One of the greatest pleasures that can be had in London is to wander among its courts and alleys. Considering the effects of bombing in the Second World War and the almost incessant waves of redevelopment, it is surprising just how many survive. To delve into these narrow passages is to be transported back in time as the modern city is left behind within a few footsteps.
My favourite cluster remains those I first explored as a teenager just off Fleet Street starting at Wine Office Court. All the romance of the square mile’s history was, and still is, summed-up in that name. It first appears in a map of 1676 and was labelled after the office which issued licences for the purchase of wine. Immediately on seeing the sign, I can sense the rich odours of port and oak barrels in my nostrils. I can hear the scribble of quill pens on parchment and the click of Dr Samuel Johnson’s stick on the cobbles.
At its junction with Fleet Street for about thirty metres Wine Office Court is a completely covered passageway before opening-up. As if to compensate for the glimpses of the sky that are now possible, the passage narrows so that the view can only be achieved by craning the neck and looking directly upwards. And it is at this point that the sign of ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ pub is seen on the right-hand side. ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ is a fabulous piece of late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century London. Sitting off Fleet Street, the so-called ‘Street of Ink’, naturally enough the pub became a haunt of journalists and people of letters. Was that Oliver Goldsmith’s ghost who just wandered past me, and did I hear Polly, the pub’s famously loquacious parrot, give her splendid imitation of a champagne cork popping?
Stroll on and a kind of courtyard crossroads is met as Hind Court, another glorious constriction, makes a junction. Bear left across this junction through another passage and Gough Square is suddenly encountered. Although a very modest space, it seems immense after the enclosed world of the two courts. After a few moments the brain adjusts to the new space, like eyes that have come from darkness into a candlelight – one moment it is blinding, next it is a warm flicker. Gough Square (actually, it’s more of a short rectangle) is charm and warmth personified, which exerts a magnetic attraction. On two of its sides are excellent examples of Georgian red brick London houses, perfect in their scale and balance. The most famous of these houses, and the heart of the magnetic power, is that of Dr Samuel Johnson, the address where he compiled his dictionary, dined with his companions and chucked around the aphorisms recorded for us by his friend and biographer, James Boswell.
Johnson’s house abuts an archway leading out into Pemberton Row, and here the senses click in again for it is so easy to hear the rattle of a wagon and horses come past, perhaps delivering coals for Johnson’s fires. Take a few steps through the archway, look left and imagine a church in early Gothic Revival style standing at the corner, for this was the site of Holy Trinity Gough Square, one of London’s shortest-lived churches. Completed in 1842 to take pressure off St Bride’s, by the end of the nineteenth century the resident population of the City of London was so low that Holy Trinity was closed and demolished in 1906. (It was also described as ‘absolutely the most ugly church in London’ by one nineteenth century journalist.)
At this point, I always turn back and retrace my steps into Gough Square, for I like to rejoin the world by passing through Bolt Court. Probably named after the long-vanished inn, the Bolt-in-Tun, Johnson moved here from the stone’s throw of Gough Square in 1776. It was also once the home of the Bolt Court Technical School which specialised in the training of engravers and lithographers, as was entirely fitting for an institution just off the ‘Street of Ink’. And what could be more romantic than lithography conjuring up as it does those eighteenth-century maps of London with a scrolled corner plaque giving the publishers name and address, which was usually somewhere equally romantic like Shoe Lane or Fetter Lane.
The past doesn’t just live in the courts, alleys and passages of London, it leaps out, greets you, links its arm in yours and takes you away. Let me make the introduction for you.
