Guilds -- England -- London; London (England) -- Description and travel; London (England) -- History
Bucklersbury was cut in two when Queen Victoria Street was made. The
upper portion consists chiefly of large modern many-windowed business
houses. Near the north-east corner there is an old brick house
containing part of Pimm’s restaurant. In the southern half Barge Yard is
modern. The Bourse Buildings, occupied by a great number of engineers,
accountants, and business men of all sorts, take up a large part of the
street.
Passing westward we come to =Bow Lane=, which was formerly called in the
lower part Hosier Lane, from the trade of those who occupied it, and in
the upper part, for a similar reason, Cordwainers’ Street.
The street spoken of in the _Calendar of Wills_ by the name of Hosier
Lane belonged to the parish of St. Sepulchre without the wall. The same
street is mentioned in Riley’s _Memorials_.
For the Church of St. Mary-le-Bow see p. 10.
In its modern aspect Bow Lane is not uninteresting.
A covered entry, inappropriately named New Court, leads into a
fascinating corner. There is a gateway really and ruinously old; it is
said to have survived the Fire. The ironwork pattern is lost now in
meaningless and broken twists, though there is a semblance of what might
have been a monogram over the centre gate. The houses all round the
court evidently date from the period directly after the Fire. That
facing the street is of red brick toned by age, and is said to have been
the residence of a Lord Mayor. The others are of dark brick, picked out
in red. No. 5 contains the offices of the _Financial World_.
Beyond it a narrow passage leads at an angle round to the churchyard. A
more spacious way runs beside the church itself. At the corner of this
is a polished granite drinking fountain, erected in 1859, supporting
green painted dolphins.
In the churchyard a scene of confusion and turmoil daily takes place on
the pavement which lies over the bones of the “ancient dead.” Great
wooden crates and packing-cases are littered about. They are from that
large modern building on the west, facing the church, belonging to
warehousemen and manufacturers. But one old seventeenth-century house,
of a date immediately succeeding the Fire, remains, on the south side of
the churchyard, facing Cheapside. Its quiet blackened bricks and flat
windows have beheld many a change of scene on the stage before it. The
ground-floor windows and doorway are connected by an ornamental cornice.
The red bricks of the church in Bow Lane contrast with a long narrow
building of the eighteenth century which is squeezed against them. These
contrast with the gaping cellars and basements of the more modern
buildings.
Of =Bread Street= there is very early mention. In 1204 the leprous women
of St. James’s received a charter respecting a certain tenement in
Chepe, at the head of Bread Street; in 1290 this tenement again becomes
the subject of a charter. In 1263 there was a fire which consumed a part
of Bread Street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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