It occurred to me that staying at this particular hotel might be an adventure when I saw that the desk clerk had purple hair and an earring through the nose. Although it was a late Victorian building, it definitely no longer had a Victorian atmosphere.
The room was so small that we had to crawl over our beds to get out of the door. I kept my suitcase in the space between my bed and the wall, hauled it out to get take things out or put things in, and then put it back again. There was no room to leave it out or to unpack it. Instead of a closet, the room contained a small wardrobe (which was just one more thing upon which I could bark my shins in the night). The ceiling was higher than the measurement of the floor space — 14 feet.
The reasons we had chosen this particular hotel were its location (just off Trafalgar Square, so we could walk nearly everywhere), the fact that the Georgian hotel at which we had stayed before had gone up in price, and the fact that it was Victorian. I love all things Victorian, as anyone who has ever been inside my house could tell you. Although fairly modern on the outside, I have ignored that and decorated the inside with a mixture of Victorian and Georgian furniture, with the occasional medieval piece tossed in for good measure.
On this particular trip, I was focusing on a Victorian/theatrical/Charles Dickens/Sherlock Holmes theme. We started by heading over to St Katherine’s Docks and having lunch at the Dickens Inn. The building had been a spice warehouse back in Dickens day and converted to a pub and restaurant when this area had been refurbished as flats, shops and an area for docking private boats.
The hotel was located on Villiers Street (named after George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, whose house once stood on the site), a cobblestone street that connected the Embankment (a riverside park that had been laid out in Victorian times) to The Strand (a main thoroughfare which had been lined with theatres and restaurants back in the Victorian era and still was) — a crossroads of sorts, where the government agencies end and the theatre district begins. If I went south, I ended up on Whitehall; north and west was theatreland.
Just up The Strand from Villiers Street is the Adelphi Theatre, where we went to see “Me & My Girl”, which was starring Karl Howman in the leading role (he had replaced Robert Lindsey when Lindsey and the show went to Broadway). Nearly one hundred years earlier, in 1897, one of the Adelphi’s leading actors, William Terriss, was murdered by a deranged fellow actor just outside the stage door. It is said that his ghost still haunts both the theatre and the nearby Covent Garden tube station. I wonder why he’d be interested in haunting a tube station. Doesn’t seem like that great of a place to hang out to me. The wonderful Victorian restaurant, Rules, is just across the street from the Adelphi’s stage door. Seems like a much nicer place to haunt. But I suppose he has his reasons.
Many of the theatres in the area have interesting histories, but none so fascinating or as long as the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (where we saw “Miss Saigon”). The oldest theatre in London, Drury Lane was founded in 1662 when Thomas Killigrew received King Charles II’s royal charter. The King first met his most famous mistress, Nell Gwyn, at that same theatre. Most of the present building dates from 1811-12 as it burned down a couple of times.
During one of the fires (in 1809), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (the playwright) was theatre manager. As the fire raged on, he settled into a nearby tavern, quietly drinking a bottle of wine as he watched the conflagration. When asked how he could be so calm while his theatre was burning down, he answered, “Can’t a man enjoy a glass of wine by his own fireside?”
One section of the theatre that survived the blaze is the grand staircase. It is really two separate staircases, one on each side of a rotunda. In the late 18th century, King George III and the Prince Regent had separate stairs built because they encountered one another one evening on the original single staircase, got into a fight, and the King boxed the Prince’s ears. If the real Prince Regent was anything like the way Hugh Laurie portrayed him in the third series of “Black Adder”, I wouldn’t blame the King for boxing his ears. The words “King’s Side” and “Prince’s Side” can still be seen over opposite doors.
The theatre is also reportedly haunted. It is supposedly the most haunted theatre in England. Several of the theatres in London’s West End are haunted. Both Her Majesty’s Theatre (home since 1986 to “The Phantom of the Opera”) and the Theatre Royal Haymarket are both haunted by former managers. I guess some theatre managers have difficulty letting go.
The Theatre Royal Haymarket is mentioned in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Although he was a fictional character, many of the locations used in the stories were real, and some of them are still standing. These include the Criterion (where Watson first met Holmes), the Charing Cross Hotel, Claridge’s, Covent Garden, the Albert Hall and, of course, the Victoria, Paddington, Waterloo, Euston and Charing Cross rail stations. The Grand Hotel on Northumberland Avenue (called the “Northumberland Hotel” in the Holmes mysteries) is no longer standing. But, across the street from where it once stood, is the Sherlock Holmes pub. This was about two blocks south of my hotel. The sitting room of 221B Baker Street has been duplicated behind a glass wall in the pub. It sort of makes one feel like a voyeur.
Across the street from our hotel used to be a boot blacking factory where Charles Dickens worked as a child. Around the corner on Buckingham Street was a house where Dickens lived briefly as a young journalist in 1834, and which he used as one of the settings for David Copperfield. Just a few blocks away was a subway (an underground walking tunnel) where boys like those Dickens wrote about in Oliver Twist used to congregate to divide the loot after an afternoon of picking pockets.
Closer to the British Museum, on Doughty Street, is a house which used to belong to Dickens during two very productive years in which he completed The Pickwick Papers, wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, and began Barnaby Rudge. This house is open to the public. The day that Mom and I arrived to see it, we were greeted at the door by a young man dressed in Victorian garb and looking like he had just stepped out of one of Dickens’ books. He gave us what ended up to be a private tour of the house. The house was furnished as it had been back in Dickens’ day and contained some of his original handwritten manuscripts.
Smack in the middle of a very bustling are is the Old Curiosity Shop. It was built in 1567 and hadn’t changed since 1700. The proprietor of the shop had begun working there as a teenager and eventually took it over. He owned an amazing collection of Dickens memorabilia. He allowed Mom and I to go upstairs and see what he had. We were the only customers in the shop at the time. The main floor was still an antique shop, so Mom and I looked around to see what we might want to take home with us. We both ended up with tapestries of Tower Bridge. Mine still hangs in my bedroom. I bought a small Toby mug (also known as a character mug) that sits on a shelf of an antique pier cabinet, that had belonged to my grandmother, in my living room. Sadly, on a later trip, we found the Old Curiosity Shop to have been converted into an upscale shoe shop. I guess that the charming fellow who had owned it reached a point where he couldn’t run it any more, had nobody else to take it on, and sold it.
To finish up our visit, we had high tea at the Charing Cross Hotel. The room in which the tea was held was quite lavish and Victorian. I could easily picture Holmes and Watson meeting with Sir Henry Baskerville there before setting off for Baskerville Hall. The sandwiches were dainty, the scones delicious and the desserts amazing. Oh yes, and the tea — Darjeeling. This was our first high tea in the UK. It would not be our last.
