Sept. 19-20
I went to St. Giles Cripplegate a few days ago, so I decided to give St. Giles in the Fields equal time. I’m glad I did, because all these years I have been misinformed.
I had read long ago that St. Giles in the Fields was established by parishioners fleeing the thieves’ den around the other St. Giles. Good story, but not so, it seems.
The nave of St. Giles in the Fields was closed when I got there.
But the narthex was open, so I was able to get a brochure with a brief history of the parish. I expected to read one thing and found something completely different.
The parish developed from a chapel connected with a leper hospital founded in 1101 by a queen named Matilda. She had recently married King Henry I, about whom I know nothing.
The chapel became a parish church and added “in the fields” to its name seven Henries later, when Henry VIII dissolved the monastery at the hospital.
The current building dates to the early 18th century. That makes it a few decades older than St. Paul’s Chapel in downtown Manhattan.
This section of town, along with the Seven Dials, which adjoins it, was the notorious slum. There may have been slums around the other St. Giles, but this is the neighborhood once known as the Rookery.
As the brochure puts it, the area in the 18th and 19th centuries was “the most notorious in London for squalor and degradation.”
I decided to stroll around the Rookery a bit—well, what used to be the Rookery. It’s a commercial district now. One of the streets specializes in musical instruments where you can buy or sell new or used guitars, flutes, lutes, pianos, and the like. There are stores that advertise repairs to instruments, too.
It was about here that I noticed the top of a huge round building, made of metal and glass with text running in lights too dim to read near the top. It was a true eyesore.
I’d expect to see something like this among the Soviet relics in Prague. Not in a city full of townhouses four stories high.
I headed in its general direction to find out what it is. As I came nearer, it was no longer visible. Either I was too close and those four-story buildings were enough to block the view, or somebody had agreed with me and removed it.
I asked a policeman who was ticketing a parked car about it. It is the BBC tower.
I never did find it, but found two other grotesque buildings in the same general area.
One has a scalloped white wall that looks like plastic. That one is forgivable, though, because it’s a museum, and many modern museums are ugly on the outside.
I have no idea what the other one, right across the street from the museum, was designed for. Large heating vents are exposed in a pattern on an outer wall, like the back of an electric clothes dryer. Someone may have thought that was decorative.
Having visited the Rookery, I was ready for another crime scene.
I took the Central Line from Tottenham Court Road station to Liverpool Street, where I promptly got myself lost in East London.
My destination, the Ten Bells pub, was a lot closer to the station than I realized. I even had a map and couldn’t find the turn.
I was supposed to go north on Bishopsgate and take a right onto Brushfield St. To start with, I came out on the wrong side of the station.
I may have already been past the turning point when I found Bishopsgate.
In any event I walked until long after Bishopsgate became Shoreditch High Street. I hid in a corner from public view and checked my map. It was a long walk back, but mostly downhill.
I was crossing a large street and looked in the general direction I wanted to take. At the end of the road was a large sign reading “Truman’s.”
Truman’s has been “proudly brewed in East London” since some time in the remote past, maybe the beginning of time.
That’s one of the reasons I wanted to go to the Ten Bells. It’s the only place where I knew Truman’s ales were on tap. That and a little Ripper nostalgia.
I was also getting very hungry. It was after noon and I hadn’t had anything but coffee so far. And remember, I had gotten a lot more exercise walking than I had planned.
I made for the sign and found it belonged to a pub called the Golden Heart, On the wall outside was the silhouette of a man rendered in bottle caps.
The place was on Commercial Street, the same as the Ten Bells.
But it wasn’t the Ten Bells. Was I close?
Yes, there was the pig on the sign for St. John Bread and Wine, a great little high-end restaurant that serves food to go with wine, rather than the other way around. I ate dinner there five or six years ago, even had a mildly sweet wine to go with the Eccles cake I had for dessert.
That’s before I found how great IPAs are with dessert.
The Ten Bells is a couple of dozen steps farther down Commercial Street, on the corner. The Ten Bells has one tap of Truman’s and it was out of order.
I chose something new to me, Franciscan Wells Chieftain, described as “Irish pale ale.” It was a cask ale hopped like an IPA, very good.
Aside from that faulty Truman’s tap, the Ten Bells has the distinction of being the only connection for several of Jack the Ripper’s victims.
They were all street-walkers who lived in the neighborhood.
I’ve read conflicting reports. At least two, and maybe all, of the women drank at the Ten Bells.
The Ten Bells, I discovered, doesn’t serve food, so I finished a half pint and left.
So it was back to the Golden Heart. The bar has two Truman’s taps, and only one was out. I ordered a golden ale, which was very savory, and asked about food. The place has no kitchen.
So far, that’s a full pint on an empty stomach. So I was feeling good.
But I needed something solid in there, too. I was getting wobbly, and not from the beer.
I wound up backtracking to the Liverpool station (which isn’t too far if you don’t go by way of Shoreditch) to the Railway pub directly across from the Underground entrance.
I had a plate of fried shrimp with peas and chips, the thick fried potatoes often called something like steak fries in the States. I wolfed it down.
I have no idea if it was good, bad, or just fatty. I was so hungry by then, taking breakfast around three in the afternoon, that notepaper with malt vinegar would have tasted good.
I had two half pints with the meal. Both are ales I’ve had before. One, Abbot Ale, is a gentle pale ale.
The other, Greene King IPA, seemed a little disappointing this time. Maybe it’s not popular at this place and sat too long. Or maybe my palate was off. Or distracted.
Then I walked a few blocks to Mitre Square. I had been there several years ago. It’s a small paved space where the body of one of the Ripper’s victims was found.
At the time of the crime, it was probably surrounded by tenements.
When I was there the first time, there was a park bench in the middle of the space. The bench certainly didn’t date back to the 1880s, but it gave the place an eerie sense of presence.
The bench is gone now, and all that’s left is a slab of concrete. Maybe they are going to replace the bench. I hope so.
On my way out of Mitre Street, I passed the Craft Beer Co., a pub with 18 conventional taps and seven or eight cask taps. Not one is Bud or Coors Light. In other words, my kind of bar.
I tried the house bitter, which I was told, is made in Kent. It was interesting. It didn’t have much perfume, but then, bitters usually don’t. It was dry in the mouth and turned a little sweet on the way down, but not too sweet.
Thornbridge Jaipur IPA had a great floral perfume, like the best IPAs. The flavor was complex and a lot of fun. It had a little of that pine-resin edge common to IPA. It wasn’t at all sweet, but was like drinking the perfume of the flowers.
I rode the Underground to Holborn and got as far as the Queen’s Larder on Old Gloucester Street, about halfway to the hotel.
The bartenders confirmed the story of the place’s name.
Queen Charlotte personally tended the mad King George when he was hospitalized in the neighborhood. She stored the food for his meals in the cellar of the building that now houses the pub,
The Neurology Hospital is still in operation, although Charlotte and George are long gone.
At the Larder, I had a half pint of Pathmaker, a single-hopped ale, which was quite good, and Hopspur, a cask ale that was pleasant enough. It came across almost as tart as a wild ale, but not quite as sour.
After a stop at the President, I finished the evening at the Friend at Hand.
I got into a conversation when a man sat at the other end of the table.
He is Jock, from Dumfries. He said his family goes back about 800 years in Scotland. Now, if your ancestors live in any country for half that long, you’re going to be everybody’s cousin. He is connected to Robert Burns, for instance.
His wife’s grandfather was a Jewish refugee who moved to England in the 1920s from Latvia. Things were bad enough, I guess, to drive him out even before Hitler got there.
I had to turn in early because my wake-up call was at quarter to six.
I couldn’t remember how long it would take the Picadilly line to go from Russell Square to Heathrow. Turns out, it was only little more than an hour.
Anyhow, I got out of the hotel around eight, and by 10 I had checked my bag, passed security, and was eating scrambled eggs with smoked salmon at the Something-or-Other Kitchen in the airport.
The plane trip has been very unusual. I got to the waiting area and wondered if it was the right place. I don’t think the plane is half full.
This is a 767, seven seats across—two, three, and two. There is no one else in the entire row besides me. Nobody sitting in front or in back of me, either. I can recline in coach, if I want, with a clear conscience.
Most of the seats have been taken in business class, but economy is wide open. I’m glad I didn’t pay for extra leg room. I have all I need here in the proletarian seats.
The plane landed on time, around 3. But the landing was rough. The plane was waffling on the way in and we hit hard.
I don’t know if there was interference from shear winds or if the pilot was drunk.
Everything after then went fine. Even passport control, which like everything else associated with Newark, is inefficient and slow.
I took a cab to Joanna’s house because I had parked my car at the far end of her driveway.
I’m sending this from a Comfort Inn in Fairfield, N.J.
I need sleep.
Good night, all.
Harry
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