Free Georgian London: Into the Streets by Lucy Inglis Page A

to ‘demonstrate’ a manned balloon flight with the help of his partner, George Biggin. This was to take place on the Artillery Ground near Moorfields, in September 1784. The almost impossible number of 200,000 people turned out to see this demonstration, including the royals and a healthy chunk of the nobility.
    Lunardi made everything dramatic and packed his cat and dog into the basket with him for company before releasing the tethers, whereupon the balloon rose ‘ with slow and gradual majesty into the air’ to the disappointment of ‘the splenetic’ doubters. ‘He appeared composed, and as the balloon went up, bowed most gracefully, and calmly waved his flag to the admiring and wonder-struck spectators .’ It wasn’t all glamour, though: the cat got sick and was let out when the balloon touched down briefly in north London before Lunardi finally landed near Ware, to a very surprised reception.
    Lunardi bonnets, fans and garters became all the rage, and the charming Italian had quite a fan club. The balloon went on show in the Pantheon on Oxford Street, the great hall of public entertainment designed by James Wyatt, which stood on the plot now occupied by Marks & Spencer. Thousands came to visit Lunardi’s balloon, displayed in the Pantheon’s rotunda, and aerostatic science became the wonder of the age. Allegedly, after seeing a balloon on Hounslow Heath in 1784, Horace Walpole predicted that the whole heath would become ‘ the harbour of the skies ’ – predicting, if not quite prophesying, the arrival of Heathrow. The sense of potential these first balloon ascents created was huge: visible, exciting proof that the world was changing, and almost anything was possible.
    After Lunardi, Moorfields would no longer hold the massing crowds and soon disappeared under housing of the meaner Georgian sort, in addition to workshops and cookhouses. In 1800, it was the site of an illuminating case of dognapping, illustrating the diversity of the area, when a man venturing into an establishment for a bowl of soup was surprised to find his missing and ‘much-lamented’ bull terrier, Cesar, there under another name. The owner of the cookhouse, Mr Day, explained that the dog, named Charles, could not possibly be Cesar and was, instead, the produce of the costermonger’s dog, Lover of Smut, and the lamplighter’s dog, Rose. Charles had been born in Moorfields on the premises of a ‘horse-boiler’ and raised by a carter, before being purchased for one guinea by Mr Day. Eventually, it emerged that Mr Day had, in fact, purchased the dog from Charley, ‘the milk-man from over the water’.
    By the time of Cesar’s restoration to his rightful owners, Moorfields had largely disappeared beneath urban development. It would remain densely populated by the poorer classes before being comprehensively flattened during the Second World War.
GRUB STREET: HOME OF ‘ YE POETS, RAGGED AND FORLORN ’
     
    The geography of Moorfields and Bedlam is now hidden, but both were linked inseparably with the legend of Grub Street, particularly during the early part of the eighteenth century. To live and work in Grub Street as a writer, either in reality or metaphorically, meant literary prostitution. It was a poor street running from St Giles-without-Cripplegate (the church still standing in the Barbican complex) north to Chiswell Street, in Clerkenwell.
    The Moorfields book and ballad sellers were in place by the Restoration, but it was to be a different generation of writers who would create the Grub Street legend. There are many who could lay claim to being ‘the first’ writer of Grub Street, but there are few who could do it with as much authenticity as Daniel Defoe, born the son of a Presbyterian butcher in Fore Street in the scrubby parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, the parish which covered the bottom half of Grub Street.
    Defoe would go on to become one of the most important political writers of his day, working for Robert Harley and