Holborn and Bloomsbury | Page 8

vicious and bad. Terrible accounts of the overcrowding and consequent immorality come down to us from the newspaper echoes of the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The opening up of the new thoroughfares of New Oxford Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, and Charing Cross Road, have done much, but the neighbourhood is still a slum. The seven streets remain in their starlike shape, by name Great and Little White Lion Street, Great and Little St. Andrew Street, Great and Little Earl Street, and Queen Street.
Short's Gardens was in 1623 really a garden, and a little later than that date was acquired by a man named Dudley Short.
Betterton Street was until comparatively recently called Brownlow, from Sir John Brownlow of Belton, who had a house here in Charles II.'s time. The street is now, to use a favourite expression of Stow's, "better built than inhabited," for the row of brick houses of no very squalid type are inhabited by the very poor.
Endell Street was built in 1844, at the time of the erection of the workhouse. In it are the National Schools, a Protestant Swiss chapel, and an entrance to the public baths and wash-houses, to the south of which rise the towers of the workhouse. Christ Church is hemmed in by the workhouse, having an outlet only on the street. The church was consecrated in 1845. In Short's Gardens is the Lying-in Hospital, the oldest institution of the kind in England. On the west side, between Castle Street and Short's Gardens, the remains of an ancient bath were discovered at what was once No. 3, Belton Street, now 23 and 25, Endell Street. Tradition wildly asserts that this was used by Queen Anne. Fragments of it still remain in the room used for iron lumber, for the premises are in the occupation of an iron merchant, but the water has long since ceased to flow.
Drury Lane has been in great part described in The Strand, which see, p. 97. The Coal Yard at the north-east end, where Nell Gwynne was born, is now Goldsmith Street. Pit Place, on the west of Great Wild Street, derives its name from the cockpit or theatre, the original of the Drury Lane Theatre, which stood here. The cockpit was built previous to 1617, for in that year an incensed mob destroyed it, and tore all the dresses. It was afterwards known as the Phoenix Theatre. At one time it seems to have been used as a school, though this may very well have been at the same time as it fulfilled its legitimate functions. Betterton and Kynaston both made their first public appearance here. The actual date of the theatre's demolition is not known. Parton judges it to have been at the time of the building of Wild, then Weld, Street. Its performances are described, 1642, as having degenerated into an inferior kind, and having been attended by inferior audiences.
At the north-east end of Drury Lane is the site of the ancient hostelry, the White Hart. Here also was a stone cross, known as Aldewych Cross, for the lane was anciently the Via de Aldewych, and is one of the oldest roads in the parish; Saxon Ald = old, and Wych = a village, a name to be preserved in the new Crescent. It is difficult to understand, looking down Drury Lane to-day from Holborn, that this most mean and unlovely street was once a place of aristocratic resort--of gardens, great houses, and orchards. Here was Craven House, here was Clare House; here lived the Earl of Stirling, the Marquis of Argyll, and the Earl of Anglesey. Here lived for a time Nell Gwynne. Pepys says:
"Saw pretty Nelly standing at her lodgings door in Drury Lane in her smock-sleeves and bodice, looking upon one. She seemed a mighty pretty creature."
The Lane fell into disrepute early in the eighteenth century. The "saints of Drury Lane," the "drabs of Drury Lane," the starving poets of Drury Lane, are freely ridiculed by the poets of that time.
"'Nine years!' cries he, who high in Drury Lane, Lull'd by soft zephyrs through the broken pane, Rhymes ere he wakes, and prints before term ends, Obliged by hunger and request of friends."
The boundary of St. Giles's parish runs down Drury Lane between Long Acre and Great Queen Street. Of the last of these Strype says: "It is a street graced with a goodly row of large uniform houses on the south side, but on the north side is indifferent." The street was begun in the early years of the seventeenth century, but the building spread over a long time, so that we find the "goodly row of houses" on the south side to have been built by Webb, a pupil of Inigo Jones, about 1646. A number of celebrated people lived