Alan Crosby's family history blog: a stroll through London and into the past

Our regular columnist Alan Crosby takes a stroll through London and its rich architecture – and into his family's past

Monday 6 September 2010
Alan Crosby, editor of The Local Historian
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Late in the afternoon of Bank Holiday Monday we were strolling down Fleet Street, en route from St Paul’s to Bedford Square. For me, walking in London is rarely a pleasure – too many people, too much traffic, such a lot of noise and congestion. But this was quite different – it was a beautiful warm sunny afternoon as the shadows lengthened, and there weren’t many people around. The roads were quiet, and we had plenty of time. So it was a rare chance to stop and stare, to meander and pause, looking at the extraordinary variety of architecture and the fascinating visual complexity of one of the world’s most famous streets.

One of the pleasures of being able to take a leisurely architectural stroll is to look above shopfront level to see the upper storeys, with their elaborate facades, sculpture and ornamentation. We can do that anywhere, provided that it’s not a busy worktime with crowds of shoppers and officeworkers getting in the way (well, actually we’d be getting in their way). 

I guess the star of Fleet Street is the sensational Daily Express building of 1932. Its gleaming curved black glass façade stood out as the acme of modernity 80 years ago, and it looks no less impressive now. There’s a building which is truly stylish, in a way that the concrete of the 1950s and 1960s so rarely was. But it shares the street with a wealth of other inter-war buildings, with art deco façades and sculpture – such a shame that the newspapers have gone and the street has lost its central role. But it’s extraordinary, too, that on the opposite side are fabulous turn-of-the-century buildings with glazed tiles, cream-painted figures of mythical beasts, flowery window surrounds ... the sort of thing which gets the guidebook writers very excited in Prague and Barcelona, but is often overlooked in our own towns and cities.

Yet just along from there, past St Dunstan’s in the West (where the Church of England is exotically sharing its worship space with the Romanian Orthodox Church) are some of London’s last authentic pre-Great Fire, pre-Victorian rebuilding, pre-Blitz and pre-planners buildings, the half-timbered, pointy-gabled, jettied Old Cock Inn and Prince Henry’s Rooms, reminding us like shadowy ghosts of an almost-vanished architectural style, the multi-storyed living of our forebears four centuries ago.

Then through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, lined with massive trailers and lorries because something was being filmed there (no idea what and never found out – does anybody know?). For me, a little bit of family history – my great-great grandfather was a prosperous London solicitor with offices at 59 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, so we paused outside and paid homage to Thomas Zachariah Goldring, the man in question.

Between 1791 and 1808 the house, a splendid mid-17th century building much altered in the 1750s, was the residence of Spencer Perceval, a man who would be but a footnote in history except for the fact that in 1812 he became the only British prime minister ever to have been assassinated. What an intriguing connection!