Holborn: St Giles-in-the-Fields

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Sir Walter Besant, in The Fascination of London, published in 1903, continues his survey of Holborn with this look at the church of St Giles-in-the-Fields:

The name of the parish is derived from the hospital which stood on the site of the present parish church, and was dedicated to the Greek saint St. Giles. It was at first known as St. Giles of the Lepers, but when the hospital was demolished became St. Giles-in-the-Fields.

In a plan dated 1600 St. Giles's is shown to consist largely of open fields. The buildings, which before the dissolution had belonged to the hospital, form a group about the site of the church.

A few more buildings run along the north side of the present Broad Street. There are one or two at the north end of Drury Lane, and Drury House is at the south end. Southampton House, in the fields to the north, is marked, but the parish is otherwise open ground.

In spite of many edicts to restrain the increase of houses, early in the reign of James I the meadows began to be built upon, and, though a little checked during the Commonwealth, after the Restoration the building proceeded rapidly, stimulated by the new square at Lincoln's Inn Fields then being carried out by Inigo Jones.

To St. Giles's may be attributed the distinction of having originated the Great Plague, which broke out in an alley at the north end of Drury Lane.

Several times before this there had been smaller outbreaks, which had resulted in the building of a pest-house. Even after this check the parish continued to increase rapidly, and by the early part of the last century was a byword for all that was squalid and filthy.

Its rookeries and slums are thus described in a newspaper cutting of 1845: "All around are poverty and wretchedness; the streets and alleys are rank with the filth of half a century; the windows are half of them broken, or patched with rags and paper, and when whole are begrimed with dirt and smoke; little brokers' shops abound, filled with lumber, the odour of which taints even that tainted atmosphere; the pavement and carriage-way swarm with pigs, poultry, and ragged children...But in the space called the Dials itself the scene is far different. There at least rise splendid buildings with stuccoed fronts and richly-ornamented balustrades...These are the gin-palaces."

Naturally, among so much poverty gin-palaces and public-houses abounded. It is curious to note how many of Hogarth's pictures of misery and vice were drawn from St. Giles's.

"Noon" has St. Giles's Church in the background, while his "Gin Lane" shows the neighbouring church of St. George, Bloomsbury; the scene of his "Harlot's Progress" is Drury Lane, and the idle apprentice is caught when wanted for murder in a cellar in St. Giles's.

Next: The Gallows: the Tyburn Procession