Monthly Archives: December 2013

Vanity and Wind

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Looking skywards in London can be surprisingly rewarding. There’s so much detail up there, passing most of us by, most of the time. Weathervanes, for example. Dozens of them, perched on top of our churches and other buildings. They range from the run-of-the-mill weathercock to a wide variety of other creatures and inanimate objects, usually with an interesting and emblematic significance linking them to their particular home.

Weathervanes are an ancient invention, dating back to at least the first century BC when a vane was erected on the Temple of the Winds in Athens. The common use of the cockerel or rooster is believed to be linked to an edict of Pope Nicholas in the 9th Century that all church steeples be surmounted by the symbol of Christ’s betrayal by St. Peter (that Peter would deny Christ three times before the cock crowed on the morning following the Last Supper). The Bayeux Tapestry (1) shows a workman attaching a weathercock (the less charitable might see it as a squirrel) to the roof of Westminster Abbey:


Here are ten London weathervanes I’ve spotted recently. We’ll begin with the traditional poultry, and then move on to some of the more idiosyncratic varieties.



All-Hallows-by-the-Tower. A very traditional-looking vane, on the City of London’s oldest church (originally built c.675, although gutted during the Blitz and extensively rebuilt after the Second World War). This vane is a good illustration of the two main rules of weathervane-making: (1) the centre of gravity must sit directly over the central spindle; (2) the surface area of one side should be significantly greater than the other. With such a big tail, the cockerel will face into the wind and give the direction from which it is blowing (it appears the wind was South-Westerly on the day I took this photo…)

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. Another weathercock sits atop Wren’s beautiful spire with its four flying buttresses. The main body of the church was ruined in the Blitz and never rebuilt. It is now a rather lovely enclosed garden.

Our third weathercock is at St. Katherine Cree on Leadenhall Street. Another beautiful building, dating mostly from the early 17th Century and one of the very few City churches to survive both the Great Fire and the Blitz almost unscathed.

Perhaps the next most popular category of weathervanes is the ship. Unsurprisingly given its great maritime history, London has its fair share of these:

Trinity House, Trinity Square is the HQ of the General Lighthouse Authority for England, Wales and the Channel Islands. Trinity House has been looking after shipping for more than 500 years so it is fitting that it is overseen by this model of a 16th century ship.
A rather more ornate ship adorns the pinnacle of the splendid Two Temple Place, near Temple Underground station and built for William Waldorf Astor in 1895. It is a representation of Columbus’s Santa Maria, intended by Astor to symbolise the path of discovery of his own ancestors and the linking of the US and Europe.
Another fitting nautical tribute is the replica of the Pilgrim Fathers’ Mayflower above the famous Liberty store in Great Marlborough Street. Not just because of the associations between the US and liberty, but because the store’s famous mock-Tudor beams were recycled from two ships, HMS Hindustan and HMS Impregnable.
It’s not all chickens and ships, however. The church of St Peter-upon-Cornhill boasts a rather large and ornate representation of St.Peter’s key to the gates of Heaven…
…and there is a wide variety of other creatures adorning London’s rooftops. For example at the former Billingsgate Market on Lower Thames Street, we should not be surprised to find:
…whereas at St. Helen’s Place off Bishopsgate, the former premises of the Hudson’s Bay Company, once masters of the Canadian fur trade, is topped by a golden beaver.
And finally, it is surprising how few people notice the giant creature at the very top of the Royal Exchange…
…this beautiful golden grasshopper, the family emblem of the Exchange’s founder Sir Thomas Gresham. This is a real whopper at around eleven feet long, and is believed to be from the original incarnation of the Royal Exchange built around 1567, having survived both the Great Fire and a further conflagration that destroyed the second Exchange in 1838.
You can read more about the Gresham grasshopper in our separate post on the old signs of Lombard Street, click here.
Sources and further reading
(1) Source: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/images/bayeux-029.jpg
All other images © @HistoryLondon

Elevating London: the story of the Pedway

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The Pedway: Elevating London is a 40-minute documentary by filmmaker Chris Bevan Lee on the post-war redevelopment of the City of London, focusing on the ambitious attempt to build a network of elevated walkways through the city. Packed with newsreel footage, it's a fascinating glimpse back into 1950s and 1960s London and a reminder of the extraordinary scale of devastation wreaked by the Blitz.
 
The film centres on a blueprint originated in 1947 by architect Charles Holden and planner William Holford whereby new commercial development in the City would incorporate raised walkways and bridges that would elevate pedestrians above the exhaust fumes and danger of the increasing traffic flows on the streets below. By the 1960s the City of London corporation had included the Pedway scheme in its own plans, requiring developers to incorporate Pedway elements in their buildings in order to obtain planning permission.
 

With the exception of the Barbican Centre, where the Pedway element was sufficiently integrated to work in isolation from other paths, the bizarre result was a series of dead-end bridges and paths many of which, now abandoned, still haunt the square mile.



Before watching Bevan Lee's film I knew nothing of the Pedway scheme but had often wondered about the seemingly inaccessible foot ways and bridges that cross the London Wall and Lower Thames Street dual carriageways. To my delight, when I started to read up about the scheme after watching the film, I learned that the building where I work (the St.Helen's Tower off St Mary Axe) was itself part of the scheme and until the 1990s had a walkway connecting it to its next door neighbour!

This is a lovely and very enlightening film. The extensive archive clips fit seamlessly with the modern footage and there are fascinating contextual sequences from movies like Fritz Lang's Metropolis that influenced the ideas behind the scheme. The film is beautifully shot and perfectly balanced with the commentary by expert academics and planners. All in all, an excellent documentary and I would highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in London's history and architecture.
 
The film can be viewed free of charge for a limited period at:
www.elevatinglondon.co.uk
 
You can contact Chris Bevan Lee here
 
You can learn more about the Pedway scheme here.

 

Middle Temple Hall (1562)

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‘…those bricky towers,

The which on Thames’ broad aged back doe ride,

Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,

There whilom wont the Templar knights to bide,

Till they decayed through pride.’ – Spenser, Prothalamion (1596).

For more information about this wonderful Elizabethan building, click here.