Monsey, but I cannot produce you any other authority for its
truth; and I shall likewise, therefore, leave you to read, and judge
for yourself, the amusing account of Dean Swift’s and Pope’s visits and
conversations with Crispin Tucker, of London Bridge, in chapters viii.
and ix. of the work I have referred to.
“It was, however, not only the ordinary buildings in the Bridge-street,
which were formerly occupied as shops and warehouses, but even
the Chapel of St. Thomas, which, in its later years, was called
Chapel-House, and the Nonesuch-House, were used for similar purposes
before they were taken down. Mr. John Nichols, in his ‘_Literary
Anecdotes_,’ tells us, volume vi., part i., page 402, note, on the
authority of Dr. Ducarel, that ‘the house over the Chapel belonged to
Mr. Baldwin, Haberdasher, who was born there; and when, at seventy-one,
he was ordered to go to Chislehurst for a change of air, he could
not sleep in the country, for want of the noise,’--the roaring and
rushing of the tide beneath the Bridge,--‘he had been always used to
hear.’ My good friend, Mr. J. T. Smith, too, in his very interesting
volume of the ‘_Ancient Topography of London_,’ which you have already
quoted, page 26, has also the following observations concerning the
modern use of this Chapel. ‘By the _Morning Advertiser_,’ says he,
‘for April 26th, 1798, it appears that Aldermen Gill and Wright had
been in partnership upwards of fifty years; and that their shop stood
on the centre of London Bridge, and their warehouse for paper was
directly under it, which was a Chapel for divine service, in one of the
old arches; and, long within legal memory, the service was performed
every sabbath and Saint’s day. Although the floor was always, at
high-water mark, from ten to twelve feet under the surface; yet such
was the excellency of the materials and the masonry, that not the
least damp, or leak, ever happened, and the paper was kept as safe
and dry as it would have been in a garret.’ In that ‘_Survey of the
Cities of London and Westminster_,’ printed in 1734, and purporting to
have been compiled by Robert Seymour, Esq., but which was in reality
the production of the Rev. John Motley, the famous collector of Joe
Miller’s Jests, it is stated in volume i., book i., page 48, that at
that time one side of the Nonesuch House was inhabited by Mr. Bray, a
Stationer, and the other by Mr. West, a Dry-Salter. So much then, Mr.
Barnaby, for the few anecdotes which I have been able to collect of the
dwellings and inhabitants of old London Bridge.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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