Points of View

London 1870s and now - 8: Gatehouse, Inner Temple

This is the eighth in a series of posts comparing photos of London taken by Henry Dixon in the 1870s and 80s with the same view today. Use our Google map to see where they were taken.

Inner Temple, on Fleet St, is one of the four Inns of Court in central London: associations which since the 14th century have played a central role in recruiting and training barristers. The Inns of Court (Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray's Inn and Lincoln's Inn) hold the exclusive rights to call candidates to practise law at the bar of England and Wales. Many of their picturesque quadrangles and courts, just a few yards from busy thoroughfares, are surprising havens of quiet, lacking any modern buildings.

The top picture is Dixon's. A zoomable version of this image is on our Online Gallery. Writing about the building in 1880, Alfred Marks commented: "The plumes of feathers in the panels between the first and second floors were intended as a compliment to Henry, Prince of Wales". The unusually bold advertisement linking the hair-cutting salon with Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey "...can only be accounted for by supposing that the author of the inscription confused this Gatehouse with that of the Middle Temple, with which... Wolsey's name is indeed connected."

Below it is the same view as it appeared in August 2009. The shop next to the gateway is still a hairdresser, just as it was in the 1870s. However, then you could have a trim for sixpence, roughly a tenth of a decent day's wage for a labourer. Similar cut-price tonsures can be had today for £7 in many places in London; but the Inner Temple salon of 2009 is a little more upmarket, with prices ranging from £35-£70.

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London 1870s and now - 7: Austin Friars, the City

This is the seventh in a series of posts comparing photos of London taken by Henry Dixon in the 1870s with the same view today. Use our Google map to see where they were taken.

Austin Friars is a narrow, winding, cobbled cul-de-sac in the City, just behind the Bank of England. It was named after the leading Augustinian monastery in England, founded in 1253 by Humphery de Bohun.

The top picture is Dixon's. A zoomable version of this image is on our Online Gallery. Writing about the building seen in the photograph, Alfred Marks commented: "The house, No. 10, is a good example of the genuine Queen Anne style; its date, 1704, is seen on the rain-pipe... At the dissolution the house was bestowed on William Paulet, the first Marquis of Winchester, and from the residence built by him on the site of the Friars' house, cloister, and gardens, Great Winchester Street took its name."

Below it is the same view as it appeared in August 2009. All the original buildings have gone, and only the tiny alley of Austin Friars Passage off to the left confirms that the two photos were taken from the same spot. The Dutch church behind the photographer and to the right remains, however, and the street - still accessed from Broad St through an old archway and still with at least three 90-degree bends in its short span - retains much of its quirky old charm.

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London 1870s and now - 6: Bevis Marks/St Mary Axe

 

This is the sixth in a series of posts comparing photos of London taken by Henry Dixon in the 1870s and 80s with the same view today. Use our Google map to see where they were taken.

The top picture is Dixon's. A zoomable version of this image is on our Online Gallery. Writing about the building in 1880, Alfred Marks noted: "This overhanging gabled house, of a kind fast becoming very rare in London, was destroyed in the course of last year." The rather grim-looking corner housed a pub, the 'Golden Axe Tavern'.

Below it is the same view as it appeared in August 2009. A visitor from Dixon's time would be astounded and disoriented by the 180m-tall curved figure of 30 St Mary Axe, 'the Gherkin', opened in 2004. It dominates a financial district whose architectural look and feel is constantly being reinvented.

But tucked away between the slabs of steel and glass, a few religious buildings around here would be familiar to the folk of 140 years ago. Just around the corner from here is Bevis Marks Synagogue, which has been a place of continuous worship since 1701, for example; while a few dozen metres away to the right is the church of St Helen's, one of the few City churches to survive (with restoration) the Great Fire and the Blitz, dramatically dwarfed by the Gherkin.

London 1870s and now - 5: Macclesfield St, Soho

This is the fifth in a series of comparing photos of London taken by Henry Dixon in the 1870s and 80s with the same view today. There's a new post every Tuesday. Use our Google map to see where they were taken.

Macclesfield St is a short thoroughfare in Soho, part of today's Chinatown district. The top picture is Dixon's, and shows the shopfront of No. 10. A zoomable version of this image is on our Online Gallery. Writing about the building in 1880, Alfred Marks commented: "The shop, well-known to architects as 'the oldest shop in London,' was probably built about 1690."

It is impossible to locate the No. 10 of Dixon's photo in today's Macclesfield St. The picture below it, from August 2009, demonstrates how different the street looks now. No doubt it would bewilder the lady in the top photo.

As with the other streets in Chinatown, the street sign carries a version of the name in Chinese characters. The last of the four characters means 'street', and the third '[rice] field'.

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London 1870s and now - 4: Ashburnham House, Westminster

This is the fourth in a series of posts comparing photos of London taken by Henry Dixon in the 1870s and 80s with the same view today. Use our Google map to see where they were taken.

Ashburnham House stands in Little Dean's Yard, a secluded private square off picturesque Dean's Yard (pictured below) behind Westminster Abbey. It is part of Westminster School. A zoomable version of the top image is on our Online Gallery. Writing in 1880, Alfred Marks commented: "The house is supposed to have been built for one of the Ashburnham family, probably for John Asburnham, the attendant on Charles I from Oxford to the Scotch army, and from Hampton Court to the Isle of Wight. At all events it was in possession of the family at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Hatton's New View, II., 623), and so remained till 1730, when it was purchased by the Crown, of John, the third Lord and first Earl. The Cottonian Manuscripts were kept here, when in October, 1731, a fire broke out which nearly proved fatal to the entire collection."

The Cotton collection was donated to the nation and so came to the British Library. Among its most celebrated items are Beowulf and one of the four surviving copies of the 1215 issue of Magna Carta. Only just surviving though: the damage it sustained in that fire of 1731 is all too evident. Many items from Cotton's collection are are on display in the Library's John Ritblat Gallery of treasures.

The photograph beneath it shows Ashburnham House as it appeared in August 2009. The tree is the same tree; the front wall from the 1870s however - said to have been erected on the orders of the House's owner to block out the view of Westminster School's students running around in the playground - is no more.

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