St Martin's Churchyard

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ANTIQUE LONDON ENGLAND MAP POPULATION DENSITY Rare NR
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VINTAGE CABINET PLATE CRIES OF LONDON BLACK CHERRIES
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Sir Walter Besant, in The Fascination of London, published in 1903, continues his survey of Trafalgar Square with this look at St Martin's churchyard:

Before the erection of the palaces along the riverside the fishermen of the Thames lived beside the river bank at Charing Cross.

A piece of ground in the churchyard of St. Martin's was set apart for their use and kept separate.

Meantime, as one after the other of the Bishops' town-houses were built, the fishermen found themselves pushed farther up the river, until finally they were fairly driven away, and established themselves at Lambeth, where the last of them lived in the early part of the nineteenth century.

Their burial-ground, meantime, was preserved even after they had disappeared.

The churchyard of St. Martin's was curtailed in 1826, and the parish burial-ground removed to Pratt Street, Camden Town.

Behind the National Gallery is the National Portrait Gallery, opened in 1896, and opposite to it St. Martin's Town Hall, with the parish emblem - St. Martin dividing his cloak with a beggar - in bas-relief on the frontage.

Charing Cross Road is very modern. It was opened in 1887, and swept over a number of narrow courts and alleys.

In this is the Public Library, where some watercolours and old prints of vanished houses are hung on the staircase.

There is also the eighteenth-century plan from Strype's Survey, well worth studying.

Next: Leicester Square