St Giles, London
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St Giles is a district of London, in the south-west of the London Borough of Camden. It gets its name from the parish church of St Giles in the Fields. The combined parishes of St Giles in the Fields and St George Bloomsbury (which was carved out of the former) were administered jointly for many centuries; leading to the conflation of the two, with much or all of St Giles usually taken to be a part of Bloomsbury. Points of interest include the church of St Giles in the Fields, the Phoenix Garden and St Giles Circus.
History
There has been a church at St Giles since Saxon times, located beside a major highway. The hospital of St Giles, recorded c. 1120 as Hospitali Sancti Egidii extra Londonium was founded, together with a monastery and a chapel, by Queen Matilda, wife of Henry I. St Giles (c. 650 – c. 710) was the patron saint of lepers and the hospital was home to a leper colony, the site chosen for its surrounding fields and marshes separating contagion from nearby London. Peter Ackroyd argues that the character of vagrancy has never left the area. A village accreted to cater to the brethren and patients. The crossroads which is now St Giles Circus, where Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road, Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford St meet, was the site of a gallows until the fifteenth century. The Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle was hanged, and he and his gallows were burnt there. Grape Street, in the heart of the St Giles district, runs beside the site of the hospital's vineyard.
The south-west of the parish of St Pancras, showing boundary with Giles in the Fields, 1804: Tottenham Court Road to the west and Francis street (now Torrington Place) to the north
The monastery was dissolved during the Reformation and a parish church created from the chapel. The hospital continued to care for lepers until the mid-sixteenth century, when the disease abated and the hospital instead began to care for indigents. The parish was known as St Giles in the Fields and it is recorded in 1563 as Seynt Gyles in the Field. The first post-Catholic parish church was built in 1631 and from the mid-seventeenth century church wardens note "a great influx of poor people into this parish". The cellars in particular were already recorded as horrific places in which whole families resided, "damp and unwholesome" as the village was built on marshland. The Parliamentary Act of 1606 had condemned the area as "deepe foul and dangerous" . Vagrants expelled from the city settled in the St Giles district known for the generous charitable relief of the parish. Irish and French refugees were drawn to the area as well as "St Giles blackbirds", black servants reduced to begging.
The 1665 Great Plague started in St Giles and the first victims were buried in the St Giles churchyard. By September 1665, 8,000 people were dying a week in London. By the end of the plague year there were 3,216 listed plague deaths in St Giles parish, which had fewer than 2,000 households. After the Restoration, the area was populated by Huguenot refugees who had fled persecution and established themselves as tradesmen and artisans, particularly in weaving and the silk trade.
The southern area of the parish, around present day Shaftesbury Avenue, was a wasteland named Cock and Pye Fields. Houses were not built there until 1666, after the Great Fire, and not fully developed until 1693, becoming known as Seven Dials. Thomas Neale built much of the area, giving his name to Neal Street and Neal's Yard. St Giles and Seven Dials became known for their astrologers and alchemists, an association which lasts to this day. The village of St Giles stood on the main road from Holborn to Tyburn, a place of local execution. Convicted criminals were often allowed, in tradition, to stop at St Giles en route to Tyburn for a final drink - a "St Giles Bowl" - before hanging.
Local Governance
The area appears to have been a part of the parish of Holborn when St Giles hospital was established in the early 1100s.
The date when the Ancient Parish of St Giles was formed is not clear. Some sources indicate that the parish was in place before 1222 while others suggest 1547. From 1597 onwards, English parishes were obliged to take on a civil as well as ecclesiastical role, starting with the relief of the poor.
The parish formed part of the Ossulstone hundred of Middlesex. The parish of St George Bloomsbury was split off in 1731, but the parishes were combined for civil purposes in 1774 and used for the administration of the Poor Law after the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. George Buchanan was appointed Health Officer for the parish around 1856. Upon the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855 the combined parishes became the St Giles District and were transferred to the County of London in 1889.
The St Giles ecclesiastical parish was an elongated "L" shape, stretching from Torrington Place in the north to Shelton Street in the south and then east to include Lincoln's Inn Fields. For registration, and therefore census reporting, the civil parish was divided in North and South districts, with Monmouth Street broadly forming the division. The length of St Giles High Street is identical to the width of the parish at that point. The ecclesiastical parish of St George Bloomsbury was located to the northeast. In 1881 the population of St Giles North was 13,837[15] and St Giles South was 14,864.
The local government of London was reorganised in 1900 and St Giles became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Holborn. Since 1965 it has been part of the London Borough of Camden
Street name etymologies
St Giles has no formally defined boundaries – those utilized here form a rough triangle: New Oxford Street to the north, Shaftesbury Avenue to the south-east and Charing Cross Road to the west.
- Brook Mews
- Bucknall Street – after either Arabella Bucknall (or Bucknell), mother of John Hanmer, 1st Baron Hanmer who owned this land in the 19th century,[17] or Ralph Bucknall, local 17th - 18th century vestryman.
- Cambridge Circus – after Prince George, 2nd Duke of Cambridge, who formally opened the new development of Charing Cross Road in 1887[19][20]
- Charing Cross Road – built 1887, and named as it led to the cross at Charing, from the Old English word "cierring", referring to a bend in the River Thames[21][22][23]
- Denmark Place and Denmark Street – after Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne[24][25]
- Dyott Street – after either Simon Dyott, local resident in the 17th century,[26] or Jane Dyott, daughter of local landowner Henry Bainbridge[27]
- Earnshaw Street – after Thomas Earnshaw, noted watchmaker of the 18th-19th century, who worked near here[28][29]
- Flitcroft Street – after Henry Flitcroft, architect of St Giles in the Fields church[30][31]
- New Compton Street – as with Old Compton Street which extends to the west, it is believed to be named after Henry Compton, Bishop of London in the 1670s[32][33]
- New Oxford Street – built as an extension of Oxford Street in 1845-47[34][35]
- Phoenix Street – named after an inn that formerly stood near here[36][37]
- Princes Circus
- St Giles Circus, St Giles High Street and St Giles Passage – after St Giles Hospital, a leper hospital founded by Matilda of Scotland, wife of Henry I in 1117. St Giles was an 8th-century hermit in Provence who was crippled in a hunting accident and later became patron saint of cripples and lepers. Circus is a British term for a road junction, with several roads meeting and a central reservation or 'roundabout, the traffic passing in a one way system around the roundabout or 'circus'
Points of Interest
- Bloomsbury/St Giles Workhouse [1]
