Free Lost London by Richard Guard

keepers met with tragic accidents. Christopher Preston, for instance, was attacked and almost devoured by one of his bears in 1709.
    The first advertisement for human-based ‘entertainment’ at Hockley-in-the-Hole dates to 1700, when the Daily Post reported that four men were ‘to fight at sword for a
bet of half-a-guinea, and six to wrestle for three pairs of gloves, at half-a-crown each pair. The entertainment to begin exactly at three o’clock.’ By then, Hockley was widely regarded
as a place of ill repute. Jonathan Wilde, the self-styled ‘Thief-Taker General’ who was executed in 1725, is thought to have lived here for a time. For many years, the Bear Gardens also
displayed a suitcase inscribed ‘R Turpin’ and said to have belonged to the notorious highwayman.
    Hockley-in-the-Hole’s popularity waned as a more enlightened attitude to its ‘sports’ spread through society. Nonetheless, the squalid, tumble-down street remained until the
widening of Farringdon Road and a programme of improvements to the Clerkenwell area in 1856–7 swept it away.

Holborn Restaurant

    218 H IGH H OLBORN WAS FORMERLY A DANCE - HALL , casino and swimming baths, but reopened in 1874 under
    Frederick Gordon as a spectacular public dining room. Among its diners was Gandhi, who ate here as a young law student in 1889 and found the setting quite palatial.
    That same year the venue was extended and redecorated, and a decade later a Lieutenant-Colonel Newnham-Davies described eating there in his Dinners and Diners :
    In the many-coloured marble hall, with its marble staircase springing from either side, a well-favoured gentleman with a close-clipped grey beard was standing, a sheet of paper in his hand,
and waved us towards a marble portico, through which we passed to the grand saloon with its three galleries supported by marble pillars.
    The restaurant offered a choice of locations to eat, including the Grand Salon, Duke’s Salon, Ladies’ Salon, Grill Room or Lincoln’s Inn Buffet, as well as private dining
rooms. Although clearly approving of the service and décor, Newnham-Davies was nonetheless somewhat scathing about the food: ‘The cutlet of mutton that was brought to each of us was
small, and had suffered from having to journey some way from the kitchen.’
    An enduringly popular venue for reunions and annual suppers, the Holborn closed in 1955, in an asset sale prior to being demolished, it listed some 960 chairs for sale.
Holy Trinity

    Minories, Tower Hill
    F OUNDED IN 1108 BY M ATILDA (Henry I ’s queen), from the late 13th century
Holy Trinity served as a convent for an order known as the Poor Clares or Sister Minoresses (hence the street name, Minories).

    It was granted papal exemption from the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury and even after the dissolution of the monasteries, the church claimed the right to marry
people without the calling of banns.
    In the late 16th century, London’s first great historian, John Stow, remembered as a child buying milk from the farm attached to the convent:
    Near adjoining to this abbey, called the Minories, on the south side thereof, was some time a farm belonging to said nunnery; at the which farm I myself (in my youth) have fetched many a
halfpenny worth of milk, and never had less than three ale-pints for a halfpenny in the summer, nor less than one ale-quart for a halfpenny in the winter, always hot from the cow, as the same was
milked and strained.
    Having escaped the Great Fire of 1666 unscathed, Holy Trinity fell into a state of dilapidation but was rebuilt in 1706. Sir Isaac Newton worshipped here when Master of theMint from 1699 to 1727. The church’s tiny graveyard often overflowed with the dead and was emptied twice, in 1689 and 1763, though no one knows what happened to the bones. In
1852 a rather macabre discovery was made in the crypt when the head of Lady Jane Grey’s father, the Duke of Suffolk, was found. Despite his having been beheaded