The Man Who Joined Up London
Thursday, September 6th 1666. The King was Charles II, and much of the City of London was a smouldering heap. To the West, saved by the open fields in between, were the palaces, gardens and grander houses of Westminster. Events are events; in this case, you know the story about the fire, so my interest is in the seldom-told story of the rapid redevelopment that followed it, and in particular what happened in the ‘in-between’.
Unfortunately, Charles had neither the will nor the unchallengeable authority to dictate the necessary reallocation of land ownerships, so in the great English tradition, those plans were ignored. The fact is, Architects build your monuments, and developers build your cities. So, also in the English tradition, property developers set about making money out of misfortune.
Charles’ reign was preceded by Cromwell’s republic and a Parliament named after one of its prominent members, Praise-God Barebone, a leather merchant and occasional preacher of no great means, who was eagerly awaiting the Second Coming, and whose house was one of the first to succumb to the fire. Here he is, looking the part!
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| Praise God Barebone |
In the late 1630’s, he had a son, who he named ‘Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned’. Presumably this was a reminder, but Praise-God need not have worried. Nicholas was also a religious fruitcake, but unlike his father, he didn’t integrate this into his career plan. Initially, he trained in medicine in the Netherlands, but this didn’t survive his return to England, when he saw the money to be made in the building industry and decided to worship Mammon as well.
Barbon the Developer
Developers are not a popular breed, and Barbon was greedy and unscrupulous, but he got things done. While he did some building in the City, his main target was the ‘in-between’ land to the West, where the legal enclaves and a scattered collection of palaces, grand houses, and monumental buildings along the river enjoyed air cleaned by prevailing westerly winds. The existing Landowners, often aristocrats, were happy to cash in by selling long leases of the land and leaving the risks of actually building to the likes of Barbon. It is difficult to see the detail in the pic below, but you can see that the land to the west is comparatively undeveloped.
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| London in 1600 |
He had no monopoly on this activity, so had perforce to move quickly and at scale, bulldozing existing buildings and ignoring vexacious Royal Declarations, laws, regulations and objections. This wasn’t plain sailing. Compared with schemes in Westminster, his new houses were built with a far denser layout while still being aimed at people with money or who wanted to be seen as having money.
I don’t know of anyone before him who built whole developments within a wider street plan, building as many houses as possible and offering only small islands of greenery when circumstances or economics encouraged it. You can see this in the street maps today; the only major green space is Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and to a lesser extent, the green spaces in the legal enclaves, both of which predated Barbon. This rather more generous layout was the pattern followed later in the developments by the Grosvenor and the Marylebone estates further west.
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| Holborn Squares |
Barbon’s work gave us much of what is now Holborn, Bloomsbury and the streets beside the Thames, which, collectively and for the first time, joined the City with the majority of the population and markets to the seat of government at Westminster. The ‘in-between’ space had been filled, and Barbon became the most famous builder of the age.
A major scheme was Red Lion Square. This wasn’t permitted (but what the heck!) and occupied fields next to the Inns of Court, where the lawyers valued their quasi-rural outlook. They hired a large gang to stop the building work.
Barbon, who was described by contemporary commentator, Roger North, as ‘an exquisite mob master, recruited his own band of thugs who prevailed in a riot involving hundreds of people. The lawyers then did their lawyerly thing and got an arrest warrant, but Barbon ducked, dived and eluded that as well, to finish the scheme. But he did throw the lawyers a sprat in the form of the small square whose scale is probably exaggerated here, together with some trees. (Late, in 1974, Red Lion Square returned to fame as the site of an anti-fascist demo in 1974 where the police allegedly killed one of the demonstrators).
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| Red Lion Square |
Similarly, when he purchased Essex House, he appeased the lawyers at nearby Middle Temple by building the Devereux pub off Essex Street. It is still there, and if you care as much as I do about these things, the beer is good, albeit pricey. Devereux had been the Earl of Essex, but he died without an heir after the Civil War. It cost Barbon nothing to humour the family when he bought the land by remembering them when naming.
The way he operated came with obvious legal perils, so he hedged his bets by effectively buying the right to become the MP for the notoriously rotten borough of Bramber in Sussex. It only had about twenty voters at the time, so it shouldn't have been too expensive, and it gave him substantial immunity from prosecution.
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| Rotten Boroughs |
His houses were built to impress rather than to last, and while they were blessed with new squares and streets, they came with no guarantees. The existence and condition of construction below ground level can be hard to check, and later their foundations and drainage were often found wanting. (Of course, London was no stranger to this carry on. Later, the grand buildings designed by John Nash were afflicted by penny pinching. The white stucco often covers shoddy brickwork, poor drainage and walls incorporating mud and straw.)
One result of all this was that not many of his houses survive, and many of those that have are much altered. But the overall pattern he created can still be seen and, if the squares around Holborn seem more modest than those further west, well, Barbon would fill every square inch with bricks if that earned him more.
One surviving exception was part of his scheme for Buckingham Street, to the south of what is now the Strand. It was occupied by Samuel Pepys. The land was bought from George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, and in another instance of humouring the family’s vanity, he remembered them in the street names. Now, the only relic of the palace that once stood there is the handsome Watergate at the end of the street, which once gave access to the river.
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| York Stairs & Watergate |
When you buy a house, businesses queue up to add to the expense, and Barbon wanted to harvest as much of your investment as possible. His National Land Bank was one of the first to offer mortgages, and towards the end of the 1600s, it looked likely to surpass the Bank of England.
People were understandably worried about the possibility of another fire, not least because you had to repay the mortgage even if the house burnt down. Another novel financial product offered by Barbon was fire insurance. Thousands subscribed, and the insurance business has retained a regard for him ever since. See the online ‘Insurance Hall of Fame’ here:
https://www.insurancehalloffame.org/nicholas-barbon-simple
In order to reduce the costs of any payout on this insurance, he introduced a uniformed fire brigade who would try to extinguish a fire before it caused too much expensive damage. But of course, it only served his own mortgaged properties. There was no public-spirited high-mindedness and responsibility here, and the firemen were paraded around the street in bright uniforms as a means of promotion.
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| Firefighting in the 1600s |
All this suggests that Barbon thought deeply about business economics and seems to have initially started writing about it in order to promote his schemes and financial services. He published a pamphlet soon after the punch-up with the lawyers, with the snappy title ‘An apology for the Builder: or a Discourse showing the Cause and Effects of the Increase of Building’ before quickly moving on from this non-apologia to a wider argument and, on this score, the rapacious and self-interested developer became a prophet.
The dominant economic theory of the time was that governments should aim to acquire as much wealth as possible, by fair means or foul and preferably in the form of precious metals.
Like paper money and coinage nowadays, these had little intrinsic value and were effectively just another fiat currency. They were not as useful as, say, iron or wheat; you couldn’t use them for building or eat them. But they could be used to hire mercenaries, which you could use to protect your stash or nab someone else’s. This was a zero-sum game and handy if you were one of the rich who stood to benefit, but did not do much to improve the lot of the man in the horse-drawn Clapham onmnicart.
Barbon pointed out that the things people actually valued for themselves were often luxuries. He argued that by focusing on increasing trade and encouraging the consumption of such luxuries, the economy might actually be expanded for the benefit of all. In short, an aversion to spending on fripperies might be morally bad, but economically benign.
In England at the time, land was the preferred store of wealth for the rich. He pointed out that this also did little to increase the size of the economy. Richer places like Venice and the Netherlands had little land but had grown wealthy from the proceeds of trade, and that was his vision for England. Looking forward, he thought that maritime trade protected by a navy was key to its future imperial expansion, saying that it ‘seems the properer seat for such an Empire’.
An allied point was that interest on money was effectively the payment to rent it. Nowadays, you would see it as the choice between renting a property or ‘renting’ from a building society, the money to buy it. His views on all this came together in 1690 in a book entitled ‘A Discourse on Money’.
Nowadays, discussion on the musings on economics by his contemporaries, such as John Locke or later David Hume, seems limited to the shallow rhetoric of crusty, right-wing politicians. In contrast, Barbon’s enthusiasm for trade and views on fiat money were echoed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo and were cited approvingly by Karl Marx in the opening chapter of Das Kapital and (crossing the aisle!) by John Maynard Keynes in‘The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money’.
Karl Marx : “Or, as old Barbon says: ‘One sort of wares are as good as another, if the value be equal. There is no difference or distinction in things of equal value".
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| Marx & Keynes |
In short, the man who provided the (dodgy) foundations for a lot of London’s buildings also provided (sounder) foundations for a lot of the financial services it provides and the economic theories that underpin them. Whichever way you look at it, the story of London’s development in buildings or its economy, Nicholas Barbon returns your gaze through the embers of that fire in 1666.
There are not many of his buildings left, not least because of the lamentable construction standards of his builders. In many cases, where they still stand, they sport new facades added in the 18th and 19th centuries.
One almost complete exception was the house subsequently occupied by Samuel Pepys in Buckingham Street, near Charing Cross Station and referred to earlier. But beyond that, many of the streets and the small squares he built remain, and when you are walking through Holborn or along the Strand, you are in a landscape he shaped.
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| Pepys House |
For much of his working life, he lived and worked in a house in Crane Court, off Fleet Street. This wasn’t one of his own. I think it was built by Christopher Wren; maybe he was wary of his own handiwork! It was subsequently the home to the Royal Society, but burnt down in 1877. Like a lot of London’s back streets, Crane Court is an unprepossessing spot, but with a lot of history of its own.
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| Barbon's House, Crane Court. |
He ended his days living his argument about luxuries, just outside London in Osterley House in Isleworth. You can visit it, but it has changed a lot since Barbon’s time. But in the finest tradition of the property development business, Barbon borrowed too much and died broke.
He is buried in St Leonard Churchyard in Heston in West London. Worshippers of Mammon like Barbon do not invite remembrance; there is no memorial, but like some of the aristocrats he bought land from, he hasn’t been altogether forgotten in the street names. Barbon Close is opposite Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital in central London, and Barbon Alley is off Devonshire Square. It doesn’t do him justice.
This Google map will show you the location of some of his schemes that survive in some form.
Link : Barbon Houses