Free London Urban Legends by Scott Wood

that another one is being used as a way of drawing people into a building. In his book London’s Lost Rivers: A Walker’s Guide , Tom Bolton described the River Tyburn’s appearance in the basement of Gray’s Antique Market on Davies Mews off South Molton Lane. The market owners moved into the building in 1977 and found the basement flooded. Claiming the water was the Tyburn, they channelled it into a twee model river with a small bridge and goldfish. The owners of the building take their attraction seriously, putting signs up instructing visitors to not touch the waters of this working river. Tom is not so sure, pointing out that while the Tyburn does flow under South Molton Lane, the river flows through a sewer so would not be fit to be channelled through a building. The water is possibly from groundwater springs that may have fed the Tyburn before it was buried and enclosed.

8
THE SUICIDAL SCULPTOR
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    In London, starving workers dine
With old Duke Humphrey; as for wine,
’Twas made by Christ, in ‘Auld Lang Syne’
But now he’s turned teetotaler.

    Woe in London Brimstone Ballads
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Unknown Stone
    If we can be certain of one thing in London, it must be our statues. To be set in stone suggests confidence and permanence, and London’s representations of its great and good must be a solid link back to the best of our shared past. ‘Dining with Duke Humphrey’ is a sweet but sad expression from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London which means, in short, to be too poor to be able to afford dinner. The homeless and hungry lost scholars would congregate by a memorial of the hospitable Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (1391–1447) in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral.
    This event becomes sadder still when one realises that the cenotaph at the centre of this crowd is not for ‘Good Duke Humphrey’ but Sir John Beauchamp. London’s oldest outdoor indigenous statue (not counting anything ancient, lifted and shipped in from Egypt) is of King Alfred the Great, a bearded and caped figure who is believed to have once stood in the Palace of Westminster and who is now slumming it in Trinity Square in Southwark.
    However, the 1910 book Return of Outdoor Memorials in London by the London County Council could not find any reference to who the statue might be, and lists it as Alfred with a question mark by it. The book notes: ‘The Secretary of Trinity House states that the Corporation have endeavoured to ascertain the facts in connection with the origin of the statue, but without success.’ Understandably, due to the blank drawn about its origins, the statue’s status as London’s oldest is uncertain too. King Alfred is thought to date back to the fourteenth century. The statute of Queen Elizabeth I that stands on the façade of St Dunstan-in-the-West can also claim to be the oldest, as it was erected during the Queen’s reign, either in or around 1586. Nearby are the statues of London’s mythical founder, King Lud and his son Tenvantius, who may have first been erected on the gates at Ludgate in 1586.
    Another mystery memorial is the ‘Eagle Pillar’ that stands in Orme Square, just off Bayswater. No one can remember what the double pillar with an eagle on the top is there to represent. The theories are that it was erected by a grateful Mr Orme, who made a fortune selling gravel to Russia; that it is a French eagle in honour of Louis Napoleon’s stay on the square, and/or that it commemorates the French Embassy, which once stood at No. 2 Orme Square. Or the eagle could in fact be a phoenix for a fire insurance company; the Geograph website notes that a ‘nearby house has birds looking like phoenixes in its frontage’. The final guess in Return of Outdoor Memorials of London is a bit fed up with all the rest; it merely suggests that ‘the column is not a memorial at all, but simply an ornament picked up in a builder’s yard’.
Suicidal Sculptors
    If we are uncertain about London’s oldest stone statue,