row and also shows the Strand blocked by the southern section of Holywell Street. Within a short distance we find Clare Market, the two churches of St. Mary’s and St. Clement Dane’s (not specifically identified), and more importantly, the proximity of the Inns of Court, particularly New Inn with its entrance into Wych Street. Just north lie Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Portugal Street and Clement’s Lane. In the 1814 Stranger’s Guide map, Newcastle Street running from Stanhope Street to the Strand is identified and Wych Street is clearly seen as a continuation of Drury Lane. The Olympic theatre which had occupied the northern corner of Wych Street where it intersected with Newcastle Street since 1806, however, is not shown. The 1840 Cruchley map adjusts the direction of Wych Street more accurately to show that it ran at an angle to Holywell Street and formed a natural extension to Drury Lane, and while Butcher’s Row has now been replaced by Pickett Street, we can also see the bulk of the Drury Lane theatre and its proximity to Wych Street.
By 1885, theatres are clearly marked as part of Baedeker’s visitor’s guide to London. Of particular relevance are the three theatres that directly impinge on Wych Street. The street connects directly with Drury Lane and from Drury Lane to New Oxford Street and High Holborn. The maps, however, reveal little more than increasing congestion, the enduring survival of the Inns of Court and a sense of scale: the closeness to the City and the proximity of the theatres to each other, representing the eastern perimeter of the now emerging West End: Drury Lane, the Gaiety, the Olympic, the Globe, the Opera Comique and the Strand. It is easy to surmise that throughout the period lawyers, legal students and city clerks would have passed through this area, some of whom would have been attracted to the cluster of theatres and to the many pubs (fifty-one of them) in the immediate area.
To obtain an idea of the actual residents, however, we might consider Charles Booth’s poverty map of London at the end of the nineteenth century. This reveals a complex tapestry. The southern face of the Strand is shown to be populated by the middle class and reasonably well to do; Holywell Street and the southern part of Wych Street are mapped as having inhabitants that are fairly comfortably off, with good ordinary earnings. But, certainly, beyond the street frontages Booth discovered evidence of the very poor, suffering from chronic want – behind the Gaiety and opposite Drury Lane Theatre – and further north on Drury Lane large tracts of houses, which he categorises as belonging to ‘the lowest class, vicious and semi-criminal’ (Figure 1).
Section of Charles Booth’s Maps Descriptive of London Poverty showing Wych Street.
Nevertheless, the overall impression is one of heterogeneity: congested areas of poverty often masked by street frontages that suggested the comfortable and the industrious, areas of middle-class respectability, as well as areas of people living on incomes of twenty-eight shillings a week. In other words, we find diverse social constituencies, a perspective supported by a sampling of the census returns for Wych Street from 1841 to 1901. Overall the impression of the area is of an increasing population density, the presence of many young families, skilled tradesmen and casual workers including actors living cheek by jowl with professional people like civil servants and lawyers throughout the century.
Yet Wych Street preserved a rather particular identity. We know that it was a very old street and its houses retained many Tudor and seventeenth-century relics including the Inns of Court. The maps seem to suggest that it formed part of an artery together with Drury Lane which connected streets further north to the Strand. This is what an 1884 lithograph by J. C. Maggs, Wych Street, Strand, London, Days of Hogarth, implies in its evocation of eighteenth-century Wych Street. It shows a street with old houses, shops, men and women strolling, lawyers, children playing and a coach and four travelling towards Drury Lane. The picture does not suggest a narrow and dingy environment but rather a substantial thoroughfare. Yet the pictorial documentation of the street a century later shows a rather different place (Figures 2 to 4).
‘Wych-Street’, Illustrated London News, 1 January 1870. Henry Dixon, Alfred and John Bool, Old Houses in Wych Street, Society for Photographing the Relics of Old London, photograph, 1880. Wych Street, postcard, 1901.
The narrow street shown in these images would allow little room for anything other than one-way traffic. Small shops and pubs are prominent, especially the Rising Sun at the junction of Wych and Holywell Streets, and certainly the last photograph (Figure 4) taken in 1901 does convey a sense of desolation and melancholy. Even the pubs appear inhospitable and deserted. This may reflect the fact that by 1901 many of these houses had in fact been abandoned as the demolishers came closer. Nevertheless, the nineteenth-century depictions of Wych Street may be as misleading as the eighteenth-century picture as though the documenters were intent to preserve what they considered to be the essence of the street’s identity, a vestige of old London increasingly at odds with the progressivism that surrounded it. The evidence certainly supports Charles Gordon’s description of Wych Street as ‘the most picturesque street in London which for its size has the largest number of old houses’. 4
Even if the complex juxtapositions of Wych Street are rendered illegible or at best elusive, the contemporary topographers and historians of place like John Diprose, Charles Gordon and Beresford Chancellor describe the area around Wych Street in terms that suggest movement, the interaction of differing communities, and above all, they agree on its long connection with spectatorship, both in the streets and in the theatres. Indeed, Wych Street and its immediate environment had been and continued to be the focus of spectacle and performance in extra-theatrical modes. Not only had the butchers and their assistants who traded in the Clare Market immediately adjacent to Wych Street patronised the theatres in the area since the late seventeenth century, they also on 5 November each year contributed to the spectacle of the streets when they built bonfires in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and ‘thrashed each other round about the woodfire with the strongest sinews of slaughtered bulls’.
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John Diprose writing in the 1860s describes Clements Lane, connected to Wych Street by the New Inn, as a street which ‘from being the polished abode of wit, genius and fashion, was converted by the ruthless hand of time into a huge, overcrowded den’. He goes on: There are blackened vocalists called niggers who delight the gaping crowds morning, noon and night in and around the metropolis, who are in the habit of making themselves up with burnt cork, striped trousers, huge collars, woolly hair … daily emerging with lively steps and cheerful voices, dressed in their grotesque costumes, … providing al fresco entertainments for laughter loving crowds.
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Spectatorship, however, might also take on other forms. Francis Place recalled listening to bawdy street singers in the late eighteenth century, particularly two women who used to stand in an open square between Holywell Street and Wych Street singing, with lewd gestures, a song about a man whose wife’s sexual appetite had reduced him to a skeleton, with the refrain (in which bystanders joined): ‘And for which I’m sure she’ll go to Hell/For she makes me fuck her in Church Time’.
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Newcastle Court according to Diprose contained houses of ill fame … There might be seen in the broad glare of day, sitting at the parlour windows of every house, abandoned women, young and old, decked in tawdry finery, bloated with gin and debauchery, lavishing enticing smiles … to entrap the unwary passer-by … the vicious inhabitants were turned out but only for some of them to resume their shocking mode of living in Wyck (sic) Street.
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Hollywell-street and Wych-street, in which are shops the windows of which display books and pictures of the most disgusting and obscene character, and which are alike loathsome to the eye and offensive to the morals of any person of well-regulated mind. Clipping, Illustrated Police News, undated.
When we come to the pubs and eating places in Wych Street, we discover that many had long associations with performers, journalists and literati. The Shakespeare’s Head had been owned at one time by Mark Lemon, of Punch fame, while the Crown and Anchor around the corner, destroyed by fire in 1854, had been associated with Douglas Jerrold. At the other end of Wych Street, a portion of Craven House, most of which had been pulled down when the Olympic Theatre was built, was turned into a pub, the Craven Head. Between 1851 and 1855 its landlord was Robert Hales, ‘The Norfolk Giant’, who stood 7′ 6″ and weighed 432 lbs. In mapping the theatrical life and death of Wych Street, then, we are mapping the spectacle of its streets and shops, the pub communities as well as its theatres, and acknowledging the myriad ways in which it catered for the recreation of both inhabitants and visitors.
Wych Street and its immediate neighbourhood yielded the spectacle of everyday life amid a plethora of pubs, theatres and bordellos. An Atlantic Monthly correspondent claimed in 1864 that it had been an evil place for centuries and ‘one we English are ashamed to show to foreigners’, fearing it would be many years more before the street would be demolished. 12 Despite the quaint and picturesque appearance of its tenements, these compensated ‘but ill for their being mainly dens of vice and depravity inhabited by the vilest offscourings of the enormous city’. ‘Next to Napoli senza sole, Wych Street, Drury Lane’, continued the correspondent, ‘is, morally and physically, about the shadiest street I know’. 13 Yet throughout this period we are confronted with the paradox that it housed or was proxy to a number of respectable west end theatres, while also acquiring this unsavoury reputation. Errol Sherson, looking back on Wych Street in 1925, accentuated the contrasts between a street inhabited by ‘the dregs of the town, the thieves, the informers, the harlots, the go-betweens and the hangers-on of every kind of vice’ and ‘the very oasis in a desert of foulness’ represented by the beacon of the Olympic Theatre. 14 The Atlantic Monthly commented on the fact that the Olympic Theatre was in the 1860s (as in the 1830s) ‘one of the most favourite resorts of the British aristocracy’, contrasting ‘the gorgeous assemblage’ with ‘this murkiest of streets’ and adding that ‘[t]he Brahminical classes appear oblivious of the yellow streak of caste when they come hither’. 15 In 2005, Lynda Nead preserves this binary when she describes Wych Street as part of an area characterised by ‘poverty, drunkenness and immorality’, in which the Olympic Theatre stood as a bastion of rather awkward respectability. However, her assertion that the Olympic’s ‘performances were usually popular and sensational’ is misleading within the broader theatrical context of the time and disregards the more significant question as to why so fashionable a theatre survived amid what Tracy C. Davis has described as ‘the geography of sensual activity in the neighbourhood’. 16
Yet Wych Street was insufficiently disreputable and dangerous to deter people from frequenting the neighbourhood. The theatres obviously attracted a cosmopolitan and fashionable audience. For others there were the attractions of those booksellers that were not purveyors of obscene literature. Mathieson and Co, located at 41 Wych Street, were highly respectable publishers, who had published a five-volume history of the origins of Christianity in the 1860s. Wych Street also attracted artists like Thomas Hosmer Shepherd in the 1850s, James McNeill Whistler who had sketched one of the street’s old houses in the 1870s and John Crowther in 1881 (Figure 6). Obviously, they were attracted to the Street because of its antique charm. Yet their works also transformed Wych Street into a theatrical setting. One might be forgiven for confusing their portrayals and even some of the photographs with the stage designs of a Hawes Craven or a Joseph Harker.
John Crowther, Wych Street and Holywell Street, Westminster, London, watercolour on paper, 1881.
Overwhelmingly, however, cultural tourists visited Wych Street for its theatres, three of which were in operation by the 1870s. The Olympic Pavilion, later the Olympic Theatre, had been opened in 1806 by Philip Astley. Until 1843 any theatrical venture in the centre of London required careful negotiation in the face of the entrenched interests of the patent theatres, Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Astley defiantly sought to replicate his success with equestrian performances at his Amphitheatre on Westminster Bridge Road by building a theatre (similar in appearance to a circus tent) which had the potential to draw patrons away from the nearby patent theatres. The Olympic Theatre’s colourful history subsequently spans the managements of R. W. Elliston and Madame Vestris, who in the early part of the century turned it into one of the most fashionable theatres in London. Vestris’s management forestalled attempts to demolish the theatre in the early 1830s to make way for a building to house the newly established police force. Throughout the nineteenth century it intermittently retained its fashionable appeal as a west end theatre, for, unlike the neighbourhood theatres of east and south London, it catered not for local residents but for middle-class theatregoers from other parts of the metropolis. Queen Victoria visited the Olympic during the opening Wigan-Robson season of 1854. Fashionable audiences thronged to The Ticket of Leave Man and later to a series of adaptations of Wilkie Collins novels. The critic Clement Scott said that the Olympic possessed a pit that was the ‘best and most comfortable in London’, 17 and the literati agreed: Mark Lemon, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, for example. It contributed to the energy and diversity of Wych Street for many years, as destination and icon, and was quickly rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 1849. Even later in the century, when its audiences mingled with the street prostitutes who thronged the Strand and streets east of Trafalgar Square after 7 pm, it still operated successfully.
The building of the Globe and Opera Comique theatres forms part of a rather different narrative. Both were speculative ventures conducted by entrepreneurs well aware of the increasing agitation to construct a north-south boulevard linking the Strand and Holborn, which would certainly result in the demolition of large tracts of land east of Drury Lane. The demolition would inevitably erase Wych Street off the map. Thus, impermanence was embedded into the fabric of these theatres, and reflected in the kinds of patrons for whom they were intended. The managements of both theatres were at pains to emphasise their proximity to the Strand in order to attract the passing trade and to identify the theatres as relevant to a major arterial thoroughfare. The connection with Wych Street was a tenuous one: it provided a rear entrance to an entertainment site that was remote and ultimately irrelevant to the neighbourhood. To be sure, both theatres enjoyed sporadic successes like H. J. Byron’s Cyril’s Success and Brandon Thomas’s Charley’s Aunt at the Globe or the D’Oyly Carte seasons at the Opera Comique, but for the most part both theatres eked out their limited existences as garages for visiting productions or end of run transfers. Neither was able to establish an identity for itself, exacerbated by the fact that theatrical life by the end of the century centred on Shaftesbury Avenue rather than the eastern approaches to the West End.
The life and death of Wych Street eventually becomes a story of mapping and movement, of the imposition of order upon perceived chaos, of the curtailment of uncontrolled energy to create new urban thoroughfares. According to James H. Winter: The builders of Kingsway would not have wanted the avenue they had created to be shaped by the culture and people whose lives they had disrupted or the character of the streets they had destroyed. They could see no value in narrow run-down Wych Street with its cluster of sixteenth-century gabled houses and were positively delighted to obliterate picturesque Holywell Street … Down went the pubs, and down with hardly a quaver, went Lyon’s Inn, the Opera Comique, and the Strand, Olympic and Globe Theatres. Clinicians that they were, they could see little worth saving, even as referents or reminders, in streets that many centuries of use had evolved. Instead they constructed a passage way that people would hurry through on their way to somewhere else, an artery in a communication [chain] instead of a vital public space in a great city.
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[E]ven Wych Street is not yet out of the hands of the housebreaker, and where demolition is bringing its dust clouds, there will you find some stalwart tenant holding on to his premises. ‘Business as usual’ is cheerfully displayed amid a desert of empty tenements as if the writer of the legend was determined to keep his flag of tenant rights boldly flying amid what appears to be evidence of a siege or an earthquake … There is the Olympic Theatre still standing, given up for the time to religious services, and in Stanhope Street, Vere Street … there is practically no evidence of progress …
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