Free The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall Page B

the old City walls. It was becoming a metropolis – a new word then – and by and by the repercussions of this were felt on Bankside also.
    Melchisedeck Fritter, the long-time lessee of the Cardinal’s Hat, died in 1673, and his widow took over the business. The ground landlords were no longer the Browker family since the property had been sold to a Thomas Hudson seven years earlier. In 1686 the Widow Fritter handed the tenancy of the inn on to a Sarah Humphreys: the inn may have adopted a different name for part of the Fritter tenancy, and now it was renamed in the lease as the Cardinal’s Cap, as if the name of the alley alongside had finally won over other versions. Sarah Humphreys left the lease to her son and grandson, but I do not know for how long the innkeeping business was continued. Hudson died in 1688, leaving ‘his messuages on Bankside’ to his sister, Mary Greene, and after her to his great-nieces Mary and Sarah Bruce.
    About this family, I have not been able to discover anything more. Did Mistress Greene and her nieces, whose parents were evidently out of the picture, live in one of the houses, perhaps in the former Cardinal’s Cap itself? Or was it, as before, a piece of property to be let as a source of revenue? The same family seem to have owned it for many years, but with the new century the nature of the house, and indeed of most of the houses on Bankside, was soon to undergo a great change. For in or about 1710 (the date can only be conjectural, based on architectural features, and on a lead drain-head marked ‘1712’ which used to adorn the front of the next-door house) the timbered Cardinal’s Hat/Cap was largely, though not entirely, demolished. It was never again to be an inn, for it was replaced by a decent, but not grand, brick-fronted gentleman’s abode, in the new style.
    Yet at this crucial moment in the existence of the house opposite St Paul’s, we know less of what was going on socially on Bankside than at any other era since the Middle Ages. The house did not have to be rebuilt, for the Great Fire never reached the south bank. The Building Acts of 1667 and 1707, which were designed to thwart future fires by stipulating the use of less combustible materials, only applied to new houses, not existing ones. In other outlying parts of London that had escaped the Fire, particularly Holborn, timbered and gabled houses continued to stand, many lasting well into the nineteenth century. So the fact that most of the gabled houses of Bankside were rebuilt, in the approved modern style, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, can only suggest that this redevelopment seemed worthwhile to their owners – a fair number of owners. Unlike many better-documented areas on the other side of the river, Bankside was not one estate with a wealthy ground landlord making a comprehensive decision. Bankside proprietors, such as Henslowe and Browker, and now apparently the descendants of Mary Greene, did often own more than one house. The three houses a little to the east of the Cardinal’s Cap, which had once been Henslowe’s and were to become numbers 44, 45 and 46, belonged at this date to a Sir Richard Oldner, knight, and he owned another house along Bankside in which he lived. But this was the pattern: small holdings of freehold plots, two, three or four houses along the waterfront at the most, and then not always in one piece. Clearly, if so many of these were rebuilt at the same period, a number of individuals must each have decided that Bankside was the sort of desirable location on which it was worth laying out money. The banking system as we know it today was just beginning to form: credit was easier to get than it had been when much wealth tended to be kept in solid form in purses; London’s population was continuing to rise, the town was growing rapidly westwards. There would surely, it must have been said, be a demand for genteel houses