Free London Urban Legends by Scott Wood Page B

himself on realising (after it had been completed) that the lion, one of the world’s largest cast-iron statues, was incorrectly represented. Its stance is said to look more like a domestic cat walking than that of a lion.
    Farther afield is the story of another enthusiastic English sculptor who threw himself into the Danube when he heard that the lions he had designed for the Chain Bridge in Budapest had been cast without tongues. These Hungarian lions are stone, not metal, and were certainly carved with tongues; it’s just that they can only be seen from above.
Backward Buildings
    The eighteenth-century Fort George, on the coast between Nairn and Inverness in Scotland, was apparently designed to be invisible from the sea, but when the architect rode out to view this on completion (why not before?) he could still see one small piece of the fort and so reached for a handy pistol nearby to shoot himself.
    The most famous error of this type is the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, which is said to have been built the wrong way round with a modest entrance for the public at one end and two imposing turrets for the back entrance. It is said that when the architect discovered the error, he leapt to his death from the building. In truth, of course, the building had not been built backwards and the architect probably does not haunt his cursed building. Frank Crocker, however, is said to haunt the hotel he built on Aberdeen Place in NW8. It was built not the wrong way round but in the wrong place. Crocker believed that the terminus for the Great Central Railway would arrive at St John’s Wood, and so he went about building the Crown pub and hotel on Aberdeen Place between 1898 and 1899, in anticipation of the masses. It was a fine building with a marble bar and fireplace and guest rooms with imitation Jacobean plaster. Adding another layer to the myth is the Shady Old Lady blog, which says the sly architect of the building managed to get his dig in by including a bust of the Emperor Caracalla in the pub, a Roman emperor known for his ‘architectural excesses and his complete insanity’. Caracalla is remembered for his massacres and the exuberant public baths he is said to have commissioned in Rome. However, the London terminus for the line ended at Marylebone, not St John’s Wood. And so, ruined financially with nothing to show except a grand hotel with no customers, Crocker jumped out of a high window and the pub’s name changed from the Crown to Crockers Folly. The Doctor Johnson pub in Barkingside, east London, has the same story to explain its size: it was built to service the users of a new road in and out of London which never arrived.
    As Antony Clayton points out in The Folklore of London , the Doctor Johnson pub is so large because it is an ‘improved’ public house to serve the growing housing estates on the edge of London. The Crown Hotel, aka ‘Crockers Folly’, was completed about the same time as Marylebone station, and so was not positioned on Aberdeen Place by mistake. While Frank Crocker died relatively early at the age of 41, his death was of natural causes.
    The sculptor or architect’s mistake, followed by suicide, is a story that must always be hanging in the air, waiting to attach itself to a large building or statue or when something is out of place or missing, like Charles I’s saddle girth. The narrative is then inevitable: the grand project, some hubristic pride, the realisation of the error and then the shameful ending.

9
THE DEVILS OF CORNHILL
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    Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.

    W.H. Auden, The Secret Is Out
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    T HE BEST WAY to find the devils of Cornhill is to walk north from London Bridge, up the west side of Gracechurch Street, through the city of