7th to 13th June 2010
THE HISTORY
Hatton Garden occupies what was once a great estate that surrounded Ely Palace, the London residence of the Bishops of Ely which stood on what is now Ely Place.
Hatton Garden takes its name from Sir Christopher Hatton, a great favourite of Elizabeth I who gave him possession of Ely Palace and its beautiful garden, vineyard and orchard in the 1570s..
The outlines of this estate when the Palace and its grounds stood in open country, can still be traced in the buildings, street names and boundaries that shape the area today.
THE ORIGINAL OWNERS OF THE GARDEN
Ely Palace, built in 1290 by the Bishop of Ely was, by all accounts, one of the finest London residences of its time. When it was built the Bishops of the Church held substantial power and influence in Court affairs and spent much of their time in London and so needed a suitable London residence.
A previous arrangement by which the then Bishop of Ely lodged in the Temple had broken down in 1250. A later Bishop, John de Kirkeby, had acquired nine cottages and some land in Holborn, then a village on the road between the City of London and Westminster. In 1290 he left them to his successors who set about building a residence on their site suitable to the dignity of a bishop.
So how how did Christopher Hatton, country gent, get his hands on Ely Palace? It was a case of simple favouritism by the monarch. Born about 1540, Hatton was the son of a wealthy country family through which he had inherited substantial estates in Northamptonshire; in 1571 he set about building Holdenby Hall there, said to be at that time the largest house in England. But besides being a member of the wealthy landed gentry, he also came to the Queen Elizabeth’s court in London. Acknowledged to be a handsome and accomplished man, especially distinguished for his elegant dancing, he soon attracted the notice of Queen Elizabeth and became one of her gentlemen pensioners in 1564. But despite total devotion to her, his governmental career was slow to develop. He became a member of parliament in 1571 and the captain of the Queen’s bodyguard in 1572. In 1578 he was knighted, and became the Queen's spokesman in the House of Commons as well as vice-chamberlain of the royal household and a member of the Privy Council. In 1587 Hatton was made Lord Chancellor, the last MP to hold this position until Jack Straw, some four hundred and twenty years later. Although he had no great knowledge of the law, he appears to have acted with sound sense and good judgment in his new position.
During his rise to power and eminence he received valuable estates and offices from the Queen, and this prompted rumours that he was her lover, a charge that was definitely made by Mary, Queen of Scots in 1584. (He was one of the commissioners who later found her guilty of treason.) He is said to have been a Roman Catholic in all but name, yet he treated religious questions in a moderate and tolerant way. In any event throughout those difficult times Hatton's loyalty was never questioned; he brought about a memorable incident in the House of Commons in December 1584, when four hundred kneeling members repeated after him a prayer for Elizabeth's safety.
Whether he was her lover or not, Elizabeth’s frequent and generous gifts to her friend were badly needed. Quite early in his career he was heavily in debt and by 1575 he estimated his liabilities at £10,000. His financial position steadily worsened despite the Queen’s generosity and his successful investment in Drake's circumnavigation. Hatton had, by now, become a tenant of the Bishop of Ely who had continued his predecessors’ habit of allowing various notables of the time to rent portions of the Palace as a temporary London residence. Amongst these has been John of Gaunt. Perhaps the height of Queen Elizabeth’s generosity to Hatton came when she forced the then Bishop of Ely to give him a long lease on much of the Palace and all of the grounds. The payment was a rent of one red rose, ten loads of hay and ten pounds a year. Ely Palace became his own residence. In 1577, Hatton, having spent a lot of money on the Palace, generally securing it on the value of his lease, asked the Queen to prevail upon the Bishop to make the entirety of the Palace over to him. The Bishop resisted but died in 1581 when title to the property was passed to Hatton. This forced transfer of ownership was the root of many subsequent legal wrangles over the proper titles to property in Hatton Garden.
Right from the start Sir Christopher’s ownership of Ely Place was a financial disaster that strained his friendship with the Queen. By 1591 his debts totalled over £40,000, and he was unable to settle his accounts. He had been imprudent enough to borrow much of the money for improvements to Ely Palace from Elizabeth. He was never able to repay the loan, which is said to have broken his heart. During his last illness the Queen paid him several visits, and was said to have fed him with her own hands. Despite this tenderness she was, at the same time trying to recover her loans to him by means of a title on the freehold of the Palace. Sir Christopher Hatton died in the Palace of Ely, on 20 Nov 1591 and was buried with great pomp in St. Paul's cathedral. Hatton never married and his heir was his nephew, William, son of his sister Dorothy and John Newport. William Newport adopted the surname of Hatton. The freehold of Ely Palace was held in trust against the family’s debts to the Crown.
Sources:
' Ely Place', Old and New London: Volume 2 (1878), pp. 514-526.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45119
http://www.tudorplace.com.ar/Bios/ChristopherHatton.htm
The Romance of Hatton Garden (1930), Maryatt and Broadbent, Cornish & Sons.
The oldest remaining buildings
Originally built in 1546 to refresh the servants of Ely Palace, the Olde Mitre Tavern is hidden down an alleyway between 8 and 9 Hatton Garden. When it was built, just outside the walls of Ely Palace, one of the roof supports was a living tree. There’s more history on this site:
www.pub-explorer.com/gtlondon/pub/ye oldemitre review2.htm
Follow the alleyway further to find St Etheldreda's chapel, England’s oldest Catholic church where the Bishops of Ely, original owners of Ely Palace, worshiped from 1250 to 1570. It has had a chequered career since then including a spell as a distillery and then much later and rather ironically, as a Welsh language Episcopalian chapel. It was finally returned to the Catholic church at the end of the nineteenth century and so became the oldest pre-reformation Catholic place of worship in the country. This building is steeped in history. Get the full story here:
http://www.stetheldreda.com/home.html
Today’s Ely Place occupies roughly the site of Ely Palace proper By 1772 the Palace building was in a ruinous mess and the then Bishop of Ely, who still retained some rights in the freehold obtained by Act of Parliament the right to sell them and the Crown bought him out offering as part of the settlement an alternative London lodging in Dover Street. The Government intended to build an excise office on the site, then the relocation of the Fleet Prison was proposed but both projects fell through and it was leased as it stood to a distiller. Possibly as a result of a public outcry at the storage of liquor in the chapel the lease was revoked. In 1776 Mr Charles Cole, an architect and surveyor leased and later bought the whole site, a proviso being made that St Etheldreda’s chapel should continue as a place of worship. It is his plans and building designs which can be seen in Ely Place today. But even now the curse of litigation and disputed ownership hung over the site and and in 1874, as a result of rival family claims to the Cole estate it was sold by order of the Court. The sale included St Etheldreda’s chapel which was bought by a Catholic order, so returning the Chapel to the faith in which it was originally built.
Source: The Romance of Hatton Garden (1930), Maryatt and Broadbent, Cornish & Sons.
Ely Place in 1590
Today’s Ely Place was built on the site of the Palace.
Hatton Garden, the road, was driven up through the middle of the adjoining formal gardens in the 1670s, the work of a later Hatton family member, now enobled to Lord Hatton, .
Leather Lane which still boasts a long established daily market was originally named Lither Lane, lither being equivalent to slough, or ‘very muddy’.
Hatton Wall is the road that marks the northernmost limit of Hatton’s estate in 1590.
Saffron Hill, Herbal Hill and Vine Hill all have obvious ‘garden’ connections and the Bishops original garden was well known for its crocuses producing saffron.
Kirby Street was named after the Hattons’ family manor in Northamptonshire.
Brooke Street and Greville Street were named after the Elizabethan and Jacobean courtier, Fulke Greville, later enobled by King James as Lord Brooke who commissioned Inigo Jones to build Brooke House on the site where the street is now. He was assassinated by a disgruntled servant.
Bleeding Heart Yard is supposedly named after the discovery at dawn of a woman’s heart still pumping blood; some versions of the myth say it was 17th century socialite Lady Elizabeth Hatton.
In Shakespeare's Richard III, the Duke of Gloucester says to the Bishop of Ely: “When I was last in Holborn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there”. An annual strawberry fair is still held in Ely Place.
http://www.stetheldreda.com/home.html
At 39 Brooke Street in August 1770 the despairing 17 year-old child poet Thomas Chatterton, impoverished and starving took his own life by swallowing arsenic. He was hailed after his death as chief poet of the 18th-century “Gothic” literary revival, England’s youngest writer of mature verse, and precursor of the Romantic Movement. At an early age he wrote spurious mediaeval histories and poems that he copied out in a fake hand on old parchment. His elaborate fabrications were detected - and ignored. The embittered author left Bristol, his home town, to seek success in London, where he arrived in April 1770. He became a contributor of squibs, tales and songs to many of the leading publications though without earning much money. Penniless and with little hope of immediate success he committed suicide.
The Thieves’ Den – Dickens View of the Area
Dickens knew the area well; Fagin’s thieves’ den was located on Saffron Hill as was the One Tun Pub, rebuilt in 1875, which claims to be the original of the Three Cripples, a favoured haunt of Fagin and Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist. 54 Hatton Garden is the site of Hatton Garden Police Court, the original of the ‘notorious’ police office, where Oliver Twist was accused of theft. And Bleeding Heart Yard features in Little Dorrit. Mr Plornish and his wife, who was ‘so dragged at, by poverty and the children together, that their united forces had already dragged her face into wrinkles’, lived here in the book and, in the same novel, the inventor Daniel Doyce had his factory ‘over the gateway’.
Fulke Grevile, later Lord Brooke, was an Elizabethan and Jacobean courtier who held many official posts but was also a notable poet. He was a man who treated ‘all classes of men’ with respect and courtesy and his contemporaries described him as a brave, affable, charming, humorous and generous man of intellectual and artistic genius who possessed such elegant speech that Bishop Corbett, who knew him well, claimed that his ‘every word was wine and music.’ His poetic reputation rests on a body of work, most of it published posthumously, of which the most famous is Caelica (1633), a sequence of songs and sonnets containing love poems as well as religious and philosophical verses.
Happy Families, Tiddly Winks, Ludo and Snakes and Ladders were all invented in the 1800s at No 102 Hatton Garden by John Jacques II, third generation of the Jacques family whose games business is still going today, still run by the family. The business was started in Hatton Garden when his grandfather of Hugenot descent apprenticed himself to an ivory turner in Leather Lane in 1780 later taking over the business of his master (after prudently marrying his daughter). A later family member was the designer and producer of the classic ‘ Staunton’ chessmen that since 1924 are the standard pieces used in national and international tournaments. They were named after the leading English player of the day. For more go here:
http://www.jaques.co.uk/data_bank/history.htm
http://www.chessbaron.co.uk/staunton.htm
The first machine gun to use recoil for repeat firing was made and test fired in 1884 by its American born, English inventor, Sir Hiram Maxim, in his workshop at the corner of Hatton Garden and Clerkenwell Road. There is a splendid plaque on its wall to commemorate this, but no holes remain. For more about this extraordinary man go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Stevens_Maxim
Hatton Garden was also the home of a collaboration between an architect and an entomologist which led to the production in a laboratory located there of fluids designed to kill insect pests – the original Rentokil liquid. The pests were death watch beetles in Westminster Hall and the Professor of Entomology was Harold Maxwell Lefroy from Imperial College, London. In the early 1920s, Lefroy was asked by Sir Frank Baines, Principal Architect of the Office of Works, to study ways of exterminating the beetles in the hall. His work led him to devise various successful formulations, and in time Lefroy began receiving regular orders from people who had heard about his work. In 1924, Lefroy and his assistant Miss Elizabeth Eades started supplying bottles of woodworm fluid from a small factory in Hatton Garden. This was the origin of the company now known as Rentokil Initial. More about this and Lefroy’s untimely death from inhaling poisonous fumes in an accident with his own concoctions here: http://www.initial-hospital-services.com/about/history.php
Growth of the Jewellery Industry in Hatton Garden
Crammed into Hatton Garden and its surrounding streets are more than 800 businesses involved one way or the other in making or selling jewellery. This is more than one third of the total industry in Greater London.
The businesses, trades and crafts that make up this concentration, the largest in Europe, are bewildering to the layperson in their variety.
There are craftsmen whose painstaking, metal working mastery dates back to prehistory who work next door to designers using computers, machine tools and lasers to produce prototypes in minutes.
In the same streets are the refiners, dealers and suppliers of the precious metals, diamonds and gemstones that are the raw materials of all jewellery manufacture. And alongside them are the toolmakers and equipment suppliers that manufacturers need to support their work.
Most visible of all to the passer-by are the wholesalers and retailers who bring the finished work to market with glittering displays in their shop windows.
The question that has to be asked is: Why are they all here in Hatton Garden?
Here is a brief timeline of some of the events and forces that have shaped the growth of the jewellery industry in Hatton Garden.
1290
Ely Palace, later Ely Place started by Bishops of Ely based on six cottages and their lands, in open country but well placed on the main road between the money of London’s mercantile centre, now the City of London, and the seat of power, the Sovereign’s Court, now the Government, at Westminster.
1327
The many Goldsmiths in Cheapside, in the nearby City form The Goldsmiths' Company as a craft guild a royal charter from Edward III and two years later buy a house in Foster Lane in the City, still the site of Goldsmiths' Hall today.
1363
The Goldsmiths’ Company became responsible for testing and ‘hall marking’ all gold and silver wares to show metal purity and the maker’s name.
1570
Elizabethan grandee and the Queen’s favourite Sir Christopher Hatton acquires Ely Palace, develops its gardens and orchard and gives his name to the district. Other grandees settle in the area, already home to nearby Inns of Court where lawyers had been lodging, training, and practicing since the 13 th century.
1655
The private diamond trade in England was legalized, the beginning of London’s uninterrupted reign of dominance in the worldwide distribution of rough diamonds.
1684
Resolutions in the archives of the Court of Directors of the East India Companies, note that the centralization of the diamond trade in the hands of English merchants had, by that time, become an accomplished fact.
1700
By now Hatton Garden is emerging as a rather grand residential district, despite the apparently deserved reputation of nearby Saffron Hill as being a den of thieves huddling on the edges of the Fleet River. The Fleet ran where Farringdon Road runs now, and which was, in effect, an open sewer.
Development is relatively slow due to interminable legal wrangles over ownership of the estate all stemming from Elizabeth the First’s enforcing transfer of its ownership to Sir Christopher Hatton.
There is little evidence of Hatton Garden being especially concerned with metalworking, jewellery and the diamond trade.
Nearby Clerkenwell, however, is by now much more industrialised and densely populated with craftspeople and artisans taking advantage of the opportunity to work without the restrictive regulation and closed-shop protective practices of the City Guilds.
1732
Customs duties on diamonds and other precious stones are abolished by an Act of Parliament which opens with the words: “Whereas this Kingdom is now become the great mart for diamonds and other precious stones and jewels, from whence most foreign countries are supplied…” By now the European cutting centres were receiving the rough diamonds produced in India, Brazil or Africa, either solely or mostly via London.
1817
Percival Johnson, the founder of Johnson Matthey sets himself up at 79 Hatton Garden as an "Assayer and Practical Mineralogist" valuing gold bars by assaying the exact quantities of the metal in a bar, guaranteeing quality by offering to buy back them back.
1824
Described as an “esteemed situation for the Gentry” Hatton Garden boasts some influential residents. Living at No. 87 is Sir Moses Montefiore, partner and brother-in-law of Nathan Mayer Rothschild, founder of N.M. Rothschild, the world’s biggest merchant bank of the period.
Rothschild’s has historical links with two major businesses that have shaped Hatton Garden’s destiny: the precious metal refiners Johnson Matthey, just started nearby, and, at the end of the century, the South African colossus of the world diamond trade, De Beers Consolidated Mines which still has offices on Holborn.
1830
Johnson builds a small gold refinery at the Hatton Garden premises for the refining and assaying of gold bars that were then coming into London from Brazil.
1836
The postal directory of the period shows Hatton Garden becoming a more substantial business district with 13 firms involved in jewellery and allied trades.
1838
George Matthey joins Percival Johnson as an apprentice. Matthey's scientific talents, coupled with a shrewd business sense, speed the company's development of the platinum industry during the second half of the 19th century.
1850
Unlike genteel Hatton Garden, nearby Clerkenwell has become an area dense with small workshops devoted to trades such as jewellery manufacture, precious metalworking, watchmaking, bookbinding, printing and cabinet making.
Watch and clockmaking has especial affinity with jewellery manufacture both needing metal working skills and both needing a bewildering variety of distinct suppliers and crafts to produce the finished article.
The pressure for more workshop space leads to the last major houses being vacated in Hatton Garden to be taken over by workshops, diamond merchants and bullion dealers.
This is the year Johnson Matthey expands its premises to build a large-scale silver refinery for silver arriving as demonetized silver coinage from European States.
Hatton Garden is set to develop dramatically through the rest of the 19 th Century.
1880
At the height of the Kimberley diamond mining rush the first De Beers Mining Company is registered by Cecil Rhodes, with a capital of £200,000. Barney Barnato floats the Barnato Mining Company the same year, comprising some of the richest claims in the Kimberley mine. Both sell rough diamonds onto the world market through offices in Hatton Garden.
1888
After a battle for control of the South African diamond mining industry, De Beers, with backing from N.M.Rothschild buys out the Barnato brothers for £4million, paying by cheque, at that time the biggest ever signed.
1890
The London Diamond Syndicate with offices in Hatton Garden is formed by Cecil Rhodes; it comprises ten of Europe’s largest diamond buying firms and its aim is to balance supply and demand.
1891
By now a major diversified chemicals and metals company Johnson, Matthey & Co. forms as a private limited company, still based in Hatton Garden. It adopts a corporate policy, still at the heart of the company today: only to be active in products and markets the company can dominate.
1930
The postal directory lists 360 businesses in Hatton Garden and nearby streets involved in the jewellery and allied industries.
1955 onwards
Hatton Garden survives the Second World War with relatively little physical damage and as postwar austerity lessens business begins to expand again. A feature of the increasing prosperity is the expansion of jewellery retailing in the area.
1980s
Hatton Garden becomes well established as a top shopping destination for jewellery for that special occasion. Designer-maker jewellers establish themselves in increasing numbers bringing a contemporary look to the Garden’s shops and studios.
1987
80% of the world annual diamond production passes through Hatton Garden where the De Beers controlled Central Selling Organization (CSO) brings them to market.
2000
As a result of market changes the CSO is replaced by the Diamond Trading Company (DTC) and further changes to the way diamonds are marketed are put in place. The long term aim is to pass the sales operation back to the countries of origin where the diamonds are mined.
2006
The Goldsmiths’ Company takes a stake in Hatton Garden when it opens its first off-site hallmarking facility in modern times in Greville Street.
Compiled by Richard Boulton June 2008
In Shakespeare’s Richard II, his well-known, patriotic speech - This Sceptr'd Isle by John of Gaunt - was made in Ely Court just off Hatton Garden.
Charles Dickens lived in close proximity to Hatton Garden and based some of his landmarks on Hatton Garden. Dickens refers to Bleeding Heart Yard in Little Dorrit. Pay a visit to the author’s home at 48 Doughty Street, which is now the Charles Dickens Museum.
Karl Marx lived next to Clerkenwell Green when writing "Das Kapital"
The oldest sports and games manufacturer in the world, Jaques of London, hatched the ideas for Tiddlywinks, Ludo and Happy Families in Hatton Garden. Jaques introduced the game of croquet to the UK and invented the first version of table tennis. (Another theory has its origins in England as an after-dinner amusement for upper-class Victorians in the 1880s. Mimicking the game of tennis in an indoor environment, everyday objects were originally enlisted to act as the equipment. A line of books would be the net, a rounded top of a champagne cork or knot of string as the ball, and a cigar box lid as the racket.