Free Amazing & Extraordinary Facts: London by Editors of David & Charles Page A

Infanta of Castile (the eldest daughter of the then King of Spain) who was at one time engaged to Charles I. Spitalfields also has foreign associations, having become the home of immigrant Huguenot silk weavers in the late 17th century. The word spital is a shortened form of ‘hospital’ and the area takes its name from the St Mary Spital, a hospital founded in the 12th century. Finsbury to the north of central London owes its name to the fact that it was once part of the Great Fen, a marshy area which lay just outside the City walls.
    In 1849 the humorous magazine
Punch
suggested some street names which reflected the insanitary state of the capital in the pre-Bazalgette years.
Punch
suggested Open Sewer Street; Slaughter House Buildings; Shambles Place; Knacker’s Yard; Graveyard Crescent; Charnel Square; Typhus Alley; Scrofula Lane; Consumption Alley, and so on.

A well-appointed city
London’s watery resources
    M any London placenames have their origins in water supplies. Marylebone is an abbreviation for Mary-le-bourne, the word ‘bourne’ meaning a spring. Its water was conducted in a lead pipe to the Great Conduit at Cheapside in the City in 1236 from which citizens could draw water free of charge. Conduit Street, off Regent Street, and Lamb’s Conduit Passage in Holborn were also the location of water conduits. Holywell, near Liverpool Street Station, Clement’s Well near the Monument and Clerkenwell all mark the sites of former wells as does Sadler’s Wells. The last of these became a fashionable spa in the 18th century and the original well may still be glimpsed through a glass floor panel behind the scenes at Sadler’s Wells theatre. New River Head, next to Sadler’s Wells in Rosebery Avenue, marked the terminus of the New River Company. The brainchild of Hugh Myddleton, Welsh silversmith and City entrepreneur, the New River was built between 1609 and 1613 to bring water by gravity from the Chiltern Hills near Ware to the city. It now stops short at Stoke Newington where it feeds into the London Ring Main and continues to supply Londoners with water four centuries after its construction. In the abandoned stretch beyond Stoke Newington it survives in small lakes and the original waterworks and cistern may be seen off Rosebery Avenue. Cold Bath Square in Clerkenwell marks the site of a facility which flourished until 1878 and is now close to the home of the Royal Mail’s main sorting office at Mount Pleasant. Teddington, west of London, was originally called ‘Tide-end-Town’, a reference to the fact that it is the place where the Thames ceases to be a tidal river, now marked by Teddington Lock.

    The Great Conduit

Property magnates with stiff collars
The grounds for the invention of retail therapy
    M any of London’s most elegant shopping streets were designed for residential purposes and did not acquire a significant number of shops until the 19th century. In the early 17th century a tailor called Robert Baker made a fortune from selling a stiff collar of his own design known as a picadil. In 1612 he built himself a fine mansion in Great Windmill Street, close to the present junction of Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue. Envious aristocrats who resented the wealth of this arriviste dubbed his new home Piccadilly in reference to the source of his wealth and the name became associated with the road on land that Baker also owned. Later in the century the nearby Jermyn Street drew its name from Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans who received the land by a grant of Charles II whose exile he had shared during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. A building on the corner of Jermyn Street and Bury Street has a relief, dating from about 1680, showing the king presenting the deeds to Jermyn. Four years later a property developer called Thomas Bond began to develop Bond Street as a smart residential quarter which accommodated such ‘celebrities’ as Jonathan Swift, Edward Gibbon and Horatio Nelson.
    The first