August 14, 2024

#10: An Accidental Mews Pub Crawl

Ed Jefferson is attempting to visit every Mews in Greater London. This week: indignation meetings, pothole demarcation, and unwanted launderette kissing, but first…

Actually this week I’m going straight to the Mewses because I’ve written quite a lot of stupid bollocks about them AND depending on how you count there are 11 of them this week so that’s an exciting BONUS for you.

#91 Sidmouth Mews, Camden, WC1H

Post-war council estate (of the sort that annoys a very specific sort of Tory who gets mad at the idea that someone poorer than them should be allowed to live in Zone 1) that reused the name of a Mews that ran through the middle of the current site.

One former resident of the original Mews who probably won’t be getting a blue plaque any time soon was anarchist Thomas Cantwell, who was arrested several times in the 1890s for things up to and including ‘inciting the murder of the Royal Family’, mainly by printing pamphlets saying stuff like “They had the right idea in France”. He also organised “an indignation meeting” in Hyde Park to coincide with the wedding of the future King George V. About 120 years later I got very pissed in the same park to ‘celebrate’ William and Kate’s wedding while wearing a Union Jack tie ‘ironically’ so solidarity, brother.

#92 Henrietta Mews, Camden, WC1N

So named because it was the Mews for Henrietta Street, named for the wife of a governor of the Foundling Hospital (see Mews #40 for more on this). Some time in the late 19th century, after the governor and said wife were safely dead, Henrietta Street was renamed Handel Street, after the composer, a benefactor of the hospital (he left it the rights to his most famous work, Messiah). This was presumably either to distinguish it from the Henrietta Street in Covent Garden or because everyone was embarrassed about the nepotism.

#93 Wakefield Mews, Camden, WC1N

The original Wakefield Mews ran north to south behind houses that were replaced by an apartment block called Clare Court, and the name has been ostensibly retained for the access road that runs through under one side of the block.

Where the Mews meets Judd Street on the other side there’s a sort of satirical blue plaque dedicated to ‘sparrows’, because apparently there used to be sparrows here and wouldn’t it be nice if there were still sparrows here, if you’re way more into sparrows than it has ever occurred to me that anyone would be.

There is the suggestion that the name of this (and Wakefield Street) derive from the Pindar of Wakefield, a pub to the east on Gray’s Inn Road, although it doesn’t seem immediately clear why that would be the case given it’s not that close to either.

The Pindar of Wakefield is a character in a ballad about Robin Hood, it says here, but he wasn’t in the 1990s children’s TV series Maid Marion And Her Merry Men so isn’t canon as far as I’m concerned. The pub is still there but was renamed The Water Rats upon being purchased by the Grand Order of Water Rats, a sort of sub-Freemasonry organisation for men in the entertainment industry to do funny handshakes at each other or whatever.

Under both names the pub has been a notable music venue, having hosted the UK debuts of both Bob Dylan and Katy Perry. I went to see lots of bands here in 2000s, none of whom have gone on to be as famous as Bob Dylan or Katy Perry as far as I can remember, although I did once go there to interview a singer whose name I have long since forgotten and asked him what the fastest he’d ever spun around was, because his album was called ‘Spin Me Round’. I would not consider myself a music journalist, no.

#94 Woolf Mews, Camden, WC1H

Part of a late 20th century bit of redevelopment along with a building named Virginia Court. Can you see what they have done there?

#95 Ormond Mews, Camden, WC1N

Confusingly, not the original street in this area with this name, which is to the south of Great Ormond Street Hospital and is now called Barbon Close, so I have no interest it. Start a Close Letter if you care about Closes. The current road, a service road for the hospital, is roughly aligned with part of what’s called Landsdowne Mews on older maps. If you find a small white dog that doesn’t answer to any name but is usually called Di, please return it here as it has apparently been lost since 1807, according to an ad in the Morning Advertiser.

My source for the current name is the National Street Gazetteer maintained by GeoPlace and I do suspect the names applied in the case of these very minor streets are sometimes on the notional side. But I am going be a Mews maximalist here and will lean on the side of including Mewses that might not exist rather than excluding Mewses that might exist.

As well as being responsible for much brilliant and important medical treatment of children over the last 172 years, Great Ormond Street Hospital is also notable for the fact that UK copyright legislation bends around it. JM Barrie left it the rights to Peter Pan - under normal circumstances this copyright would have now expired, but UK copyright law has a specific provision that publications or performances of Peter Pan must continue to pay royalties to hospital¹.

#96 Grenville Mews, Camden, WC1N

Alternatively known as “Access Road To The National Hospital”, though older maps confirm that Grenville Mews was indeed a road on this site in the 1850s. The National Hospital’s full name is the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, though it was originally the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, iterated on a few variations of that before settling for the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases until 1990, when it was determined that that sounded too silly.

#97 Gower Mews, Camden, WC1E

Gower was apparently part of the maiden name of one of the Duchesses of Bedford - the Dukes of Bedford owned and (continue to own) much of the land round here, so when they got bored of naming stuff after themselves decided to give their wives a go. Is it flattering to have a stables full of all horse poo and that named after you? Different strokes I guess.

#98 South Crescent Mews, Camden, WC1E

Or is it?

According to the Street Gazetter, South Crescent Mews is a gated alleyway running off South Crescent on Store Street. Maps from the mid-1850s show South Crescent as row of houses - by the early 20th century these had been replaced by, give or take, what’s there now - three large blocks of 4-6 storeys. The buildings have been used for a variety of purposes but the alley partly running under the building on the Western side seems to always been there.

But is it South Crescent Mews? There’s no evidence of the name on site, or on any map I can find outside of the Street Gazetteer that it’s called that, and just up the road we have…

#98 South Crescent Mews, Camden, WC1N

There used to be a road that ran behind the houses on the southern half of Cartwright Gardens called South Crescent Mews - with an entrance on Marchmont Street by the Lord John Russell pub - the road sign for it still exists, sort of - the ‘South’ bit of it has at some point since June 2021, so it now just says Crescent Mews.

Most of the Mews has long since disappeared - for some years the site was covered by a bus depot and milk distribution centre. It was then redeveloped into Woolf Mews - see above, but this is now blocked off from the original entrance, leaving the one remaining bit of South Crescent Mews as an arbitrarily cobbled space for outdoor drinking.

As it turns out I am actually extremely familiar with this tiny bit of Mews - while at university I lived in a very small flat round the corner and spent a lot of time nursing pints outside this pub, not least because we had no washing machine and there’s a launderette over the road. I suppose I could have waited in the launderette but one time I did that and a very drunk Australian man tried to kiss me, so the pub seemed a better bet (your milage may vary, I suppose).

The pub is the Lord John Russell, yet another example of the Dukes of Bedford getting shit named after them (to be fair he was the one who was also the Prime Minister) - as far as I can remember it hasn’t changed much in the last 20 years, though the bar no longer has a heated cabinet full of grim looking meat products and the selection of beer available on tap is wider, albeit without being any better.

Anyway, which is the real South Crescent Mews? My suspicion is that the ‘mews’ off South Crescent was never actually called that until someone working on the data the Street Gazetteer uses had a name for a road that they couldn’t find on a map, and a road on a map without a name, and made a not illogical deduction.

So, we have, depending on how you look at it, somewhere between 0 and 2 South Crescent Mewses - I will split the difference and let them share #98.

#99 Percy Mews, Camden, W1T

Another mews entrance ‘through’ a pub - this time The Wheatsheaf, which I know quite well as for some years this was the host venue of a monthly event called ‘Big Ideas’ at which someone would present a talk on a philosophical or philosophy-adjacent theme, which would be then be discussed at increasingly boozy length, occasionally spilling into the Mews for fresh air and/or cigarettes. Who says that Philosophy degree was a waste of time?

I recall someone once pointing out that the border between the boroughs of Camden and Westminster runs right down the middle of the road outside, and while I was there I could see what appeared to be some council officials anxiously pacing around a fenced off pothole in the middle of the road, occasionally stopping to make some measurements, then getting very excited when they finally worked out that it was not their problem.

#100 Stephen Mews, Camden, W1T

Another pub-fronted Mews, this time accessed by an alley next to The Bricklayers Arms, of the Sam Smiths chain loathed/beloved for its distinctly mediocre beer provided at distinctly low prices, except they’ve ruined one half of the equation by making it almost exactly as expensive as all the other pubs in London thus removing the single reason for anyone to actual enter one, unless you have a fetish for being told off for swearing/using your phone.

Stephen was apparently the business partner of the Swiss property developer responsible for much of this area, Peter Gaspard Gresse (hence Gresse Street, which the Mews connects to), so it wasn’t just wives who got stuff named after them.

Peter Gresse’s son was an artist called John Alexander Gresse, who for some reason the Dictionary of National Biography bothers to note was so corpulent that people called him ‘Jack Grease’. There are worse things than being forgotten I suppose.

Total mewses visited: 100/2380